I flew into Dubai early yesterday morning from a two week stint in Kenya and Tanzania.  Coming from one of the least developed areas of the world – I spent a week without electricity and running water – into one of the most developed cities on earth and home to the world’s tallest building, I was reminded of this article which I wrote for The Other Journal three years ago after a similar trip.  Enjoy…

There are few air hops that will give you a greater contrast than the four-hour trip from Nairobi to Dubai.

Nairobi is the capital of one of the poorer nations in the world, the home of the infamous Kibera slum, and a textbook case of how population growth, rapid unplanned development, and massive environmental degradation result in poverty and human suffering. Flying out of Nairobi, you can see signs of distress in every direction just by looking out of the plane window.

Dubai is one of the wealthiest cities on earth. Flying into Dubai, evidence of prosperity is as obvious as the poverty of Nairobi. High-rise buildings grow out of desert sands, massive highways clog with traffic. The terminal itself is more of a shopping mall with jetways than an airport: a temple to consumerism. Every imaginable gadget, garment, and trinket is on offer at prices that may be as low as anywhere else in the world.

But there’s another way to look at these cities. Let’s rewind and put on a different set of glasses:

Read the rest of the article here.

If the theme interests you, pick up a copy of my latest book, When Heaven and Nature Sing at careofcreation.net or on Amazon.

This post comes to you from an airport lounge in Nairobi, Kenya, where I am waiting for my flight to Tanzania to visit the new Care of Creation project in Iringa.  Meanwhile, I am thinking of the many people, sights and sounds from the last week.  One of the most important events is actually one that happened on April 28, a week before I arrived, when an unaturally large rainfall event caused a portion of the mountain above the community where our project is located to slide down.  Such an event is a natural part of God’s creation – or is it?

The evidence of God’s grace and mercy in the aftermath of the April 28th landslide in Kijabe, Kenya, is clear.  The slide happened after midnight on a Saturday night, so the path the slide took down the main street of the town (which runs straight down the slope) hit no vehicles, no houses and  no people.  It did wipe out several hundred meters of the boundary fence of Rift Valley Academy, and could have done serious damage to a local high school and the famous Kijabe Christian Hospital but for a strong fence and row of trees at the bottom of the street – and because of the damming effect of a railway line above the town – but we’ll come back to that in a minute.

A couple of days ago the Care of Creation Kenya staff hiked to the top of the slide to see if we could begin to understand what had happened and why.  It appears that there were multiple small to medium slides at various places on the mountain that all fed into the same ravine, adding their energies together and multiplying the force that was descending on the town.  It is clear from the pictures (click on different pictures for a larger view) that this mountain, which is actually a part of the Rift Valley escarpment, is far more fragile than it appears.  Where the slide ripped the top soil away, it is quite clear that the layer of soil is in many places not much more than 18 inches (half a meter) thick, and often less than that.  So we are beginning with a landscape that is less stable than it seems.

Add to that the missing trees.  We know from previous surveys of this very slope that between 40 and 50 per cent of the large, hundreds of years old trees that should be on this hillside are no longer there.  They have been cut down, illegally, for charcoal, firewood or to make cedar posts, and much of this cutting has happened in the last five years.  This landslide makes it quite clear that the trees are holding that fragile layer of soil in place.  Where there are trees, they managed to stop or limit the damage.  Care of Creation Kenya director Craig Sorley will tell you that what appears to be an intact forest around Kijabe town is in fact honeycombed with spaces where trees are missing.  It’s like a wooden beam in your house that has been eaten by termites. Looks good from a distance, but when a stress comes, down goes the house.

And we could discuss the rainfall itself – which, while not unheard of, would certainly have been close to a record event.  One of the recognized effects of human-induced climate change is fewer, but more intense rain events exactly like this one.  Can we say this rainstorm was caused by global warming?  No.  But we can say that a warmer world makes such events much more likely.  The dice have been loaded toward such events, and now we’re having to play the game.

What saved Kijabe from massive damage? Ironically, another manmade alteration in the landscape.  Kenya’s one railway from the coast to the interior runs along this slope just above the town.  Where it crosses the ravine, it served as a dam, blocking most of the mud from continuing onto the buildings just below.  What was a large open area about 45 feet (15 meters) deep is now completely filled with some of the finest topsoil in all of Kenya.  If that railway embankment had not been there, we could have had a major human tragedy on our hands.

