Are you hot enough yet?
It is only the beginning of July and I am beginning to lose shrubs in my garden.The water supply from our country well won't stretch to saving everything and making tea regularly both. We have to make choices.
At this point I am fairly ready to believe Naomi Klein in "This Changes Everything" that it is past time to deal with global warming.
But what to do? Will it make a difference if I don't jump in the car and run to the store to get a jug of milk? What about the brush burning I feel guilty about doing every Spring to deal with the dangerously mounting pile of pruning and woody waste that builds up over the course of a year on my place? I can rejoice that the price of gas seems to have stopped climbing and I can afford the car run. I tried a chipper once but it wasn't equal to the task of dealing with large tree limbs and it burned gas too. These are moral issues for me.
The Bible was written at a time when the environment was threatening rather than being threatened.
Just like early Canada, the wilderness needed to be tamed by group effort to provide a living place. Things have changed. We are still inclined to think there is a limitless and somewhat dangerous “out there” we can expand into. The bush is endless waste capable of absorbing everything we dump into it.
We visited Macchu Pichu in Peru once. Yes, Naomi, it took a flight to get there. It is on a mountain high above a river which is a tributary of the Amazon. Water that has thousands of miles to go before reaching the sea. On the way, travelling along near the banks of the river my eye was caught by a strange line of something in the shrubs lining the river. It took a minute to realize that a line of plastic bags all at high water mark was caught in the branches. Later we stayed in a modern hotel overlooking the river built to accommodate the new tourism industry and in the morning sitting in the breakfast room we were treated to a panoramic view of porters carrying loads of the previous day's trash and dumping straight into the river. Gone to the endlessly absorbent environment?
This might be fairly ok for biodegradables like food waste or perhaps paper and certainly for the kind of local materials which could have been discarded with little impact for hundreds of years by villagers now acting as porters. But plastics? We change our ideas slowly.
And Christian ideas rooted in the past have changed over time. From being people afraid that we might not get our daily bread, we became stewards of the earth that provided it. Now we need to become protectors of this singular ball spinning in space that we appear to inhabit without any guarantees.
We need to incorporate that idea into our moral views.
Now is it going to be alright for me to barbeque tonight with my tendency to release smoke into the atmosphere; or is it better just to have a green salad? But the lettuce has dried up and I will have to go the store to buy some - brought in from California of course. I'll talk to Scott and see if he can help sort this out!
Written by: Derek Bissett