When the Left Turned Green

At college in the mid-fifties, a Pete Seeger concert opened my mind to non-Republican ways of thinking –  about working people getting their just due and everyone getting a share of the pie.  I loved the lyrics of  “Roll on Columbia” by Woody Guthrie that advocated technology bringing wealth to all the people.
And on up the river is Grand Coulee Dam
The mightiest thing ever built by a man
To run the great factories and water the land
So roll on, Columbia, roll on
Your power is turning our darkness to dawn. . .
I was proud to identify with a Left that advocated a better world for all.
During the 60s, a couple of books were published, initiating the environmental movement. Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, making DuPont’s phrase “better living through chemistry” a joke. Carson’s book inspired much needed citizen action to clean up pollution of our air, water, and land.
In 1968, an ugly side of the environmental movement emerged when Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb.  This book representing the radical, people-negative branch of the environmental movement, implies consumption [not the TB kind] is bad, because there are only so many resources to go around, and the best thing to do is have fewer people using them, else humanity will crash like a neglected fruit fly population in a milk bottle.   Ehrlich didn’t take into account that human ingenuity creates resources by finding new uses for existing materials.  In the Stone Age, iron ore was just dirt.  And the Stone Age didn’t end because they ran out of stone.
Ehrlich stated:  “India where population growth is colossal, agriculture hopelessly antiquated, and the government incompetent will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain,” in other words, die.  Despite his callous recommendations, Ehrlich became the guru of the radical environmental movement.   However, Black Panthers and Catholics, unlikely bedfellows, understood the problem was one of distribution, not finite resources.  
Pete Seeger climbed onto the environmental bandwagon writing songs about the population explosion, species extinction, and pollution in general with such songs as “We’ll All Be A’Doubling” and “The Last Whale” in 1970, and “Garbage” in 1977.   These songs focus on people’s relationship with the earth rather than with each other.
As the concern for the planet increased, concern for the ordinary people on it decreased.  We all need a healthy planet for our own survival, but there are those, such as Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, who believe humanity is a cancer on the planet.  

Belonging to the Beloved Community

When I signed up for the annual Canvass Dinner, I explained that I needed to eat in the Social Hall because I have to wear a gas mask in the sanctuary to filter out the allergens in that room and I can’t eat wearing a gas mask.  No problem, they said.  I confirmed my need to eat in the Social Hall twice more.  Not to worry, they said.
That day I arrived at three to help set out brats and buns for the dinner.   After we separated out special foods for the gluten-free, the dairy-free, the pork-free, the meat-free, and the all animal products-free diners, I laid my raincoat on a chair to reserve my place in the Social Hall.   Then around five someone asked me to welcome the arrivals and I went out to the parking lot with an umbrella.   Half hour later, when I came into the Social Hall to eat, my coat had been moved and the table was full. Nobody claimed to know why the coat was there or whose coat it was although my name was printed prominently on it.   One person at the table said, “Everybody knows you were supposed to reserve a place by drawing on the newsprint.”  The others at the table laughed.
  I was so furious I couldn’t speak. My mind flashed back to middle school Mean Girls.  Wasn’t my need to simultaneously eat and breathe as important as the needs of the voluntary vegans?  
I took my plate of food and went home.

