NO SNOW ON KILIMANJARO

a sermon preached by the Rev Dr Tim W Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Earth Day, Sunday April 22nd, 2007


I often get kind of a warm feeling in my heart when Earth Day falls on a Sunday, because as some of you know, the very first sermon I ever wrote and preached was for Earth Day back in 1979. That sermon was inspired by my then-recent insight that the word “Economy” and the word “Ecology” have the same root, the Greek word oikos or “house.” Economics is literally the Law of the House while Ecology is a Word about the House, or perhaps more expansively, Ecology is the study of the basic principles by which households function and flourish, while Economics attempts to define the rules for profitable household management. But I remember my entire message that morning basically revolved around a quotation from Socrates found in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, that “the Earth, being a Goddess, teaches us justice, for she gives the most to those who serve her best.”

Of course, both the natural sciences and the “dismal science” have come a long way in the past twenty-five centuries since Xenophon first recorded those words of Socrates, and even in the quarter-century since I first preached that sermon. But I think that this basic principle, that the Earth teaches us justice, because she gives the most to those who serve her best, is something we ignore only at great peril. It was true back then; it’s still true now -- and those who have been wise enough to see the big picture have always known this, no matter what century they have lived in.

But recently it seems as if this big picture is on everybody’s mind. It’s as if we have reached some sort of “Tipping Point,” and information that was once in the possession of only a knowledgeable few is now common knowledge for everyone. In 1992 then-Senator Al Gore wrote a very important book called Earth in the Balance which was widely ridiculed as evidence of the one-time English major and Divinity Student’s stiff and wonkish erudition. This year former Vice-President Al Gore won an Oscar for his documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” and even influential members of the post-Katrina Bush Administration are starting to take his message seriously. It’s a sea change in public opinion...but what worries me is whether this “Tipping Point” (this point in time after which so many people are aware of something that it can no longer be ignored) may also be a marker of “the Point of No Return” -- an indication that the real issue is no longer how to reverse climate change, but rather one of learning how to live with it.

Some of you may also remember that last year on this Sunday I preached a sermon called “Ice for the Polar Bears,” in which I talked about my former father-in-law’s often-expressed desire to leave his entire estate to the cause of buying ice in the summer for the Polar Bears at the Chicago Zoo, and how this small act of idiosyncratic charity might easily serve as a metaphor for the challenges which face us all as we attempt to come to grips with a world that may well be changing beyond recognition. And I also spoke about the five stages of grief, and how in many ways our society must learn to mourn the death of something we assumed would last forever, by passing through stages of denial, anger, bargaining and depression, until we finally come to an eventual state of acceptance that allows us to move forward with our lives.

And now have have a little bit of an update about the Polar Bear situation, which I believe just goes to show that even when we can start to agree about what the problem is, we can’t always agree on the best solution. As you may have heard, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether or not to list Polar Bears as a threatened or even an endangered species. As the polar ice packs shrink, and the ice seals which are the Polar Bears’ preferred food source become more and more difficult to hunt, not only are Polar Bears beginning to starve or to drown as they attempt to swim further and further across open water in search of prey, they have also started migrating closer and closer to human habitat, and some scientists believe that they are even beginning to develop a taste for alternative food sources (although many others would dismiss these assertions as wishful thinking).

But while Americans debate about whether or not to declare Polar Bears endangered, the Russians are beginning to consider allowing legal hunting of Polar Bears again, which has been outlawed in that country for almost 50 years. Their logic (which has also been echoed by the Governor of Alaska), is that without some sort of legalized hunting to thin the population and eliminate nuisance bears, illegal poaching and the collapse of their natural habitat potential pose an even more catastrophic threat to the bears’ survival. Presently in Alaska, legal Polar Bear hunting is already an important part of the Inuit economy, both for their own subsistence and also by providing employment as guides for trophy hunters from other parts of the world. And so, the conundrum: do we hunt the Polar Bears in order to save them, or try to protect them and in doing so, possibly destroy them instead?

On a similar note, six years ago now climatologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University predicted that the world-famous glacier atop nineteen-thousand-foot high Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (which is situated just three degrees of latitude south of the equator), could all be melted by 2015. Already the ice pack there has diminished by 82% since it was first measured early in the 20th century, over a third of that in the last 20 years.

There are all sorts of potentially unpredictable environmental consequences brought about by No Snow on Kilimanjaro. But the biggest anticipated impact of this dramatic example of climate change is on tourism. Over 20,000 people a year visit Tanzania to see its snowcapped equatorial mountain with their own eyes, making it that country’s largest source of foreign currency. Recently a more extensive and sophisticated study of the mountain suggested that professor Thompson’s estimates may have been unduly pessimistic -- and that the glacier could well last until 2040.

