A Talk from the Greening Committee

Good morning, everyone. Warm thanks to our Rector, David, for giving me this time today to speak to you, on behalf of our Greening Committee, Jenny le Riche, Sally McFadyen, Martha Denning, Anne Weeks, and me, about our ideas and work for St. Jude’s.

The Greening Committee has one very specific central project, to improve the energy efficiency of our parish buildings, the sanctuary and the sexton’s house, their heating system, air conditioning and use of electricity for all appliances and things like lighting. Guided by the diocese, we update the “energy audit,” a measurement of the energy we use to run this little religious shop of ours. It’s a very specific focus, on one place, our parish.

Today I thought it would be interesting to step back and consider greening issues from a wider, global perspective, because it reminds us of the reasons why we do all our greening projects.

We all come to concerns about climate and the environment from different perspectives. My own interest, and I think I can say the Greening Committee shares it with me, begins with a simple sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of the natural green world around us, in our gardens at home, in the garden at St. Jude’s, in the parks of our town, provincial parks, Oakville harbour, or on a golf course, trying to Klog a ball out of weeds or a sand trap.

I begin, then with two ideas: 1. How unspeakably beautiful the world is, and 2. How much I want to preserve it. Would anyone disagree with me on either these concerns? I think I can say that this agreement is a good place to begin.

These ideas are rooted in scripture:

Psalm 8: “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth. Thou hast set thy glory above the heavens…”

Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…”

Today’s Psalm 91, “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty,” The picture is of God providing shelter and a place of safe keeping, a fortress, a nest, covered by the God’s wings and feathers.

Hildegard of Bingham puts it this way: Praise be to the Holy Trinity!

God is sound and life, Creator of the Universe, Source of all life whom the angels sing…

There is a deep sense of physical, spiritual and psychological calm in the tranquility of a green pasture beside a quiet stream. And think of water’s association for us with baptism, purification and fruitfulness: “living water.” This quietness of still water can be so peaceful as to open intimacy with God.

On the Greening Committee, at our September meeting, we’ve chosen water as the central concept for our work this year. Today, I want to step back from our parish, and consider one or two aspects of greening concerns from a global perspective, and to set parish concerns into that perspective. The Greening Committee has added several books about the environment to the parish library, and I’m taking, as the basis of what I say today, one of these books called The Blue Machine, How the Ocean Works, by Helen Czerski. She is a physicist who has made a global study of the ocean, talking to biologists, and experts on oceans and people whose living is on the ocean. Helen Czerski has travelled to every continent, including the Arctic and Antarctica in her research and sea travel and her study of Kish and birds and sea creatures.

She is a physicist. But let’s not get too complicated. I’m a retired teacher who struggled to Fly a kite in an English classroom. If I can understand at least bits of this, you can!

Back to this sense of awe and wonder at the marvels of our world. Here is a taste of things Czerski tells us that deepen my own sense of wonder at the world’s beauty.

The oceans, as we know, cover two thirds of our planet. In places they are several miles deep. In that sense, she reminds us, these oceans are huge. But if we imagine the Earth as a large inflated balloon, the oceans would be no thicker than the cellophane skin of the balloon. This suggests the ocean is not so large as to be invulnerable.

Sea dwelling creatures vary in size from enormous whales to single cell beings. And they vary in their functions, and the parts they play in the aqueous ecosystem. Some of the smallest are most important. One sea creature she describes is a single cell called a diatom. She says “Diatoms are sun-harvesters and they generate a huge proportion of the Earth’s oxygen.” (272)

What is the largest waterfall on the planet? Niagara Falls? Victoria Falls? It’s actually an underwater waterfall between Iceland and Greenland, where extremely cold water from the Arctic, flowing south, flows over an underwater cliff into one of the deepest parts of the ocean.

Czerski describes the oceans as a blue machine. The oceans form a vast, interconnected ecological system of interdependent parts. The Atlantic Ocean, for example, is not just a huge randomly sloshing body of water, but a system of currents that keep to a pattern: they flow north along the coast of North America, east across the Arctic, south along the west coast of Europe to the equator where they turn west to North America again.

How do we know the current flows east across the Arctic? Fridjoft Nansen, the great Norwegian explorer and polymath, wondered why detritus from a shipwreck on the west coast of B.C. ended up considerably east of this location in the Arctic. Ocean currents had taken it there.

