Dream On

Add some imagination to your concept of Church, I’ve argued with its hierarchy. Give something new, even radical, a chance. It just might save you. And, by the way, giving what we are doing to the environment, opening our minds in all areas might save us, too. So, let’s just do that and see what happens.

The problem with getting preachy with others is you also have to preach the same to yourself. Could it be I might have to grow more open on one of my favorite topics, saving the environment, (along with ordaining women and other gendered, of course, since they are connected)?  What if I am confronted by more promising solutions from a premise with which I do not agree? Is it time to take a hard rather than a soft look at problems and possibilities? Is that my version of embracing the new and the radical?  

I’ve mentioned her before, and so you know I am enchanted by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.  As a Native American botanist and teacher, she combines indigenous wisdom and values with science to mesmerizing effect. I’m at heart a dreamer, and so I love pondering the questions she asks of us as we struggle to save our planet. I also like it very much when we get some answers and I can turn dreaming into doing. It’s a soft way to a hard place.

On the other hand, I was definitely not enchanted, but decidedly challenged, by an article I came across in the September 23, 2019 New Yorker “Ideas in the Sky: Jonathan Ledgard Believes Imagination Could Save the World” by Ben Taub. Ledgard definitely has some answers to how we might save the planet, but they are not the ones to which I am usually drawn. They involve hard, sometimes cold, often practical, sometimes fanciful, but unfailingly unique and modern solutions to our struggle. No ancient wisdom need apply. He has taken to heart what Tennessee Williams wrote in “The Glass Menagerie”, “blow out your candles…for the world is lit by lightning now.”

I have always been in the Kimmerer camp wanting to save the earth by getting us to love it fiercely enough. She writes about taking a reluctant group of pre-med students on a week’s field trip to the forest and wetlands. On their last night, she asked them what they could offer all the plants that had fed and helped shelter them, provided them with tools, and even soothed their wounds, physical and emotional for all those days. One student retorted that they are, after all, just plants; it’s good they have a use but we don’t owe them anything. Another conceded that they were indeed gifts but argued that, as such, they don’t require repayment. Most, however, concluded that just because the plants may be gifts did not mean we had not incurred some kind of debt in using them, if only a moral and ethical one.

As they pondered what reciprocity to the earth’s gifts might entail, the students came up with a series of ideas: a permit fee system for anything we take from nature with proceeds going to conservation efforts; school workshops touting the myriad values wild plants bestow; more protection and defensive strategies against all invasive species, especially of the human variety; attending local town planning meetings to advocate for wetland preservation; getting rain barrels installed around college buildings to collect water; joining the Nature Conservancy, and on and on it went. Some may stop at merely dreaming like many of us, I thought, but some may turn into doers like more and more of us. The impact of their solutions on the world may be not be earth shattering but, accumulated through a lifetime, might engender significant change.   

The problem is, according to Jonathan Ledgard, the earth is shattering and, although welcome, we are far past dreams, loving acts, and we don’t have lifetimes. Instead: “Imagination at scale is our recourse.” I was okay with that, but imagine how jarring it was to read author Ben Taub’s interpretation of the kind of question Jonathan Ledgard might have asked students in his quest to save the planet: “What if human greed (italics mine) could be harnessed as a kind of natural resource, and redirected to mitigate its own effects?” I had always thought we were to mitigate human greed by tapping into human goodness, but even as I cringed at the question, I was determined to stay open to new answers.

Ledgard, a journalist, had immersed himself in learning and reporting the problems of sustainability and equal distribution of resources on the planet and in interviewing those with the power to do something them but was not getting answers. The only truly innovative proposals, he found, were coming from the technology sector’s fringes, like advanced robotics, artificial intelligence, etc. Here was where the unconstrained imagination he called for – and exercised himself – was happening.

Consider, for example, one proposed solution for insuring sustainability and profit: building a network of cargo drone ports in the remotest areas of the world so that forests and plants and animal habitats were no longer devastated by road building and other infrastructure projects. Drones could carry medicines and critical supplies but also manufactured goods through open skies above the earth without harming it. Multiple drone depots facilitating a whole world of e-commerce would attract investors looking for profit, while growing, producing, packaging and transporting goods and maintaining the drones and ports would give desperate people in the most far flung and deprived areas of the world a chance for long term livelihoods without destroying more of the planet. Working with leading architects and other technological partners, Ledgard had a system designed and tested and proposed to several African leaders. The technology worked but geo-political and other obstacles to date have so far thwarted full implementation.

Nobody said change would be easy – just critical. 

Another proposal involved placing high enough financial value on endangered animals and ecosystems that they would wind up “paying” for their own protection. Great numbers of us who care about them would compensate local community members more for sustaining and increasing their populations than they could get killing them for meat or chopping them down for firewood or charcoal. This was the kind of proposal that came not from a bleeding liberal heart but a rigorous logical mind: “There’s a significant minority—or maybe a majority—of human beings who are biophiliac. They like living things. And that hasn’t been priced correctly.”  

The fact of my “liking living things” never having being “priced correctly” would have never come to my mind, and I resist thinking that way. I prefer going to the woods and dreaming up sweet solutions as I sometimes prefer going into an ancient Church illumined by candles on an altar. But I cannot rest in either place. The world, even the world of the Church, is lit by lightning now and we need lightning-fast, hard and realistic solutions to save it. And that requires embracing major changes of mindsets – even, alas, our own.