Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Ecojustice

  • One Thing

    Sermon copyright (c) 2026 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “Global Warming Blues” by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie. You can hear the poet reading this poem on Youtube.

    The second reading was the poem “look at the blackbird fall” by June Jordan. This poem is available in the anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille T. Dungy (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2009), or in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).

    The third reading is usually attributed to Unitarian minister and novelist Edward Everett Hale.
    I am only one
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something,
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    Sermon

    Right at the beginning, I should tell you that this sermon got the wrong title. I called it “One Thing,” but as you will see, a better title would have been “Ten Times One Is Ten.” I should also tell you, right up front, that while it might seem a little depressing at the beginning, this will wind up being a positive sermon.

    For the past twenty years, one of my sidelines has been doing environmental education with children and adults. Not that I’m trained in environmental education or biology, but I’ve been fortunate enough to work with, and learn from, biologists and environmental educators. The reason I wound up doing environmental education even though I wasn’t trained in it, was because I could see that humanity faces numerous ecological challenges of our own making, challenges which have prompted spiritual questioning and even spiritual crises in quite a few people.

    Let me give an example of a spiritual crisis prompted by ecological challenges. Ten years ago, I was one of the people leading a week-long ecology day camp for grades 2 through 8. We gave kids lots of opportunities to play outdoors and explore the natural world, and we even did a little citizen science with them. We also talked openly about the environmental challenges that humanity faces; we didn’t emphasize them, but we were honest with kids that humanity faced some big problems. In fact, the kids were relieved that we adults were willing to talk openly about those big problems. Children and teens are quite aware of the world’s environmental problems, but sometimes adults don’t want to talk with kids about such serious and discouraging topics.

    Toward the end of the week-long camp, while we were out walking somewhere, one of the seventh graders said to me, with a little bit of fear in her voice, “Are we going to be all right?” There were a couple of levels of meaning contained in this seemingly simple question. At an abstract level, she wanted to know if humanity was going to survive the various ecological crises we’re facing. Then at a personal level, she also wanted to know what their life was going to be like, and over the course of their life how they navigate the problems raised by global climate change, toxics in the environment, and so on. And at a spiritual level, she was facing a crisis of meaning — would she survive?

    My reply to that seventh grader was pretty much what you’d expect. I said that humanity had faced big challenges in the past, and somehow managed to come out all right. I said that in spite of the big problems we faced, I felt humanity was capable of solving those problems. In short, I tried to tell her things that would give her hope for the future.

    This exchange helped me understand the roots of the spiritual crisis many kids — and many adults — experience as we contemplate ecological problems. When we contemplate ecological problems, we wind up confronting several spiritual questions. We wind up confronting the nature of humanity — Is there some evil in humanity, some basic flaw, that has prompted us to do so much damage to other living things? Is there enough good in us to overcome the bad, so that we can solve our ecological problems? Then we wind up confronting the purpose of existence — Is it true, as some conservative Christians tell us, that the only purpose of this life is to prepare us for an afterlife? Is there some deity, or some force in the universe, that will be angered by the damage we’re doing to other living beings? And we also wind up confronting some old stories that have been told in Western culture for thousands of years, stories about how there will be an end time filled with disasters. Are those old stories true? — and before the skeptics among us say, “No of course they’re not true” — I would remind you that old stories like that can shape your behavior at an unconscious level, even if you doubt them at a conscious level. And whether or not those old stories are true, are they maybe affecting our behavior in ways that we don’t like, and maybe we want to retell those old stories so that we behave in ways we do like?

    All these are spiritual questions. They are questions that cannot be answered scientifically or logically, because they are feeling questions. Ultimately, these spiritual questions boil down to whether we feel a sense of hope for the future.

    Getting back to that seventh grader — she was more or less satisfied with the answer I gave her, but I wasn’t. I knew I had only given her a scientific and logical answer to her spiritual question, which meant that I didn’t really address her spiritual concerns. How could we address those very real spiritual questions that those kids had? After talking it over with all the adults who were running that day camp, here’s what we came up with….

