Sermon: “Living At The Peak�
Said by Rev. Lisa Friedman
Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Mankato
February 26, 2006

Readings from Beyond the Peak by Richard Heinberg

“Sustainable. Unsustainable. What do these words really mean?

Perhaps peak oil at last provides the word sustainability with teeth. People now speak of “sustainable development,� “sustainable growth,� and “sustainable returns on investment.� That, my friends, is sustainability lite. The word has been diluted and denatured almost beyond recognition.

An understanding of peak oil provides us with a minimum definition of the word: can we do this, whatever it is we're talking about, without fossil fuels? IF we can, then it just might be a sustainable activity or process. There's no guarantee: there are a lot of human activities that don't involve fossil fuels and that are not sustainable – like large-scale whaling with sailing ships, or intensive irrigation agriculture in soil that isn't properly drained.

But if you can't do it without fossil fuels, by definition, it ain't sustainable.

And that includes most of what we do in North America these days.�

from The U. N. Environmental Sabbath Program

We who have lost our sense and our senses – our touch, our smell, our vision of who we are, we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt.

We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion.

We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again.

Sermon “Living at the Peak�

Since I first entered the ministry ten years ago, it has been my practice to offer a sermon topic for the annual fund-raising auction – a chance for someone to pose me a specific theological, spiritual, or ethical question to be shared with you in our worship. I love the joy and challenge of doing this. I have the privilege of getting to know someone better as we discuss the topic he or she has chosen, and I am challenged to delve deeper into areas of faith and living that I might not have discovered on my own. And I have never even come close to receiving the same question twice.

When I learned at last year's auction that Ted Downey had won the sermon topic, I was delighted and I knew I had my research cut out for me. Many of us know of Ted's passion and concern both for the environment and for the human and societal issues involved in the impending energy crisis. I suspected his question to me would come out of this commitment, and I was right. As we have met and talked over that past several months, his question is in fact a multi-faceted one: Are we aware enough of the issues facing our world in light of its overwhelming dependence on a dwindling oil supply? Is there a role that our congregation might have in taking leadership on this issue for our community? What does it mean for us and the generations who follow that we may be living in a time of great change? And, perhaps most importantly, why is it so hard to convince people that there are viable, concrete things we can do now that will help shape the future?

In an effort to do justice to these questions, I titled this sermon “Living at the Peak.� While I do want to share some facts and figures for our collective awareness, this sermon is not intended to be a lecture on oil supply or climate change. Rather, I want to address the spiritual and theological challenges raised in Ted's questions. I am very aware that this sermon could also have been called, with a nod to Kermit the Frog, “It's Not Easy Being Green.� I suggested to Ted that the environmentalist's curse in this day and age is not unlike the curse of Cassandra, the great prophetess of Troy, who was gifted to know the truth about the dangers facing her people, but doomed to be dismissed as a prophetess of doom and gloom. If you are one of those people, who like me, can be tempted to let their eyes glaze over at the enormity of the topic at hand, stay with me this morning. I make it a practice never to preach about any topic, unless there is some vision of hope in it. And Ted's questions deserve an answer. Why it is so hard for us respond to the state of our earth and her resources? How are we called, religiously, to live at the peak?

Here are some brief facts and figures on the current peak oil debate to frame our reflection. The earth is estimated to contain 2 trillion barrels of oil. Since oil production began in 1860, we have consumed roughly half of the world's supply. At the current rate of oil consumption at 27 billion barrels a year, not calculating in the increasing demand from industrializing countries such as India and China, we will consume the remaining trillion barrels within the next 37 years, or around the year 2041. Contrast this with Daniel Leeming's observation, in his article “Energy: the End of Cheap Oil�, “To vastly expand solar, wind, and nuclear sources, not counting planning and political delays, it would take at least 40 years to match our present-day consumption of oil. We must also anticipate that there are days when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow..... It has been projected that if we were to implement radical change tomorrow with energy-efficient vehicles, buildings and systems, oil dependency in the U. S. could drop to zero by 2050.�

Simply put, the facts reveal a race against time in more ways than one. On the one hand, we have the race to slow down our oil consumption both to allow us time to develop alternatives and to slow down the release of climate changing gases into the atmosphere. On the other hand, we have the race to accelerate our creative response to new ways of living and producing that leave a lighter footprint on the earth and her resources. As of today, it is uncertain whether we will win or lose either race, or in what order, or to what degree, and therefore the nature of the consequences, while certain to arrive in our lifetimes, are unclear. I find the image of a race useful in reflecting on the spiritual aspects of the peak oil dilemma, for how we envision the race influences how easily we envision reaching the finish line.