But Kilimanjaro is not the only endangered equatorial glacier. A few hundred miles north, on the border between Uganda and the Congo, the fabled “Mountains of the Moon” (whose snows feed the sources of the Nile), are also melting, while some glaciers in the South American Andes could disappear entirely in as little as five years. Even in the Himalayas, the glaciers are in full retreat, with all kinds of ugly consequences for the folks downstream, many of whom live in some of the poorest regions of the planet, and who now face a “boom-and-bust” scenario when it comes to their water supply.

In his classic short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Ernest Hemingway writes of a middle-aged American writer who has gone on Safari in Africa with a wealthy female companion, and is slowly dying of gangrene from an infected and untreated scratch from a thorn, while his lover waits anxiously for the arrival of an airplane which she hopes will rescue them and save his life. The first few lines of dialog in this story are famous (or at least they’re famous among a certain vintage of one-time aspiring undergraduate creative writing students) for the way they illustrate Hemingway’s brilliant talent for showing you everything you need to know in just a few words, and yet telling you almost nothing at all.

“The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,” he said. “That’s how you know when it starts.”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t! Please don’t.”

“Look at them,” he said. “Now is it sight or is it scent that brings them like that?”

The cot the man lay on was in the wide shade of a mimosa tree and as he look out past the shade onto the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatted obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed, making quick-moving shadows as they passed.

“They’ve been there there since the day the truck broke down,” he said. “Today’s the first time any have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” she said.

“I’m only talking,” he said. “It’s much easier if I talk. But I don’t want to bother you.”

“You know it doesn’t bother me,” she said. “It’s that I’ve gotten so very nervous not being able to do anything. I think we might make it as easy as we can until the plane comes.”

“Or until the plane doesn’t come....”

And so it goes on from there. A dying man lies in the shade of a tree while vultures circle overhead, dying of a small scratch he foolishly ignored until it was too late, lying to himself about his fear of death, about his loss of hope, about the significance of a life which once held great promise, but which he now feels like he squandered along with his great talent. All within sight of snowcapped Kilimanjaro, whose imposing presence on the horizon seems eternal.

And now even the snow on Kilimanjaro is melting.

It’s hard to read this Hemingway story today, 70 years after it was first published in Esquire magazine, without reading in to it this additional layer of meaning, and irony. Many of the African animals Hemingway hunted on Safari in the 1930’s are now threatened or endangered; 21st century African explorers shoot photographs of the animals rather than the animals themselves, as if documenting for posterity an aspect of life on Earth which may well have disappeared entirely in another generation or two. Only the poachers (and those who hunt them) carry firearms now -- the former are often impoverished indigenous guerillas heavily armed with automatic weapons and the other tools of modern warfare; the latter typically outgunned and underpaid government officials, who in many cases can do little more than document the slaughter.

For those of us who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War, and read Hemingway as an exemplar of the heroic individual beaten down (yet not defeated) by forces larger than himself: fate or chance, the impersonal horrors of modern industrial warfare, even Nature itself, the idea that the world might truly end not with a bang, but a whimper...from an infected scratch rather than a shotgun blast to the head, can be a little difficult to accept. “ ‘The marvelous thing is that it’s painless,’ he said. ‘That’s how you know when it starts.’ ” It really does stink though, and the vultures do come circling round eventually. And all the writing in the world isn’t going to change that, or make them go away.

And likewise, Global Climate Change itself in many ways merely represents another order of magnitude in the genre of environmental catastrophes which are already far too familiar to us: deforestation and soil erosion, population displacement, species extinction and the loss of biodiversity, economic exploitation in the name of economic “development,”pollution, drought, famine and disease... much of which can ultimately be traced back to human ignorance and human greed, and a political mentality which embraces the path of competition, confrontation and conflict rather than one of clarity, consensus and collaboration.

It’s one thing to recognize that we have a problem, and quite another figuring out what to do about it. And as for actually DOING it: actually making the changes and the sacrifices required to make a difference, that’s a whole new level of challenge in and of itself. But ignoring climate change is no longer an option; the world is changing around us whether we like it or not, and we can either learn to change with it, or die not trying....

It’s a grim, even morbid insight I know; not exactly the sort of thing to inspire a lot of happy feelings on a beautiful and sunny Sunday morning in Spring. But for too long now we have chosen to serve ourselves rather than learning how to serve the earth, and now the earth, being a goddess, is teaching us justice. Let’s hope that we can finally learn that lesson, before it’s too late for us all.