"The earth doesn't care if you drive a hybrid." So proclaimed Nobel Prize winning physicist Robert Laughlin recently, in a line that was promptly picked up by George Will and has resonated widely among those who prefer to ignore environmental issues and inconvenient truths like what I recently dubbed "global weirding."
Interestingly, I agree. The earth really doesn't care what happens to it, and it will do perfectly well if most (or all) of the species currently living die out. The point that Will and others seem to miss (I won't presume to speak for Laughlin) is that our children and grandchildren will care. That's just one of the many reasons I drive a hybrid and buy electricity generated exclusively by the abundant Texas wind.
Let me dig deeper, though, because this really is an existential and even theological issue, and I want to make it clear where I stand, and where I believe others stand.
Human beings are unique. That is one of the central claims of most religions, even if they find very different ways of expressing it. Our place in the world - our uniquely fragmented, contentious relationship with the rest of creation - is, in a real sense, the issue on which everything else depends. That's why, as I've said several times before, our relationship to the environment is my number one moral issue.
The fact is, human beings are the only things in the universe capable of caring about what happens to the environment in which we live. Other species may reproduce at will and die out when the food supply is exhausted, or when predators grow too abundant. That's more or less how natural selection works. The earth, indeed, doesn't care. It also doesn't care if beautiful mountain vistas are distorted by earthquakes or worn down by erosion. It doesn't care if beautiful seacoast scenes are devastated by hurricanes. This is all in a day's work. Only people have a sense of beauty, and will mourn the loss of these things - if we survive to do so. This is our blessing and our curse. It is the seed of the divine that we bear within us. It is the shame we also bear for not being able to carry the burden.
Those who - correctly - point out that the earth doesn't care what happens to the environment just don't get this. They are the innocents among us: those who have not known sin. They cannot possibly share the horror that J. Robert Oppenheimer felt in quoting the Bhagavad Gita: "We are become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds."
So here is my response. Indeed the earth doesn't care. Whatever we do to the precious ecological balance that has allowed us to thrive and enjoy our brief lives of pain and beauty will be but a small blip - an unnoticed deviation - in the grand geological history of the world. It truly won't matter to anybody but us. However, since we are the ones whose glory and fragility are both exposed and challenged by the current environmental crisis, we should indeed care very much. We stand at one of the great dividing points in human history, in which both our limitations and the divine spark we bear within us are being exposed and tested as never before. Our response will have moral, theological, ethical, economic and cultural ramifications that will dwarf anything we have previously faced in our history. On all of these fronts, driving a hybrid is the very, very least that we can do.
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Environment. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Earth Day, Then and Now
The first Earth Day was April 22, 1970. I got in on the ground floor, since my father—a biologist who has always been deeply concerned for the environment—helped spearhead the observation of the occasion in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where I grew up. I was in the 9th grade that year. In subsequent years, I helped organize an Earth Day Fair at my high school. One of the highlights was the "(ecologically) pornographic picture contest." Prizes were awarded to the photos that most graphically showed the degradation of the local environment.
Due to my father's example, I have had over four decades to get used to the idea that our current level of energy consumption is dangerous and unsustainable. Thus, the recent crystallization of concern over climate change was no surprise to me. Unlike many others, I saw this coming.
I saw something else coming, too. I still remember my shock when Mr. Wilson, my art teacher, started telling anybody who would listen that environmentalism was a communist plot. I liked Mr. Wilson; he was a sweet man and a good teacher. He did have his causes, though. He freaked out if anybody drew a picture containing any kind of alcoholic drink. I figured he'd probably been fighting that demon himself, so it didn't bother me when he preached to us about the evils of booze.
I have no idea, though, how he might have been harmed by environmentalism, or why he was determined to wage a crusade against it. On that first Earth Day, he constructed a big display case in the school lobby documenting what he believed was the environmentalist/communist connection. The trump card was the fact that April 22 was Lenin's birthday. You have to wonder, of course, what was going through Mr. Wilson's mind. If I wanted to construct a plot that was designed to fool people into promoting Nazism, I would surely be smart enough not to schedule my flagship event on Hitler's birthday. Such subtleties, though, were apparently lost on my art teacher. Environmentalists were communists. He was gracious enough to acknowledge to me that my father probably wasn't a communist; he was just a dupe. I could rest assured, though, that the motivation for Earth Day was coming straight from Moscow.
The irony will not be lost on regular readers of this blog. As I revealed in my post on McCarthyism last month, I did have communists in my family. They were all on my mother's side, though. My father had no connection to them.
They were also patriots. My cousin Richard Lippman, as his daughter Martha recently reminded me, served as a major in the US Army during World War II. He was rewarded by being blacklisted from his profession and hounded literally to death. So I was not very sympathetic to Mr. Wilson's argument. Nor was I sympathetic when, 20 years later, I heard a local Congressman in California, where I lived at the time, call environmentalists "watermelons:" green on the outside, red in the middle.