What are the lessons here?  It is clear that we do not understand how God’s creation works as well as we think we do.  When we devastate a forest slope, there are hidden costs.  But it is also clear that God’s mercy and grace is still at work – and the best way to navigate the changing world we live in is to work hard, work smart – and rest in him.

(Below – the mudpool behind the embankment that saved Kijabe)

I am currently in Kenya, being reminded once again of the enormous human toll caused by environmental degradation.  This post is four years old, but perhaps even more relevant than when first published:

Alan Paton wrote his novel in 1946, published in 1948.  It is set in South Africa.  What is startling about the book is that the first two pages could have been written about Kenya – and could have been written yesterday.

The lessons from today’s reading are painfully clear:  1)Environmental degradation is not a new problem.  Abuse of God’s creation is, apologies to Paton, as old as the hills.   As ancient as human nature.  If you’ll allow me to quote myself in Our Father’s World, ‘environmental problems are sin problems.’

And, 2)Why don’t we learn?  If it was obvious that people were destroying the very land they needed to live on more than 60 years ago, why do we keep acting surprised?  Why do we think we can solve this with more fertilizer or another loan from the World Bank?

Here’s the reading.  (Pick up the book here)

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills.  These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it…

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh.  The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth.  Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left, and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man.  They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children.  The men are away, the young men and the girls are away.  The soil cannot keep them any more.

The grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil.  It holds the rain and the mist, and they seep into the ground, feeding the streams in every kloof.  It is well-tended, and not too many cattle fee upon it; not too many fires burn it, laying bare the soil.  Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator.  Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men.  Destroy it and man is destroyed.

Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil.  But the rich green hills break down.  They fall to the valley below, and falling, change their nature.  For they grow red and bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist, and the streams are dry in the kloofs.  Too many cattle feed upon the grass, and too many fires have burned it.  Stand shod upon it, for it is coarse and sharp, and the stones cut under the feet.  It is not kept, or guarded, or cared for, it no longer keeps men, guards men, cares for men…

Did you read this far?  Then it’s time to close the lap top or turn off the monitor, get yourself outdoors for a bit, and do two things:  If you can see good healthy soil, ground that still has the capacity to ‘keep men’, rejoice and give thanks to God for his mercy.  And at the same time, weep and repent for what we have done to God’s creation, and for those now suffering and dying because ‘the soil cannot keep them any more.’

“Hope springs eternal,” we say, and Earth Day certainly demonstrates that truth.  Earth Day was founded in hope in 1970; as you will read below, we are still hopeful.  The question is, should we be?  In the face of all of our challenges, where should we look for real hope?  These are my Earth Day #44 thoughts (see some earlier year’s thoughts here and here:

Madison Wisconsin, can arguably claim to be the historical center of the modern US environmental movement.  This small city has direct connections to many of  the movement’s pioneers:  John Muir (Yellowstone National Park), Aldo Leopold (“Sand County Almanac” and many other works), Sigurd Olsen (The US/Canadian Boundary Waters), Gaylord Nelson (founder of the first Earth Day), and Cal DeWitt (Au Sable Institute).  Perhaps because of these historical connections, the current voices of the environmental movement can often be heard in this city, and what these voices are saying – and not saying – is worth noting.

Two events here the last two weeks deserve mention.  In the first, Dr. Frederick Denny, a prominent Islamic scholar addressed the topic of Ecological Principles in Islam.   Dr. Denny is the author of one of the standard textbooks in the field of Islamic Studies, and has recently begun exploring what Islam, the Qur’an and Islamic scholars have to say about environmental issues and ethics.  For full disclosure, and as an interesting footnote, my own brother is the author of the other major textbook and both of these scholars speak highly of each other.

We might begin by noting that this lecture was hosted by the Religious Studies Department of the University of Wisconsin and not by the Environmental Studies Institute.  This would at least suggest an indication of the extent to which environmental concerns have spread throughout the academic community.  The environmental crisis is not just the concern of scientists any more.