    First, we decided that we needed to be more explicit about the ecological problems facing humanity. By not being specific, we made it feel as though ecological problems were huge and amorphous and beyond the capability of any one person to tackle — and when you feel powerless to address something, that can prompt a spiritual crisis. I had heard a talk given by Dr. Stuart Weiss, a Stanford-trained biologist who ran an environmental remediation company. Weiss listed five major threats to earth’s life supporting systems:

    One: Global climate change. Two: Invasive organisms, non-native plants and animals that outcompete native organisms. Three: “Toxication,” or pollution from solid wastes like microplastics, to chemical wastes like PFAS. Four: Deforestation and other land use changes that now affect three quarters of the Earth’s land area. Five: Overpopulation by humans.

    I use the acronym DOGIT to remember these — Deforestation, Overpopulation, Global climate change, Invasive species, and Toxication. Other biologists have come up with similar lists with different acronyms. The biologist E. O. Wilson used the acronym HIPPO, which stands for Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, human Population, and Overharvesting. Use whatever list or acronym you prefer — the point is to get more specific about the challenges facing us.

    At the day camp, we told the campers about Stuart Weiss’s list of five major environmental challenges. Then we told them that they do not have to solve all of these challenges. All they have to do is choose one of them on which they wanted to focus their efforts. We also gave them stories about role models, people whom they could emulate who had taken on one of these big environmental challenges. So, for example, we told them about Wangari Maathai, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for starting the Green Belt Movement to help reverse deforestation in Kenya. We told them about Rachel Carson, who brought public awareness to the damage that chemical pesticides were doing to the environment. As we talked about Wangari Maathai and Rachel Carson and others, we would make it clear how each one of these people focused their efforts into straightforward and achievable projects. Wangari Maathai didn’t try to solve land use problems everywhere the world, she focused on addressing deforestation in Kenya where she lived. Rachel Carson didn’t try to tackle every kind of pollution, she focused on what she knew best, pesticides like DDT. In addition, for each one of our role models, we made sure the kids understood that these people did not work alone, but rather they worked with others to bring about positive change.

    One of the ways we reinforced this was by reciting the following short poem:

    I am only one
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something,
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    When talking with kids, I usually attribute this poem to Unitarian minister and novelist Edward Everett Hale even though it probably wasn’t written by him. I like to attribute it to Hale because it captures the spirit of what he believed. One of Hale’s most famous novels was titled Ten Times One Is Ten. The novel begins just after the funeral of Harry Wadsworth. Ten people who had all known Wadsworth, but who had never met before, wind up telling each other stories of the good things Harry Wadsworth had done for each of them. For it turned out that Harry Wadsworth was one of those people who quietly went around doing good things for other people. Not that the good things he did were anything extraordinary — everything he did was something any one of us could have done — but he went ahead and did them, whereas all too often the rest of us don’t.

    As they sat around listening to each other’s stories of Harry Wadsworth’s good deeds, these ten people became inspired by his actions, and they wanted to continue his legacy. They wanted to form a club to carry on his legacy, but because they lived all across the country, they couldn’t have a conventional club with bylaws and meetings and so on. Instead, they decided that each of one of them would go out and do something good in the world; then they would report what they had done to the others. And, to better capture the spirit of Harry Wadsworth, they adopted the following mottos:

    “To look up and not down,
    To look forward and not back,
    To look out and not in,—
    and
    To lend a hand.”

    Since there were ten of them whose lives had been touched by Harry Wadsworth, they set themselves the goal of each touching the lives of ten more people. Now you begin to understand why the book is titled Ten Times One Is Ten. Each of those people did something good that touched the lives of ten more people, so that ten times ten becomes a hundred. Then those hundred people went on and did things to touch the lives of ten more people, until before long it ten times a million became ten million. And the good work spread from person to person, until at last the club realized that they had reached a thousand million people (ten times a hundred million is a thousand million) — which at the time the book was written, in the late nineteenth century, was the entire population of the world. As the narrator of the novel puts it: “When ten million people have determined that the right thing shall come to pass in this world, having good on their side, they will always be found to have their own way.”

    “Ten Times One Is Ten” became a bestselling novel in the late nineteenth century. The novel proved so popular that it spawned a real-world movement of “Lend-a-Hand” clubs across the United States, devoted to making the world a better place. (These nineteenth century clubs have mostly disappeared, although when I worked at the Unitarian church in Lexington twenty-five years ago they still had a Lend-a-Hand Club, and there is still a Lend-a-Hand organization in Boston.) And you can see how the Lend-a-Hand club concept sounds like that poem attributed to Edward Everett Hale:

    I am only one
    But still I am one.
    I cannot do everything,
    But still I can do something,
    And because I cannot do everything
    I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

    So even if Edward Everett Hale didn’t actually write this little poem, the anonymous author captured one of Hale’s most important teachings in a memorable form. Furthermore, Edward Everett Hale would go on to say, though you may be only one — ten times one is ten.

