Ice for the Polar Bears

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Earth Day, Sunday April 23rd, 2006


OPENING WORDS:

“We are called to assist the earth, to heal her wounds and in the process, heal our own -- indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder. This is our hope: That the child born today may still have a bit of green grass under their bare feet, a breath of clean air to breath, a patch of blue water to sail upon, and a whale on the horizon to set them dreaming.”

--Wangari Maathai (from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech)

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When I was still married, my father-in-law (who I saw in person precisely half-a-dozen times in 18 years of marriage) would occasionally phone our home just to check-in with his daughter and find out how things were going out in our neck of the woods. My former wife was not exactly close to the rest of her family. Her brother (who lives in rural Pennsylvania about an hour outside of Pittsburgh) I have only seen once, and I never did meet my mother-in-law, who passed away a decade before I ever met Margie. The anniversary of that death was typically a catalyst for one of these infrequent calls, which almost always ended in exactly the same way -- with my father-in-law lovingly reminding his daughter and grandchildren not to expect too much from him in the way of an inheritance when he finally passed away, since he was planning to leave his entire estate to buy ice for the Polar Bears at the Kansas City Zoo. It was kind of a family joke, endearing in an eccentric sort of way, which suited my father-in-law to a “T.”

My father-in-law was (and remains) an avid woodworker, a dedicated golfer, and a diehard fan of the Chicago Cubs. For much of his career he was employed as an early pioneer in the field of data processing, and even in retirement he still kept an IBM mainframe in the basement of his home and did freelance work for local businesses, back in the days when an Apple II Plus was a state-of-the-art desktop computer.

He is also a direct descendent of Captain James Weddell, the Antarctic explorer who discovered and named both the Weddell sea and the Weddell seal. On Sunday afternoons when his own children were little, Ray used to take them regularly to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he would stand in front of the exhibit of the stuffed seal bearing his family’s name, and lecture Margie and her brother Jim (in a voice just a little too loud to be intended for their ears alone) about the illustrious exploits of their notorious ancestor: a lecture which always ended in exactly the same way. “So remember children, it’s a proud name and a proud heritage. Never let anyone misspell it, never let anyone mispronounce it, and never EVER forget that you are a WEDDELL.” Margie used to tell me that often the people standing around them would break into spontaneous applause at the conclusion of this speech, while she and her brother tried to make themselves as small as possible, so they might attempt to slip between the cracks in the floor.

I’m not exactly certain how or why my father-in-law developed his commitment to the Polar Bears, but I suspect it followed the same lines as his other passions. And I know that while our own kids were still at home, Margie and I often used to take them to the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, where the Polar Bears were one of our favorite exhibits. They are impressive, magnificent creatures -- so huge and yet so graceful (especially in the water); potentially so dangerous, and yet so compellingly attractive at the same time. The exhibit in Portland is designed like an aquarium, so that you can actually walk along below the surface of the water and view the animals as they swim, through a series of large, Plexiglas windows. It’s no wonder my father-in-law plans to bequeath them his entire estate. Once you’ve seen a Polar Bear up close, it’s hard to imagine a more deserving heir or a more worthy legacy.

Of course, the reason I’m telling you all this is that my former father-in-law’s idiosyncratic cause has now become front page news. The Polar Bears are running out of ice -- not the ones who are living in zoos, but those who still inhabit their natural habitat in the Arctic, whose very survival as a species is increasingly threatened by the effects of Global Warming.

I don’t really think I’m going to have to preach very hard or will have much trouble convincing those of you here in this room that Global Warming is real. The hard part is knowing what to do about it. The problem seems so immense, and the potential consequences so catastrophic, that the whole issue easily becomes a little mind-numbing. Graphs and statistics and molecular calculations based on measurements in the parts per million; elaborate computer models of changing climate patterns, ocean currents, and feedback loops; apocalyptic “worst case” scenarios predicting mass extinctions and sea levels 200 feet higher than they are today...the facts and figures -- the observations, measurements, calculations and projections -- are both emotionally overwhelming and difficult to grasp.

Scientists tell us that 19 of the 20 warmest years on record have occurred within the last quarter century, but what does that really mean to someone who associates “warmth” with “comfort?” We see with our own eyes the devastating effects of hurricanes like Katrina, which seem to grow stronger and more numerous every year; but there have always been hurricanes, and they have always been disastrous. Yet somehow, the image a polar bear perched on the edge of a melting ice flow, along with reports that these magnificent animals are now drowning in unheard of numbers as they attempt to navigate a diminishing polar ice pack, has a vividness and an urgency that is easy to understand. What once seemed solid and unchanging is literally disappearing beneath their feet. And beneath our feet as well.

