We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations.
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Polls tell us that Canadians are worried about the environment, and willing to sacrifice to protect it. A 2007 poll found that:
About 93 per cent of those surveyed said they were willing to make some kind of sacrifice to solve global warming, according to findings from the poll conducted by the The Strategic Counsel.
According to the results:
76 per cent are willing to pay to have their houses retro-fitted to become more energy efficient;
73 per cent would reduce the amount they fly to times when it is only absolutely necessary;
72 per cent would pay more for a fuel-efficient car;
62 per cent are willing to have the economy grow at a significantly slower rate;
61 per cent would reduce the amount they drive in half.
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The Green Sanctuary program similarly emphasizes personal and congregational re-evaluation and sacrifice. Here are the objectives, as posted on the UCC website:
- To build awareness of societal environmental issues among Unitarians
- To generate commitment for personal lifestyle changes
- To motivate Unitarians to community action on environmental issues
- To build a connection between spiritual practice and environmental consciousness
- To build awareness of and rectify environmental injustices.
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And who can forget the 3 Rs? I think that most of us have heard the same mantra over and over again, as in this post from the US Environmental Protection Agency, which urges us to:
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
There are many ways to produce less waste:
- Reduce the amount and toxicity of trash you throw away and reuse containers and products.
- Recycle as much as possible and buy products with recycled content.
- Practice composting by using microorganisms (mainly bacteria and fungi) to decompose organic waste, such as food scraps and yard trimmings.
Canada's One Tonne Challenge, now cancelled, had a wealth of suggestions for cutting energy and water use in the home, including this one:
Give your dishwasher a rest. Save on both water and energy by washing and drying dishes by hand.
If you fill up half of one side of the sink with soapy warm water and the other side with rinse water, you use only half as much water as most dishwashers. If you choose to use the dishwasher, make certain it is full and that you select the no-heat or air-drying cycle.
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In fact, there is a world of advice out there, and sometimes the discussion becomes rather abstruse, as in this discussion from a blog called Mastery in Living
The sustainable family goes beyond the basics of buying organic food, using eco-friendly cleaning products, and recycling. A sustainable family is one in which each family member thrives, physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually while contributing to the sustainability of the earth. To keep the family unit sustainable and thriving, pay attention to what is cooking in the kitchen.
Cooking for individual needs can get tricky. Individual bodies require different types of care. Different body types, different blood types and different metabolic rates thrive best when their individual needs are addressed. The experts all disagree about the ratio of protein, carbohydrate and fat people should consume. The truth, as I see it, is that each person needs to tune into their inner wisdom and listen to what their own body needs becoming fluent in the language of their own body.
Your small-boned, type-O blood child may get constipated and flatulent when eating too much healthy, raw and dried foods. Maybe she needs more fat for balance. On the other hand, your large-boned, type-O blood child may thrive on daily salads but get tired and lethargic when eating too much fat. Paying attention to family member’s individual food needs can help them thrive and shine their light more brightly in the world.....
(The author goes into a long, detailed description of what kind of food she offers each member of her family.)
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Okay, what do all these bits of advice have in common? They're about "personal lifestyle changes," which is to say, that most of them are about cooking, cleaning, shopping, childrearing, transportation -- in short, housework! And for me, there's the rub.
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Just as housework and sustainable living support our homes, so our weekly offerings support our church home. We pause now so that the ushers can collect the offering. I have a music video for you to watch.
For the beauty of the earth
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My household has a rain barrel for watering plants, like the rain barrels in the back of the church here, for the community gardens. Watering by hand takes a long time -- much, much longer than watering with a hose. The other day I came in, after nearly an hour drawing water into sprinkling cans and watering each section of the garden separately, to find a friend had sent me a link to a UN report she'd just found:
A United Nations survey carried out in 177 countries has revealed that women collecting water spend an estimated 40 billion hours. The period is equivalent to a year's labour for the entire workforce in France....
