I wrote this editorial for the most recent issue of our student newspaper, and find that it is applicable in not only our lives as humans, but in our walk as Christians. If we are the "stewards" of the earth, does it make sense for us to just let what is happening with our ecology continue while we stand idly by? No - it doesn't make sense. Our relationship to the land, and our treatment of our environment is crucial in, admittedly, a political sense - but more importantly in a moral sense. It is our moral obligation, and our spiritual connection with the land as its "stewards" to do the best we can to maintain the balance of our ecosystems, and to do our utmost to prevent catastrophe. It seems like an impossible goal to achieve, but it starts right in your own life; no one is expected to make the change in one day... but maybe in a year. And then others will, and then others... “Nothing is scarier than the truth.”
So ends the trailer for a recent documentary titled “An Inconvenient Truth,” directed by Davis Guggenheim and featuring Al Gore, which presents its audience with the scientific facts and fears of global warming.
But it’s not just global warming that’s a big problem – it’s an entire way of living for the world’s population that is the bigger issue.
In his book The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry writes that “…the definitive relationships in the universe are… not competitive but interdependent. And from a human point of view they are analogical. We can build one system only within another… At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another.”
We are being called upon to act as a global community, as a nation, as a state, as a college, and as an individual to change our interaction with the environment. We must not, and quite literally cannot, keep living in the same ecological pattern of destruction.
In the documentary’s preview, Al Gore states, “This is really not a political issue so much as a moral issue.”
A moral issue that we have heard about our entire lives – oh yeah, the same-old, same-old conservation stuff. Well, that same-old conservation “stuff” is the only chance we have of actually surviving intact for the next hundred years.
And I don’t mean to sound fatalistic or apocalyptic… oh wait, yes I do.
When Berry first wrote his book in 1986, he urged that we, as inhabitants of the Earth, “…should be at work overhauling all our assumptions about ourselves and what we have done and what we are capable of doing, all our attitudes toward life and its complex sources, all our resources of technique and technology. If we are heading toward apocalypse, then obviously we must undertake an ordeal of preparation.”
Twenty years have passed since he wrote these words, and though our culture is more “aware” of ecological problems, are we more concerned and active in trying to prevent disaster?
We have to start somewhere, and even if it’s doing weekend recycling for an organization at Bethany – that’s a start.
I commend our school for having a recycling program in place, but can’t we go further? We have a very small campus in a very small town… why don’t we walk more often? We have the capabilities of watering the lawns in the evenings and mornings rather than in the middle of the afternoon when the water evaporates more easily… why don’t we? We can use plastic and Styrofoam plates, inhale, eat, or imbibe numerous toxins in our air, our foods, and our trash… why don’t we exert more control over our exposure to them?
It boils down to this: We have to take control, we have to make the decision, and we have to realize that it won’t be easy.
“Our ability to live is what is at stake,” says Gore.
And what will it be like to live with the knowledge that we didn’t do everything we could to prevent the ruin of our resources?
We won’t be alive to find out.
*To watch this trailer log on to www.climatecrisis.net and click on "Watch Trailer"*
