Dr. John Young 4/22/07
Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville
Celebrating Earth Day: Toward Sustainable Lives
For most of human history, the good Earth’s abundance seemed inexhaustible. As we learned about evolution, in the nineteen and twentieth centuries, we realized that many species had become extinct, and that in our modern ‘conquest’ of the Earth, that we had begun not only to kill off species at a greatly increased rate, but that we were undermining the foundations of nature itself so that the extinction of all life on the planet was increasingly becoming probable.
Now, we are beginning to face up to the facts that we must significantly change our ways of living, thinking, and acting. If we truly conquer nature, the human species will die. So, we must discover how to live in harmony with nature so that our descendents can survive. Science and technology can help significantly, but they cannot alone solve the problems we face. We must learn how to practice science and choose technologies so that they can truly help us to sustain the planet and allow humans to survive and hopefully to figure out how to flourish in a world with limited resources and a natural world that is rapidly disintegrating under the pressures of our explosions of human population, technology, and consumption. What follows in this sermon are not intended to be criticisms of the choices that you, I or others have already made, that’s water over the dam, but suggestions about what needs to be seriously considered today and for the future.
Children need to be understood to be a privilege and a responsibility not a right. We need, at most, to be permitted to reproduce ourselves, beyond that society probably needs to penalize over-population rather than continuing to reinforce over-population through tax dollars and public support.
The world cannot replicate the present average American life style. In fact, we cannot continue it here in America. We need to focus on sustainable technologies and tax and progressively prohibit anti-social technologies and focus on sustainable consumption, taxing and progressively prohibiting anti-social consumption.
We all need to consume less, concentrating on quality rather than quantity. When we consume junk, we become junk. When we excess, waste, and fail to pay attention to the results of what we are doing, we become extremists, wasting ourselves, and diminishing who we are and what we value. We need not only to consume less, but we need to focus clearly on sustainable consumption. How can we do that? By paying attention, learning about the wisest ways to do things using technology and science and then concentrate on cooperating, sharing, re-cycling, re-using, and making practically everything that we use and do become a self-sustaining cycle.
For instance, limit every adult to one motorized vehicle. If they want more than one, let them pay a 100% tax every year for that unsustainable privilege. I don’t think highly polluting vehicles should be allowed to keep on polluting. Ban them, take them off the roads, and destroy them. When Kathleen and I were in China in 1997, China already allowed no vehicles older than six years. Limit every American to one pet, and penalize people who have more than one. If a consumption habit is anti-social, creating bad health and exploding social costs, tax it, and progressively discourage it through restrictions and prohibiting its growth, manufacture, and distribution.
There are so many things that we individually have or think that we need that we could figure out ways to share and use cooperatively. There is a great deal that could be done not only among families and neighbors but within congregations and through employers. All these kinds of behaviors could be supported through tax incentives while anti-social consumption habits could be discouraged through taxes, regulation or prohibition.
I would just eliminate guns for private use. I see no constructive purpose for them in America. If we prohibited the manufacture of ammunition except for the military and law enforcement, the millions of guns out there would quickly become useless.
If we really want to curb mass terrorism, we should be using the power we already have. We have laws on the books to replace almost all of the nuclear reactors around the world capable of making atomic weapons, and we already have a program to buy and destroy the former Soviet Union’s stock piles. Fully funding these programs would cost less than a few months of our abortive war in Iraq. We, and the other industrialized nations, make almost all of the weapons, ammunition, and explosives; so, we could control their manufacture, and mark every one so that it could be identified and traced. We need, across the board, to use science and technology to change the rules of the game so that we begin to practice sustainable lives.
For instance, we do need quickly to establish alternative primary forms of energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen, fuel-cell, etc., and probably also atomic. But if no place is willing to store the nuclear wastes; then, nuclear energy becomes questionable. Certainly replacing gasoline with corn-based fuel is just another big rip-off. There are many forms of potential bio-fuels that America is simply throwing away, all those weeds on the highway and railroad right-of-ways, all that garden trash that we put out every week, the endless fat in our fast foods. We need to use the really cheap and wasted sources of energy, and stop figuring new ways to pay off the people who are already making the most money.
This congregation has a long history of environmental activism. Soon after we built this building, which won awards for integrating itself into nature, using natural light and heat, UUCJ leaders gave away 4 ˝ acres of its property to the Tree Hill Nature Center. Soon after I arrived, Phyllis Fleming funded UUCJ’s beautiful Fleming Nature Walk. Now, the UUCJ Board has established a Green Sanctuary Committee. Its Co-Chairs are Lynne Paradise and Rick Kirkwood, and I invite all of its members to stand up now. They are going to be your moderators and scribes in the small groups today, and they are going summarize what you say, and use it in helping to decide their agenda’s priorities and projects in the months to come.
What are we willing to do personally? Will you reproduce less? Are you willing to limit yourself to one pet per family? No unnecessary motorized vehicles? Using less energy? Consuming less of everything?
When we think about our congregation, people often say, oh, let’s stop using paper products. Well, there are whole cultures that use no toilet paper. Are you willing to do that? There are sanitary ways to practice that human function without paper. If we do not use paper products, then somebody has to wash the dishes, the dish towels, etc. Will you do that, not only for yourself but for your congregation and your other groups? Are you willing to limit your diet to what you can personally grow? I am not, but Kathleen and I are learning to eat less in general because it is better for us. We are down-sizing slowly, and we intend to do so dramatically when I retire, and we move to be close to my children. We will probably then have less than half the square footage in our home, only one car, only cell phones. What are you willing to do yourself, and what are you willing to help happen here at UUCJ? Too often, we have loads of good ideas, but most of them are for what we think other people should do. So, these questions for your small groups today, are an opportunity for you to say exactly what you are willing to do yourself and as a household or family, and what you are willing personally to help UUCJ do to make a more sustainable world. Perhaps, we should not talk at all unless we willing to literally walk our talk and live our talk in order to make a more sustainable world.
I am proud to announce at this Earth Day Service, 2007, that my son, Rahul Young, who is an environmental engineer with ICS in San Francisco, focusing on sustainable energy use and green building, has just successfully helped Yahoo commit themselves to a carbon neutral policy for their entire operation by the end of 2007. He is in negotiation with several other international corporations to help them to do the same. Most of us will not be able to accomplish what my son is doing to nurture a more sustainable world, but every one of us, and this congregation, can do a great deal. So, now is an opportunity to tell one another what you are willing to do, yourself, and for this congregation to nurture a sustainable world.