God, Faith, and Global Warming
Mike Tidwell
February 23, 2003
The first Presbyterian church I ever set foot in had mud walls, a grass roof, and a cow bell to call people to worship. It was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the very center of sub-Saharan Africa, where I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small village almost 20 years ago.
I would hear the clang of that cow bell on Sunday morning and join a couple dozen villagers, most of them barefoot, just a few missionary Bibles between them -- and we would gather for some of the most joyful, uplifting, and spiritual worship I have ever experienced. To the electrifying beat of drums and women yodeling and dancing, we would sing, "Ela diyi ku Nzambi," ("Go tell it on the Mountain") as well as other traditional and indigenous hymns.
In many ways, I think my true instruction as a Christian began in Africa. It was there that I learned what goodness is really all about.
I remember having been in Africa just a few short weeks and getting lost. I was an agriculture extension agent, covering a 400-square-mile area with he aid of a Yamaha 125 DT Enduro dirt bike. It was early one morning, in a remote village, and I couldn't find the hut of a farmer who'd asked me to call on him. In the distance, along the trail, I saw two village elders, two men, walking placidly side by side, enjoying a quiet morning stroll. I pulled up beside them, putting up my hand to indicate I wanted them to stop. I didn't bother to turn off my loud, roaring engine, having just arrived from a lifetime in fast-paced suburban America where human connections and deference didn't matter nearly as much as speed, convenience, and efficiency.
So there on my roaring motorcycle, with my banana yellow crash helmet on, with my bulging safety goggles and riding boots and my flashy, over-stuffed riding gloves, I turned to the elders and blurted out above the engine, "DO YOU KNOW WHERE KABAMBA LIVES?"
The men stared at me for a long moment. hen looked at each other, then looked at me again, and said, "Good morning to you, too."
I was, of course, instantly flooded with shame. Of course I had acted badly. "I am so soorry," I told the old men. "Good morning to you. How are you gentlemen?"
I was now in a world where people mattered, where everyone mattered, where community mattered, where taking care of community resources, taking care of the land mattered, because dirtying a river or catching more than your share of wild antelope affected everyone.
I was in a world where, out of necessity and thanks to that spiritual push of the Sunday cow bell call to worship, a core Christian ethic was practiced daily, in every way: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
I was many times the beneficiary of that ethic in Africa. I had entered this community so now I mattered to everyone. And so when I got malaria -- five times in two years -- I was comforted and cared for. When I got advanced schistosomiasis, with my liver and kidneys approaching failure, with my body to weak to travel and with no phone or other vehicles around, people from my village walked 20 miles to fetch a missionary doctor.
These people saved my life.
And so... today...you can imagine my growing daily sadness as I read and learn on TV about the strange, deepening, record-breaking drought in much of sub-Saharan Africa, from the southern Congo on down. The fields of the same people I lived with are now parched from three straight growing seasons without rain. Further south it's even worse. In Malawi, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, desperate people are now eating their seed corn. Hungry parents and children are eating wild roots and even dirt. 40 million Africans are now at risk of starvation in Southern Africa. 40 million!
But unlike the past, this drought in NOT part of the cyclical weather ravages that have always afflicted the world's poor from Biblical times on. This is not just another hardship of the developing world that is out of our control in the West, allowing us to write a small check for famine relief and go our way.
No, this is different. The planet, God's planet, God's creation, is changing, all of it, in Africa, in America, everywhere, very rapidly.
Many of you already know the details. Fourteen of the warmest years on record have occurred just since 1980. The world's glaciers are vanishing -- vanishing -- with breath-taking speed. Half the world's coral reefs are dead or dying from record high sea surface temperatures and rising sea levels. Extreme weather events -- floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, DROUGHTS -- are happening with such frequency that many of the world's leading insurance companies can now barely keep up and are forecasting their own bankruptcy if trends continue.
There's no longer any serious debate whatsoever. Global warming is happening. Its impacts can be measured everywhere. And though it may be hard to fully appreciate it now with the winter we've been having (itself an extreme climate event), just think back to the record heat of last summer, the record warmth of last winter -- Metro trains air-conditioned in January! We've all noticed the unusual string of mild winters and blistering, dry summers.
And we all know what's driving it. Climate scientists and atmospheric chemists remind us that each time we turn on a light switch or turn on our furnace or drive our cars, we are burning fossil fuels -- coal, oil, natural gas -- which produce six billion tons annually of carbon dioxide. This gas migrates to the atmosphere and stays there for decades, creating a suffocating, warming blanket that traps the sun's heat.
The Washington Post reported last month on the front page that a growing number of climate scientists now believe that the 40 million Africans at risk of starvation are the first mass casuaties of climate change, victims of global warming. This drought is too large, too long-lived, too strange in its characteristics to be much else.
