Earth Daze

Today is Earth Day, and now more than ever it’s time for us to give our planet much more than lip service.  Most of us say we care enough to defend our blue planet from the slow and steady erosion of its health caused by population pressures and global industrialization at an unprecedented scale, but then we do next to nothing.  We let our elected officials twiddle their thumbs while the Earth burns. 

When Earth Day was established on April 22, 1970, I was in college.  It was the beginning of the environmental movement.  In fact, on December 2, 1970 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created.  Everyone seemed to wear the Earth Day logo pins and was enthusiastic for reduction of environmental pollution: land, rivers, sea, and air.   Much was accomplished, but much was left undone.

So here we are 44 years later and impassioned debate continues about our planet’s fate.  However, now the threats are more profound and earth-shaking.  Global warming: is it real nearly everyone asks?  I tend to be skeptical; however, science no longer supports my belief that global warming is just a political football.  In fact, I’m influenced by renowned skeptic Michael Shermer who said in the October 2013 issue of Scientific American, “…I went to the primary scientific literature on climate and discovered that there is convergent evidence from multiple lines of inquiry that global warming is real and human-caused: temperatures increasing, glaciers melting, Arctic ice vanishing, Antarctic ice cap shrinking, sea-level rise corresponding with the amount of melting ice and thermal expansion, carbon dioxide touching the level of 400 parts per million (the highest in at least 800,000 years and the fastest ever)…”

One of my favorite authors, Thomas L. Friedman in his 2008 book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why we need a green revolution and how it can renew America, stated, “America has a problem and the world has a problem.  America’s problem is that it has lost its way in recent years – partly because of 9/11 and partly because of bad habits that we have let build up over the last three decades, bad habits that have weakened our society’s ability and willingness to take on big challenges…the best way for America to get its ‘groove’ back – is for us to take the lead in solving the world’s big problem”

Now, I’m not an alarmist, but I do expect any day now for the lights to go out and for Klaatu and Gort to appear at Mashpee Commons, perhaps on the field across from Christ the King.  Klaatu will say after his alarming intro, “I came here to give you these facts, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder.” Klaatu’s (Michael Renne from the 1951 movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still) comment about our global violence is right on the mark, but the robot Gort will not have to reduce the Earth to a cinder.   We don’t need extraterrestrial help.  We can and are doing it ourselves to God’s wonderful creation and gift to us.  

Our fate won’t be a cinder. Stark, unpredictable environmental and climatic change likely is our destiny if we and the rest of the world continue to ignore the science and refuse to believe that which is so painful to accept.  As Shermer noted, “Too often my [our] beliefs trump the scientific facts.  This is called motivated reasoning, in which our brain reasons our way to supporting what we want to be true.”

This Earth Day let’s be motivated to keep informed and not let today be a one in 365-day event.

Deacon David Pierce