    Regardless of who actually wrote that poem, we taught it to the kids in the day camp. I wish we had also thought to teach them the motto of the club in Hale’s novel:

    Look up and not down,
    Look forward and not back,
    Look out and not in, and
    Lend a hand.

    Yet even though we didn’t teach them those exact words, we taught them that sentiment. Look up for solutions rather than getting pulled down by the problems. Look forward to the future rather than always looking back at the past. Don’t get trapped inside yourself, but look outwards to other people, for there is where you’ll find hope. And finally, of course — Lend a hand where you can.

    This is not to say that we ignored the very real phenomenon of “eco-grief.” “Eco-grief” is a term that I learned from a professor of environmental biology; she uses that term to describe the feelings of her college freshmen students when they realized the true magnitude of the environmental problems we face today. Eco-grief is a real phenomenon; most of us have some feelings of eco-grief. We should not dismiss eco-grief, but if we get trapped in our inward feelings of eco-grief, then nothing will change for the better. Go ahead and look in on your feelings of eco-grief, but remember to then turn and look out, and lend a hand.

    I’m making this sound like while we were running that ecology day camp, we considered all these matters ahead of time, and then implemented a carefully constructed curriculum to help kids maintain a positive attitude, so that they weren’t overwhelmed by eco-grief, so they could go out and change the world. Actually, what happened is that we made it up as we went along. We watched how the campers responded (and, if I’m honest, we watched how we adults responded), and then made adjustments on the fly. This took us several years.

    We knew we had succeeded by watching the campers. We got to a point where they didn’t have to ask us if things were going to be OK, because they already knew how they could contribute to make things better; that is, they were looking forward, and not back. I’ll tell you about two of our very obvious successes. One girl, who started out as a camper and went on to become a junior counselor, told us one year that she could not return to camp again because she had gotten a summer internship in local government working on environmental issues. Another girl who had been a camper then a junior counselor and was about to enter her senior year of high school, announced that she was applying to college programs in environmental science. We had other successes that weren’t as obvious, although they were just as successful. There was the camper who planned to become a high school history teacher, and who wanted to teach his students some of the history of environmental problems. There were the many campers who learned to love and enjoy the outdoors, and we knew they would grow up to become voters for whom environmental protection would be a priority.

    Our successes with these kids grew out of the basic principle that you do not have to solve all the environmental problems by yourself. Do the one thing that you can do, no matter how small. When you do that, see if you can touch the lives of other people. When you touch the lives of others, perhaps you will inspire them in turn to do just one thing to address our environmental challenges.

    This basic principle works for kids, and it works equally well for adults. We can begin by reminding ourselves that it is not up to us to solve all the world’s problems as isolated, solitary individuals. One person can’t do everything. But each one of us can do one thing to make the environment a little bit better. We can focus our efforts even more, to make it seem less overwhelming. We can each pick just one of the five major environmental challenges. Remember the acronym DOGIT — Deforestation, Overpopulation, Global climate change, Invasive species, Toxication. You are only one person, so you only have to concern yourself with one environmental challenge at a time. And for the one challenge with which you choose to concern yourself, you only have to do your part. If you choose to address deforestation, you could support your local land trust to protect natural habitats. If you choose overpopulation, you could support Planned Parenthood in teaching people about contraceptive choices to help reduce unwanted births. If you choose global climate change, you could help local governments in supporting renewable energy infrastructure. If you choose toxication, you could pick up trash whenever you go for a walk. Or if you choose invasive species, you could help remove invasive garlic mustard plants.

    All you have to do is one thing. And it can be a small thing. But when you do that one thing, see if you can touch the lives of others. See if you can bring joy and happiness to other people, helping them feel better about the world. Just as in Edward Everett Hale’s novel, if your one effort inspires ten others, then ten times one is ten; ten times ten is a hundred; ten times a hundred is a thousand; and so on until we reach eight billion people.

