A Sobering Reflection

I’m clearly not a linguist. But I do wonder about words and their meaning, especially when I’m trying to share a thought I have with someone else. One word I keep bouncing around is “sacrifice”. It’s a possible word to describe what I feel is an essential component of addressing justice in the climate crisis. By “sacrifice” I’m not thinking of offering up animals on an altar for homage to some supreme being. Rather the sense of relinquishing something so that others might benefit.

I find it a bit ironic, that the idea of “sacrifice” is embedded in the Christian and other religious traditions, and yet politically in our culture, the concept is an anathema to personal freedom and the supreme right of the individual or “the market”. One has to wonder which god those pledgers of allegiance to the American flag are acknowledging in their recitation of it.

I’ve been catapulted into this concept of sacrifice because I see no way for the human family to achieve climate justice in my lifetime, or any time before mid-Century, without the “developed” world curtailing its consumptive appetites. Yes, Christians often “give up” something for the season of Lent and Muslims go without food and beverage during sunlight hours during Ramadan. Both of these, and many other faith traditions, use seasons of sacrifice to have the follower reflect on all that we have and consume and the relationships with the rest of the community of life we share the planet with. I suspect many followers do so reflect, and some continue aspects of their seasonal sacrifice after the season ends.

But the nature of the wholesale shifts that our best science tells us we need in reducing greenhouse gases in now less than 81 months. This means that we who have been blessed with so much, must look at where we can reduce our material and energy consumption and push for larger systemic reductions. When Jimmy Carter asked folks to put on a sweater during an earlier energy crisis, he has been ridiculed as performing political suicide. Maybe that’s why there appears no one in political leadership today (please correct me if I’m mistaken) suggesting we make any sacrifices for the common good. Is there absolutely nothing we are willing to give up?

I wrote a short piece not long ago entitled “When is Enough, Enough” that addressed a similar addiction, but more narrowly focused on guns and violence. I’m echoing the same feeling here again, because our culture’s penchant for “more”, “bigger”, “faster” infuses our advertising and permeates our lives. It is quickly pushing us and the community of life we are part of, towards an unknown calamity. In our highly revered individualism, we have denied our essential social realities. We need to quickly understand our deep connectedness to each other and all of our natural world that has made our singular existence possible. Are we willing to “sacrifice” a livable future for our offspring for our own consumptive pleasures? As I write this, just yesterday UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres visited Somalia where he noted “although Somalis make virtually no contribution to climate change - as a matter of fact, Somalia contributes 0.003 percent to the emissions that cause climate change - although Somalis make virtually no contribution to climate change, the Somalis are among the greatest victims. Nearly five million people are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.”

The climate crisis that becomes more visible everyday affects all of us, and especially all living beings that collectively make this planet habitable. We in the developed West are more responsible for its demise than our neighbors in the developing world who generally have so much less. Can we justify our current lifestyles given this reality? Is it enough to simply reduce our own footprint, without trying to change the system that drives this consumption focused frenzy? Should the wealthiest amongst us who have the largest footprint, pay reparations? Tough questions no doubt. But they must be asked and be answered by each of us.

Let me close this meager attempt to address our crises with this passage from a book I was reading this week.

This is not to say that the environmental crisis is not a situation from which some people benefit. Clearly there is a great deal of money to be gotten from selling pesticides, even if they are carcinogens and degrade the soil. Building weapons may lead to enormous pollution, from waste products of building nuclear weapons to the toxic chemicals used to protect tanks and airplanes from rust; but weapons provide power. On a more individual level, non-organic produce is cheaper, non-hybrid cars have more storage space, and some people really do like their thermostats set to toasty in the winter and chilling in the summer. There are a lot of short-term, self-interested reasons to contribute to our non-sustainable way of life.

This is also not to say that everyone’s responsibility for the environmental crisis is equal. The peasants who deforest hillsides to cook dinner are not the same as executives of oil companies who obstruct governmental action on global warming. The woman who has to commute many miles to work to support her children is not the same as the lobbyists who convince legislators to keep car fuel efficiency standards pathetically low. The migrant workers who die from pesticide poisons are not the same as their manufacturers.

…When all of us, the author of this essay no less than any of its readers, more or less continue more or less as usual, turning our minds to all the other Very Important Things we have to do, and allow governments, schools, businesses, TV weathermen, universities, churches and synagogues and mosques, the PTA, and the Knights of Columbus to act as if this isn’t happening, or as if enough is being done about it, or as if some mystical “They” (the EPA, the U.N., clever engineers, brilliant scientists, and –God help us—“the market”) will take care of it—might we not reflect and see that we, no less than any junkie on the corner, have been led by addiction to our “way of life” into a kind of madness? (Roger Gottleib, Political and Spiritual: Essays on Religion, Environment, Disability, and Justice. 2015 pp. 198-9.)

            During his visit to Somalia this week, UN Secretary-General Gutteres, accompanied by the Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, Adam Abdelmoula, who also serves as his Deputy Special Representative for the country, met some of the Somalis affected by the country’s humanitarian crisis during a visit to a camp for internally displaced people in Baidoa, the largest city in Somalia’s South West state. 

He met with two different families there. The first had travelled 105 kilometres by foot and donkey cart, to seek refuge in Baidoa last year, after all of its livestock perished during the ongoing drought. The second family had done the same after its livestock died and travelled some 70 kilometres to seek aid. Are we willing to sacrifice nothing for our fellow brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters?