"Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath"
Give Us This Day Our Daily Breath
Robert Doss
Wilmington
October 24, 1976
Ecology: The science of the relationships between organisms and their environment – including humanity.
Ecology: A science triggering concern for our environment, evolving religious concern, calling forth, like modern versions of the Old Testament oracles, the 20th century prophets of doom.
With predictions of an exploded population, half of which, by the end of the century, will be living in cities, no wonder such prophets abound.
How much longer can “fun” city be called that? The crunch is on, figuratively and literally.
In an attempt to stave off pain with humor, Russell Baker last week wrote of the parking problem in New York City.
It’s getting to be worth your marriage to save or fail to save your neighborhood parking place. In 22 months, declares Baker, he has had a parking place in his block only once.
Also, one has to use a micrometer to fit in or get out of a parking space. Or, as the columnist describes it:
“The driver who wants to leave revs his engine and presses firmly against the blocking car in front, then reverses quickly and slams into the car behind – sets up a chain of jiggling bumper-to-bumper machines until he has cleared enough space … to … escape.”
“Through my bedroom window,” laments Baker, “I often hear the clanging and thumping of this violent escape- maneuver in the street below and reflect sadly on the damage being done to all those high compression engines.”
It gets worse!
“Twice a week, the street is cleared for the ‘street sweeper’ to come along the curb and stir up three or four days of dog droppings with its big steel brooms, pulverize them into fine airborne particles and set them dancing in the breeze until they filter through the windows and settle in the curtains.”
Of course, it’s not really funny. Sometimes one has to laugh at how awful a thing is. But, Tom Quinn is not laughing.
Tom Quinn, Governor Brown’s chairman of the California Air Resource Board, one of the toughest guardians anywhere of safety for the air we breathe, admits that already, it will be virtually impossible to improve the quality of the Los Angeles air to the standards required by the Clean Air Act.
Still, he’s trying. And gets all over the automobile manufacturers with power to make them take notice. And is pressing hard against the Petroleum People whom he thinks are just plain dishonest, not to mention greedy.
He takes seriously, and thus is afraid of, a risk-study survey connected with the possibility of building a liquid natural gas terminal at Long Beach, that the worst possible spill there could Kill, Kill, 97,000 of the inhabitants of that area.
Ecology: The relationships between organisms and their environment.
Our ecological interrelatedness –the whole earth it is said, is in danger.
In reading and thinking about this, I have noticed, roughly, three kinds of reactions to the facts and assumptions about pollution, energy, and economics.
In the face of the facts and/or assumptions, we hear from the GO people, the CAUTION people, and the TURN people. No groups that I know of advocates a complete STOP, which could be reached only by doing away with all the people on the earth.
GO, perhaps represents Gigantic Optimism. The GO people apparently believe in limitless economic growth of the material kind.
Perhaps Dr. Sicco Maushalt, a chief of the European Economic Community, is representative, when he says: “More, further, quicker, richer are the watchwords of present day society.”
E.F. Schumacher, author of “Small Is Beautiful,” believes such talk is in the same tone as Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “Why have you come to hinder us?”
The Great Optimists believe that pollution can be controlled, economic growth can pay for that control, natural resources can be replaced with synthetics, reactors to fast breeders, fission to fusion can handle the loss of fossil fuels – technology can handle it, whatever IT is, and, in any case, there is no choice, given the possibilities of population explosion and world hunger.
One optimist, Eugene Rabinowitch, editor in chief of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists “believe we can do without animals on the earth altogether – all except the human kind – that the only other animals we must have are the bacteria inhabiting our bodies – and that sooner or later, economic ways will be found to synthesize food from inorganic raw materials.”
He isn’t pleased with that thought, might you, but he reminds us, in his words, that “millions of inhabitants of ‘city jungle’ in N.Y., Chicago, London or Tokyo have grown up or spent their whole lives in a practically ‘azoic’ habitat (leaving our rats, mice, cockroaches and other such obnoxious species) and have survived.”
At what cost?
Is it any wonder the concern of the United Nations for habitat?
The biggest of the Great Optimists I have read is Herman Kahn, the one I believe who used to give us his friendly statistics on how tolerable it would be to undergo nuclear warfare and how many would survive here or there.
Kahn is convinced that 1976 marks the middle of the fabulous 400 – 400 years of greater and greater prosperity and affluence for the United States and for the whole world.
The Have nations will lift the Have-Nots, not by lending a hand but because the Have-Nots will sell us their resources and then try all the harder to catch up in order to be the kind of Haves we are.
One after one, he ticks off problems as opportunities for growth and technology – all will be solved, and by the year 2176, he confidently predicts, the earth’s 15 billion people will enjoy, for every man, woman and child on this earth, a comfortable $20,000 income each and – what’s more – in 1975 dollars.
Give Us This Day Our Daily Milk and Honey!
And how are those of us who are laymen and women to know?