What was memorable was not the content of the lecture – it appears that while an ecological ethic can be built on Islamic doctrine, there is not a lot to start with (my conclusion, not the lecturers).  No, it was the lively discussion that began (I won’t tell you how) to explore the question of sin, repentance and forgiveness with regard to things we do to harm the environment, God’s creation.  The most memorable comment of the evening:  “God may forgive us for what we have done, but will creation do so?”  All in all it was a most refreshing kind of discussion to have in the middle of one of America’s great (secular) universities.

The second event was a talk by none other than Jane Goodall.  Introduced by Tia Nelson, daughter of Gaylord (of Earth Day fame), Jane spoke to a crowd of more than 2000 people.  I don’t have to tell you that Jane Goodall is as close to an environmental saint as we have today (you can read some of her inspiring life story here).  Her topic was in keeping with her reputation:  “Reasons for Hope”.  Having the recent discussion on sin still on my mind, I was eager to hear what hope Jane might have to offer.

She is a marvelous story teller, and her quiet, understated delivery is nonetheless powerfully eloquent.  Unfortunately, when you look carefully at what she was offering under the label of “hope”, the message fell short.

“I do feel hopeful,” she said, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.  Her main reasons for hope:  Human intellect.  We’re smart enough to know what damage we’re causing to the environment, and smart enough to find solutions.  The resilience of nature.  Creation shows an astounding ability to rebound from insult and injury.  And what she calls the indomitable human spirit as evidenced, she believes, in the enthusiasm she sees among young people around the world today.

I listened carefully.  I wanted to share her hope, I really did.  But my mind kept going back to that discussion about sin.

If the problem really is sin – if environmental problems are sin problems, a phrase that is repeated often at Care of Creation – then there will be no hope in intellect.  If there ever were a hope that human brains can outwit human greed, the corruption on Wall Street should put that idea to rest more or less permanently.  Yes, nature can bounce back, but how many times and how often? It’s kind of hard to bounce back from extinction, as the Passenger Pigeon and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker would tell us if they could.  And that indomitable human spirit?  We were just as enthusiastic about Earth Day 44 years ago.  Somehow our shortsightedness and our sinful materialism outlived that young enthusiasm.

So what’s the lesson for us this Earth Day?  Is there any hope?

I would answer with a cautious yes.  There is hope in our struggle against environmental sin, because there is hope for environmental sinners.   It is the same hope that is there for sinners of every other kind – hope that comes from Jesus

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus], ²⁰ and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. [Colossians 1:19-20]

May this Earth Day be another step toward recognizing that sin is the deep root cause of our environmental challenges, and may we respond to that awareness with the kind of repentance that God will accept.

Then there will be hope.

Every year I try to write an Easter-themed devotional. (See some previous posts here.)  Here are this year’s thoughts on the occasion of Holy Week.  This will be emailed to our newsletter list in a few days, but as many on this blog and on our Facebook pages don’t get the newsletter, here’s your copy early.  Enjoy – and let me know what you think in the comments.

It is the start of Holy Week.  We Christians of whatever label take time this week to remember and celebrate events that are at the heart of our faith:  A coronation march into an ancient city.  A sham trial.  A barbaric execution.  An unexpected finale with earthquakes, empty tombs, and wild rumors.  And finally, a dead man come to life.  Euphoria, despair, confusion, victory – all in one short week.

This up and down cycle of Holy Week is a pretty good metaphor for life.  Whether it is our own small lives or the grand drama of human history through the ages, we experience the same wild swings from giddy joy to awful despair, with a lot of waiting time sprinkled throughout.  This is a picture of how God works in our histories, small and large, to bring us to an end that he sees and has ordained from the beginning.

We know how it ends before we begin

That last phrase is where we have to begin:  The end has been planned from the beginning.  As Jesus went through the cycle from the exuberance of the Triumphal Entry (Palm Sunday) to the sorrow of the Last Supper to the humiliation of his trial and the agony of the cross, he knew that that he was participating in a drama whose end had already been written.  There was pain.  There was shame.  But there was no uncertainty.  He knew how it would end.

John makes this clear in his introduction to the events of the Last Supper:

Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end… Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he had come from God and was going back to God, rose from supper… [John 13:1,3-4]

Jesus’ whole-hearted embrace of events that had been laid out for him from the beginning of time reminds me of Psalm 44:4 where we are told that God “decrees victories” for his people.  What a great thought – we don’t have to earn our victories – God has decreed that we will win. If this was true of Jesus, and of the ancient people of Israel, it is also true of us in our day.  Whatever today feels like, God has already decreed that there will be a victory.  It almost feels like cheating – like starting your first game in the NCAA tournament knowing that strings have been pulled and you have been guaranteed the crown.

