Apparently, G.W.Bush read a book! And he agreed with it 100%.
What is scary is that he is getting his advice on what could be central question of our times from a fiction writer. Did I say fiction writer? I should have said a fiction writer who got the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' annual journalism award this month. Did I write that novel got a journalism award? Since when do the Petroleum Geologists give awards to fiction writers? This is a strange new world.
Glaciers are receding in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Norway and other Northern Climes.
This happened before in the history of the planet, but well before our species had evolved. The warm up of nine degrees fahrenheit 55 million years ago was due to a massive release of carbon and methane in the atmosphere. But, unlike the the Palaeocene-Eocene era, today we are releasing those same greenhouse gases 30 times faster.
If present trends continue the earth will experience unprecedented climate change.
The ice is melting in North. In time the water will rise and our present seacoast will be under water.
I think of the Gulf Coast where I live. No use rebuilding New Orleans. We should abandon Miami and most of Tampa too. Rising oceans alone would impact the hometowns of about one third of the population of the United States directly. But another third lives in river valleys that drain into the oceans, and along the Lakes that depend on access to the Atlantic.
But isn't that a long time from now? Not at the rate the ice is melting, it means no Cape Cod (or Key West or Catalina) in life time of many of my readers.
But there are other more immediate problems. The big kill of the polar animals is happening now. Despite triumphalist interpretation of Genesis I we were not given this earth to abuse. Inuits are losing their homeland. Another genocidal attack by an arrogant and self absorbed people.
And the ice is fresh water. Melting that much ice means the saline mix of the ocean will change and that will change the circulation of the oceans. The Gulf Steam is that is moving by me right now is on its way to Western Europe. Look at a map, Europe is kind of far North. Without the Gulf Stream it will be cold like Thunder Bay, Ontario in Paris. I love Paris in the spring time will be no more.
Apparently some don't want to hear it. I receive a protest from a blogger that would prefer his Unitarian Universalism to be pablum. He writes "For a long time i quit watching nature shows because I got sick of the constant complaining about deforestation.
Constantly reminding people how bad they are and how they are ruining the world is not, in my opinion, a good way to grow our churches either."
Religion isn't about making us comfortable. Check out any serious tradition you want. Religion makes demands on our lives and on our conduct. Any religion that makes us self absorbed and comfortable is no religion at all.
And the world will go on very nicely without so many of us. No we won't ruin the world.
The struggle against deforestation reversed what could have been a disaster, and the people who made a difference did a lot more than watch nature shows. Can we reverse global warming? Yes. The earth is a living, breathing organism and she has recovered in the past and she will again if we respect what she is telling us, and begin to make the changes that are called for.
People don't need to be reminded of how bad they are, people aren't bad. We do need that gift that Universalist John Murray urged his preachers to preach, we need to give our people hope and courage.
Hope requires conviction and determination to realize those convictions. Hope without conviction is wishing.
We must reclaim the conviction that we are a nation "of the people, for the people and by the people." To realize that conviction means having the courage to rid our nation of the corrupt political culture that masquerades as democracy. Previous generations of religious liberals rose up against the powers that be, and created new political alinements. We must as well. To become effective in our rising we must become citizens once more rather than consumers and spectators of what passes for election campaigns. We must have as a goal to check the corporate vultures who have turned this land into America, Inc.
We must do this because of a religious imperative namely: we belong to the earth, the earth does not belong to us. Treating this earth as a thing is killing to our souls, and if history teaches us anything it is this, soulless people have no future.
What's this got to do with Unitarian Universalism? Isn't Unitarian Universalism about reciting our principles and purposes and congratulating ourselves on our liberalism? Do we have to make a difference?
This last January was the warmest year in several millennia, and the last decade was the warmest in a thousand years. The polar ice is melting, and the snow isn't falling in North America or Europe. Say goodbye to Maple Syrup.
