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ANNUAL REPORT
The Institute for Earth Education 2016
Three “Rs” For A New World
I spoke at an interfaith religious conference outside Washington, DC in November. Inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change, the organizers decided to make their topic for 2016, “Faith and the Environment.”
It turned out to be a mixed group. Some participants were still talking about turning off the lights and faucets, while others were urging wetland conservation and the prevention of runoff into Chesapeake Bay. Most appeared stunned when I said it was too late to “save the earth,” that the earth as we know it is finished. They seemed unable to comprehend the enormity of the situation we have created, or they did and were inert in the face of it. We watched Leonardo DiCaprio’s film, “Before the Flood,” a sort of update on Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” This new production is a tour de force on global warming, but it seemed to avoid the heart of the problem: a lack of deep ecological understanding, unfettered global capitalism, and uncontrolled population growth.
For decades, hundreds of books and articles have projected what’s now upon us, but there has been no vision, and thus no leadership, compelling enough to change our course. Like lemmings headed for the cliff, we could only make small changes in our immediate surroundings while the whole of humanity continued its surge toward an ecological abyss. Many well-
meaning teachers and outdoor leaders still think all this is about discussing
environmental issues, writing letters on behalf of a natural area, recycling our waste, etc. It’s not; it’s about saving ourselves. Mother Earth has a fever,
and we are the antibodies that created it. Sadly, this fever is now destroying our oasis in space.
In the early 90s, Al Gore wrote Earth in Balance, a journalistic review of our environmental crisis, but basically concluded at the end that we could grow our way out of it. Of course, growth represented the prevailing ethos at the time, but it was a stunning commitment to an environmentally-flawed economic system. We grew our way into the problem, but the acceptable delusion was that we could grow our way out of it. We did not. We just grew a larger problem.
At the conference, many participants seemed unprepared and unwilling
to accept that the “tipping point” had already occurred. It was standard
denial. No doubt, I did not do a satisfactory job of explaining why there
was nothing we could do now to prevent the coming collapse of our
home in space. If we all gave up cars and cows tomorrow, we could not
turn back the clock of global warming. What we need to do now is to
shift our focus (still turning off those lights and faucets), but begin
envisioning and crafting how we will live on a planet that’s being irrevocably transformed.
“an independent voice in the educational side of the environmental movement”