Reflections presented to Westminster Presbyterian Church, March 16, 2014

ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMISM?

Reflections Presented to Westminster Presbyterian Church

Sunday March 16, 2014

Dries is out of town this weekend with the Border Links trip, so in an act of desperation and knowing I work cheap, he asked if I would provide some reflections today on his recent theme of violence in our world.  In particular, knowing of my interest in things environmental, he asked if I would talk about violence to our environment.  I told him No, I really didn’t like the imagery of that language, but if I could call it something else, perhaps.  And I asked if he wanted a real sermon, or just some reflections.  He said “just some reflections”, so with those qualifiers, I agreed.  So you don’t get a sermon today, just some thoughts and ideas, mainly some questions for you to ponder yourself.  I can pretty well assure you that I will not be providing a lot of definitive answers.  Sorry, but you’ve probably heard of the client who wanted to hire a one-armed lawyer, so that he couldn’t keep saying “Well, on the other hand……….”

So, why the title “Environmental Extremism”?  I start with my view of myself, as a bit of an environmental extremist in my personal life.  I walked here today, and do most Sundays, and almost always walk to the many events I attend at the College.  I ride my bike to work…. well, on weekends anyway.  I recycle every scrap of paper I can get my hands on.  I don’t use paper towels to dry my hands in restrooms, they always get dry in a minute or two anyway.  I drive a car which gets 30 miles per gallon, and I turn off the engine if I’m waiting in a line and not moving, and coast either in neutral or with the engine off whenever I can.  We keep our house pretty cold in the winter, turning the thermostat down even lower at night.  Our house is not air conditioned and we rely upon shade trees for cooling in the summer.  I walk and carry my bag when I play golf.

I pick up pop and beer cans on the street to take them home to my storehouse of cans to take to recycling.  When helping my son clean up at his business, I fish pop and beer cans out of the trash to be sure they get recycled.  When Dries recounted last week his and Beth’s encounter with a plastic item on campus, saying that Beth playfully kicked it while he was reminded that in South Africa such was never done for fear of the kicked item blowing up, I just thought they should have picked up the plastic item and thrown it in a recycling bin!  I recycle absolutely everything which I can at home and regularly have much more in my recycling container than in trash bags every Wednesday morning.

I believe with all my heart that bottled water is immoral, unless one is in a third world country where the tap water can’t be trusted.  My co-workers will assure you that I am kind of a fanatic about this (and other things) at the office.  I don’t eat red meat and am about 80% vegetarian, partly for health reasons but also because that is one of the most effective ways that an individual can reduce one’s carbon footprint.  I’m not quite to vegan, but respect those who are.  Especially since my good friend Dave Noble says the hardest thing about it is enduring the grief he gets about it from his friends.  (But he can take it, so don’t worry about that.)

I could go on … and on… and on, but I think you get the point.  And I can assure you that you really don’t want an extensive list of my personal quirks and eccentricities!  But kind of extreme, don’t you think, or at least it seems so to me since the vast majority of the people I encounter in my daily life do very few of these things.  And many people I encounter really don’t seem to even care about even the simplest of these things, such as throwing a can into a nearby recycling container instead of the trash.

But am I really an extremist?  Or just kind of wacky and out on fringe just on my own selective basis?  After all, our other car is a gas hogging SUV, I drive when I could walk to work most days, we buy more packaged food than we really need to, I certainly use more paper than I really need to, I use a clothes dryer instead of hanging clothes out to dry, and our house is warm enough that I don’t need to wear my coat inside.  I travel and use more of the earth’s resources than many, probably much more than 90+% of the world’s peoples. 

Am I just rationalizing my otherwise excessive use of the earth’s resources by taking the steps listed earlier?  Am I like the Prius owner whose main atmospheric emission is “smug”?

My answer to this question is very clear and it is “I don’t know”.  This is Reflection Number One for today.  I think about these things often.   I really do think I’m helping by the long list of things that I do to try to help out.  But I often wonder, am I making a meaningful difference?  I hope so, and I’m not going to quit doing all of this (perhaps just because I’m old and stubborn).  So I invite you to think about it, too, and react as you see fit.

Let’s turn to another use of my title “Environmental Extremism”, by looking at public policy matters.  A fair amount of my daily work is dealing with various business owners who deal with environmental regulators, and anecdotally I would say that well over half of the environmental regulations that I encounter are nonsense and counterproductive.  It is the nature of the job that EPA enforcement folks are “cause” people who probably live their personal lives along the lines of mine but who have no common sense and no understanding of running a business and providing employment and economic advancement for our society.  Don’t get me wrong, I fully believe that tough environmental laws are important and the reality of pre-environmental law days was pretty nasty.  As recently as the 1960s, it was very common for businesses to simply dump toxic chemicals outside and not think anything about it because that’s just what was done.  Everybody did it.  The United States is a much better place now that we don’t do that any longer (or at least not very often) and now that we are getting those places cleaned up, one by one.  But when one of those sites has been largely cleaned up, and time will attenuate anything remaining, and there is no impact on public water supplies or anyone’s health, it makes no sense to require a business to literally go bankrupt because it cannot afford the cost of getting that last little bit removed a little sooner than natural attenuation would do it anyway.

