Facing the Monstrous Crow

June 1, 2008

Since this service is about saving the planet, I thought we should begin by looking at IT. We need to set the stage for Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

 So, here it is, the Earth, third planet from our sun making its orbit in about 365 ¼ days, tilting ever so slightly on its axis in its elliptical journey, giving us our  solstices, our equinoxes, our seasons, our plantings, our harvests. The earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours; thus we have day and night, dawn and dusk.  These reference points organize our human time.

We are just far enough away from the sun for our atmosphere to have evolved. If we imagine the earth as a rather large onion the atmosphere is its skin. It surrounds the earth and has allowed life to evolve and flourish including human life. In it we truly live and move and have our being. Our empires, our cultures, our histories, our philosophies, our sciences, our religious beliefs, our very lives are completely dependant on that onion skin of atmosphere that encircles the earth.

Modern science has allowed a select few of us to escape that atmosphere- hence this picture. It has allowed us to explore the solar system of which the earth is a part. Our space probes have found no habitable planet or satellite there! Out telescope lenses now penetrate the galaxy and beyond. The nearest star is Alpha Centuri, four light years away, light traveling at 300,000 kilometres a second. Perhaps there is a planet we could emigrate to there. But Alpha Centuri is a binary, two stars circling each other, an extremely unlikely place for an earthlike planet. And three hundred thousand kilometers a second taking four years to get there is a very long hike.

Science fiction may have invented warp speed but we haven’t. No, for all our cleverness and technology we are stuck here on earth.

Our earth is very old, about 4 billion years give or take several million. If we look at this meter stick as earth’s time line, at what point did the human species originate? New scientific discoveries keep pushing human evolution back in time,  presently putting that origin at about 200,000 years, on our meter stick a fraction of a centimeter. For most of that time we were hunter gathers, keeping alive by what plants we could find or animals we could kill. But we are a very smart species, and in time we discovered how to use fire, how to domesticate animals and how to farm.

About 500 years ago we invented the Industrial Revolution. I have painted the end of the stick red to indicate that.

It has always been a daring adventure to be alive on this planet. For it has its own life and sometimes trips up human beings. Earthquakes, Tsunamis floods, fires, and droughts have always been here from the beginning. So we will acknowledge right now that there are unpleasant planetary events over which we humans have no control. But the overarching reality is that this earth has given rise to a most elegant, complex and beautiful ordering of life. From the deepest oceans to the highest mountains life spreads its interdependent web of existence of which we are a part.

But with the ascendancy of human activity now busy unraveling that web, it is time to turn to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, two fat little men that Alice encountered Through the Looking Glass.

I brought along my well loved, well worn copy of Alice in Wonderland. It is the first book I ever owned.

Tweedledumand Tweedledee
agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

 Tweedledum and Tweedledee have been busy about their human affairs. They have become quite angry. Tweedledum has acquired a new rattle.  He is very proud of it.  He quite loves it. It’s his. But then Tweedledee has come along and spoiled it. As for Tweedledee, why shouldn’t he have the rattle? It is loud and it is pretty and he covets it. So the accusations and excuses escalate until finally the brothers are drawing their swords. Prepared to fight to the death. Over a Rattle!

Does this scenario sound familiar? If you grew up with siblings, I’ll wager that you have been Tweedledum or Tweedledee over and over again. That dynamic is ingrained. In your childhood some adult usually came along and sorted you out before you came to blows. But T and T in this talk represent adult humanity. The rattle symbolizes Goods, Territory, Resources. If you look at human history you will see that we have been enacting the first verse of our poem for ever. We humans are a scrappy bunch. How did we get that way? And how is that dynamic causing environmental degradation?

Three years ago I visited Ireland and picked up a book, “Life Before the Celts”. Ireland, that compact little island, is a great place for studying prehistory. So we are going to take a lightening trip through six and a half thousand years to get a sense of how we have operated through history.

8 thousand to 4 thousand BCE:  Mesolithic hunter gathers arrived in Ireland. They were flint knappers and knew the use of fire. Throughout this long period they established small settlements along the coasts and along river valleys. To do so they chopped down trees.
4 thousand to 2 thousand BCE:  The Neolithic age had arrived. By chopping down more trees and clearing land they could begin farming and thus secure a reliable food source. Their population began to build. On the whole, though, they were peaceful people.

2 thousand to 12 hundred BCE:  The Bronze age arrived. Now they could make bronze axes. They’d be able to chop down even more trees. To make one tonne of ore they needed 2500 tons of fuel heated to 1200 degrees C. That required 100 mature forest oaks felled logged and converted into charcoal.  One tonne of ore gave 20 kilograms of  pure copper. This required two more forest oaks. This cost 800 work days . An average axe weighed 500grams and took 20 days of labour. Each person had to be housed, fed and compensated.

From “Ancient Ireland”, (p.233)
“The environment encountered by Mesolithic people when they first arrived in Ireland was totally unspoilt. It was people who began spoiling it. The first fire lit by our Mesolithic ancestors saw the first emissions by human  agency of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; the first small clearings saw the beginning of the destruction of the natural means of combating these emissions. The vastly more extensive forest clearance engaged in by Neolithic farmers to provide space for their crops and herds helped to hasten the effects. To this, in the Earlier Bronze Age, was added the emission of arsenical vapours, and then, with the smelting of sulphide ores, sulphur dioxide. Acid rain had been invented.”