We read two or three or 10 sides presented by experts (in conflict with each other), and wait for the evidence. But, the evidence now is not good. At least the air and the water, the purity of which used to be measures according to whether or not it was fit to drink from the stream. Air, water, and too often the food itself are not healthy for human beings.
We heard another optimist at the General Assembly in California last June. Bruce Murray, Director of the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal. Tech., an expert in space research.
Perhaps he’s right that human beings will transcend the past; that the population will spread out away from cities and industry will decentralize. That unimaginable progress in communications will help us to do this, that we will learn to use human as well as other waste as an energy source, that the technology can be tamed. Furthermore, mankind will probably and eventually discover other thinking beings in the universe. We will communicate with them, and learn more of nature’s secrets. Somewhere, all of the answers await our curiosity.
Murray believes that Ivan Flich[??] with his “Tools of Conviviality” far less industrialized peoples and Schumacher, with his “small is beautiful” economics, are reactionaries, not the liberals of our time.
His Ware [??] lecture sounded like a call to the motto of bygone Unitarianism: “The progress of mankind onward and upward forever.”
We may hope so.
But, what do we do now until the millennium comes?
Enter, wisely, the second group of people deeply concerned about ecology and conservation – the CAUTION people.
Act now to slow things down for the sake of the quality of life.
And how?
At the U.N. conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver, British Columbia last summer, British world citizen Barbara Ward or Lady Jackson – or, indeed, lady Habitat and Habitats superstar, as she as called, offered two steps when asked what religious people could do about human settlements.
Her words of caution are strong. Make the governments and the industries change.
Step One, the easy one, she said, “is to form active citizens groups in every country to bully and fight and generally harass politicians so they actually fell there is a vote at stake.”
The second step, the harder one, says Barbara Ward, is “to live in a slightly less affluent fashion oneself.”
In Delaware, you can join “Delawareans for Energy Conservation” and lobby. And, at home, suggests Dr. Myrna Bair of Wilmington, president of that organization, one can ask and act on it: “How many lights are burning unnecessarily? Does air conditioning have to be so cool – does it have to be on at all? How much hear? How many gallons of gasoline did we waste in our gas guzzling cars today? Are the houses properly insulated? This is only the beginning.”
I say there are the Caution People – though they might prefer the word ACTION. I do not use caution as a pejorative term, however, only a relative one.
Dr. Bair, for example, points out, and I quote: “For the future, we have two potential unlimited sources of energy: solar and nuclear fusion. Theses are both still in the developmental stage. Solar heated building unites are becoming available, but they are still vey expensive. Nuclear fusion, which could proved us with virtually free energy for millions of years, is at least 30 years away from reality.”
But, that brings me to the people who are having a third kind of reaction to the ecological crisis or threat: the TURN people.
DO NOT GO ahead optimistically, they say. DO NOT merely slow down to conserve energy and create time or nuclear power. Turn away from nuclear power altogether. turn as far as possible back to nature and apply the soft technologies to the solution for a life worth living.
In this group, I would include Jacques Cousteau.
Listen to him:
“Despite the best efforts and intentions of the people the United Nations, human society is too diverse, national passions too strong, human aggressiveness to deep seated, for the peaceful and the warlike atom to stay divorced for long. We cannot embrace one while abhorring the other; we must learn, if we want to live at all, to without both.”
The prophet of the Turn – turn to simplicity, is, perhaps, Schumacher. His book Small Is Beautiful is worth reading whatever your point of view.
He is clearly not one of the Optimists. He writes against “gigantism” because of an almost universal idolatry of it. He wants a turn for balance, it being necessary, he says, “to insist on the virtues of smallness” at this time.
If it were the other way –– there were a prevailing idolatry of smallness, “irrespective of subject or purple, one would have try to exercise influence in the opposite direction.”
But, the problem today, he believes, is gigantism.
We must turn from being greedy and envious ourselves, resist the temptation to allow our luxuries to become our needs, and scrutinize and simplify ever our needs.
If we haven’t the strength to do so, he thinks the least we can do is stop “applauding the type of economic ‘progress’ which palpably lacks the basis of permanence and give what modest support we can to those who, unafraid of being denounced as cranks, work for non-violence: as conservationists, ecologists, protectors of wildlife, promoters of organic agriculture, distributists, cottage produces, and so forth.”
The best example today, perhaps of the TURN people are the New Alchemy people. They are trying to take the ancient aim of alchemy, that is, the integration of science and the humanities, seriously.
At Cape Cod and Prince Edward Island, Canada, and in Costa Rica, they are attempting to put people back in touch with nature, to handle their own small technologies themselves and up close. To help people become self-sufficient and non-polluting, to take positive steps to turn to an alternative way of life in a fatalistic time.
To some, these TURN people have visionary ends but they are using down to earth means, inventing new windmills to transmit wind power by hydraulic systems to generators on the ground. Generating their own electricity, heating with solar energy, and growing high-protean-African-algae-feeding fish for human consumption in tanks in their living rooms or dining rooms.