    I know this sounds hopelessly idealistic. I know it sounds like pie in the sky. But from my experience with that ecology summer camp, I’ve seen how eminently practical it can be. It is practical because when we inspire each other, we give each other hope. And when we give each other hope, we free ourselves — and we free our children and grandchildren — to make the world a better place….

    Look up and not down,
    Look forward and not back,
    Look out and not in, and
    Lend a hand.

  • Gardens, not Walls

    Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The text below has not been proofread. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation.

    Reading

    The reading was the poem “Set the Garden on Fire” by Chen Chen. (The poem is not reproduced here out of respect for copyright.)

    Homily for the annual Water Ritual

    Every year, when we have this water ritual, we talk about how we are all connected. Or more precisely, how all human beings are connected to each other, and how all human beings are connected with all other living beings and indeed with the non-human world as well. We are literally, physically connected by the water cycle (as Kate and I pointed out during the moment for all ages), and we are also connected by ethical concerns, concerns that may not be physical but are just as literal as the water cycle.

    In the first reading, we heard a poem by Chen Chen, a now-middle-aged poet who was born in China and grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. This is a poem about a suburban community. It could be a poem about Newton, or it could equally well be a poem about Concord, Massachusetts, where I lived and worked for the first forty years of my life, or it could just as well be a poem about Cohasset or Scituate or any South Shore suburban community. Here in the suburbs, we are both good at nurturing human community, and we are bad at nurturing human community.

    We are good at nurturing human community when we keep our communities safe so that we don’t have to fear interactions with strangers. We are good at nurturing human community when we support local organizations like parent-teacher groups, and elder affairs councils, and congregations, and scouting groups, and community aid groups like food pantries and the Cohasset Community Assistance Fund, and so on. Indeed, many of us move to the suburbs precisely because we think it will be easier to be part of human community here.

    On the other hand, suburbs can also be places that are actually destructive of human community. I’ll tell you a couple of stories to show what I mean, both taken from my home town of Concord. First story: A friend of mine had a new family move in next door, and when she saw her new neighbor getting his mail at the mailbox, she ventured to go up and say hello. He retrieved his mail from the mailbox, and then said into the air — not looking at her — “One of the things that I like about the suburbs is that you don’t have to talk to people.” Second story: When I was in my thirties, I was talking with an older friend about an affordable housing project that the town proposed building near her house. She was vehemently opposed, because, she said, “Black people might move in.” (She was so vehement I decided not to tell her that it was much more likely that I’d move in, because as a current town resident in the right income bracket, I’d get preference.) From these two stories, you can see that sometimes people in suburban towns do not nurture human connections.

    Of course this is true of people everywhere, not just in the suburbs. In the current political environment, we have two political parties whose primary vision for the future seems to be the eradication of the other political party. I have friends who are Democrats who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate Trump, and I have friends who are Republicans who seem to mostly want to talk about how much they hate liberals. Neither party are exemplars of nurturing human connection. Similarly, in the current ethical environment, too many of our thought leaders are people like the former CEO of Steward Health Care, who received hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, while at the same time the hospital chain didn’t have enough money to pay for critical supplies, or to pay staff salaries. Again, this man is not an exemplar of nurturing human connection.

    I’m reminded of a story in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sabbath 31a. A man approached the famous Rabbi Hillel. “I would like to convert to Judaism and become a Jew,” he said. “I know I have to learn the Torah, but I’m a busy man. You must teach me the Torah while I stand on one foot.”

    “Certainly,” said Rabbi Hillel. “Stand on one foot.”

    The man balanced on one foot.

    “Repeat after me,” said Rabbi Hillel. “What is hateful to you, don’t do that to someone else.”

    The man repeated after Rabbi Hillel, “What is hateful to me, I won’t do that to someone else.”

    “That is the whole law,” said Rabbi Hillel. “All the rest of the Torah, all the rest of the oral teaching, is there to help explain this simple law. Now, go and learn it so it is a part of you.”

    Of course we all know that we shouldn’t do to someone else what is hateful to ourselves; as another rabbi put it, we all know that we should love our neighbors as we love ourselves. But notice that Rabbi Hillel adds the instruction: “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” (1) When Rabbi Hillel tells the man to go and study, he’s not talking about some academic kind of study; he’s talking about study as a sacred act; he’s talking about knowing something so well that it becomes a central part of who you are. An implicit part of this kind of study is that it must happen in community. This isn’t the kind of studying where you sit down alone somewhere and memorize a bunch of stuff. This is the kind of study where you engage with the biggest possible moral and ethical questions by talking and arguing with other people. Indeed, I’d argue that serious moral and ethical study can only be done in community, can only be done with other people.