As the 42nd Earth Day rolls around, the rhetoric is still the same. Environmentalists are now out to destroy the foundations of American capitalism with their trumped up claims about climate change. No-one should be surprised by this. That's been the line of choice from the beginning; only the specifics have changed.
Don't fall for it. The crisis is real, and growing worse. Far from being a threat to America, those concerned about preserving and protecting our environment are patriots, and deserve to be honored as such. Take some time today to thank those who were prescient enough to see the need for this observation way back in 1970, and then honor them by keeping the momentum going. It's the right thing to do. In fact, it's the only thing to do.
Due to my father's example, I have had over four decades to get used to the idea that our current level of energy consumption is dangerous and unsustainable. Thus, the recent crystallization of concern over climate change was no surprise to me. Unlike many others, I saw this coming.
I saw something else coming, too. I still remember my shock when Mr. Wilson, my art teacher, started telling anybody who would listen that environmentalism was a communist plot. I liked Mr. Wilson; he was a sweet man and a good teacher. He did have his causes, though. He freaked out if anybody drew a picture containing any kind of alcoholic drink. I figured he'd probably been fighting that demon himself, so it didn't bother me when he preached to us about the evils of booze.
I have no idea, though, how he might have been harmed by environmentalism, or why he was determined to wage a crusade against it. On that first Earth Day, he constructed a big display case in the school lobby documenting what he believed was the environmentalist/communist connection. The trump card was the fact that April 22 was Lenin's birthday. You have to wonder, of course, what was going through Mr. Wilson's mind. If I wanted to construct a plot that was designed to fool people into promoting Nazism, I would surely be smart enough not to schedule my flagship event on Hitler's birthday. Such subtleties, though, were apparently lost on my art teacher. Environmentalists were communists. He was gracious enough to acknowledge to me that my father probably wasn't a communist; he was just a dupe. I could rest assured, though, that the motivation for Earth Day was coming straight from Moscow.
The irony will not be lost on regular readers of this blog. As I revealed in my post on McCarthyism last month, I did have communists in my family. They were all on my mother's side, though. My father had no connection to them.
They were also patriots. My cousin Richard Lippman, as his daughter Martha recently reminded me, served as a major in the US Army during World War II. He was rewarded by being blacklisted from his profession and hounded literally to death. So I was not very sympathetic to Mr. Wilson's argument. Nor was I sympathetic when, 20 years later, I heard a local Congressman in California, where I lived at the time, call environmentalists "watermelons:" green on the outside, red in the middle.
As the 42nd Earth Day rolls around, the rhetoric is still the same. Environmentalists are now out to destroy the foundations of American capitalism with their trumped up claims about climate change. No-one should be surprised by this. That's been the line of choice from the beginning; only the specifics have changed.
Don't fall for it. The crisis is real, and growing worse. Far from being a threat to America, those concerned about preserving and protecting our environment are patriots, and deserve to be honored as such. Take some time today to thank those who were prescient enough to see the need for this observation way back in 1970, and then honor them by keeping the momentum going. It's the right thing to do. In fact, it's the only thing to do.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Selfishness wins
There's been a lot of talk lately about the new book by Rob Bell, Love Wins. If you live outside of the Bible belt and/or don't have friends who are evangelical Christians, you may not have noticed. If you're one of those who has heard of the book but simply hasn't read it, here's the lowdown: Rob Bell believes in hell, and his detractors are in it. If you want, you can skip the rest of his book and just read Chapter 7 for clarification. I'm sure Bell would be too gracious to say what I just said in so many words, but his interpretation of the story of the Prodigal Son speaks for itself.
The reason I bring this up is that the Rob Bell controversy shows just how judgmental some Christians can be. Many seem to hate Bell's book, whether they've read it or not, for the simple reason that they truly can't stand the idea that they might have to stop denouncing and excluding others. After all, if you're one of God's people, there's got to be somebody who's not, or what's the point, right?
As for me, I try very hard not to be judgmental. That's how you know that for me to write a post like this one, my back has to be really up against the wall. If I'm going to claim publicly that there are people around who seem determined to oppose, undermine and destroy everything the Christian religion stands for, I need some serious provocation, because I just don't say things like that. But then there's Paul Ryan, and I guess he brings out the worst in me.
Here is an article from Newsweek that makes it clear just where the inspiration for Ryan's budget is coming from. Ayn Rand.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/10/war-on-the-weak.html
If you're not aware of this, Rand, whom Ryan reads "religiously," deliberately turned traditional ethics on its head. Instead of believing that all people receive their life from a common creator and hence have obligations to each other, she avowed that there is no God and hence nothing beyond self-interest to pursue. Instead of affirming that it is the duty of the strong to help the weak, she saw the strong as virtuous and the weak as lazy and ineffectual. The desire to help others - what is commonly known as altruism - was to her the original sin of human society. The strong and powerful owe nothing to anything beyond themselves, because they are natural heroes. The poor are evolutionary misfits, and encouraging them to believe that they are anything else is a disservice to society and will only lead to more suffering in the future. Better to let them starve and die now than continue to reproduce.