An article in the March 7 Wall Street Journal carried this headline:  “Rare Détente:  New EPA Chief and Industry;  Executives Say Gina McCarthy’s Willingness to Listen – and Make Concessions – Sets a Different Tone on Regulations”.  Time will tell how this works out, but this article makes my point that too often environmental enforcement has been counter-productive and more harmful than helpful.

We need environmental extremists pushing public policy, because it is an ironic truth of our world that the pushy extremists are the ones who cause things to happen.  But when the regulators insist upon things that just really don’t matter, it offends me.  And I am sure it offends the business owners who get these things shoved down their throats, and I am sure it really offends the workers who lose their jobs because the business owner is spending money on something counterproductive.

So, Reflection Number Two for today is again nothing definitive, no final answer for you to go home and implement.  But rather just a request that you think about the public policy implications of environmental enforcement and hope for common sense to prevail, at least sometimes.

For another use of my title “Environmental Extremism”, consider one of the most amazing things to hit Ohio and our neighbors to the East in many years, maybe ever, and that is the shale oil and gas drilling boom that is underway in Southeast Ohio.  This is the real thing.  All indications are that it is not an exaggeration to say that this region can become the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.  One horizontally drilled well can produce the oil and gas of 400 conventional vertically drilled well.  I won’t bore you with the details, but this is something I have worked with quite a bit and our law firm is up to its waist in related legal work.  And much of the publicity that surrounds this development is just plain wrong.  I want to scream when I hear the phrase “the new technique of hydraulic fracturing”, because that process is not new at all.  It’s been going on since the 1940s or so, and there is not a single reported instance of hydraulic fracturing (also called “fracking”) impacting a water supply.  Not one.  The so-called news to the contrary is simply false.  That is not to say that the drilling of an oil and gas well cannot negatively impact a nearby water supply, because it can if the drilling is not done properly.  But existing regulations already protect against that, and the point is that that has absolutely nothing to do with fracking.

So, Reflection Number Three for today is something definitive, with a clear final answer for you to go home and implement. The shale boom in Ohio is real and it’s a good thing for our area and fracking is making it happen with zero negative impacts on the environment.  Again, I am not saying that there is no chance of something bad happening when an oil and gas well is drilled.  But there is nothing wrong with fracking and the next time you hear that …  well, just be skeptical, and remember that you heard the truth here.

And to wrap up, let’s remember that my Reflections today are here in Church.  What does all of this have to do with Church?  Are we stepping outside theology and into geology?  If so , should we?

            Some say we have a mandate to care for God’s creation which stems from scripture. We read in Genesis 1:31  that God beholds all creation as “very good” and commands us in Genesis 2:15 to “till and tend the garden”.   We read in Psalms 24:1, “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof” .   Psalms 82:3 says we have a paramount obligation to “defend the poor and the orphan; do justice to the afflicted”  and Matthew 25:35 says to care first for “the least of these”.  Care for God’s creation particularly requires protection of vulnerable life.  

            But Genesis 1:26-28 also says that God wanted humans to “rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.   So God created humankind in God’s own image….  God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Isn’t a little pollution a pretty logical consequence of that?

So, I still wonder if it’s really from the Bible that we have an obligation to sustain the future well-being of all life on Earth.  Isn’t it really a public policy issue and not a religious matter?  I certainly don’t find anything in scripture that gets me too close to saying that we ought to reduce our use of paper or to recycle pop and beer cans.

And don’t you sometimes wish that some public policy issues would just stay there and out of Church?  For example, can’t we figure out the right thing to do for marriage equality without citing Scripture?  Just sayin’…………….

So, Reflection Number Four,  the last one for today is again nothing definitive, no final answer for you to go home and implement.  But rather just a request that you think about why is it that we should do what I think most of us think we should do.  That is, I think everyone in the room would agree on some basic principles of environmental stewardship, even if we disagree on some of the specifics, but why?

I am not sure if it’s biblically based or not.  My leaning would be to say Yes, it is, because that is at least one important source for most of us to order our lives and one of the tenets found therein is to do our best to care for others, and certainly good environmental stewardship does help others around us, here in Wooster, in Ohio, and throughout the world.  But maybe it’s just the right thing to do anyway.

When Dries first asked me to talk today, he suggested that I share some thoughts about the raft trips that I regularly take through the Grand Canyon.  I am always happy to talk about that, and why wouldn’t I when this is the scenery:

One of the joys of the trip is the peaceful solitude with nature.  No cell phones, no email, no work to do.  Just get up when the sun comes up and go to bed under the stars when the sun goes down.  We just follow the current downstream, away from all the cares of the world, hiking throughout and being in awe of God’s creation.  If you have a coffee table book of Grand Canyon photos, I can assure you that this following shot is in that book, taken from some ancient granaries at the end of a grueling hike and looking down the Canyon:

Here are the boats which we use.  Notice the small outboard motor at the back.  The purists say that one should go downstream powered only by oars and the flow of the River.  So, is this acceptable, since the motors make it an 8-day trip, compared to the 16-day trip required for a rowing trip?  Is the Environmental Experience diminished by this concession to modernity?

And how do we get out of the Canyon?  By helicopter, up to the North Rim, from where we fly back to Flagstaff, Arizona.  Same questions.  Same lack of clear answers!

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After you have given some thought to all of these things, please get back to me if you have found the definitive answers!  In the meantime, I’ll just keep thinking about them, and hoping for the best.

Thanks for listening.  I love this place and all of you.