    Actually, this is more or less what we do here each week on Sunday morning. Unlike some Christian traditions where the minister’s job is to preach from on high, telling the congregation what is right and what is wrong, our tradition is supposed to engender argument. (At least, that’s what I’d say, though it’s open to argument.) I would say that in a Unitarian Universalist congregation, oftentimes the role of the preacher is merely to articulate a problem or concern currently facing the congregational community, and to propose a preliminary resolution of that problem or concern. Then it is up to the members of the congregation to further think about and discuss the problem or concern, and to decide for themselves how this might affect their own lives.

    And when the preacher is wrong or inaccurate, it’s up to the elders of a Unitarian Universalist congregation to let the preacher know. When I was the minister at the New Bedford Unitarian church, Everett Hoagland, a poet and college professor, used to sit in the back pew in the center, and listen carefully to what I said in the sermon. He would tell me when something I said seemed particularly accurate or true; and when I got something wrong, he’d gently tell me where I went wrong. In that same congregation, Ken Peirce, a retired schoolteacher, sat in the center about a third of the way back. He would take notes during the sermon, and after the service hand me the notes as he greeted me on his way to social hour. His notes would often prompt a follow-up sermon.

    Now, not everyone is a college professor or retired schoolteacher. Most people are not going to take notes during a sermon and correct errors the way Ken and Everett did. I remember the old Universalist in one congregation who worked as the butcher at a local supermarket. What she wanted from a Sunday service, she said, was something to think about while she was at work during the week, something to turn over in her mind, something that might help her to live her life better. Or I think about Gladys, who was dying of cancer when I knew her; she had little interest in intellectual exercises, but she was facing the biggest possible human questions about life and death and mortality, and she came each Sunday to be part of a community where it normal and acceptable to talk about such big issues. Or I think about Nancy, who was in her seventies and homeless when I knew her; she came to Sunday services to have a time when she could think about something more than basic survival.

    To my mind, these people exemplify, each in their own way, what Rabbi Hillel meant when he said, “That is the entire Torah, the rest is its interpretation. Go study.” None of these people was Jewish, none of them read the actual Torah; but each of them, in their own way studied what it mean to be part of a community and a tradition that dealt with the highest moral and ethical and religious questions. For some of these people, study took the form of notes and verbal discussions. For others, study too the form of mulling over thoughts and ideas that might help one to lead a better life. Still others were confronting pressing questions of survival and life and death, and they needed a community where they could confront those questions openly and without shame.

    Because of this, I sometimes think the most important part of our Sunday services is social hour. That’s when you get a chance to have conversations with other people about life’s big issues. In our tradition, those conversations might not take the form of formal religious and theological discussion and argument; instead, those conversations are more likely to take the form of conversations about life and job and volunteer commitments and political actions and of course family (which includes both biological family and chosen family). Rabbi Hillel said that studying Torah was important, not for the sake of abstract religious and theological arguments, but rather for the sake of determining how to live by the dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” For Rabbi Hillel, study was not merely an academic matter, but a matter of the highest ethical values and concerns; study was not something you do in your head, study is something that affects your entire life.

    Socrates said something similar when he was facing the death penalty. According to Plato, Socrates told his accusers, “I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of [humanity], and that the unexamined life is not worth living.” (2) This, too, is what it means to study. To talk about virtue and other big questions is to lead a life that is well worth living.

