An Inconvenient Truth

I just finished watching An Inconvenient Truth. (The timing is coincidental, but I suppose you could think of this as a belated Earth Day post.) I could kvetch about the way the film and the slide show it's based on serve as vehicles for Gore's political personality . . . but let's not strain at gnats and swallow camels here. Humanity is in deep trouble; life on earth as it has come to be organized by the confluence of various natural forces over the last several thousand years is in deep trouble. We have been unfaithful—if not just incompetent—stewards of creation.

I knew I was going to get all depressed and morbid and apocalyptic by watching this film. Gore gives it a quintessentially American optimistic ending: we can solve the problem; we have everything we need now; we can even do it without sacrificing that most cherished American ideal—wealth. That was actually the term he used: wealth. I had to grind my teeth at that point. God forbid that Americans should have to make real sacrifices in our living standards—and that we should be required to make them by force of law as part of the social compact. I know that you have to start somewhere; I have faith that by small and simple things, great things are brought to pass. But to suggest that climate change can be solved—and all those disasters averted—if people will voluntarily carry out the individual-level advice that flashes across the scene during the closing credits (change your thermostat; buy more efficient light bulbs) strikes me as naive. We need more radical solutions. We need more radical ways of reorganizing how the human family does things. To invoke an analogy: This isn't a time for a "Pennies by the Inch" drive; it's a time to implement the law of consecration.

I have faith—or at least I have hope—that the God who created this world can help us save the ecological order on which we, and the other living things we share this planet with, depend. I have faith in the power of Christ's resurrection to bring about temporal as well as spiritual salvation—that the forces of life can triumph over the forces of death. But I was also raised on a work of scripture that is all about the collapse of civilizations, and I wonder: Am I living in a time like the time of Mormon and Moroni? Am I watching my society march toward a destruction we could once have averted but which is now inevitable?

I can't think about these things. It's too paralyzing. I think sometimes it is entirely possible that I will die of starvation, in the not-too-distant future, in a civilization that has collapsed and a world that has become uninhabitable. I really worry that things may be that bad. But of course you can't dwell on that kind of thinking if you're going to live your life in a productive way. So you get up in the morning, and you go to work, and you worry about the little everyday things that need to be done to keep your life and your world going the way it is for now . . . and you hope that somehow you'll escape seeing it all someday collapse around you.

That's the morbidly depressing part. The infuriating part is the populist, anti-intellectual skepticism that retards the development of a political will in this country to take climate change seriously . Those loud, inflated, arrogant amateurs who imagine themselves qualified to challenge or dismiss the conclusions of the trained experts. It's the dark side of American democracy—this Jacksonian glorification of the common folk that says "the people" can know better than the experts with their high-falutin' college educations. That Jacksonian anti-intellectualism has been a hugely important formative impulse in Mormonism, so this hits especially close to home for me. "Don't be deceived by the so-called experts who predict ecological disaster; we know from the scriptures that the earth is full and to spare"—that kind of thing.

I'm worn out from getting depressed and angry. Let's pray. Bluntly.

************

Creator God—

We're f-----, aren't we?
Help us. Please.

There are people who are trying to make a difference.
Breathe out your life-giving, transforming Spirit through their efforts.
Magnify their contributions.
Make them instruments of temporal salvation.

I pray for an administration in this country that will sign the Kyoto accord.
I pray for a political will to mandate environmentally friendly change on the part of corporations, not simply to provide "economic incentives" for them to change. I pray, in other words, for real corporate accountability.
I pray that people of faith will become a more potent, prophetic force on behalf of effective social stewardship of the environment.

I pray that disaster can be averted.
I pray that Nineveh will be spared. You know what I mean by that.

In Christ's name, amen.