Those of us who are trained to do grief counseling are taught that individuals who receive catastrophic news or are otherwise forced to cope with some sort of trauma will typically react by moving through five predictable mental and emotional stages. These stages are most frequently associated with the work of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross on the experience of Death and Dying, but they can actually be observed surrounding any Change of Circumstance which produces an Experience of Loss and thus evokes a Sense of Grief, from the news that you or someone you love is afflicted with a terminal illness to the discovery that your battery is dead and your car won’t start on a cold winter morning.

The intensity of the reaction is a function of how significant the potential loss is perceived, but the five stages remain the same. Our first response is typically one of DENIAL -- this isn’t really happening to me. You turn the key again, and then again; you check the lights, the heater, you turn off the radio; you turn the key one last time and still there’s no result....

So you move on to the next stage, which is ANGER. You curse the car, you curse the weather, maybe slam your hand against the wheel or the dashboard; curse anyone and anything else you can think to curse, including perhaps the entire economic system which has you awake and out of your warm bed on a cold winter morning trying to start your car so you can commute to a job you don’t especially like in the first place.

Then, as you start to realize that there are potential consequences to the failure of your car to start, you begin BARGAINING. If only the car will start one more time you promise to buy a new battery, get a tune up and flush the cooling system, replace the tires, belts and hoses, and never miss a scheduled oil change again.

When you finally recognize that the car isn’t going to start and that you are powerless to change that fact, you give up hope and instead DEPRESSION makes its appearance. The battery is dead and there is nothing you can do about it...and because of that you are probably going to end up being late to work as well.

But with any luck, this Depression will quickly be followed by ACCEPTANCE -- you go back inside, call the Auto Club, and make other plans to move forward with your day. In the case of something relatively trivial, like a dead battery, this whole process may only take five or ten minutes. Depending on your personality and how often you have experienced things like this before, you may even skip a stage, or move through two or three of them simultaneously.

But more serious losses typically take much longer to resolve. And the real “Grief Work” doesn’t actually begin until one has both accepted the reality of their loss and allowed themselves to feel the pain of it, and then started the challenging process of adjusting to a new environment without the lost object, and reinvesting themselves in that new reality. (*)

The potentially catastrophic change represented by Global Warming, and the traumatic losses that accompany it, represent a serious need for “grief work” on a global scale. Many of us have been in deep Denial for decades. Many more of us are profoundly Angry, and some of us are now Bargaining furiously: if only we could get more people to turn out the lights when they leave the room, and to drive hybrid cars instead of SUVs; if only we could build more wind turbines and stop burning fossil fuels, then all would be right in the world again. The Depressing news is that it may already be too late. We may already be powerless to turn back the rising tide, and reverse the runaway Greenhouse Effect that the uncontrolled Carbon Dioxide emissions of our modern industrial economy has already created.

Only Time will Tell. But Acceptance of this possibility does not mean we must surrender to it. No matter how overwhelming the problem may seem, or how helpless we may feel about our ability to change things, there is always one thing over which we have complete control. We can always control how we CHOOSE to respond. We can choose to ignore the fact that our past actions have consequences and continue on as we always have; we can choose to feel helpless and simply give in to the inevitable. Or we can choose to act as if our future actions have meaning, responding in the way that we know we should respond, even though we have no real assurance that our actions will be effective.

And this is where the problem of Global Warming ceases to be a question of science and economics, and becomes instead a moral and a spiritual issue.

The Hebrew scriptures tell us that God created the earth in six days, and that He gave humanity dominion over it, along with a mandate to go forth and subdue it. And there are many conservative theologians who read this passage in Genesis as a blank check for human beings to do whatever they wish to the Earth; to exploit it and all its creatures for their own personal pleasure and profit, without regard to any other consideration.

But there are other, more enlightened theologians, who interpret this mandate in a dramatically different light. Human beings are the custodians of the earth, charged with the responsibility of sustaining and renewing it, so that all God’s creatures might be fruitful and multiply. And these competing world-views, both grounded in Scripture, perhaps have more to say about the ultimate survival of our planet than any scientific insight or technological innovation.

It is not so much the changes in our climate we must grieve and ultimately learn to accept, as it is the change in our lifestyles that must come to pass if we ever hope to arrest and reverse the trend. In a word, we must learn to think of prosperity differently than we do at present. Our current economic system is based on concepts of increasing productivity and maximizing return, within an unregulated marketplace which efficiently matches the demands of Buyers to what Sellers can supply, and holds down prices by holding down costs (or in many cases simply pushing them off on those who cannot afford to object or are not powerful enough to resist).

