In the adult Sunday School class I teach, I talked yesterday about social justice and the difficult questions thinking prophetically about our faith may ask of us who claim to follow Christ. One of those issues, is the environment and the responsibility each of us has to the wider human community both now and in the future. Everyone agrees that we should care for the earth, but when it comes to how far each of us is willing to go in our individual lives, the discussion gets difficult.I heard a good example of this on NPR this weekend. Randy Cohen, the ethicist for the NY Times Magazine comes on from time to time to tackle thorny issues. This one was about whether it was ethical to drive a gas guzzler--for Coehn, the answer was simple: "NO." The more difficult answer to provide was what do you do with the gas guzzler? In this case it was a early 1970's muscle car. Sell it to somebody else and the pollution continues. Junk it and lose the money you've put into it. So what do you do? Listen and find out.
Closer to home, here in St. Joseph, it's worth asking how much inconvenience are we willing to under go in order to care for the environment? As people who care about the earth and the condition of it we leave for our children and grandchildren, just what would be willing to do to have a curbside recycling program? What would we do to discard toxic chemicals in a safe way? What about the manufacturing and farming businesses in our area that our economy depends upon? Just what kinds of standards are we willing to enforce and what happens if those standards impact the jobs of families who live in our neighborhoods? These are the difficult questions.
As I wrestle with these questions as a person of faith and a person who cares about the earth--two things that should go hand in hand but often don't--I was encouraged by Nicholas Kristof's column in the NY Times today. He writes about VP Cheney's comment several years ago that conservation worked as a personal virtue but not as an energy policy:
Mr. Cheney’s image seems to be of a dour stoic shivering in a cardigan in a frigid home, squinting under a dim light bulb, showering under a tiny trickle of (barely) solar-heated water, and then bicycling to work in the rain. If that’s the alternative, then many of us might be willing to see the oceans rise, whatever happens to Florida.
But new research has shown that improvements in energy efficiency often pay for themselves, actually leaving us better off.
“This is not a sacrifice deal,” Daniel Yergin, head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says of conservation. “This is a technology deal. After all, we’re twice as energy efficient now as we were in the 1970s, and at the same time our economy has more than doubled.”
Perhaps the advancement of technology will help our culture to make strides where personal conviction and religious belief and political courage continue to disappoint.
In regards to political leaders who continue to deny climate change is a real problem, Kristof concludes with this zinger:
Climate skeptics say that we don’t know how serious climate change will be, and they’re right. But isn’t it prudent to address threats even when we’re unsure of them? We don’t expect to be caught in a fire, but we still believe in fire escapes and fire departments.
Suppose we had political leaders who snorted that fires are nothing new, that the science of firefighting is unclear, and that we can’t impose a burden on business by establishing fire departments — while brightly adding that citizens can extinguish fires on their own out of “personal virtue.”
Why, we would think those leaders were nuts.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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