As we humans morphed from hunter gathers to farmers and pastoralists we began to gather into villages, then towns, then cities. At each step our concern with human affairs intensified and our distancing from the earth escalated. Those in villages and towns became Tweedledums; they had a good thing going there.  But the Tweedledees lurked at the edges of their clearings. They could go in grab some of those stored grains, nab a sheep or two, go home and have a feast. So Tweedledum had to protect his goods. Instead of axes he began to make swords. The concepts of ownership of property and warfare began to take shape. More trees felled. More noxious emissions into the atmosphere. The Monstrous Crow grew more muscles, put on more black feathers and sharpened his beady eyes.

And so, the distancing from the earth and the planetary destruction went on and on into the 21st. century with the invention of the state and the carving up of the planet into countries and empires.

The axe morphed into the sword, the gun, the tank, the Stealth bomber, the battleship, the nuclear weapon. At each step forward more despoliation of the earth, more pollution, more people to manufacture these things, and to wage war, more tearing of the planetary web of life.  Especially more pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

For of all the environmental degradation we have loosed in the world, global warming is the most ominous. I haven’t time to go into that phenomenon in any kind of detail today – besides most of you know all about it anyway.

Briefly the sun’s rays beat down on the earth but most are deflected back into space. Those that are captured by the atmosphere are used by plants to survive. In the past some of that carbon became oil, some coal. Photosynthesis produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. But our forests are great carbon sinks preventing much of that carbon from escaping back to the atmosphere thus increasing global warming.  As our air warms, our forests heat up and our glaciers melt. triggering feedback loops.  Thus the pine bark beetle usually kept in check by our cold winters has been able to survive and multiply. It has destroyed thousands of square miles of trees in BC. Now those trees are beginning to decay releasing more CO2. Instead of the forests storing carbon, an asset, they now release it, a liability.

Our polar ice caps are milting opening up seas hitherto under ice. The ice is a protection.  The albedo effect, the result of ice and snow, bounces those warming rays back into the atmosphere protecting us from global warming. But the dark seas absorb CO2 and warm up still more, causing more melting and more warming.

Alberta is a dry province but the tar sands provide oil, a fossil fuel. Massive amounts of water are required to release the oil from the sands. Huge tracts of forest and prairie have to be leveled by gigantic machines to extract the oil, to produce still more of the fossil fuel that is a major cause of global warming. What is so different in the mind sets of the Alberta tar sands barons from the bronze age Irishmen who cut down their forests to make axes?

Here are some brief consequences:
1. At the Rio Earth Summit I learned that the most environmentally unfriendly human activity is warfare. We are still fighting. We have huge munitions industries. Some of us  are now contemplating star wars.
2. The melting of the Artic and the Antarctic Ice Caps will cause a sea level rise of about 8 meters. 20% of the world’s population lives within that 8 meters. Where will these people go?
3. The last mass extinction of species occurred 65 million years ago when a meteorite crashing into the Yucatan peninsula wiped out the Dinosaurs. Human destruction of habitat is causing a comparable distinction now. When will it be our turn?
4. We now have a very limited time left to drastically reduce our carbon footprint, thus avoiding the triggers I spoke of previously. Elizabeth May spoke of 2015 as the target time. Our monstrous crow has grown to huge proportions . It menaces the whole earth.

So here we are today. Tweedleedum and Tweedledee are filled with dread, cowering in the bushes, gazing with horror at the monstrous crow of environmental degradation. Have they escaped detection? Or is the M C about to gobble them up. Their human conflict is forgotten as they face the annihilation of their species, that annihilation largely caused by themselves. Is there any hope at all for them?  Well T and T have one advantage.  They have seen the MC . Hiding in the bushes they can choose to study it. The trouble is they know that many of their fellows are not aware. Do not want to be aware. Are in utter denial.

Aside – In Canada’s Earth Hour the lights of Rideau Hall were out. Our Governor General is aware. The lights of Stornaway were out. Stephan Dion is aware. The lights of 24 Sussex Drive were on as usual. Our Prime Minister is either unaware or does not care. In any case, he was unwilling to stand in solidarity with people all over the world who for one hour acknowledged that we have a big problem with global warming. His action is scary.

And then there is Alice. Alice has two things going for her. She is female and she is young. She belongs to the gender that for thousands of years has been oppressed by the present hierarchical world view. But she carries within her immense creative energy of a different kind – that expansive inclusive female energy that is needed so desperately by our world. She stands for Life with a capital L. She can remind herself that all human life comes through her sex. We are all of us woman born. Then she can take that energy and life and confront the death-dealing run-amok energy so evident in our leaders right now- the energy that is destroying the earth.

And she is young. As yet she is free of the old constricting ways that bind even the most enlightened of us older folk. Her future is all ahead of her. Her energy is in the ascendancy. Like Craig Keilburger and Severn Suzuki, she can act to confront the present system and find new ways of relating to the planet.

And then there are you and I. Since we are in a Unitarian Church all of us are on a spiritual quest. All of us are Deep. Think of the collected experience and wisdom that is present right here now. We are up to looking at the Monstrous Crow out there in the world, in all its malevolent manifestations, and then turning the searchlight of our souls on the MC that lurks within ourselves. For of course the MC is present in our own lives too. It could not be otherwise, living as we do in this dysfunctional world. Then we can realize that being immobilized by fear like T and T never solved anything. And we can choose to act.  To call our leaders to account. To challenge cooperate greed.  To curb our polluting ways.  To reduce global warming.  To restore our forests and wetlands, our oceans and skies. To save the planet.

Joan Cornfield    May 25th. 2008