Not what we expect

But the victory that God has decreed is not like winning a tournament.  It may in fact be a ‘win’ that looks and feels like a defeat.   Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem had all the marks of a popular revolution – a “Jewish Spring” with crowds in the street, and an implicit appeal to history (“Hosanna to the Son of David…”) – but it ran headlong into roadblocks thrown up by entrenched authorities, both religious and political.  The “powers that be” would not be challenged so easily.  Thus betrayal by a close associate, arrest in the dark of midnight, an illegal trial and a hurried execution.

None of this precluded the victory that God had decreed for Jesus – in fact, this chain of events was the path to victory.  But no one could see that. God works in ways we can’t predict and often don’t expect.  God’s victory, absolutely certain and final, does not look like anything we expect or can predict before it happens.

A whole new beginning

Jesus did try to prepare his people for the nature of the victory that would be coming:  “They are going to kill me, yes.  But on the third day I will rise from the dead.”  He told them this a number of different times.  And no one believed him; but how could they?  They saw him killed.  They saw him arrested, beaten, nailed to the cross.  They heard his last groans, watched as his lifeless body was shut into the tomb.  They saw a guard posted, a governor’s seal across the entrance.  Jesus was as dead as a human being could be, certified by the full authority of the government.  That was that.  It was all over.

Except that it wasn’t.  For there was something else at work here that trumped all of the usual calculations, a power for which  political power, religious hubris and the limitations of the laws of biology and physics have no relevance.  Human ‘winning’ is based on human rules, but God’s victory is based on his own rules.  This is what this looks like, according to the Psalmist:

Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
² The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
³ “Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”

⁴ He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the Lord holds them in derision.
⁵ Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
and terrify them in his fury, saying,
⁶ “As for me, I have set my King
on Zion, my holy hill.”

Jesus could not lose, but he would not win according to human calculations.  His victory was of a different order altogether, an act of power so unimaginable that its consequences are still beyond our comprehension.  For this victory was not simply a reviving of one battered, dead body, though it was that.  Nor was this victory only the first step in the defeat and banishment of all human death (see I Corinthians 15), as awesome as that would have been even if that were all that had been accomplished.

No, this is God’s triumph over all that is wrong, and all that is evil.  It is his mighty restoration of everything that has been bent, broken or stained by human sin.  It is resurrection and it is redemption.

It is victory!

This is why we do what we do at Care of Creation – because every tree planted, every flower tended, every puppy hugged, every child caressed is one more piece in this great victory.  Caring for creation is one way we can participate in the victory that is Easter.

Why don’t you join us?

The film runs about a half an hour, but it is worth the time.  Highly recommended for those of your friends who might be wondering about this creation care stuff but aren’t quite sure.  (Also recommended – the book of the same title that has no connection to the film… !)

Enjoy!

The lights came because my street is one of the more ‘troubled’ neighborhoods of Madison.  A lot of kids live here, most are not supervised after school or at night, and police calls are frequent.  Lighting up the neighborhood seems logical – and even biblical:  “…people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. (John 3:18-20)

This new development on my street made me listen a bit more closely a couple of days ago when NPR aired a story about – talk about connecting unconnected dots – artificial lighting at night and breast cancer.  It sounds like a story out of the Onion, but no, there seems to be some solid research here:

Richard Stevens, an epidemiologist at the University of Connecticut Health Center, was one of the first to make the connection between bright, artificial light and breast cancer. Stevens’ research found that artificial light can disrupt our body clock — and affect our production of melatonin.

“We know for sure that the lighting in the modern world can disrupt our circadian rhythms, and that cannot be good,” Stevens tells Headlee.

Follow the link in the quote above and you get a bit more about Stevens’ work:

UConn researcher Richard Stevens is a cancer epidemiologist at UCONN Medical Center who studies the impact of artificial light on our health. He joined us on Where We Live five years ago, to talk about his research into the causes of a rise in breast cancer rates and said,  “About 20 years ago we started thinking about what else changes with industrialization. The lighting changes, people doing shift work, people not getting enough dark.”

