As a child during Advent, I fought with my three siblings over Jesus. We didn’t argue about conversion, but rather the right to put a one-dimensional infant the size of a thumbnail onto the Advent calendar made from red felt and glitter glue. My mother devised a rotational system, which meant that every four years, each child would place baby Jesus into his glittered manger on Christmas Day.
For my children, that same Advent calendar represents one step in our preparations for Christmas. (In a more secular waiting game, my cousins use the Elf on a Shelf, that magical spy for St. Nick.)
The start of Advent, this season of waiting and watching, coincided with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico. We are not waiting for climate change. It is here. And religious communities are taking the lead with incremental solutions to a warming planet.
“a warming planet”……tell that to the people in the upper midwest all the way to New England.
Try North Carolina! My fish pond is frozen over!
I hear you! Down here on the gulf coast of Mississippi we hit 26 last night and my heat pump is still running to keep up.
“Start to heal our planet” … oh, puh-leez.
When I was a child in Connecticut the Naugatuck River, sewer to many chemical plants, caught fire. My father, both a chemical engineer and an ardent conservationist, nearly 60 years ago began to work with those companies on chemical recovery. His angle? They were flushing a lot of money down the river, and doing a lot of damage to his in-laws’ oyster business at the same time.
That scenario was repeated thousands of times by different individuals in different places, for decades. Where has McDuff been?
The net result of people who “started” two generations ago — with absolutely no urging or regulation or subsidies from government — is that two years ago I was at the helm of an oyster boat built by my great-grandfather nearly a hundred years ago.
We were on Long Island Sound, less than 30 miles from New York City, dragging up fresh oysters and fearlessly eating them raw on the spot.
In similar news, wild Atlantic salmon have been running the Connecticut River for the first time in over 350 years. Or this:
Thirty-five years ago growing corn (maize) required herbicide applications on the order of 5 to 6 pounds of active ingredient herbicide per acre. Modern herbicides require applications as low as 1/2 [i]OUNCE[/i] per acre.
It was impossible in the Pittsburgh of 1960 to hang laundry outside, consequence of acid soot. Been there lately? “Start to heal the planet” ? Go to central and eastern Europe, or Mexico.
The successes of freedom and capitalism create a prosperity allowing people to protect, heal and improve the environment.
This sounds too much like a General Convention worship service. Think I’ll pass.