An improved economic system must somehow incorporate the idea of Sustainability into this equation. It sounds so simple, and yet it appears so elusive, especially here in the wealthiest nation in the history of the planet, where a mere 4% of the world’s [human] population consumes far more than our fair share of the world’s resources, and produce a full 25% of the world’s Greenhouse gasses.

In the Earth Day materials distributed this year by the UU Ministry for the Earth, one writer observes that “We Americans suffer from a “Gratitude Deficit Disorder’ -- we keep trying to make ourselves happy through more stuff, but it never works, so we have to grab for even more stuff. It’s a never ending escalation, this addiction to stuff. We must break the cycle, remembering that happiness comes from relationships, connections, [the] satisfaction of worthwhile endeavors.... If we pay attention, the Earth will teach us gratitude instead of grasping, simple joy instead of compulsive consumption, openness to life instead of a driven (and fruitless) attempt to control everything. Thoughtlessness needs to give way to awareness, arrogance to compassion, addiction to balanced calm. A deep and abiding connection with nature can be that antidote to the compulsiveness and stresses of a life spent chasing the materialism of our post-modern American Dream....”

Which brings us once again back to the subject of Polar Bears. A Polar Bear is a predator. And unlike its closest (and more efficient) cousin, the Kodiak Grizzly (whose favorite food is salmon, but who also eats nuts, berries, roots, bulbs, ground dwelling rodents, and in a pinch even one of us), Polar Bears basically eat seals and perhaps an occasional walrus. They’ve also been known to snack on eggs (and the birds who lay them), kelp, and the carrion of various other marine animals, but (like all predators), Polar Bears live in a brutal but delicate harmony with their principle source of food.

When seals are abundant and hunting is good, they eat their fill of the choicest blubber and leave the rest of the seal carcass for scavengers like ravens, arctic foxes, and (of course) their own cubs, who depend on the adult bears for their own livelihood. And when seals are scarce and times are hard, the bears starve... beginning with the youngest and most vulnerable. All things being equal, the natural limitations of the bear’s own appetites and a fluctuating supply of food keeps the entire system in rough balance, although it remains a cold, cruel world “red in tooth and claw,” in which the bears must instinctively either kill or die.

The difference between a Polar Bear and a Human Being is that Homo Sapiens theoretically have the wisdom to control our instincts, to anticipate the consequences of our actions, and to change our behavior before it is too late. And the problem is that we have instead used this same ability to consume far beyond the ordinary limits of our natural appetites, and then to shift our predatory attention to other potential sources of “food” as we abandon once-plentiful resources we have ruthlessly and methodically exhausted through our greed.

But our efficiency is catching up with us. We are just too darn clever for our own good. And until we recognize and acknowledge that adopting and practicing an Ethic of Sustainability is the principle duty of responsible “dominion,” we will be continually skipping from catastrophe to catastrophe, one step ahead of the Polar Bear.

When we do become Mindful of the Duty of Sustainability, we begin once more to restore balance and harmony to our planet. It begins with individuals like you and me, who first change our own behavior, and then band together and organize in order to support one another, to educate those around us, and to influence the decisions of the people who make policy. It means holding ourselves accountable for the true cost of our own lifestyles, and changing our definition and understanding of “success.”

But perhaps most importantly, it means learning to see ourselves as the one part of this planet that is capable of seeing the bigger picture, and assuming the responsibility to behave appropriately: to replace our “natural” instinct to act only in our own short-term, short-sighted, selfish self-interest, and instead to take a more “global” perspective.

It means moving beyond our denial and our anger, our bargaining and even our depression, to accept the realization that we do indeed have a responsibility to provide ice for the polar bears...not because it is profitable, not even because it benefits us directly, but simply because it is the right thing to do...and to do otherwise would be to leave a very bitter legacy indeed.

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(*) Thanks to the TLC Group of Dallas, TX for use of their material on the stages of grief.. “TLC Group grants anyone the right to use this information without compensation so long as the copy is not used for profit or as training materials in a profit making activity such as workshops, lectures, and seminars, and so long as this paragraph is retained in its entirety.”

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READING from Day of Promise by Linda M. Underwood

All this talk of saving souls.
Souls weren't made to be saved,
like Sunday clothes that
Give out at the seams.
They're made for wear; they
come with lifetime guarantees.
Don't save your soul.
Pour it out like rain on
cracked, parched earth.
Give your soul away, or
pass it like a candle flame.
Sing it out, or
laugh it up the wind.
Souls were made for hearing
breaking hearts, for puzzling dreams,
remembering August flowers,
forgetting hurts.
These men who talk of saving souls!
They have the look of bullies
who blow out candles before
you sing happy birthday,
and want the world to be
in alphabetical order.
I will spend my soul,
playing it out like sticky string
into the world,
so I can catch every
last thing I touch.