Shades of Green 
December 30, 2007
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, Unitarian-Universalist
Laura Wallace 
 
A religious community such as ours, like so many others around the world, gives us great opportunities to think about great things. Like peace, mercy, justice, or sacrifice. When it also inspires us to change our behavior, it helps us make a difference in the world. So our purpose today is to see if we can find our way to a useful motivation for turning a deeper shade of green. 

This is going to be an upbeat sermon, I hope. But first, a little hellfire and brimstone. 

For this morning, let’s take it as a given that our planet is in deep trouble. There’s no need to catalog the horrors of a poisoned environment; just one example is enough to contemplate for now. When it occurs naturally, extinction happens at a rate of roughly one to five species per year. But now, global habitats are losing dozens of species each day. According to the Environmental Literacy Council, as of September 2007, 41,415 species appear on the World Conservation Union’s Red List. The categories are: extinct, extinct in the wild, critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, or near threatened. In addition to habitat loss, non-native species, over-exploitation, pollution and disease, scientists are adding climate change to the list of causes. Human behavior is believed to be the key. 41,415 species. Human beings are just one.

This is a devastating indictment. A cynical view could be that such disaster is merely a devolution as natural as evolution. But if we concede it is mainly the result of one species’ destructiveness, and if that species’ own evolution includes an awakening conscience, then it’s not hard to conclude that humanity owes an enormous moral debt to Planet Earth and has precious little time to repay it.

There is sometimes absolutism about virtue in our culture – an excess of language that contributes to a shrinkage of thought. You’re either good or bad. Guilty or innocent. Racist or blameless. Gentle vegetarian or savage carnivore. Cockeyed optimistic or sourly pessimistic. Green or greedy. 

Just for a moment, let’s try on sourly pessimistic, shall we? Say, hypothetically, it will take amazingly efficient and lavishly funded consortiums of innovators – all operating under ideal economic and political conditions -- to pull our planet back from the precipice it teeters on. It would be an easy response to say to ourselves, so this is out of my hands. Beyond my capability. What with global industries belching pollutants, and both human greed and population swelling while irreplaceable species are dying, what possible difference could it really make what I do? 

Such despair is enough to send you out for some retail therapy, just like the two ladies in our dialogue. But eventually, the question is, does it work? Does it help? Does it really fix anything, coming home with another shopping bag? 

When I signed on for today, I didn’t realize how hard it would be to find entry to this topic. I wanted to hold up positive motivations for changing behavior. But first I had to deal with the two worked-up, and most likely endangered, elephants in the living room.  

The first elephant is guilt. For any sensate person, much less anyone as fortunate as Unitarian Universalists tend to be, at least in this country, human culpability for the state of the planet isn’t hard to grasp. We are not Shakers, after all. We like “stuff” and we like our pleasures. We use fuel commuting and traveling, and most of us live in warm, well-lit homes. So, there’s no shortage of guilt to go around. But guilt isn’t the greatest motivator for UUs. Some of us, at any rate, get pretty defiant when anyone waves the G-word at us. Tell us we’re wrong to eat meat and we’re likely to gun the SUV for the nearest burger joint. Guilt isn’t working. 

The other elephant is fear. We’re mostly cushioned in the West from many bad things, although they do visit us. War and pestilence. Terrorism came calling and, in fear of danger, this country elected leaders who have made that danger worse. Disaster flooded a vibrant city and, in fear of taking responsibility, our leaders let it drown. These things are frightening enough. But what happens if we remain paralysed by fear while the earth heats up and the oceans rise? If we do not act, if we do not change our behavior, won’t an irretrievably devastated planet render our other problems moot?  

So I’m scared. You might be scared, too. What does an animal do when it’s scared? There’s the notion of fight or flight. It might fight a predator, or it might run from the threat. But a whole host of animals also do what I often do, and what maybe some of you do too, and that is to become immobilized. If I just stay the way I am, it will go away. Unfortunately, the endangered elephants have begun taking turns dismantling the living room while I cower on the couch. Fear’s not working either. 