The UNDP 2006 Human Development Report states that the time wasted on collecting water from distant points has incapacitated women's efforts to engage in more relevant activities including child care and productive work.
As an implication, "the time spent on collecting water reinforces time-poverty, disempowers women and lowers income." The survey further suggests that collecting water exacerbates gender inequality and has derailed women from income generating activities in addition to undermining human dignity. (...)
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I looked at the watering can I'd just put down and asked myself, "What's wrong with this picture?" Not that I'm comparing myself with women in developing countries, whose entire day might revolve around finding potatble water for their families. But I felt really strongly that, across cultures, dealing with daily necessities seems to be relegated to women.
The One Tonne Challenge suggestion that families should wash dishes by hand is an example. Not only is it empirically wrong, according to other environmental resources, but handwashing dishes for a typical family of four costs an average of 20 hours a week. Many appliances actually cost more hours than they save -- people wash clothes much more often these days because we have washers and dryers -- but dishwashers are true timesavers. Eliminating dishwashers would cost somebody a whole lot of time, and I'm afraid that the somebody in most households would be a woman.
Housework is a subject I've studied quite a bit. As some of you might know, I've published five or six books. The first was titled, "Somebody Has to Do It: Whose Work Is Housework?", published by McClelland & Stewart in 1982. It was based on 3200 responses to a national survey, and 31 in-depth interviews, from at-home mothers across Canada -- complemented with extensive book and journal research.
That 1982 date is important. Women started pushing back into the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s, demanding to be taken seriously as workers and professionals. The Second Wave of feminism stormed academia and demolished universities' restrictive quotas on how many women medical and law schools would accept. In 1982, many of us believed that very few women in the future would opt to become fulltime homemakers, and we even dared to hope that our male partners and children would step up and share the housework equitably, if not equally. Ha!
Actually, what happened is that the market rushed in, to provide goods and services that only homemakers had provided previously. So now we have childcare services -- that you have to drive to. Fast food restaurants proliferated, with all their disposable clamshell packages and plastic utensils. Dry cleaners multiplied, as wives stopped ironing clean white shirts for their partners. Many of the products that we now see as problems, can be traced back to women staying in the workforce during their childbearing years.
And there has been some modicum of change on the homefront, but very slowly. Statistics Canada reported recently that:
While women are still largely responsible for looking after their homes and families, data from the General Social Survey indicate that the household work gender gap is closing. In 2005, men aged 25 to 54 averaged 2.5 hours per day doing unpaid household work, including primary child care and shopping, up from 2.1 hours per day in 1986. In contrast, the average time women spent on these activities declined from 4.8 hours per day in 1986 to 4.3 hours per day in 2005. As a result, while women still devote more time per day to unpaid household work than their male counterparts, the gap is down from close to three hours per day in the mid-1980s to less than two hours per day twenty years later in the mid-2000s.
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A website called salary.com reported on a US survey, conducted by a company that makes cleaning supplies:
More than a third of men still think housework is a job for the ladies.
Most dads won’t have a problem putting their feet up on Fathers’ Day either – 80 per cent admit they don’t clean anyway.
A poll found that although fathers and married men are the laziest, more than 70 per cent of all men do very little cleaning.
A shocking 38 per cent think domestic duties should naturally fall to women, and one in five do not lift a finger to make their home spick and span.
The survey by cleaning experts Vileda of 1,853 men found that one in three say they have never tackled the bathroom with a mop, bucket or cloth and 7 per cent say they don’t even know where the cleaning products are kept....
And men's reluctance continues even despite the findings of another survey, that
Men who do more housework and child care have better sex lives .
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I don't want to belabour this point. Let me just close this section with a quotation from newspaper columnist and humourist Dave Barry:
The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything.
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Now I have a treat to share with you. I found some Unitarian hymns on Youtube, with words and music. Please join me in a singalong hymn.
