Does The Earth Need Us?
Sermon by Steve Edington
October 21, 2007
The title for today's sermon is "Does the Earth Need Us?" The answer is "No". Our closing hymn is.... Well, stick around here for a few more minutes anyway. Truth to tell this has to be one of the more "Duh..." sermon titles I've ever dreamed up. We're living on a planet after all, that got along perfectly well for some 4-5 billion years - depending upon whose counting - without a single human being anywhere on it; and needing nothing at all, other than certain natural and cosmic laws remaining in effect, to keep itself going. It took the late breaking arrival of a supposedly intelligent species before the question that makes up this sermon title of mine could even be raised. And therein lies the rub. Because while the Earth-centered response to the question I'm posing is an obvious 'No,' our human-centered answer, particularly in the Western World has actually been 'Yes.'
I'll come back to this point in more detail a little later, and will only note now that practically all of Western religions and schools of philosophy - for all of the differences that exist within and amongst them - they practically all assume the centrality of human beings on our planet. And there's another "Duh..." for you; of course they're going to assume the centrality of human beings, since all earthly religions and philosophies and worldviews are, after all, products of the human mind. Well, let's keep that one on the shelf for awhile so I can do one of my classic "let's back up for a minute and see where we're going with all of this" maneuvers.
Last winter we as a congregation embarked upon our participation in what our Unitarian Universalist Association has called a "Green Sanctuary" or "Ministry for the Earth" program. We formed a Green Sanctuary Task Force to carry that program forward. In a way that parallels what is going on in a wide range of religious denominations and communions right now, our Association has urged it's member congregations to undertake programs of study, action, and advocacy that will promote greater levels of ecological awareness and practices both within UU congregations, and in the communities in which they are located. We've been trying, with good success I would say, to hold up our end of things on our local level here thanks to the work of the Task Force I just mentioned. This Thursday night we're coming up to the halfway point in our Food for Thought Thursdays series on Ministry for the Earth. The theme for this week is "Supporting locally and ethically produced food in the Greater Nashua area." And there are two more to go after that. I urge you to attend as you are able.
I see my role in this very worthy effort as being two-fold. I want to support the work of our Task Force in whatever ways I can, as I hope each of you will; and I'll weigh in from time to time with a "Green Sanctuary" sermon - which is what you are getting this morning. One of my many roles as minister here, as I've come to see it, is to be the "Big Picture Guy." While I, of course, need to attend to any number of details in any number of the areas of our church life, I also need to be able to step back and say "why" in the biggest and broadest, and hopefully the best, sense of the term, we do the things we do. Sometimes that "why" goes clear to the cosmic level, which is what I'll be aiming for today.
I try to avoid the sermon-as-book-report approach as much as I can; but I want to use one of my summer readings as at least a jumping off point for us. The book is Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, which has just been published this year. In it Mr. Weisman uses a very fanciful, even fantastic, premise to play out some very factual, and scientifically based, scenarios. Weisman is an award-winning journalist, and his book is an outgrowth of an article he wrote in 2005 for Discover magazine titled "Earth Without People."
This is not one of those doomsday, we're-all-going-to-die-if-we-don't-shape-up kinds of books. It just assumes we're already gone without specifically saying how. Maybe we've all been mass evacuated to another planet. Weisman doesn't say. But to give you the book's basic framework I'll read a bit from its opening chapter:
"Let's try a creative experiment: Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. Not by nuclear calamity, asteroid collision, or anything ruinous enough to also wipe out everything else...nor by some grim eco-scenario in which we agonizingly fade...Instead picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow...Leave it all in place but extract the human beings...How long would it take to recover lost ground and restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam, or Homo habilis, appeared?...How would it undo our monumental cities and public works, and reduce our myriad plastics and toxic synthetics back to benign, basic elements? Or are some so unnatural that they're indestructible? And what of our finest creations - our architecture, our art, our many manifestations of the spirit? Are they truly timeless, at least enough to last until the sun expands and roasts our Earth to a cinder? And even after that might we have left some faint, enduring mark on the universe; some lasting glow, or echo, of Earthly humanity...?"
Now, the only thing I've ever heard of that would cause such a situation as instant human disappearance, is this event called "The Rapture," and I'm not going near that one and neither does Weisman. The rest of the book, then, is Weisman's playing out of the scenario he poses and the questions he raises. He draws very heavily on his knowledge of science and engineering in so doing. The book does have a bit of a science fiction flavor to it. In the interest of time I can only offer a few brief examples here of all the places Weisman goes, and I suggest you read the book if you want to get the whole dose. For today, try these on for size:
In New York City there is enough water constantly flowing underground that pumps have to be in constant operation in order just to keep the subways from flooding. If these pumps stopped running for only 2 days the subways would flood. Left untended for 20 years, the water would work its way up through the pavement and wash it away, Lexington Avenue would become a river. With no one to tend them, the worlds 400+ nuclear power plants would melt down; and our petro-chemical plants, again left untended, would soon start throwing out all kinds of toxins for many years to come. All of which could take out a few species here and there.
But not to worry; since the Earth still has some 4-5 billion years left before our sun expands into a red star and burns up all the inner planets, it will just eventually clean up all of our messes and our leavings and pretty much go back to the way it was before we human types came along. I say, pretty much. Things like non-biodegradable plastic bottles, bags, and Q-tip shafts - Weisman maintains - are basically indestructible over any stretch of time. [Imagine that: These little things we clean our ears out with - we can't get rid of 'em. They're gonna outlive the very Earth.] And Weisman fancifully wonders what some subsequent species, who might attain something approximating our own human capacity for perception, would make of Mount Rushmore; noting that the Abraham Lincoln who is carved there in granite will last much longer than the Lincoln on our copper pennies.