And this could be just the beginning. All the impacts we're seeing worldwide are from just one degree of warming in the 20th century. We could get three-to-TEN degrees of more warming in the 21st century, scientists say, unless we make dramatic changes very soon. And make no mistake: Warming on that scale would unleash total ecological, social, and agricultural chaos on the world.
We ... are people of faith. Beyond the obvious concerns we share with all humanity, what does climate change mean for us? First, of course, God instructs us many times in the Bible to be good stewards of His creation. We do not own creation. We are meant to treasure and nurture it as a sacred trust. As Psalms 24 tells us, "the Earth is the Lord's and all that is in it."
We should be good stewards because creation is just plain good. A half dozen times in the opening pages of Genesis, creation is described as good. And no wonder. It is in Nature, I believe, that God's spirit is most alive. I've knelt and prayed in some of the great Cathedrals of Europe, but perhaps like you, I feel closest to God on a forested mountaintop at sunset, on a whale boat watching humpbacks breach and blow, or just visiting Camp Schmidt. And where did Moses go to be closer to God, to commune with his holy power? Where did Jesus go? To the wilderness.
But now Creation is unraveling rapidly. Is it not clear that we are called upon to stop this?
And then there's the issue of justice. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Africa, with nearly a billion people, generates barely two percent of the world's greenhouse gases. It contributes almost nothing to global warming. And yet it, and other poor regions, will suffer the greatest consequences. Africa doesn't have the money and machinery and engineers to build the reservoirs and to store food and to construct the sea walls needed to adapt to climate change as we in the West can do -- at least for a while. Africa will -- and is already -- being walloped.
America, on the other hand, has four percent of the world's population and generates 25 percent of the global greenhouse gases. And unlike Africa, where energy use goes toward fundamental needs like food, warmth, and basic transportation, much of ours goes to SUVS and widescreen TVs and second homes.
There's simply no hiding from the issue any more. We know that the planet is warming. We know what's causing it. The scientific data has now taken on avalanche proportions. So my nation, right now, is KNOWINGLY bringing devastating drought to Africa, bringing it to the village where I lived, where people saved my life and where children are named after me, where on this very same Sunday morning people are still answering the cow bell call to worship, but coming to church hungrier and weaker every week and asking of God: Why? WHY?
This ... is an utter tragedy. This is totally morally unacceptable. And yet STILL our nation does almost nothing about it. It's like me back in Africa on that motorcycle: We can't think or hear because our motors are too loud, we're going too fast, we've shrouded ourselves in so many insulating gadgets and luxuries that we can't see what matters, can't see what is moral, even when it's right in front of us.
And we can't hear the voices of the world's leading scientists who say there's still time. Still time to slow the warming down and perhaps stop it; to switch rapidly to clean energy and so cut our greenhouse pollution to nearly zero in the next few decades.
And have no doubt: We can do this. Just three U.S. states -- North and South Dakota and Texas -- have enough harnessable wind power to meet all of America's electricity needs. And 100 square miles of Nevada desert, covered with solar panels, could do the same. And hydrogen fuel cell cars, could be ours in a few years, if we really want them. All this at a tiny fraction of the cost of global warmings coming impacts.
I myself have converted my home, just a few short yards from here, almost entirely to clean, renewable energy while SAVING money. No one can tell me it can't be done. I've already done it. And so can we all. So can our nation.
So global warming, at its roots, is a moral issue. It is a Christian issue. To solve it, we need a moral revolution NOW. And Christians have always played an integral role in this nations moral revolutions -- from the abolition of slavery, to the campaign for women's suffrage, to civil rights, to the ending of the Vietnam War. So we must play that leading role again.
The Rev. Martin Luther King and others in the vanguard of the civil rights movement succeeded in revolutionizing race relations in this country in a few short years because the truth was totally on their side. "Why should we wait one more day for our freedom?" they asked. "Why should we wait?"
Today, why should WE wait? Why should we be told one more time, falsely, that we can't switch to clean energy when every day of waiting means more children will be hungry and more of God's creation will be destroyed? The truth is totally on our side. There is no part of the truth that is not on our side. There's no gray area. Why should we wait one more day?
All of us in this church today, all of us alive across America today, will be remembered, vividly, by all our ancestors for many generations to come. We will be remembered because, by a random act of chance, we happened to be alive at the turn of the century when it became, for the first time, positively, irrefutably clear that the planet's temperature was spiking. We will be remembered for centuries, perhaps millenia, for how we deal with this awesome responsibility. Either we will do nothing, and let the heavens fall.
Or we will be remembered because we stopped the violence to creation, stopped the violence to the word of God, and finally created a true community of humankind, a single caring village, and so allowed good to emerge, at last, from this very dark trial.
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