We will run out of easily attainable petroleum in a decade or two, and the costs of gasoline will sky rocket. It has already started to go up and up and up.
The automobile has distorted our urban areas, over half of the land surface of most of our cities is dedicated to parking, highways, and sprawling single family housing.
Our children are driven to school, because the streets are too dangerous for them to walk or bike to school. After school they are driven to after school activities. Mothers who never heard of Betty Friedan do this driving, and experience a nagging anxiety that this is not what life is supposed to be like.
Network news organizations run documentary series on television about obesity and treat this epidemic as if it were a personal life style issue. We experience a rise in chronic illnesses and treat those illnesses with pharmaceuticals.
Most people in the United States in two decades will be people of color. Most of Unitarian Universalist churches fled to the suburbs in the 40s and 50s as part of the white flight, and most of our new starts have been located away from the city centers. And we wonder why it is so hard for our congregations to achieve "diversity." And we wonder why our prophetic voice is diminished.
We spend money on slick advertising and folks come to church. Some join. We are not changed.
Growth for religious liberalism does not consist of counting voting members in self absorbed suburban congregations, nor does it have any thing to do with the self promotion of the UUA HQ staff. Real growth means being deeply relational to our country and its people and that kind of growth will commence when we find our voice and our courage. Then we will begin to speak to our country once again.
Bill Yoder writes:
My favorite excuse of my high school students for not having time to do their homework is "I have to go to work." When asked why they have to go to work, it's "I have to pay for my car." When asked why they have to have a car, it's "I have to get to work." It's hard to defeat such circular logic. Too many kids are hooked on cars at age 16, and live the remainder of their lives enslaved by the concept of "freedom of the road."
And Ken Kifer asks:
How did people become so dependent on motorized transportation? If we believe television and movies, every American family before the car had a horse and wagon or had horses and saddles for everyone. But this is just our car culture projected backwards. It took too much time and trouble to feed and care for a horse every day (in the Westerns, the horse can magically travel for days without food), so most people lived in towns where they could walk to all their destinations. Walking long distances was not a rare event and was seen as an enjoyable activity.
Some cities were not forced to join the car culture until quite late. In Pittsburgh in the 50's and even the 60's, it was possible to ride a streetcar or walk to every destination and to just use a car for vacation trips. I say "forced" because, in Pittsburgh and other cities, the streetcar routes were discontinued while still quite popular. As a young boy, I walked city streets to school every day, and I never encountered any dangers. My parents thought nothing of walking long distances too. After getting to my grandparents' in Cannonsburg by streetcar, we would walk a mile up a steep hill to their house and then walk to every destination after we got there. Unfortunately, after we moved to Alabama in '55, public transportation was poor and sidewalks absent, so I was the only one who maintained the habit of walking everywhere.
Before I went to theological school, I was a cycling commuter. I did a little bicycling advocacy. For many years now I have just been a recreational rider.
But I have thinking about how our society has become addicted to the automobile. I am trying to do my local trips by bike. I am contemplating going carless. I found this list on a small web site, and I pass it on.
1. Remember when you first learned to ride a bike? Think back for a second. It's just as much fun now as it was then.
2. The bicycle is the most efficient form of transportation ever invented.
3. Half of all transit in the United States is six miles or less round trip, a distance easily made on a bicycle.
4. If you see someone you know while riding, it's easy to stop and say hello. Bicycles create public space, enhance street life and build a sense of community.
5. Ever go for a nice evening stroll down a busy street? Nope, too noisy. The occasional bicycle bell is nothing compared to the constant cacophony of car traffic.
6. There are no parking problems for bicyclists, nor are there parking fees or tickets. Lock your bike to parking meters rather than putting quarters in them. In the space one car takes up, twelve or more bicycles can be parked, which solves parking problems in densely-populated areas.