    And now let me return to the suburbs, and to the poem by Chen Chen. In the poem, a Chinese family buys a house in the suburbs. At this point, the people living in the house next door have a couple of options. On the one hand, they could get to know this new family (and if they felt some resistance to getting to know the new family, they’d engage in a little self-examination to figure out why). On the other hand, they could plant a hedge of rose bushes, and begin to whisper rumors of drub money and illegals and so on. In the poem, the neighbors choose the second option. And in response, the poet says:

    “Friend, let’s really move in, let’s
    plunge our hands into the soil.
    Plant cilantro & strong tomatoes,
    watermelon & honey-hearted cantaloupe,
    good things, sweeter than any rose.
    Let’s build the community garden
    that never was. Let’s call the neighbors
    out, call for an orchard, not a wall.
    Trees with arms free, flaming
    into apple, peach, pear — every imaginable,
    edible fire.” (3)

    While the poet doesn’t talk about Torah study, I think he’s saying much the same thing as Rabbi Hillel. Both of them are teaching us the importance of nurturing human community. Whether you choose to use the metaphor of study, as Rabbi Hillel did; or the metaphor of discourse and conversation, as Socrates did; or the metaphor of planting a community garden, as Chen Chen does — the end result is the same. All these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “That which is hateful to you do not do to another.” At the same time, all these are ways of learning how to embody the dictum “that the unexamined life is not worth living.” And finally, all these are ways to call for an orchard, rather than a wall; to nurture human community, and further to nurture human community that is also a part of a community of all living beings.

    So those are the kinds of things that arise for me when I consider the imagery of the annual water ritual; that’s what arises for me when I ask myself how it is that all of us human beings are interconnected, and how it is that all human beings are connected with the rest of the universe. This is not to say that what comes up for me is any better than what comes up for you; you and I are both fallible beings, and it is only by talking together that we have a hope of coming closer to the ultimate truth.

    Notes

    (1) The William Davidson Talmud (Koren-Steinsaltz), www.sefaria.org/Shabbat.31a
    (2) Plato, The Apology, 38a; trans. Benjamin Jowett.
    (3) Chen Chen, “Set the Garden on Fire,” Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, ed. Melissa Tuckey (Univ of Georgia Press, 2018).

  • Ecospirituality

    Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.

    Readings

    The first reading is an excerpt from Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

    “I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents.

    “Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.”

    The second reading is from the book Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey:

    “Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — …a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves,… and I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by computers. I promise you this: you will outlive them.”

    Sermon: “Ecospirituality”

    Many years ago the author E. B. White said, “I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” (1)

    To save the world, or to savor the world: this dilemma arises almost immediately when we begin to talk about ecospirituality. We all know we’re in the middle of a major environmental crisis, one that needs immediate attention. We could easily spend all our free time trying to solve Earth’s ecological problems. Of course if we spend all our free time solving those problems, then we don’t have any time to enjoy the environment that we’re trying to save. It can feel as though this the price we have to pay: There’s too much to be done, so there’s no time for enjoyment. On the other hand, it can feel as though our environmental crisis has arisen because we all spend too much time trying to work harder, trying to be more efficient and more useful, trying to do more and more. From a spiritual point of view, maybe we should try to do less. Maybe we should spend less time doing, and more time being. Maybe our drive to do more is much the same thing as the drive to consume more, and the drive to consume more is what’s driving the ecological crisis.

    Do we save or savor the world? I’d like to suggest one way we might thread our way through this ecospiritual dilemma. But first I have to outline the ecological problems facing us. It’s going to be a bit unpleasant, a little bit depressing, but then I can move on and talk about savoring the world.

    Like most big problems, the ecological crisis can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Many years ago, the biologist E. O. Wilson broke down the environmental crisis into five categories: habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, human population, and overharvesting; he used the acronym HIPPO as a way to remember his formulation.(2) But given how much we now talk about climate change, Wilson’s list can feel a bit outdated.

    Three or four years ago, I attended an online talk given by Stuart Weiss, a Stanford-trained biologist who works in environmental remediation. There are five items on Weiss’s more up-to-date list: climate change; land use change (which includes deforestation and “defaunation” or the decline of animal populations); invasive organisms; toxication (which includes pollution from solid waste like plastics); and human overpopulation.

    That’s a rather daunting list, and even though climate change gets the most attention in public conversations some of the other problems can be equally pressing, or even more pressing. For example, communities that suddenly discover their water supply is contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are going to place a higher priority on addressing toxication. Or if you go for a walk in Wompatuck State Park and notice how many the beech trees are dying because they’re infected with invasive Beech Leaf Disease, in that moment you might feel as though invasive species represent a more immediate problem than climate change.

    Each of these five major problems can feel overwhelming. How can we possibly stop climate change? How can we prevent deforestation and defaunation? What can we do to tackle invasive species? And what about toxication and human overpopulation? The overwhelming nature of each of these problems, and the even greater sense of being overwhelmed by considering all these problems at the same time, leads me to the first great principle of ecospirituality: You do not want to feel overwhelmed. Because when you get overwhelmed you can neither save the world nor savor it.

