Note: This is an adaptation of the Earth Day sermon I did on April 23, 2017. I remember years ago, in those dark days following the 2016 election, I took part in a rally for science. One speaker talked of how he became interested in science after waking up with a colossal hangover and turning on the TV to the show Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. He quoted Tyson saying the cool thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.
It’s also the scary thing about science, and climate change, and about the effects of our excess on our planet. That’s also true, whether or not you believe it.
I love Neil deGrasse Tyson. I heard him speak several years ago at a local university. His talk then was the future —or lack thereof— of space exploration. He spoke of the
halcyon Apollo years in the late 1960s and early 1970s when space exploration was at its height
here in the United States, when we landed on the moon, had some folks walk around and then come back.
But perhaps the greatest event happened on Christmas Eve, 1968 during the orbiting of the moon by the crew of Apollo 8. On that day, astronaut William Anders took a color photograph
of the earth and called it, charmingly, Earthrise. It was perhaps the most important environmental photograph ever taken. In the five years following that earthrise photo, five important events happened: the Environmental Protection Agency was formed on Dec 2, 1970.
The Clean Air Act Extension, written by Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, was signed into law by President Nixon on Dec. 31, 1970; it was possibly the most significant air pollution control bill in American history. It required the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency to create and enforce regulations to protect people from airborne pollution known to be hazardous to our health. It specifically targeted sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, ozone, and lead. Because of this law, DDT was banned in 1971.
Another significant event was that Doctors without Borders was formed.
It was as if having seen our planet from space we realized for the first time that color-coded borders of nations or states were only to be found on a map and did not actually exist; we realized that from a distance there really ARE no borders for doctors or anyone else.
In 1972, the Clean Water Act (CWA) was passed with the established goals of eliminating releases of high amounts of toxic substances into water, eliminating additional water pollution by 1985, and ensuring that surface waters would meet standards necessary for human sports and recreation by 1983.
And before any of those things on April 22, 1970, Earth Day was founded.
It was the idea of Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the devastation of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. He reached across party lines and built a staff of 85 people around the nation and as a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to show support for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies.
Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.
Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “We went to the moon on the premise that we were there to explore the moon but in fact, we discovered Earth for the first time.”
It occurs to me we need to re-discover earth again. We need to find within us not only our love of nature, as awe-inspiring as any Bach sonata or painting by Monet but to also remain vigilant of this great earth not in some patronizing way as Catherine Grandorff said in her speech at the rally for science, “as if we were coming to the aid of a damsel in distress.” Mother Earth is no damsel in distress; she will outlast us all. We must remain vigilant with compassion and commitment toward our relatives: this earth, this wind, the fire in our core.
Following the regime of the past four years where we had a man in the oval office claiming climate change is a hoax, who appointed Scott Pruitt--another climate change skeptic—to head the EPA; an agency he sued more than a dozen times, seeking to reduce restrictions on industries when he was the Attorney General of Oklahoma seeking to reduce restrictions on industries. Not to mention naming Rick Perry as the secretary of energy; you know, the agency he said he wanted to abolish.
In that nightmarish time in which by Earth Day 2017 Trump had already signed legislation repealing the Stream Protection Rule, which protected streams from mining operations, and moved to eliminate the Clean Water Rule, which protects 2 million miles of streams and 20 million acres of wetlands and puts at risk the drinking water for nearly 120 million Americans and countless endangered species. He was also working to get rid of car emission and pollution standards.
In that nightmarish time in which Trump had taken the word “Science” out of the mission statement for the EPA’s Office of Science and Technology, in which he ignored the peril of the Coronavirus because it wouldn’t play well for his re-election campaign, in which we lost over 569,000 people in the United States, in this brave new era of face masks and hand sanitizers, we are called to remember our love of nature, our love of this planet; we are called to heed the words of TS Eliot to marvel at the complexities of not only our planet, but how we are all connected, as Neil deGrasse Tyson says, "to each other, biologically, to the earth, chemically, and to the universe, atomically."
The answer to addressing global warming and the destruction of forests and wetlands and rain forests and the near extinction of polar bears is to come back to the core of what matters: the 7th principle of Unitarian Universalism which is respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.
Contrary to how we live our lives, our 7th principle does NOT say respect for the world wide web of the internet of which we are a part, but rather the living world of plants and trees and animals and skies and clouds.
Tyson pointed out that until that earthrise photograph, artists routinely painted the world without clouds as if the clouds weren’t a part of the earth. But now clouds are included in most paintings of the sky; we now know better.
Our 7th principle does NOT say the co-dependent web of ideologies which we bleat like sheep–
deflating the three-dimensional technicolor glory of humanity and creating only paper dolls
of us and them, of enemies and friends, of right religious beliefs and wrong.
And our 7th principle also does NOT say respect for the interdependent web of existence which we get to use up and manipulate and destroy.
What the 7th principle tells us is that WE are a part of this intricate, marvelous web of existence.
When we celebrate Earth Day and when we call on ourselves to save the planet, we are calling on us to save ourselves as well.
In the picture of earthrise, indistinguishable from space is a little 6-year-old girl named Nori peering up in the sky to see if she can see Apollo 8. Also in that picture,
beyond the blue of the oceans and the green of the earth and the clouds drifting are many of you, right? We are part of this Earth.
Maybe if we remembered that, we’d treat the rest of nature and each other with more care. Maybe what we need is to be inspired again, to remember what a marvelous world and universe we belong to, how precious this gift of life is, how — even in this vast bio-diversity we are the same. We are all made of star-stuff.
I was talking with a friend about Earth Day and she said she didn’t think we’d ever get it right,
that we’ll destroy the earth. I said I don’t think so. That we are destroying parts of it is beyond debate, but that I think we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs before the earth is destroyed. We need the earth; the earth does not need us.
I said that ultimately, yes, our planet will die out, but that it is good for us spiritually, ethically, morally to take care of our planet now, to learn how to walk more lightly on it, to learn how to embrace each other, to eliminate the words stranger and enemy from our lexicon. We are all just specks, after all, on a speck in the vast universe, galaxies upon galaxies. And yet, we are all connected to one another; to the grass we mow and the flowers we grow and the stars we wish upon.
On this Earth Day, 2021, it feels like we’re all waking up with a massive hangover; Cosmos is a good place to turn to. Maybe if we could see earthrise again, we would make different choices
in how we lived out our lives on this planet; maybe then we could step out of our delusion of isolation and recognize we are all atoms in a single living organism, and that we find our beauty in how we are put together.
Let us vow to remain vigilant with our mother earth and all our relatives here, not just politically but in our own actions, in how we treat the earth, how we seek to eliminate our own carbon footprint, how we put ourselves back into nature so that we never forget our place
in this web of beautiful, glorious, diverse, existence of which we are a part.
For more information on climate change and ideas on how you can do your part in environmental justice, check out these links:
National Geographic Environmental Action
