A Quaker Celebrates Earth Day

 The below are comments I made at an Interfaith service celebrating the 51st annual Earthday.  Each speaker addressed what their faith instructs them about their response to climate change:

Quakers believe that, there is that of God in everyone.  Many things flow from that.  We believe that we can know the truth experientially, and that our understanding of the truth may change over time.  But we hold up, as the truth we have found so far, a belief in non-violence, in equality, in integrity, in simplicity, in community, and in stewardship.  To truly embrace any of these things, leads quite quickly to the need to stop climate change as it threatens all of those things.

One cannot embrace equality and non-violence and turn a blind eye to how climate change is wiping out small island nations and creating catastrophes for some of the poorest people on earth, as well as creating wars over resources.  What does it mean to live in community when your neighbor suffers?  How can we be good stewards on an earth where we are extracting and burning fossil fuels with reckless abandon? 

Our historic call to simplicity has been to reject consumption that is bought at the cost of others’  suffering or distracts from relationship with the Holy One– this is only more true now.  Everything which is manufactured, carries a carbon foot print – some items larger than others – but which are actually necessary for our life?  So many plastic do das, throw away objects, electric potatoe peelers, etc that both clutter the unsimple life and also create more greenhouse gases.   The testimony of integrity is to tell the truth regardless of what it costs you personally – There is a lot of radical truth telling to do these days.  One of the painful truths is about our own complicity in a first world life style that is not sustainable for our Mother Earth.  The whole planet is sustainable at 2,000 Kilowats per year per person. The average American uses 11,000.  The painful truth is even those of us, myself included, that live simply, are living way above our means.

Quakers also believe we can receive leadings from the Divine Spirit – promptings to do the right thing.  In our history that has led us, to hide people escaping slavery, and to fight for women’s right to vote, and to be imprisoned and even killed for our right to practice our faith.  It means that we can be asked to take risks and not play it safe.  I think the magnitude of the climate crisis again requires us, to be boldly faithful.  Our being faithful must begin with earnestly asking the Divine author for guidance on how to rightly live and how to boldly act in the face of this greatest moral crisis of history.  Quakers also believe that when we listen in silence that we can and will hear the Inner Voice prompting us.

I have been a climate activist for 14 years.  People often ask me how I find the hope to keep struggling with this issue, and they also ask me “Is it too late?”.    I have surrendered the question “Is it too late quite” long ago.  Because what I am clear about, is that regardless of if we just squeak by, or if we are in a slow death spiral, our moral commandment is the same: to love our neighbors as ourselves, to try to do justice and to treat people with Love in the face of whatever may come.  Interestingly some of the same things we have to do to adapt to climate change are the same things we have to do to mitigate it.   So it is clear to me that the holy voice of Justice calls us.   My hope lies in the promise that God can enter a situation transformationally when we are faithful.