Global Warming: A Real Movement

From my couch, I can see Global Warming in my own back yard.  For the last few years, my quince bush that used to lose its leaves every winter has stayed green all year.  Now it’s morphed into a Little Shop of Horrors monstrosity.
Global Warming is real, yet it’s also a movement.  Movements have several characteristics.   The issue is so important that the end justifies the means.  It’s so necessary to sway people to the proper beliefs that a little exaggeration is okay.   Movements preach that if we make a few sacrifices now, a glorious future for posterity will ensue.  Movements are ideologies, causes, cults.  It seems odd that a scientific issue can become a movement, but global warming has.
From Al Gore (in interview with Grist Magazine May 9, 2006, concerning his book, An Inconvenient Truth)
“Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous (global warming) is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are...” What is the difference between “an over-representation of factual presentations” and a lie?
The Global Warming movement uses images to sway people. Images can illustrate facts, but they’re not facts in themselves.  Take the famous picture of the polar bears huddling on a shrinking ice floe.  The reader is supposed to imagine the grim future when all the polar bears have become extinct as the Arctic ice melts.  For all we know the picture was taken in August and that it might even have been photoshopped.
In the case of global warming the warnings are slanted toward the worst case scenarios.  Positive aspects of climate change are ignored: longer growing seasons, CO2 as a plant stimulant, increased areas for settlement and agriculture in northern latitudes and that more people die of excess cold than excess heat.
Possible negative effects are seized upon.  Will malaria increase with a warmer climate?  Probably not, because malaria was endemic in cold climates in the 19th century. Some say Climate Change was responsible for Superstorm Sandy, but no one storm can be due to Climate Change, just as no one case of lung cancer can be attributed to smoking because not everyone who smokes gets lung cancer and people who’ve never smoked get lung cancer.  One case does not a trend make.
The issues keep being restated to ramp up their urgency.  Global Warming has switched to Climate Change and has now been reframed as the Climate Crisis.  The word crisis means something has to be done and it has to be done now.
Movements insist it’s extremely urgent to act now.  From 350.org:  “Accelerating arctic warming and other early climate impacts have led scientists to conclude that we are already above the safe zone at our current 390 ppm, and that unless we are able to rapidly return to below 350 ppm this century, we risk reaching tipping points and irreversible impacts such as the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and major methane releases from increased permafrost melt.”
Ad hominem arguments, the hallmark of those who must stoop to attack their opponents’ character, distinguish movements.  From Oregon State philosophy professor Kathleen Dean Moore: “Unchecked anthropogenic climate change will profoundly harm the chances of future generations, undermining the necessary conditions for human life and liberty...It’s wrong to violate human rights, condemning all future people to struggle and misery.”
Another hallmark of a movement is that anyone who disagrees is treated like a heretic.  In the global warming movement, instead of heretics, they’re called  “climate change deniers.”  It’s a good thing we don’t do the burning at the stake thing anymore.   (The other side calls climate change activists “Warmists.”)
It’s always handy to have someone to blame.  Dean Moore continues, “millions of dollars are poured into attacks on climate science and scientists by those deeply invested in preventing society from drawing any conclusions that might block the unimaginably profitable activity of pouring carbon into the air. What they really must believe, but cannot say, is that greed and limitless profit trump the human rights of all future generations.” OregonLive 12/01/12
I conclude with another example of the end justifying the means from Stephen Schneider (leading advocate of the global warming theory in interview for Discover magazine, Oct 1989)
"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
But are the exaggerations and propaganda doing science any good? Says Dr Richard S Lindzen, leading climate and atmospheric science expert of MIT,  "In the long run, the replacement of the precise and disciplined language of science by the misleading language of litigation and advocacy may be one of the more important sources of damage to society incurred in the current debate over global warming."
The scientific method is our best method for gaining knowledge we can have confidence in about our world.   Political advocacy about science is a travesty of science.  Science is science, not a movement.

Credo Part III: How then shall we be religious?

Even a nerd like me needs more than abstract intellectual speculation in my religion.  I need an image of the Divine to evoke awe and wonder and also to give me a way to connect with the Ultimate.  Rabbi Arthur Waskow suggests Ruach, the Breath of the Universe as such an image: “What we breathe is what the trees breathe out, what trees breathe in is what we breathe out. Thinking of G-d as the Breath of Life is a profound metaphor and theology of G-d, as the Breath of Life, in and out breath, that which unites all life, that which is beyond us and within us. Words are physical breathing shaped by intellectual consciousness into emotional communication.  So when we pray or share words of compassion we breathe ourselves into the Breath of Life.”  
According to Seligman, we can partake in the process toward God. We can increase knowledge as a teacher, increase power as an engineer, increase goodness as a social worker.   We can breathe with the Breath of the Universe that is moving toward the Omega Point of all win-win.
I’ve now unraveled the answer to the questions of salvation: Whose are we?  To whom do we belong?  To whom are we accountable?  What keeps us going when life throws us a curve?  What larger Something are we part of?
As a contented nerd, I answer:  I am part of the Universe evolving toward the Omega Point of more knowledge, more complexity, more win-win systems.  I’ve helped push this evolution in my life.  I’ve contributed to knowledge by working as a laboratory  research assistant, to empathy by publishing a memoir about becoming gay, and toward less violence by clicker training dogs. I celebrate this belonging with my breath that I join with the Breath of the Universe.

Credo Part II: Win-win gets us to the Omega point

Last year I discovered a book that articulated and extended much of what I had been pondering about increasing complexity and win-win in human affairs.  The Better Angels of Our Nature; Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker was worth spending $24 for a hardback copy.  Moreover, for a nerd like me, figuring out the mathematical, statistical, and philosophical patterns in the book was as much fun as figuring out the patterns in a sudoku puzzle.  Pinker establishes, unequivocally in my mind, that all kinds of violence have been decreasing over the ten thousand years of human history.  
At the beginning of our history ten thousand years ago, we all lived as hunter gatherers.  According to Matt Ridley [blog 1-28-13 Mind and Matter WSJ] almost one-third of people in such societies die in raids and fights, a higher proportion than the people in worst hit areas during World War II.
Fast forward seven thousand years to the Near East world of three thousand years ago.   The society that produced such wisdom as “Love justice and do mercy”  was rife with slayings, smitings, and stonings.  The Bible tells us so.
By the turn of the 20th century, slavery and cruel and unusual punishments had been outlawed in the civilized world, but there was still a lot of violence in everyday life toward those who didn’t really matter: racial minorities, homosexuals, women, children, and animals.
When I was a young adult in the 1960s, spanking children, jerk and pull dog training, and gay bashing were still part of everyday life.    Fifty years later, time outs, clicker training, and marriage equality have replaced these hoary customs.