All Creatures of the Earth and Sky
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Environmental concerns have, as I said, very wide appeal. People are very worried about the threat posed by global warming, or climate change, whatever you want to call it. Especially since Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, the public has accepted the idea that climate change is likely to have catastrophic effects, within decades rather than centuries. Actually, Elizabeth May said last night that we could reach the tipping point by 2016. The imminent threat attracts people who have never been involved in any other social justice movement.
And yet, and yet, I'm amazed at the degree to which environmentalism has turned a central tenet of feminism on its head. Feminism teaches us to go from the personal to the political. Most streams of environmentalism that I've encountered take the opposite approach, and go from the political to the personal.
Yet that's not necessarily what environmental leaders recommend. I asked Green Party leader Elizabeth May about finding a balance between acting on a personal (household) level, and acting on a political level.
Here is Elizabeth May's response.
"Twenty-three percent of the carbon in the atmosphere is from the United States," scientist David C Orr said the recent Eco-conference. "So the US has to clean up its own act to be taken seriously." Orr estimates that up to 30% of energy expenditures could be saved by improving efficiency in the energy delivery systems (such as transmission lines) -- not something an most of us can do for ourselves.
Also at that conference, keynote speaker Nettie Wiebe emphasized that there is a definite limit to how much effect individual choices have on remedying the effects of climate change. Wiebe is a professor of ethics at U of Saskatoon. She is also a Mennonite and organic farmer, a former president of the National Farmers' Union, and a founder of the international peasants' movement, "La Via Campesina".
"We are separated from the history and place of our food," said Wiebe. "This is not accidental. The food system is designed like that." In her speech, she also emphasized that, "the food system wasn't constructed by individual choices." She is convinced that, in order to make systemic changes, "we are going to have to work collectively".
Many people in this congregation do work collectively to decrease their carbon footprint, of course. I'm thinking specifically of Prairie Sky Co-housing, but a lot of us bicycle everywhere, or carpool informally, or shop locally, or grow our own food when possible.
Still, I'm uncomfortable about the way that environmentalism seems to override so much of the other issues we've worked on for the last several decades, and undermine so much of what we've learned about other kinds of social justice. Buildings created for ecological efficiency might not be wheelchair accessible, for example. And you can buy a tall toilet that is easier for people with disabilities, or you can buy a low-flow toilet that is frugal with water, but I've never seen a tall low-flow toilet.
I shudder to think that the only way to combat climate change is to have one parent or partner in the home full-time, doing everything by hand.
Let's take a look at some environmental leaders and see what they're saying. We've heard Elizabeth May say that each of us in Canada generates an average of 23 tonnes of carbon per year, over which an individual has some personal control over the factors that contribute five tonnes. (The other 18 tonnes of emissions are industrial.)
Let's start with the beginning of the environmental movement, with a short item from Hidden History about Rachel Carson, whom Monsanto attacked as an "hysterical woman".
Nuclear physicist Vandana Shiva is world renowned for her work helping farmers in India save their heritage seeds. Monsanto has attacked her too. Shiva says that agri-business is the problem with farming -- that as long as women controlled farming, nobody went hungry. (start at 3:00)
Council of Canadians president emeritus Maude Barlow says bluntly that a corporate cartel is largely responsible for the growing water shortage. She says that the remedy is not for all of us to water our gardens with rain water -- although that couldn't hurt -- the remedy is to recognize access to water as a human right, and pass laws to protect that right.
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Let's pause here for candles of joy and concern. I have another short music video to share with you, and then you are welcome to come up to the front, light a candle, and speak briefly about a personal joy or concern.
The other For the Beauty of the Earth
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I've been talking about a disconnect I perceive between environmentalism and other social justice movements, such as anti-globalization or equality-seeking work. I'm not the only person who sees this.
Nettie Wiebe suggested in an interview with the University of Guelph magazine that work overload makes all political work more difficult.
She said, "I think we’ve been very systematically schooled to dis-integrate ‐- our culture from our work, our family from our work, our politics from our work, our church from our politics – there are reasons for that but it makes it much more difficult to see the patterns and to engage in transformation of the patterns.”