    This in turn leads to the first great principle of ecospiritual practice: You are just one person, so you only have to work one of these five big ecological problems. And you only have to find one narrow, manageable aspect of that problem where you personally can make a difference given your skills and abilities. Or you may not find one specific aspect of an ecological problem, it may have already found you. I’ll give you an example from my own life. I’ve been teaching and supervising comprehensive sexuality education programs to adolescents for a couple of decades now. I’ve developed some skill in this area, and teaching about human sexuality seems to be a good match for my abilities. When I happened to read that education seems to correlate with lower birth rates, it finally dawned on me that teaching comprehensive sexuality programs is how I’ve been using my skills and abilities to address human overpopulation.

    Furthermore — and this seems odd when I put it this way — for me, teaching about human sexuality is actually a kind of ecospiritual practice. It turns out that doing something to save the world can serve as one kind of spiritual practice. We tend to assume that spiritual practices are things like meditating or doing yoga or studying Torah or attending Dharma talks. But if the effect of a spiritual practice is to make us feel more centered, more grounded, more spiritually whole — then for some of us, engaging in concrete action to help save the world is going to be more effective than prayer or sitting zazen. Using my own experience as an example, in my case addressing human overpopulation by teaching human sexuality makes me feel more centered and grounded. I feel like I’m doing something to make the world a better place. That makes me feel good. It also makes me feel less powerless in the face of ecological problems, so I feel more grounded.

    I’m not saying anything you don’t already know. I’m sure many of you have similar kinds of stories that you could tell about yourself. The only thing I’m saying that might be a little different is I’m claiming that you only have to pick one of the big environmental issues to address; and then you only have to find one aspect of it where you can bring your talents and abilities and skills to bear. You don’t have to do everything; you only have to do one thing. If you get really good at that one thing, then you can add more to what you’re working on. But from an ecospiritual point of view, you don’t want to take on too many things. If you take on too many things, you will dilute your efforts and become ineffective, and you may burn yourself out. But if you do that one thing which you are able to do, if you can use your individual skills and talents to address environmental problems, you can experience personal spiritual growth while you help save the world.

    Now that we’ve talked about saving the world, let’s turn to savoring the world, for that is the other half of ecospirituality.

    In the second reading this morning, Edward Abbey exhorted us to be “half-hearted fanatics” when it comes to saving the world.(3) He is implying that we should spend no more than half our free time saving the world. The rest of our time, he says, we should spend savoring the natural world.

    I agree with Edward Abbey on the necessity of getting out and savoring the world. I don’t find myself in agreement with the list of activities he tells me I should enjoy: “hunt and fish and … ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers,” and so on. That may how Edward Abbey savored the world, but that need not be how you or I savor the world. I’ll give you some examples of other ways to savor the world that are perhaps less infected with machismo.

    First example: this summer I went to a weeklong workshop to learn about bryophytes, that is, mosses and related plants. Our instructor told us that one of the reasons he studied mosses was because of their aesthetic value. And he took obvious pleasure in getting out into the field to collect mosses. He got just as much joy from being in the lab, looking at mosses under the dissecting microscope or looking at slides of parts of mosses under the compound microscope. I would describe the joy he got from looking at mosses under a microscope as a kind of spiritual experience.

    Second example: I know people, and you all probably know people, for whom gardening provides a kind of spiritual experience. Preparing the soil, planting seeds and nurturing young plants, keeping the rabbits and the plant-eating insects from doing too much damage, watering, hoeing, harvesting — the whole process of gardening from start to finish can serve as a kind of spiritual experience. My father was one of those gardeners. In spring, summer, and fall, he seemed to feel a deep need to spend every spare moment working in his garden. One of the last things he did before he was no longer able to walk was go out and check on some pea plants that were still growing in his garden, even though it was November.