So if not guilt or fear, what could work, to help us change our behavior? During a recent service on love, our co-minister David Takahashi Morris said something that brought me up short. The line that suddenly seemed to offer a better motivation for “going green”, or that might make our wishes to be more responsible to the planet less impotent than they feel, was something like, what if we loved not only a significant other, but a significant universe? 

Bingo! Now we’re in territory I can understand. Love, affection, and attachment. Whether those feelings are biologically or spiritually or morally driven, or all three, they offer a way out of a maze of paralysis. Suddenly, I can see that it was only a failure of imagination that caused me to continue to stand at the grocery store accepting plastic bags until only a few weeks ago, while a little voice niggled, you’re supposed to bring reusable bags. It seems so small. There are so many plastic bags. I’m not in San Francisco, where they’ve just been banned. 

But I can say with confidence this morning, moving from the overwhelming task to the particular change needs only that step. Love. I know this, and now I know that you know this, too. Because I would wager everything that every person here has someone in their life whom they have loved enough that they have changed themselves. It might be a child. Surely, without the motivation of love, you wouldn’t want to break your sleep every few hours for many months, restrict your freedom, your mobility, your leisure, your money, your time, your energy, even your life? But for that little pudgy inheritor, you would do it over and over and over again. Even when it smells. Or if there is no child, perhaps there is a spouse or partner or relative or dear friend. Most of us, at some point in our lives, either give or receive the kind of tedious, repetitive acts of caring that nobody would do for another, for months or years on end, without the motivation of love. 

So how do we connect the motivation of love, which we have in abundance, to helping the earth grow healthy again? How can love help us to take the multiple small steps that could add up to radical, necessary and, most importantly, contagious change?  

I think it might help to consider the difference between love as an abstraction, and love in its particulars. For example, an abstract man sometimes occupies my thoughts. What I have learned from the happy marriages around me is that if I am lucky enough, and the abstraction one day lines up with an individual, there will be meaning and even delight in sharing the tedium with him. This would not mean spending all day contemplating my luck or his wonderfulness, but in washing dishes, taking out the compost, and making domestic choices as particular as agreeing on settings for the thermostat, deciding whether to live in a small house or a larger one, choosing what to put in it or leave out, deciding when to spend money and when to give it, sorting out transportation routines, even agreeing on what we eat. The meaning and delight would not always be accessible. Sometimes it would be hard, not delightful at all, and involve compromise or frustration, but that would be the deal. 

Most of us consider partners, children or friends in our daily decisions because we love them. We love them in their bodies. In their breathing reality. Their presence is real and personal to us. So most of the time, we take on the tedious, and even the smelly, as part of the ordinary experience of love. 

How might a daily experience of love affect how we treat our planet?  

The abstraction might be something like when we think to ourselves, I love nature. The beauty of the earth, the splendor of the skies. The whole Walker-Evans-amazingness of it. But if we follow David’s inspiring notion of loving not only significant others, but a significant universe, then the earth is not an abstraction we notice outside our doors only when it’s spectacular, or when there’s weeding to do. What if the earth is a particular living body in just the same way that a person we love is a living body? Then, in daily decisions, wouldn’t we have the earth we love as naturally present in our thoughts as we do our children? Or our mates or dearest friends?  

Now, it’s feeling simpler. We can’t simply love governments into ‘green’ behavioral change, although we can use our voices and votes to influence them. But just from living our ordinary lives, we know we can have a positive impact on the living bodies of people we love. What do they need? We pause and take them into consideration. It becomes automatic. Because that’s what you do when you love, or when you share a home. 

There isn’t time this morning to catalog all the particular, personal changes we each can make to help reverse devastation to the planet, and stop the destruction of species. That information is available everywhere.  

But perhaps a single thought to carry home today could be this: if we allow ourselves to actually fall in love with the earth, our daily decisions will begin to include it.  

I can become an elephant whisperer! I will seize their hairy, flapping ears and whisper into them, I love you. When I think of changing my daily behavior toward the earth this way, the elephants calm down. And then I can start to clean up the mess. 

May we each help to clean up the mess, may we each bring the earth into our decisions every day. Not because we’re guilty, or afraid. But just because we’re in love.