When people challenge my contention that there is less violence in the modern world, I tell them to imagine themselves in front of our local courthouse.  What will they not see?  Lots of things:  a stake to burn witches, a pillory, a stocks, a gallows, a slave market, a debtor’s prison in the basement.  What they might see: same sex or mixed race couples strolling arm and arm without fear of being attacked.
Pinker sees the process of declining violence as a consequence of more and more win-win systems. Win-win is a non-supernatural process that can be analyzed using game theory, although for me it evokes awe and wonder.  Although he identifies as a Jewish atheist, Pinker says his views are compatible with a theology that makes God inherent in the nature of the universe. Maybe that’s what God is – where win-win wins.  Win-win wins gets us to the Omega point.

Credo, Part I: To the Omega Point

When I was in high school in the 1950s, I fell in love –  with biology, a relationship I’ve maintained all my life.  During the genetics unit, I quivered on the edge of my seat because it combined biology with my last year’s favorite subject, algebra. [I was born a nerd, one who rests at the intersection of three sets of qualities:  social ineptitude, intelligence, and obsession.]  I remained glued to the blackboard during the next unit, evolution.  Kingdom, phylum, order, family, genus, species arranged themselves on a tidy tree.  At the time, I believed the Catholic God created the glorious panoply of life.
College biology centered around Darwin’s theory of natural selection and evolution, the unifying paradigm of biology. All the factoids in my head now fit into a pattern that made sense.  The evolutionary process was presented as mindless and purposeless, but I still believed God steered the process.  Besides, at least one species in the universe had opposable thumbs.
In my twenties, I discovered Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who seemed to reconcile science, evolution, and Catholic dogma.  The Phenomenon of Man was philosophical rather than scientific, so there wasn’t data to back up his conclusions. Teilhard believed the Universe was evolving toward an Omega Point, defined by Teilhard as a convergence with the divine.
Liberal arts were, in my callow mind, just intellectuals’ opinions with no basis in the real stuff, the physical world.  History was about a bunch of dead white guys fighting stupid wars.  Learning history meant remembering which event went with which four digit number.  It wasn’t until fifteen years out of college that I had the epiphany that dates let you order historical events in a sequence.  
By that time I’d fallen away from Catholicism.  I raised a family, worked as a lab tech, mostly in microbiology labs.   After a few years meditating at a Quaker meeting, twenty years ago, I became a Unitarian Universalist.  
Our first Unitarian Source affirms “direct experience of transcending mystery and wonder.”  We can draw inspiration from the Great Story of our glorious origin from stardust and our overall increasing complexity, as preached by Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow.  This couple mostly focuses on our marvelous past, rather than the future of our species.  Our glorious past inspires awe and wonder, but we need a faith that looks to the future.
About a dozen years ago I came across Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond, a physiologist, ornithologist, and environmental scientist. When scientists do history, it gets interesting. Diamond found patterns in historical data to show why things happened the way they did over the long haul. He traces the development of political organization from band to clan to tribe to chiefdom to nation-state.  Complexity increased in human history as it did with organic evolution. Complex organisms and societies are consistently more successful than simpler.
I continued my nerdy reading habits with NonZero by Robert Wright. He points out that both organic evolution and human cultural evolution have proceeded in the direction of greater complexity and win-win systems, meaning when opposing parties cooperate, everyone wins.  Also, given enough time, complex intelligence will emerge.  Then across history and the world, human social systems have grown more complex from savage to barbarian to civilization, the same process that Diamond traces.  I was reminded of Teilhard’s Omega Point.
Evolution, a bottom up process, is a messy affair that generates a lot of garbage along the way.  It’s not all up, up, up.  The ichneumon wasp is fiendishly cruel and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire should never have happened.   Wright uses the image of a balky horse, three steps forward, two steps back.  A world that produced tapeworms along with formations of flying geese looks as though it was designed by the Native American deity Coyote.
I delved into psychology, found books by psychologist Martin EP Seligman, who writes about the joys and benefits of optimism.  Seligman ends his book Authentic Happiness with a chapter on finding meaning and purpose in life, essential to authentic happiness.  Seligman summarizes the theology inherent in a win-win process and demonstrates there can be meaning in life without the Supernatural:
“Where is the principle of win-win headed?  Toward a God who is not supernatural, a God who ultimately acquires omnipotence, omniscience, and goodness through the natural process of win-win.  Perhaps, just perhaps, God comes at the end.”   Again  Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point.  Seligman continues:
“A process that continually selects for more complexity is ultimately aimed at nothing less than omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness.  This is not of course a fulfillment that will be achieved in our lifetimes, or even the lifetime of our species. The best we can do as individuals is to choose to be a small part of furthering this process. This is the door through which meaning that transcends us can enter our lives. A meaningful life is one that joins with something larger than we are – and the larger that something is, the more meaning our lives have.  Partaking in a process that has the bringing of a God who is endowed with omniscience, omnipotence, and goodness as its ultimate end joins our lives to an enormously large Something.”  

