King Cnut, in a famous
anecdote, tried in vain to hold back the tide. I saw a headline this morning
about a $50 million plan to protect Louisiana’s coastline from erosion and
rising sea levels due to climate change.
Call me a pessimist, but I think
Louisiana’s expenditure could be as effective as King Cnut’s effort.
There is no point in addressing
the symptoms and outcomes without fixing the causes. Hopefully, COP26 in Glasgow
in November will persuade the movers and shakers in the nations to commit to
serious reductions and changes in order to rein in the environmental emergency.
Meanwhile, we can continue to
do what we can. Plant more flowering bushes and trees in order to encourage
biodiversity; switch to environmentally-friendly cleaning products or make our
own from vinegar, soda, etc; change our eating habits to be less reliant on
animal products; drastically reduce our use of plastic and lobby for change. It
may sound like tinkering at the edges, but as the cargo shifts internally, the
juggernaut will alter its course. I also read that the state of Wyoming, which
has been a coal-producing state, is switching to harvesting its other abundant
resource, the wind, because the call for coal is declining.
Jesus calls us to follow him,
to challenge tradition and confront injustice, and to bring light and life into
the situations we encounter. We are all affected by climate change; we all bear
responsibility for our consumer habits and our selfish lifestyles. It’s easy to
become overwhelmed at the size of the problem, but as the little boy said to
his critic as he threw another starfish back into the sea, ‘I made a difference
for that one.’
We can’t hold back the tide,
but Jesus working in us can. When it comes to the power of Jesus, I am an eternal
optimist.
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