Tag: economic justice

This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

Sermon — “A New Revolution”

You know what today is, don’t you? It’s the nineteenth of April, and on this exact day back in 1775, the colonists of Massachusetts offered the first armed and organized resistance to the British Empire. The American Revolution began on this day. And so it seems like a good day to talk about a new, emerging revolution: the ecojustice revolution.

The ecojustice revolution concerns one of the most important moral issues of our time: the environmental disasters being caused by global climate change. There is no longer any doubt that global climate change is real, that some of its effects are already irreversible, and that it is caused by human beings. I know, I know, the radio personality and entertainer Rush Limbaugh says that global climate change isn’t real and isn’t caused by humans; but we can balance him against Stephen Colbert, and since it is a well-known mathematical fact that two entertainers cancel each other out, leaving a null set, we can dismiss both of them without a pang. Global climate change is real, and it is happening now.

To my mind, the most important thing about the ecojustice revolution is that is provides a way out of helplessness. I don’t know about you, but I feel pretty helpless in the face of global climate change. It seems like something that is pretty much beyond my control. I do what I can to reduce my personal environmental impact — so for example rather than flying, I’ll be taking the train to the annual denominational meeting at the end of June, because train travel puts out about half the carbon of jet travel. We turn our thermostat down to sixty degrees at home, and we replace conventional light bulbs with compact fluorescents. We do all those good things, yet I know that’s not nearly enough.

Obviously, we can do more than change light bulbs. Some of us will get involved in political action. Those in the sciences can work on the science of global climate change. Artists and musicians and writers can create art and music and writing that helps people understand global climate change. And there is a very important task we can take on here in our church. Here in our church, we are concerned (among other things) with morality and ethics, and so one of our contributions can be to examine the moral and ethical questions that are entwined with global climate change. A serious examination of moral and ethical questions can lead us into a powerful sense of knowing what right action must be. And I’d like to do some of that this morning with you: I’d like to examine three moral and ethical questions pertaining to global climate change, so that we might begin to know what right action might be.

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The first moral question that I’d like to ask is the most difficult question about exploitation. And to ask this question, I have to fill in some background information.

To begin with, exploitation is not necessarily a bad thing. All organisms exploit their environment. In one of my favorite books, Some Adaptations of Marsh-Nesting Blackbirds (OK, it’s not really one of my favorite books), by the ornithologist Gordon H. Orians, I find this statement: “…a predator may exploit its prey or change the behavior of the prey so as to alter the encounter rates or capture probabilities.” Red-winged Blackbirds, those pretty little black birds with the bright red wing patches, are actually ruthless predators who exploit their immediate environment in order to ensure their own personal survival, and the survival of their babies. They seek out patches in the marsh with the densest concentrations of insects, so they can increase their odds of capturing enough insects to feed themselves, and feed their babies. Gordon Orian creates a mathematical formula for this, where the bird’s energy intake from the insects it eats is dependent on the time spent foraging and the time spent in traveling, as well as the energy expended in foraging. Red-winged Blackbirds have to exploit the insect resources of the marsh where they live so they take in more energy than they put out.

That’s what all animals do. The woodchucks who eat everything in your garden are just trying to maximize their energy intake while minimizing the energy they spend in foraging — and your garden is so attractive because you lay out all those nice young succulent plants so the woodchuck doesn’t have to expend much energy to exploit the plant resources of your garden. Because the woodchuck can exploit your garden so efficiently, he or she gets big and fat and has lots of babies and generally thrives. This gets at another basic principle: the organisms that are most effective at exploiting the resources around them are the organisms that are going to survive and thrive and reproduce like mad.

So when we say that human beings are exploiting the resources of earth, in a way it’s hard to criticize us human beings for doing so. Of course we exploit the resources around us as effectively as possible, and of course we do so to the maximum possible extent. Such exploitation is literally a part of our biological make-up. We are the product of thousands of generations of earlier human beings, each generation of which got a little better at exploiting the resources around us. Exploitation is bred into our bones.

However, at a certain point exploitation moves out of the realm of biology and into the realm of morality and ethics. It’s one thing when a woodchuck exploits the world around it by eating your garden in order to enhance its reproductive success; it’s another thing altogether when a corporation exploits the world around it by dumping PCBs into New Bedford harbor in order to enhance its profits. The woodchuck eats your garden so that it can live; but the corporation destroys New Bedford harbor and endangers the health of all organisms in the vicinity, not so that it can live, but rather so that it can make far more money than it needs for survival, all at the expense of other living beings. We don’t call the woodchuck immoral for eating your garden; but we do call the corporation immoral when it dumps PCBs into the harbor.

It is this second type of exploitation that we call immoral. And we call it immoral for at least two reasons.

First of all, there’s the biological reason. Human beings are social, tribal animals: despite the American myth of individualism, human beings have always required other human beings in order to survive. Babies and children require the help of lots of adults — not just their parents — in order to survive to adulthood. And adult human beings are essentially cooperative animals who need a tribe in order to survive — we are not designed to fight off saber-toothed tigers on our own, no more than we can survive today without relying on farmers, software engineers, sewage treatment plant operators, and so on. So it is that when an individual, or a small group of individuals, exploits other human beings for personal gain, we can call that individual or that small group immoral. They are immoral because they are going against human biology, they are going against natural law.

There’s a second reason why this kind of behavior is immoral. As a religious community, we uphold idealistic notions of what human society could be. Jesus of Nazareth taught us that if we would love our neighbors as ourselves, we could create a heaven here on earth. Gotama Buddha taught us that if we could get rid of greed and self-delusion, we could end human suffering. Confucius taught us that if we could maintain a well-ordered social structure where we live for the sake of others as much as we live for ourselves, we could create an ideal world. Whichever religious tradition we choose to learn from teaches us that moral behavior requires us to think of other human beings; requires us to transcend selfishness and self-interest. So it is that when an individual, or a small group of individuals, exploits other human beings for personal gain, we call that individual or that small group immoral. They are immoral because they are being selfish, they are going against religious law.

It should be obvious by now that global climate change is caused by immoral violations of natural law and religious law. When a small group of human beings decides to dump PCBs into New Bedford harbor because they’ll make more money if they don’t have to clean up the toxic waste, that’s both a violation of natural law — by denying the reality that all human beings are interdependent — and it’s a violation of religious law — by allowing their selfishness to overwhelm the requirement to love their neighbors as themselves. Thus we call this kind of behavior “immoral exploitation.”

Here we encounter an interesting point. From a moral viewpoint, this economic exploitation of the natural world looks exactly like the economic exploitation of persons based on race and racism. Racism in America started out as slavery, where people of African descent were enslaved by some people of European descent, so that the people of European descent could make lots of money without having to pay wages; morally, this is exactly parallel to corporations dumping PCBs into New Bedford harbor so they can make lots of money.

Racial exploitation and the exploitation of the environment that has led to global climate change stem from the same kind of immoral exploitation: a violation of natural law through a denial of human cooperation; and a violation of religious law through a denial of loving our neighbors as ourselves. And you will not be surprised to learn that in fact persons of color are more likely to be adversely affected by environmental disasters — for example, persons of color are more likely than whites to live near toxic waste sites; in New Orleans, persons of color were more likely to live in the low-lying areas most likely to be flooded.

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. If we want to understand the moral roots of global climate change — that is to say, if we want to understand the moral problem of exploitation — one of the best places to start is by engaging in conversations with people who have been fighting racism. I have gained some of my deepest understanding of how immoral exploitation works through reading African American writers like Frederick Douglass and Cornel West; and what I have learned from them, I have been able to apply directly to environmental work.

As we try to solve the problem of global climate change, environmentalists will benefit from building alliances with people who are solving the problem of racism and racial exploitation, because both these problems stem from the same moral issue of exploitation. The fundamental moral point here is that resources should not be controlled by the greedy few. This is one of the key insights of the ecojustice revolution: that racism and environmentalism are inextricably intertwined; and therefore, those of us who are working to end racism are natural allies to those of us who are working to end global climate change.