    Third example: Henry David Thoreau wrote extensively about going for long walks, and the things he saw on his walks. One of Thoreau’s most famous essays is titled “Walking,” and in that essay he claims the people with a real genius for walking actually engage in “sauntering,” a word he says derives from the “idle people who roved about the country in the Middle Ages … under the pretext of going à la Saint-terre, to the Holy Land.” “Saint-terre” became “saunter,” and the people walking were saunterers.(4) This was how Thoreau humorously justified his long walks: when his more straitlaced neighbors accused him of being a mere idler who walked in the woods to avoid work, he called himself a saunterer, a person engaged in a religious journey, someone who could find the Holy wherever he walked.

    Thoreau’s conception of walking as a spiritual practice has become an accepted part of our culture. When we think of things that constitute ecospiritual practice, we are most likely to think of something like Thoreauvian walks in the woods. By extension, it’s not too much of a stretch for us to think of activities like climbing mountains and running rapids in a canoe as possible spiritual practices; these, too, are forms of sauntering.

    But I’d like to broaden the understanding of ecospiritual practices. Earlier, I said that teaching a class in comprehensive human sexuality to adolescents was a kind of ecospiritual practice for me. Now let’s broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice even further. I want to broaden the definition of ecospiritual practice enough to include science. For a trained scientist like my moss instructor this summer, looking at moss under a microscope can be a spiritual experience. Doing work in the biological or ecological sciences can lead to spiritual experiences for some people. For these people, science can even become a kind of spiritual practice. Even for people who aren’t trained scientists but who seriously try to learn about biological and ecological sciences, both amateur science and citizen science can become a kind of spiritual experience.

    Including science broadens the definition of ecospiritual practice beyond what our society usually allows. Our society usually assumes that science and religion are completely incompatible. But some of the scientists I’ve known have been very spiritual people; perhaps they wanted nothing to do with traditional religion, but they were spiritual. Anything that brings us into a greater awareness of the wider ecosystem, the wider universe, can result in a spiritual experience.

    I find it difficult to name that wider awareness, to come up with a term for that transcendent feeling. Traditional words for this feeling include God, Dharma, Brahman; but to my ears, in contemporary American idiom none of these words can quite convey exactly what I mean by a transcendent feeling. Ralph Waldo Emerson described the feeling of transcendence by saying: “all mean egotism vanishes; I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”(5) I like this formulation better, even though the image of a transparent eyeball is grotesque. But Emerson gets at the experience of what can happen when engaging in ecospiritual practices: your sense of self can disappear, leaving you with a simple awareness of oneness with the rest of the ecosystem.

    I may not like the image of the “transparent eyeball” — and even in his own day, people made fun of Emerson for using that image — but I have nothing better to offer. Personally, I prefer to talk about the interdependent web of existence, but that phrase doesn’t really describe that feeling where you lose your self and feel a part of a greater whole. How do you describe it when a scientist loses themself for an hour looking at a specimen of Ulota crispa complex through a microscope? How do you describe it when you’re working in your garden, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been so immersed in the life of plants that you lost track of an hour or more? In that hour, all mean egotism vanished. In that hour, the currents of Universal Being circulated through you. Even when I’m teaching a course in comprehensive human sexuality, I’ve had times when all my mean egotism vanished.

    Maybe there are no words to talk about this. We get to a certain point, and words fail us. We know what the ecological problems are; words are adequate to talk about the ongoing environmental crisis. Words begin to fail when we want to talk about experiences of the interdependent web of life. My moss instructor could tell us that looking at moss was beautiful, but the expression on his face and the posture of his body said that there what was going on inside him was more than simple appreciation of a pretty plant.

    Words may fail, but when we can talk to someone face to face, most of what is communicated happens without words. That’s why we come here on Sunday mornings — you may listen to my inadequate words, but more importantly there is communication that happens just by being together. So it is that the best way to learn about ecospirituality is to have it come up in casual conversation with another person. Look at the eyes of the gardener when they tell you about putting the garden to bed for the season. Listen to the tone of voice of the hiker when they tell you about climbing Mount Garfield in the White Mountains. Observe the body language of the person telling you about their environmental project. Because words are inadequate, this may be the only way to discover what ecospirituality is: being with people who are doing ecospirituality in their day-to-day lives, even if they don’t call it by that name.

    Notes

    (1) Quoted in “E. B. White: Notes and Comment by Author”, Israel Shenker, The New York Times, 11 July 1969.
    (2) See for example his lecture on 18 March 2011 at the Smithsonian Museum, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6-cIBuzjag
    (3) Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire.
    (4) Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.”
    (5) Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”