For the past 30 years, scientists, environmental experts, and analysts have been sounding the concern that we, as a society, do not fully understand how reliant upon oil we are in preparing for the transition ahead. For them, the race we are in is a kind of relay race, with each runner dependent upon the success of the whole team. They have provided countless tomes of information detailing our interdependence in an increasingly desperate attempt to get the whole global leadership team on board.

Their point on our global and societal interdependence is well-taken. The end of the oil age is not merely a question of running out of gas for our cars, or being unable to afford the fuel prices for them. It is not merely a question of my calling up the Fellowship from my home in Northeast Minneapolis one Sunday morning and saying “I'm sorry, but I have no way to get down to you to preach this morning.� (Although I have considered starting to practice some old-fashioned horse-back circuit-riding skills!) The concern is that our entire way of life, from the production of food to its transportation to our grocery shelves to our medical supplies and transportation to the energy used to heat and light our homes, and the many aspects of our social and economic infrastructure are dependent upon oil in hidden, but crucial ways.

I had a lesson in such interdependence in the winter of 1996, when I moved to Manhattan to begin a year of interim ministry. The moving van had just left the parsonage on 34th St., two blocks from the Empire State Building, when the snow began. I looked out the window and thought “how pretty.� The snow kept coming, and at the point the following day where it began to reach high enough levels to hit the national news, the telephone rang. It was my mother, a born and raised Brooklynite. Instead of politely inquiring about the move or other pleasantries, she spoke in a firm and slightly frantic voice: “Go out now and buy milk and eggs.� I thought for a brief moment that she had lost her mind. But she understood all too well what I didn't – that if the snow could keep us shut up in our apartments for days, it could keep the delivery trucks off the bridges and streets. And in a city of 9 million people, there was not enough fresh food supply on the grocery shelves to go around until the trucks arrived.

There are others who are concerned that understanding our interdependence is not enough. For these people, we are not engaged in a relay race, so much as an Olympic marathon where, without proper planning and training, only the fittest may survive. These are the people who worry that the end of the oil age could come down to a mad scramble for the food left on the grocery shelves and the firewood left in our yards. They are the ones who predict widespread economic chaos, worse than the Great Depression, and other catastrophic consequences. They are the ones who want us to practice our disaster training now. On the one hand, these are people that it can often be hard to hear over their seeming doom and gloom. Dire predictions, you may remember, were prevalent around the turn of the millennium and our societal dependence upon computers. With significant planning and work, the clocks turned over relatively smoothly. On the other hand, we may never fully know what that good planning avoided.

The recent tragedies of both human-made events such as 9/11 and nature-made events such as Hurricane Katrina reveal the devastating cost of our decisions not to plan for some of the worst-case scenarios for our communities. One of the most inspiring stories that came out of the hurricane disaster was of a small hospital in Baton Rogue, who had just six months before tested their ability to establish a 600-800 bed hospital in the sports center of LSU within 24 hours notice. They did it simply as a test, a practice run, in case the need ever arose, which they hoped it never would. When the hurricane fell, while other hospitals were scrambling, the Baton Rogue team sent buses down to New Orleans and brought them home filled with people who needed them.

I believe that it is particularly the aftermath of Katrina, whose price fell most heavily on the poor, the elderly, the oppressed and the disadvantaged, which led in part to the recent declaration of the Evangelical Climate Initiative. While it has historically been religious liberals who have sounded the theological concern over global warming, recently a group of powerful evangelical leaders released a statement adding their voice to the public arena. This evangelical call to action makes four claims: “1) Human-Induced Climate Change is Real; 2) The Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest; 3) Christian Moral Convictions Demand Our Response to the Climate Change Problem; 4) The need to act now is urgent. Governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate change starting now.� In answer to the frequently asked question, “does addressing climate change mean we're becoming liberals?�, the authors' answer is no. “Reducing pollution is simply being a good biblical Christian. Climate change is not a liberal issue. It is a profound problem for people Jesus loves.�

I sat down and compared the more detailed Evangelical Initiative with the current Study Issue on Global Warming which is being brought to a vote at our Unitarian Universalist Association's General Assembly this June. While our language is different, in substance, there is much agreement between the two - a sign of hope for the broader consensus that is so sorely needed on this issue. Religious Liberals and Evangelicals may be unused to being public allies, but I cannot imagine a better time for us to begin practicing.

Comparing the theological foundations of the two documents, it is clear to me that we share much as people of faith. We agree on the sanctity of all creation. We agree on the call to love, help, and protect one's neighbor, whether they live just down the street or half a world away. We agree that our fates are delicately intertwined. And we agree on the power of individuals – diverse, ordinary, everyday individuals - to come together to act for needed change. With the facts of our world in hand, this may be the most critical shared belief of all.

