Earth Day Sunday, April 20, 2008
Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalist cluster
Audubon Park, New Orleans
Aldo Leopold has been rightly called the father of ecology. His training and experience convinced him that human beings are “fellow-voyagers with other creatures on this odyssey of evolution.” In a book left unfinished at the time of his death, he wrote: “That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.” Leopold saw that we humans abuse the land because we regard it as a thing belonging to us, but that when we view the land as a community to which we belong, we act differently.
Leopold had several strong beliefs which resonate with UUs. He thought that all individuals are members of communities, and that all communities are made up of interdependent parts. He felt that ethics were based in relationships, saying, “We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” And when he used the word “land,” he was really talking about “all of the things on, over, or in the earth.” He invented the term “land ethic” to include in his idea of the human-land relationship all of the soils, waters, plants, and animals. It is easy to see the close connection between Leopold’s philosophy and the 7th principle of Unitarian Universalism, “the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”
What would be different if we lived a land ethic? One answer might be that when we learn to act ethically with respect to the land and all creatures, we will act ethically toward all things. In The Sacred Pipe, Black Elk said:
Peace comes within the souls of [people] when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.
The center that is everywhere, that is inside of us, is also in everything we see and breathe and hear and feel in nature. That center is present in every single thing we laid upon our altar this morning, and in every one of the animals in the Zoo behind us. When we lose touch with our center, we are adrift, cut loose, from what is really important. Every serious problem we can name can be traced back to our loss of recognition of the importance of being in touch with the center, a failure to adhere to the land ethic. Fritjof Capra notes in his book The Turning Point:
We have inflation and unemployment, we have an energy crisis, a crisis in health care, pollution and other environmental disasters, a rising wave of violence and crime. …[These are] all different facets of one and the same crisis…. Like the crisis in physics in the 1920s, it derives from the fact that we are trying to apply the concepts of an outdated world view…to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of these concepts. We live today in a globally interconnected world, in which biological, psychological, social, and environmental phenomena are all interdependent… What we need is a new ‘paradigm’ – a new vision of reality: a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values.
Amazing and sad how little has changed in the 20 years or more since these words were first written. For the good of the land, for our own good, we must change, and fundamentally.
In the popular television series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the space-bound crew gets rest and relaxation from the holodeck, where any location in the universe can be realistically reproduced, complete with entire environments. Should we despoil the earth and all that is on it if we have or could develop the technology to copy it? Should we get Disney to reproduce plastic versions of Yosemite and the Alaskan wilderness so that we can go develop and destroy the real thing? Would that be enough? Sometimes I am afraid that it would be enough for far too many people.
Year ago, Earth Day founder Denis Hayes, reflecting on the progress – or lack of progress – of the environmental movement, passionately asked, “How could we have fought so hard, and won so many battles, only to find ourselves now on the verge of losing the war?”
How indeed. His question is even more relevant today. Every man, woman, and child in America uses more energy and consumes more of the world’s resources every day than human beings anywhere else in the world. If we lived a land ethic, what would we do about that? If we lived a land ethic, what would be different? I think the real answer to that is, “Everything.”
When we truly live a land ethic, our decisions are based not just on what is cheapest or what feels good or convenient for us, but on what is best for the land, for the earth and everything and everyone on it. This year for Earth Day, let us strive to live the land ethic, seeing ourselves in a community of creation, and let us govern our actions by that ethic.
I close today with an Earth Day Prayer in the spirit of indigenous traditions, written by my colleague Vern Barnett.