If you think you recognize the set of beliefs that Rand is contradicting, you've either read the Gospels and the Old Testament prophets or internalized much of their ethical content. The ideas that the strong should help the weak, that no-one is righteous in and of his or herself, and that we owe respect and love to others, including strangers, are the basis of the Judeo-Christian worldview. If you're a practicing Christian or an observant Jew, you're more or less supposed to practice those things. They're the foundation of our laws and our traditions of justice, which is why most modern people believe them regardless of their religious faith, or lack thereof. Many would even suggest that this positive ethical content is the only thing worth salvaging from the history of Western religion. That's what I was brought up to believe, and the only reason I started going to church was because I needed to get back to the source. Acknowledging how broadly accepted these ideas are is what has made me the broad-minded person that I aspire to be.
And then there's Congressman Ryan. What I hope the Newsweek article makes clear is that his worldview, which inspired his much-touted, supposedly "courageous" budget plan, is based on a conscious, deliberate rejection of everything I just described. He has a coherent worldview all right, but it is the polar opposite of Judeo-Christian ethics. That's why I can say with absolute conviction that Ryan is waging a war on everything the Christian religion stands for. There is no point of contact whatsoever. What Christianity affirms, Ryan rejects. What Christianity rejects, Ryan affirms.
What makes this whole business so frankly sad is that, as the Newsweek article makes clear, Ryan's ideas, which are Ayn Rand's, are also the ideas that have motivated the Tea Party and brought it to a position of power, and there is a broad intersection between the membership of the Tea Party and that of the so-called Christian right. I really want to take the charitable interpretation and assume that those who belong to both groups simply don't understand where this whole cluster of ideas is coming from. I want to do this because there are people I like and respect who belong to both groups. I do hope that some of them are reading this - because if you are, NOW YOU KNOW!!
The reason I bring this up is that the Rob Bell controversy shows just how judgmental some Christians can be. Many seem to hate Bell's book, whether they've read it or not, for the simple reason that they truly can't stand the idea that they might have to stop denouncing and excluding others. After all, if you're one of God's people, there's got to be somebody who's not, or what's the point, right?
As for me, I try very hard not to be judgmental. That's how you know that for me to write a post like this one, my back has to be really up against the wall. If I'm going to claim publicly that there are people around who seem determined to oppose, undermine and destroy everything the Christian religion stands for, I need some serious provocation, because I just don't say things like that. But then there's Paul Ryan, and I guess he brings out the worst in me.
Here is an article from Newsweek that makes it clear just where the inspiration for Ryan's budget is coming from. Ayn Rand.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/04/10/war-on-the-weak.html
If you're not aware of this, Rand, whom Ryan reads "religiously," deliberately turned traditional ethics on its head. Instead of believing that all people receive their life from a common creator and hence have obligations to each other, she avowed that there is no God and hence nothing beyond self-interest to pursue. Instead of affirming that it is the duty of the strong to help the weak, she saw the strong as virtuous and the weak as lazy and ineffectual. The desire to help others - what is commonly known as altruism - was to her the original sin of human society. The strong and powerful owe nothing to anything beyond themselves, because they are natural heroes. The poor are evolutionary misfits, and encouraging them to believe that they are anything else is a disservice to society and will only lead to more suffering in the future. Better to let them starve and die now than continue to reproduce.
If you think you recognize the set of beliefs that Rand is contradicting, you've either read the Gospels and the Old Testament prophets or internalized much of their ethical content. The ideas that the strong should help the weak, that no-one is righteous in and of his or herself, and that we owe respect and love to others, including strangers, are the basis of the Judeo-Christian worldview. If you're a practicing Christian or an observant Jew, you're more or less supposed to practice those things. They're the foundation of our laws and our traditions of justice, which is why most modern people believe them regardless of their religious faith, or lack thereof. Many would even suggest that this positive ethical content is the only thing worth salvaging from the history of Western religion. That's what I was brought up to believe, and the only reason I started going to church was because I needed to get back to the source. Acknowledging how broadly accepted these ideas are is what has made me the broad-minded person that I aspire to be.
And then there's Congressman Ryan. What I hope the Newsweek article makes clear is that his worldview, which inspired his much-touted, supposedly "courageous" budget plan, is based on a conscious, deliberate rejection of everything I just described. He has a coherent worldview all right, but it is the polar opposite of Judeo-Christian ethics. That's why I can say with absolute conviction that Ryan is waging a war on everything the Christian religion stands for. There is no point of contact whatsoever. What Christianity affirms, Ryan rejects. What Christianity rejects, Ryan affirms.
What makes this whole business so frankly sad is that, as the Newsweek article makes clear, Ryan's ideas, which are Ayn Rand's, are also the ideas that have motivated the Tea Party and brought it to a position of power, and there is a broad intersection between the membership of the Tea Party and that of the so-called Christian right. I really want to take the charitable interpretation and assume that those who belong to both groups simply don't understand where this whole cluster of ideas is coming from. I want to do this because there are people I like and respect who belong to both groups. I do hope that some of them are reading this - because if you are, NOW YOU KNOW!!
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