Nature, Twisted Into Increasingly Unnatural Shapes

Nature is back in the news this week, although in a way that is decidedly unnatural.  A working group convened by the United Nations has issued a new report on climate change that ratchets up the alarm about the deteriorating state of our environment and the accelerating pace at which it is occurring.  The United Nations is often politically unpopular in this country, which might provoke some to dismiss the report’s findings.  I rather view the UN’s unpopularity as a credential rather than a critique.  Our smug self-righteousness needs needling from time to time.  Our body politic isn’t well-served by the chorus of palace prophets who routinely coddle our leaders and their constituents with what they want to hear. 

The scientists from around the world who authored this climate report are clearly not palace prophets.  They have challenging news to deliver.  Not “news”, really, except in its severity.  The report chronicles in detail the facts we have been hearing for quite some time:  that the climate is changing, chiefly because of human activities, the environment  -- the soils, the air, the temperatures and the weather patterns -- is degrading, and that the implications will be consequential.  We can choose to ignore the facts, but that growling sound we increasingly hear will be our stomachs.  Hungry.  Feeding ourselves will become more and more difficult as a direct result of our behaviors.

We don’t like these kinds of reports, and so we routinely ignore them; burying them beneath a comforting barrage of contrary reassurances from those who profit from the status quo.  They don’t want us to change our ways any more than we do.  Their quarterly reports of return on investment depend upon us doing more of what we are doing, not less; and we simply don’t want the hassle of changing our patterns and reorienting our “way of life.”  Even if it kills us.  So, we keep consuming, extracting, manufacturing, building, eating and relating in ways that are not sustainable, instead of imagining and conceiving and investing in different possibilities. 

In so doing, we imprison ourselves in the facts we don’t want to hear.  Crops that are increasingly difficult to grow; herbicide resistant weeds we are increasingly unable to kill; soil that because of more persistent droughts we are increasingly unable to retain; more frequent and more severe storms that are more and more devastating; food shortages and bread basket conflicts prompting food immigrant refuges we already refuse to tolerate, let alone welcome; political paralysis driving us into another Dark Age; solutions we find inconvenient and therefore ignore. 

When I think of our collective blindness toward climate change and its solutions, I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s famous observation about Christianity - that it has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found hard and therefore not tried.

The authors of the report are quick to point out that it contains more than dire statistics.  It contains hope, in the form or concrete, encouraging and accessible suggestions for changing the trajectory we have set in motion. 

They simply require us to permit ourselves the grace of being redemptively inconvenienced.