And on it goes. Here and there, now and then, the author takes the reader to a few isolated spots on the planet where the Earth has retained much of its primeval character. This is to give us some idea of where the Earth would be going, or going back to, once we are out of the way.
Okay, it's an interesting book. It's well researched and written; and it's a good read. But what's the point? Weisman treads very lightly when it comes to offering any philosophical, or religious, or spiritual reflection on all the data - speculative data to be sure - that he puts out. He, by and large, leaves that part to his readers. So I'll take it up.
The first thing I came away with after reading the book was a sense of how tenuous - for all of the many and sometimes vast human civilizations we have erected - our grip on this planet actually is; and in what fragile ways we actually cling to it. The second, and closely related, conclusion I came to was how foolish we human beings have been to place ourselves at the center, and at the apex, of creation. For while our common sense tells us that No, the Earth does not need us to be here; we still act and believe as if the Earth were somehow waiting around for us to show up to give it some reason for being here.
Think about the fundamental creation story that lies at the heart of the Judaic and Christian traditions - and by extension the basic mind-set of Western Civilization. It does not matter whether you read the story on a literal, mythical, metaphorical, or allegorical level. It doesn't even matter what kind of a believer or non-believer you are when it come to the religions that have told this story over the past couple or millennia and more. We all live out, and participate in, its implications.
The Creator starts with the heavens and the earth, and then moves to water, and then to plants, and then to animals, and finally - blare of trumpets and roll of drums - brings on the human beings. The whole creative process is treated as a prelude, or as an opening act, for the grand entry of the first humans. And those humans are told that they are to have dominion over the Earth, and they're told they can name all the other animals. Within the original context of this story, to name something is to give it purpose and meaning, in way that it didn't previously have.
Living out the implications of this story has given us some great and wonderful civilizations, amazing human creativity in the areas of science and the arts, and an earthly home that we've been able to largely shape to our liking. But it has also brought out the destructive side of our humanity in ways that have greatly despoiled our earthly home, and have left open the question of whether or not it will continue to sustain and nurture us if we keep treating in the manner that we do.
In addition to all of the necessary, and yes crucial, measures we need to be taking to live in a more ecologically responsible and eco-friendly way - and our Green Sanctuary program is one of the ways we explore and put into practice such measures - we also need to re-envision our whole relationship to and with this planet for whom we are late-comers. We need to learn what it means to be a part of a larger circle of life, rather than the alleged masters of the circle. Most of all we need images that will help us to re-envision and re-define what our true relationship to the rest of Creation really is, and needs to be. And I'm glad to say, optimist that I try to be, that some of these new images are being given us.
One I'd like to offer, as I move towards a conclusion is courtesy of the late scientist and astronomer, Dr. Carl Sagan. It's the image of the Pale Blue Dot. I want to thank Stephen Nodvin for introducing me to the words of Dr. Sagan that I'll share in just a moment. Steve read them for a chalice lighting meditation that we use to open our Executive Board meetings.
In February of 1990, as the Voyager I spacecraft was making its way out of our solar system the NASA engineers turned it around so it could take a picture of the planets before going on out into deeper space. Its picture of Earth, from nearly 4 billion miles away, was that of a pale blue dot - which I can just barely see in the pictorial reproduction I'm holding here. Carl Sagan used this image for the title of a book he wrote in the aftermath of the Voyager mission. He also used it as the theme of a commencement address he delivered in May of 1996. Dr. Sagan died just eight months later. Here's what he had to say about the meaning of this photograph in one of his last public appearances:
"If you look at [this picture] you see a dot. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you know, everyone you love, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
"Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us...To my mind there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
These are very good words and thoughts indeed. The ones I would especially hold up for us this morning are where Dr. Sagan says, "Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion [emphasis added] that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light...it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another, and to preserve and cherish this pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
If we can in fact move beyond what Sagan rightly calls the delusion that we have a privileged position in the universe - and in our world as a part of that universe - then perhaps we will truly seek and find ways to both deal more compassionately with one another as well as preserve and cherish this only home that we have and have ever known.
I'll end with this. On the brochure that describes our Green Sanctuary programs that are currently going on, there are some words that say what the program is about: "A Green Sanctuary is a congregation that lives out its commitment to the Earth by creating a sustainable life style for its members as individuals and as a faith community." That's what we're trying to do within this congregation and in our wider Nashua community. It's an undertaking we should each and all commit our energies to. I'd like to suggest that as we carry this program forward we also take the term "Green Sanctuary" to yet another level. I know I'm mixing up my color metaphors a bit here, but we should be thinking of Sagan's pale blue dot as a Green Sanctuary of its own. We need to regard the Earth as a Green Sanctuary.
A sanctuary is a sacred and holy place - and is to be treated as such. A sanctuary is where one goes for sustenance and nurture and renewal; and we need to care for the Earth so it can be such a sanctuary for us. For in the end, as Mr. Weisman does correctly point out in the midst of all his fantasizing, the Earth will make of itself a Green Sanctuary whether we choose to inhabit it or not.
Stephen Edington
October 21, 2007