7. Americans spend 15 to 20 percent of their income on cars. If you ride a bike, not only can you skip car payments, but you can also skip insurance payments, maintenance, dmv stuff and stopping to pay for gas. Carsharing for occasional driving is becoming a more and more reasonable alternative. (A good new bicycle can cost as low as $250. No dmv, no insurance, no gas, very little maintenance.)
8. Millions of Americans want to lose weight, and yet they step into cars everyday, passing up the opportunity to exercise. In addition to weight loss, bicycling reduces the risk of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes and high blood pressure. Given the abysmal state of health care in the United States (which is partially due to the cost of treating well over 2 million car accident victims each year), self-prescribed preventative activity is a wise decision.
9. If you stand in a closed garage with a running car, you will die in a matter of minutes. Hundreds of thousands of cars in our cities create dirty, unhealthy air.
10. Terrorist organizations use our gas money. In order to protect political and corporate interests, the United States supports dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, which is the number one producer of oil in the world. 15 of the 19 September hijackers were Saudi. Iraq is the second largest producer of oil, and Kuwait the third. Do those countries sound familiar? The government supported Saddam through his worst atrocities, then Saddam began to disobey U.S. orders. That is precisely when he became our enemy.
11. In 2001, more than 3,000 Americans died of terrorism on our own home soil. In 2001, more than 43,000 Americans died in car crashes on our own home soil, and about 2,200,000 suffered disabling injuries. The American death toll of the Vietnam War, which lasted several years, is about 50,000.
12. States, counties and cities spend billions of dollars fixing roads that cars damage. A Honda Civic, a compact car, weighs about 2,500 pounds. That's about 100 times more than the average bicycle. A typical SUV weighs much more than a Civic, and does more damage to roads. Wear and tear on roads from bicycles is almost nonexistent.
13. Experts estimate that easily accessible oil (in other words, cheap oil) will run out around the year 2010. After cheap oil runs out, the price of gas will shoot up. The economic ramifications of this suggest that the sooner we accommodate oil free transportation into our daily lives the better.
14. Watch any tv show, listen to any radio program, look through any magazine or newspaper and you will come across ads showing how cars will make you cool, sexy, popular, respected, at one with nature, safe, etc. The car and oil industries spend billions of dollars each year to promote a benign image of driving, but the function of all this is to assure profits and manipulate consumers, and nothing more.
15. Staying closer to home to shop and do errands builds communication among residents, which promotes autonomy. This in turn leads to political, social and economic self-determination within communities. City hall ends up truly serving the needs of the residents because residents can tell city hall exactly what they want rather than city hall guessing at what they think would be best for the residents. Besides all this, if you factor in all the costs of driving to mega-warehouses, you end up paying more anyway.
Safe Routes to School (from the website of Bikes Belong Coalition)
is a national and international movement to create safe, convenient, and fun opportunities for children to bicycle and walk to school. Safe Routes to School provides a variety of important benefits to kids and their communities, including improved health, reduced traffic congestion, better air quality, and enhanced neighborhood safety. Safe Routes to School is a solution for the alarming nationwide trend toward child obesity and inactivity.
The Problem
In the last 30 years we have seen a loss of mobility among our nation's children that has severely impacted their personal health and their ability to explore their neighborhoods, even by walking or biking to school.
Consider these facts:
Within the span of a single generation, the number of children walking and bicycling to school has dramatically declined. In 1969, approximately 50% of children walked or biked to school, and 87% of children living within one mile of school did. Today, fewer than 15% of schoolchildren walk or bike to school. (CDC)
There are more than three times as many overweight children today as there were 25 years ago. (CDC, NHANES III)
As much as 20 to 30% of morning rush hour traffic can be parents driving children to schools. (Data from local communities)
These problems are all related to the fact that many communities lack basic infrastructure-sidewalks, bike lanes, trails, pathways, and crosswalks-and are no longer designed to encourage or allow children to walk and bicycle safely. Concerns about traffic, crime, and other obstacles keep children strapped in the back seat of cars, which further adds to the traffic on the road and pollution in the air.