Another outstanding leader on the environment takes a different perspective. Van Jones is President Obama's Special Adviser on Green Collar Jobs. He grew up in rural Tennessee and went on to take his law degree from Yale before he returned to working with the grassroots. I want to share a couple of video clips with you, because Van Jones makes some really important points. In this clip, he says that environmentalists MUST take other political movements into account, or risk having poor people be conned into a "backlash alliance" with right-wingers and polluters.
Van Jones (start at 3:08) calls for "an economy where we don't have any throwaway resources, we don't have any throwaway species, and we don't have any throwaway children or neighbourhoods either."
The Earth Charter also recognizes the link between how we treat other humans and how we treat the environment, calling for "respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace".
The "culture of peace" clause brings me to my final point. It evokes the omission that I find most troubling, and that is the apparent total disconnect between environmentalists on one hand, and the peace movement on the other. When Rev Meg and Brian Kiely first presented their Confluence Lecture at the Ottawa ACM, longtime peacenik Ariel stood up and asked whether ending war is not a logical first step to stopping global warming. Brian Kiely replied, "It's not enough."
That's a common answer from environmentalists, and until recently, there haven't been any empirical data to refute it. There are numerous documents that say war is the most environmentally destructive human activity in the world, but little information about CO2 emissions specifically. Until recently.
At long last somebody has prepared a fairly comprehensive study on the relationship between climate change and the attack on and occupation of Iraq. You'll find the report online at Priceofoil.org The report notes a "dangerous feedback loop between wars and warming... Not only is climate change likely to increase conflict, particularly over natural resources, but war, in turn, is already accelerating global warming while simultaneously draining our economy of money needed for clean energy."
A Climate of War looks at costs two ways. It reviews the amount of CO2 emissions caused by the attack and occupation of Iraq, and elsewhere, and also looks at the money spent on the military. It notes that, "In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on renewable energy."
The Pentagon is the largest single user of fossil fuels in the world. Putting fuel use into perspective, the report concludes that the nearly 100 millions tons of fuel consumed as the result of military fuel use and supply of that fuel in Iraq between 2003 - 2007 more than cancel attempts to reduce fuel-related emissions in California, the most populous state in the USA. Cabon emissions from the conflict were the equivalent of putting 25 million more cars on the road.
What this report demonstrates, I think, that -- even if Brian was right that ending the war would not be enough -- that nothing will be enough unless we end the Iraq conflict and the Afghanistan conflict and all other wars.
Prime Minister Harper's government has promised $490 BILLION to the military over the next ten years. That's half a trillion dollars. That's nowhere near what the US has spent in Iraq, which has been estimated at something between three and 12 trillion dollars, but it's a huge amount of money for this country to divert from peaceful uses, such as renewable energy sources, and retrofitting homes, and finding conservation measures.
At the Power Shift 2009 conference, Van Jones said over and over again, very clearly and specifically, that "Green for All" means INcluding gender equity, native people, immigrant ("poisoned while they're working in the farms fields"), people in prison and formerly incarcerated. "If we don't have Green for ALL," he said, "there's something wrong with our movement."
And Van Jones also addressed the question of the military, saying that, "we're not going to stop at clean energy, we have to change the system...if we don't change the system, we will have biofuel fighter planes going to war with other countries to get their lithium for our batteries, instead of their oil."
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This congregation was the third in Canada to earn the Green Sanctuary designation. That's a tremendous achievement, well worth celebrating. As a longtime member of the congregation, and a lifelong worker for peace and human rights, I hope that we can take the next step, and lead the way in making the connections between environmentalism and other social justice goals. We need to make the leap from the personal to the political again if we want to influence more than our own members.
I extinguish the chalice with the final paragraph from the Earth Charter:
Let ours be a time remembered for the awakening of a new reverence for life, the firm resolve to achieve sustainability, the quickening of the struggle for justice and peace, and the joyful celebration of life.
Let us now sing, "Spirit of Life".