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I spent a great deal of time on the moral question of exploitation, because I believe it lies at the center of the ecojustice revolution. Now I’d like to turn for just a moment to the second moral question pertaining to global climate change: and that is the moral question of constant acceleration.

Let me explain what I mean by constant acceleration. Our economic system requires constant economic growth. If America’s gross domestic product doesn’t rise every year, then we are in the soup. That’s what’s happening right now, in the current economic crisis: our economy is contracting, and that means that the unemployment rate is rising, and that means that people are out of work, and that means a rise in human misery and suffering.

Of course I’m over-simplifying here. I’m no economist, and I’m aware that the roots of the economic crisis are more complicated than what I’ve just outlined. Nevertheless, we keep hearing over and over again that an increase in consumer confidence and spending is one of the things that will put an end to the economic crisis: the more we spend, the better off we are. And we all accept this as normal — it’s so much a part of the political and social landscape of America that we don’t even question it.

From a moral point of view, this is simply crazy. From a moral point of view, increasing your consumer spending is not the main purpose in life. From a moral point of view, we are supposed to be living a good life; from a religious point of view, we are supposed to be doing our small parts in bringing about heaven here on earth. At best, consumer spending has little to do with morality, so that buying a new video game is an action with no moral component at all. At worst, however, excessive consumer spending is a moral nightmare because it puts energy and resources into useless things like pink lawn flamingos; energy and resources that could have been put towards solving the problem of global climate change, or improving the lives of the billions of people who are in poverty.

Today, our society is driven by a sense that we need to keep on accelerating the pace of the economy. This ever-increasing acceleration of the economy and of everything uses more and more energy and releases more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Sadly, we are seeing right now that when the acceleration stops, millions of human beings are plunged into misery. But this ever-increasing acceleration has no real moral purpose. It just reminds us that today’s American society seems to lack any moral purpose, because our only purpose is to accelerate the pace of the economy regardless of human misery.

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This brings us finally to the third moral question pertaining to global climate change. And that is the moral question about how we can lessen human misery.

That’s the true moral purpose of technology: to lessen human misery. If we develop efficient transportation networks, we can guard against famine; when there’s not enough rain in North Dakota to grow food, we can ship food in from California. If we improve public health through improved technologies like vaccinations and sewage treatment plants, we can reduce death from horrible diseases like smallpox and cholera. And if we improve access to information through the printed word and through the Internet, we can help create democratic societies in which all persons are treated as equal.

That’s what technology was supposed to do for us. And in many ways, technology has succeeded; at least, it has succeeded in a few parts of the world, such as North America outside of the inner cities. The problem is that the goal of lessening human misery through technology got transmogrified into a goal of constant acceleration. Instead of working to lessen human misery, we somehow got sidetracked into believing that what we really needed was more pink lawn flamingos, more disposable plastic bags, and more smiley-faces. I have to tell you that as much as I enjoy pink lawn flamingoes, they really do nothing to lessen human misery.

Once we realize this — once we realize that a critical goal of human society should be to lessen human misery — it can change everything for us. The ecojustice revolution takes this one step further: by putting a check on immoral exploitation, we can both lessen human misery, and (if you will) lessen the misery of other living beings and of the natural world in general.

Once we have determined the moral goal towards which we strive, once we have a moral direction, a moral compass, we no longer have to feel quite so helpless in the face of environmental disaster. Global climate change will increase human misery, so our moral compass tells us that global climate change is morally wrong and must be curtailed. When we then realize that people who are already poor and oppressed and marginalized are going to bear the brunt of global climate change — for example, soon a huge amount of Bangladesh will be at risk of ocean flooding — our moral compass tells us that we must address this problem as one of our priorities. And by linking human misery to the misery of other living beings, by understanding that all immoral exploitation comes from the same root, we begin to understand that what we do to lessen human misery will have the effect of lessening the misery of other living beings — if we can keep the Arctic ice cap from melting, not only will we help Bangladeshis survive, we will also help polar bears survive.

What lies at the root of all our efforts are simple religious truths: to lessen misery, to end exploitation, and to create heaven here on earth. To some this might sound hopelessly idealistic; but to us these are ideals that fill us with hope for the future.