Recently Hawaiian canoeists wanted to rediscover how ancient canoeists had been able, without GPS, or an astrolabe, or radio and telegraph communication, to sail the 2,600 miles of the open Pacific from Hawaii to Tahiti. They thought such navigation skills, using the stars, the currents, every detail in the sea’s and clouds’ appearance, had been lost. Then a paddler called Mau Piailug turned up; he thought he remembered and could figure out enough to attempt the trip. In May, 1976, he and his enthusiastic crew, to enormous celebration, completed this 2,600 mile paddle crossing. Since then the paddled voyage has been done repeatedly.

The oceans, in places, are several miles deep, and the great depths are completely dark, and extremely cold. Yet creatures live their whole lives in this complete dark. Some ocean creatures are huge, like the blue whale. Some of the most important, because they produce the oxygen we breathe, are less than a centimeter long. In the great depths of the ocean there are several different climates which are the home of different species. As the ocean is warming, the habitat of many species is moving to new waters. For example, the giant blue Kin tuna, which she describes as perhaps the most efficient killing machine the natural world has created, was originally native just to equatorial waters. But with climate change, this Kish has been seen as far north as the Arctic.

What are the primary effects of the oceans on our lives? Many of them are common knowledge. All our drinking water comes from the seas, from the endless cycle of evaporation and rain and the rain’s return to the sea. I want to focus on one specific influence of the ocean, the way it absorbs light and energy from the sun. This is one of its primary effects, absorbing heat from the sun and thus cooling the whole planet, and moderating earth’s temperature.

How do we know the oceans are warming? How do scientists measure the temperature of such a vast thing as the seven seas?

The ocean and the air above it are two very different atmospheres. One difference between them is that light travels easily and tremendously far in the open air and interstellar space. But light, and the energy it brings from the sun, disappears in the ocean. Sound diffuses and disappears quickly in open air. Under water sound travels surprisingly far. How far?

The American navy once recently set off an explosion in the Mediterranean, and it happened that for various reasons, sound detectors in the ocean happened to be active at that particular moment across the planet, and the sound of that explosion was detected right round the world. We know that sound travels faster in warmer water. Scientists realized that they could take a measurement of the global ocean’s temperature by measuring the speed at which a sound crossed the ocean. If the sound traveled faster than at a previous time, this meant the oceans had warmed. This use of sound is now one principal way the temperature of the oceans is measured.

What’s the state of things today, with current problems in the oceans, and the way these problems affect us? We know more than ever now about the ocean, and about our climate, and we know there are serious concerns here, about the oceans’ warming, about there being more and more serious hurricanes caused by this warming, and there being more and more heat energy in the sea. The seas are changing in other ways. Czerski tells us that with global over-fishing the overall number of all living creatures in the seas now has decreased to 60 % of what it once was. In the case of whales, the number we have now is just 10 %.

Discarded plastic is filling the seas. There are many other problems. What do we do?

Let me take you back to Hawaii and Palestine. When I tell you about Mau Piailug, whose crew paddled from Hawaii to Tahiti, am I saying that the next cruise we plan for ourselves should be a sweaty workout like his? Not likely, at least at St. Jude’s. But what I am saying is that the perspective that will engage in helping to heal this wounded planet is closer to the paddler’s perspective of wrestling with currents and winds and wild weather, of being immersed in the breathing, pulsing world of forests and rivers and lakes and gardens, than it is to chasing taillights on the QEW. To put it another way: to move a canoe, you need a crew of paddlers, each equally committed to the work of the journey, and to each other’s health and safety.

We are all equally involved in the preservation and sustainability of the planet because we all live in it. Rusty Schweickart, the Apollo 9 astronaut, puts it this way: “We are not passengers on Spaceship Earth. We’re the crew.” He means that each of us is not a passive spectator along for the ride, but an active agent in the steering and preservation of this planet. As the indigenous people of Hawaii put it: “A canoe is an island and an island is a canoe.”

The psalmist’s marvelling wonder at the glorious earth “When I consider the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained…” is, again, for me, the inspiration for everything I do about climate. But awe and wonder are not a passive state, they are the spark and inspiration to action, in which everyone has responsibility, perhaps simply because who would look at an unimaginably lovely thing, and just let it fall apart?

Particularly when, as we believe, that loveliness was given us by God?

Hamish Guthrie