Reading through the documents, it is clear to me that we envision advocating for a third kind of race for our future, one that is not dependent only upon the experts and the athletes, but upon all of us. This third kind of race is a race for a cause, like the walks for breast cancer or diabetes, where everyone is invited in and it is the sheer numbers that help to lift up hope. Each participant is encouraged to join in at whatever they can do, whether they walk, jog, run or cheer, knowing that each and every action adds something to the whole. If, up to this point, we have failed to encourage more people to join in the race against climate change and the energy crisis, it is because we have not successfully convinced them of the power they hold to make a difference, simply joining as they are.

If you go to the website of the Evangelical Climate Initiative www.christiansandclimate.org or to the Statement on Global Warming at our own www.uua.org, you will see specific recommendations for actions that we can take to get into the race at hand. These actions fall into three categories: actions we can take as individuals, as church members, and as citizens. Not every action will be right or appropriate for everyone, but some are amazingly simple to do and widespread in their impact. Did you know that five percent of our energy use goes into keeping computers on stand-by? After you've checked your e-mail at home, take thirty seconds to power your computer down. How simple is that? After all, it is only through the small actions of many that a world-wide movement is made.

The power of the individual to create such a movement lies in more than the simple act of recycling. When I moved to Minnesota two years ago, I considered myself fairly environmentally aware. As a household, we recycle regularly, purchase organically when possible, and try to take care of our house and yard with environmentally friendly practices. Then, one afternoon, a friend of mine sold me a Blue Sky Guide as a fund-raiser for her daughter's school. Included in the guide were coupons for foods, restaurants, businesses and entertainment centers that meet environmentally green standards for quality and service. But also in the guide was a collection of free information that it would have taken countless hours to discover on my own - contacts for how to properly dispose of household waste, websites for purchasing inexpensive recycled carpet for my basement or less toxic paint, resources for having a free energy audit done on our home, car maintenance lists for fuel efficiency and native landscaping tips. I now use it more as a daily resource than my own dictionary. And I am now one of more than 60,000 people in the Twin Cities to have used the Guide to raise their involvement and awareness in green living practices. I have often thought, what if every city had one? Imagine the education we could achieve then.

The power of the congregation to create such movement lies in more than one sermon on a Sunday morning. Are you aware of the Green Sanctuary movement within our Unitarian Universalist congregations? Similar to the Welcoming Congregation curriculum which encourages us to raise our awareness of homophobia and the issues facing our glbt brothers and sisters, this program encourages our congregations to participate in evaluating their own green practices and in raising community awareness of these issues. Yes, we recycle our Sunday bulletins. Yes, we teach a religiously-based respect for our earth. And as of this year, we now serve Fair Trade coffee in our Fellowship hour. But is there more we can be doing and modeling? How is our use of energy in our new building? Can we create a support club for native gardeners? Can we be a meeting place for evangelicals, liberals, and others in the greater Mankato community who wish to study and discuss energy issues together? These are just some of the questions that a Green Sanctuary committee could help us to act upon and consider.

Finally, the power of our citizens and communities to create such a movement lies in more than strategically placed parks and car-pooling programs. In my research for today's service, I came across two stories of two very different towns whose response to the peak oil dilemma stood in stark contrast to me. The first is the story of Willits, CA, whose citizens got together, studied the issues, and decided to make their town completely self-sufficient in their energy needs. They now grow their own food, sustain their own businesses, conserve and produce their own energy, and consult on how to do this with neighboring cities and towns. They joke to each other about having successfully gone off the gird, and I found much of it interesting, even some inspiring, until I reached the very end of the article, when the reporter asked them what they would do if the energy crisis brought a food shortage, and they found hordes of people heading up from the cities to share in their bounty? Their plan seemed unsure after that, although one man offered, half-jokingly, that “we could always blow up the bridge.�

The second story belongs to the citizens of Tompkins County, NY, who of their own accord founded the Tompkins County Relocalization Plan, whose express purpose is “to research and document an emergency plan for relocalizing the production and distribution of essential goods and services in Tompkins County in response to an economic crisis.� Like the 24 hour 800 bed hospital drill at LSU, it is a plan that exists only so that it can be there if needed. But the spirit of the plan itself is important – whatever the future may bring, we will face it together. Whatever race we are in, we will finish it together. Whatever changes may come, we will create and respond to them together.

How are we called to live at the peak? With hope. With action. With creativity. With reverence. And with a profound commitment to our communities, in all their folly and glory. We are not be the first, nor will we be the last generation of humanity to live through times of great change. But if we prepare for them well, then we will have truly done our part for the generations to come.

May events prove better than our vision.