Their word is exciting: solar-hearted arks, and fish farming, vegetable growing, compost burning. … Largely self-sufficient non-polluting communities.
They believe that while they are in the Model T stage of soft- or eco-technology development, they may be “a spark in the dying embers of our civilization.”
I believe the New Alchemists can say this at least: that is our resources are limited and if energy is going to become much much more costly, then, indeed, New Alchemy is relevant.
And, as they point out, if they are wrong, at least they are not hurting anybody, which they believe is more than the super-technologists can say, relying on nuclear technology to run our supermachines once the fossil fuels are gone.
If they right and if humankind must, in time, find alternatives to the go-ahead technologies of our time, then they will be among our wisest teachers.
Bruce Murray, the Jet Propulsion man who spoke to the Unitarian Universalists last June, speculated that we need a new theology for this and ages to come. His is Optimistic.
He guessed that the time might well come when we are in communication with other worlds – that the creatures on some of those planets would be far advanced beyond us in their technologies – that their computers would have stored knowledge we do not even know how to dream of yet, and that, eventually, by combining many of the data banks of the computers throughout vast reaches in the universe, people – or thinking creatures anywhere – could someday plug in and ask this super computer any question.
AND IT WOULD KNOW THE ANSWER!
A new theology for sure.
And it could be, I guess.
But, remembering that and reading Loren Eisley’s All the Strange Hours, I was brought back to the mystery by Eiseley’s description of his struggle with IBM cards that gave him strange instructions and tried to charge him hundreds of dollars in late fees for library books.
His complaint was not that it was a personal thing, but the machine was supposed to enhance order.
“Instead,” he wrote, “it frequently gave functionaries an opportunity either to say firmly, ‘God has spoken even if mistakenly,’ or, on the other occasions, to study their nails and remark, ‘The machine is broken,’ as though this ended the day.
“It was tantamount,” he said, “to a priest giving last rites to the dying, glancing upward, and pausing apologetically to say, ‘God is broken. We’ll send a mechanic tomorrow. Too bad, old man, but not my problem. I didn’t make Him.’
“Will there arise, eventually, a university of seminar course on the ‘Ethics of the Machine?’”
A new theology? Yes, a new theology is needed. Not, I think, to do disservice to God the computer, but a theology that helps us become again deeply aware, as some of the religions of the past were once able to do, but in language we but in language we can hear and believe today, aware of the sacredness of nature, the sacredness of life, the sacredness of existence.
IT may come through certain strains of Judaism or Christianity, though these western religions succumbed largely to the elevation of humankind above the matter they called evil that was nature. They know we were more than mere animals, but forgot that we are indeed animals, too – and part of nature. Judeo-Christianity chose history rather than habitat as the arena of solution: Time instead of place, and probably chose wrongly.
Perhaps, this will come by way of eastern insights – the religious re-merger of mankind and nature.
For our continent some of the native American believe they can teach us, the love of the land, the love of place, of mountain, air and stream, of animals, of the tribe that all are one. The theology of the Great Spirit as presence in the ALL, indefinable, but alive and to be revered, the sacredness of nature.
One, D.H. Lawrence remarked that though the American Indian never again would control the content, he would forever haunt it.
To a leading Indian spokesman, Vine Delaria, “Perhaps the ultimate meaning of control is the ability to haunt.” What can that mean?
Do not the ecologists warn of the continuous constant exploitation of the earth, air and water? That mankind maybe “approaching catastrophe of undetermined dimensions?”
Did the Indian know a way that now again will become a better way?
What can convince us that the group upon which we stand is holy ground?
A Cayuse Indian named Young Chief refused to sign the treaty of Walla Walla because the whole of creation – a good and sacred creation – was not included.
And he spoke thus:
“I wonder if the ground has anything to say? I wonder if the ground is listening to what is said? I wonder if the ground would come alive and what is on it?”
“I hear what the ground says.
“The ground says, ‘It is the Great Spirit that placed me here. The Great Spirit tells me to take care of the Indians. … The Great Spirit appointed the roots to feed the Indians on.’
“The water says the same thing. ‘The Great Spirit directs me, feed the Indians well.’ The grass says the same thing.
“The ground says, ‘The great Spirit placed me here to produce all that grows on me, trees and fruit.’ The same way the ground says, ‘It was for me man was made, woman was made. The Great Spirit in placing [human beings] on earth desired them to take good care of the ground and to do each other no harm.’”
Will we learn from this haunting of the earth? Will we understand again the interrelatedness of all and call it holy?
Einstein said the most beautiful thing in the universe is the mysterious. The theory of relativity does not mean that all things are relative. IT means that all things are related.
The earth is our home.
No, more than that. …
The earth, sky and water are part of the body of humanity –– the being that can be aware of the presence of the sacred. …
“And they shall take good care of the ground, and do each other no harm.”
Silent Meditation. …
Amen.