Belonging, Part II: Who Acts for the Church?

Sunday used to be a special day. My partner and I looked forward to hearing the welcome greeting each week, “Whomever you love, you are welcome here.”  I’d beam at Diana, feeling all warm and fuzzy about our Unitarian Universalist congregation. If people don’t like us, it’s not because we’re lesbians, but because we’ve been jerks.  
“Whatever body you live in, you are welcome here.” We provide special meals for those who abstain from animal products or gluten. We have a hearing loop so all can hear the sermon and music. We have reserved parking and wheelchair ramps for those who roll in.  Our congregation is rightly proud of its accessibility and welcome policies.
Diana and I sat near the window safe from the scent of people’s grooming products and detergent residues. The dome shaped sanctuary, with its minimal air circulation, has always been a problem for me because I have multiple chemical sensitivity [http://www.uua.org/accessibility/chemical/26971.shtml].   If I breathe certain chemicals or dusts, I get a hacking cough, a condition I developed analyzing Superfund waste at the EPA.
About six months ago, attendance at Sunday services doubled thanks to our dynamic interim minister and the concerted efforts of the membership committee.  For me, it’s a mixed blessing.  Now there are so many people crowding the sanctuary that I can’t escape their scents by sitting near the window.  
Sometimes I retreated to the Social Hall to listen to the service through the sound system, but being isolated from the community made me feel like an orphan with my nose pressed to the window, watching the real families feast.
To address the air quality in the sanctuary, I earmarked 20% of my pledge for air quality improvement, asking someone from that committee to contact me.  I attended the Environmental Committee’s healthy building audit, which recommended increased air circulation in the sanctuary.  I showed the minister there was no setup for moving the air in the sanctuary other than the furnace vents and the cold air return.  I asked the cleaners to use a HEPA dust filter when they vacuum.  So far nothing has come of any of these efforts, although the ladies of the Caring Connection ask me how I feel.
Lord knows I tried to go through proper channels.  I met with the Building Committee chair, but he got transferred to the Ministerial Search Committee before he could take any action on the ideas we generated.  A representative from the Building Committee told me the furnace fan had been adjusted so it ran during services, but that’s all they could do.  (It didn’t help.)  I emailed the new Building Committee chair that a Heat Recovery Ventilator and a smooth floor to replace the thirty-year-old carpet would make the sanctuary environment pleasant and healthful for all, but there has yet been no reply.  
I was getting the run-around, as though I were a fussy old lady with princess and the pea issues.  By now, others, including the minister, are complaining of the rank air in the sanctuary along with sleepiness, sore throats, or headaches.  All in all, getting something done at the congregation, which has the inertia endemic to volunteer organizations, has turned out to be more frustrating than getting something through the bureaucracy at the EPA, where I had to remind myself of the four T’s: These Things Take Time.  
 I was tempted to slam the door on the congregation. Though if I did, I would lose friendships with people I’d known for years and would be cutting off my nose to spite my face.  To maintain my connections, I participate in activities that don’t require going into the sanctuary.  I prepare checks for the bookkeepers in the office, I lead a discussion on World Religions in the library, and sometimes I attend Coffee Hour in the Social Hall.
Diana misses worshiping with me.  I miss worshiping with her and the community that was my family for almost twenty years. I find spiritual sustenance through the Church of the Larger Fellowship whose services I watch on-line religiously every Monday morning.  I’m grateful for the virtual community, but it’s not the same as being at church.
“Whatever body you live in, you are welcome here,”  means all persons, including those with an invisible disability, deserve accessibility.  Wheelchair users aren’t expected to bring their own two-by-four's for ramps, nor should those with multiple chemical sensitivity have to provide their own respirators.