And that story from five years ago cites a Lancet article with the rather phenomenal claim that

[The World Health Organization’s] cancer research agency now considers “shift work” to be a “probable human carcinogen.” This puts night workers into the same category as those exposed to toxic chemicals like PCBs.

What we have here is another example of the Rubik’s Cube problem.  Those of you who have heard me give a talk or a seminar may remember that I occasionally pull out two Rubik’s cubes to illustrate the challenges we have in trying to solve our various problems in the world today.

The Cube is hard to solve because of the fiendish way in which unintended consequences cascade through the different faces of the puzzle.  Move one corner piece into position and you discover you have displaced two others that you just put into place.  That is one way to think of the interaction of things like street lighting, shift work and breast cancer:  Put in one “good” improvement (the street light) and discover that you’ve caused problems in completely unexpected places (cancer rates).

There’s another layer to the Rubik’s Cube story, though.  In my talks I have two cubes – one is solvable, the other is not.  I’ve tampered with it by swapping just one pair of colored stickers, creating an unsolvable puzzle.  This is what our world is really like because our problems are not technical – they are spiritual.  “Environmental problems are sin problems.”  There is only one answer to sin, and it is not money, or policy, or research.

So now I look at my new streetlight with a bit more ambivalence.  Yes, it might keep the bad guys off my street – but on the other hand…

Your thoughts?

Just over five years ago, Kenyans went to the polls.  As in other countries, the election results were far from clear cut – but instead of taking to the airwaves or to the courts, Kenyans took to the streets with machetes and gasoline cans.  More than 1000 people were killed, the country came to a standstill for months, and thousands were displaced from their homes and farms.  It’s election time again in Kenya…

S0 I’m asking you to pray for this beautiful piece of God’s creation this week, that God’s peace will descend on it.  Things are different this time:  While the electorate remains ethnically divided, the major ethnic groups have chosen different partners – like the second half of an evening of bridge.  Where the Kikuyu and Luo were aligned last time against the Kalenjin, in this chapter it’s Kikuyu and Kalenjin against Luo and Kamba, with a fifth group, the Luhya, in a position to decide the election.

Confused?  So are some Kenyans, according to an excellent write up in the New York Times today:

“All this is the mischief of politicians,” said Dominico Owiti, who lives in a new trouble spot, Sondu, a bushy borderland between the Luos and the Kalenjins. The two ethnic groups were allies during the last election, but because of opportunistic political alliances struck between Kenya’s leading politicians, they now find themselves on opposite sides of a very combustible political divide.

Similarly, two groups that fought so bitterly here the last time, the Kalenjins and the Kikuyus, are now political allies because their leaders have teamed up to run for president and deputy president on the same ticket.

“I don’t like it,” said Mary Macharia, a Kikuyu woman whose daughter was killed in the church fire in 2008, which was set by a Kalenjin mob. “But who am I to refuse?”

I have some vested interest in Kenya – my organization, Care of Creation, has an important project in the Rift Valley area, a potential focus of unrest, and am more than casually concerned about the safety of our expatriate and local staff workers.  But beyond that, it feels like this is one more attempt by the Evil One to disrupt and destroy what could be one of the most beautiful and bountiful parts of God’s good creation.

So let’s pray, shall we?  It can make a difference.

Some additional resources on this story:

A video report by a NY Times reporter.

A slide show on election preparations in the Rift Valley.

The John Brown Mural hangs in the Kansas Capitol Building. That is a Bible that the crazed abolitionist is holding in his hand.

by guest writer, Lowell Bliss

The next time you hope for some plain-speaking legislation to come out of your state legislature, you may want to take a moment and be careful what you wish for.   This is the story of three environmental bills recently introduced in the Kansas statehouse. I live in Kansas.  We’re generally known for being plain-spoken.

Our governor Sam Brownback says he has an “All of the Above” energy policy.  I do not consider that plain-speaking any more than when President Obama uses the same phrase.  “All of the above” means that an executive can throw a sop to renewable energies without threatening the continued exploitation of fossil fuels. And thus we have our first bill, House Bill 2241, which wants to give our state utility companies a break on the Renewable Portfolio Standard.  They will no longer have to get a certain percentage of their energy requirements from renewables by the original deadlines – 10% by 2010, 15% by 2016 and 20% by 2020.  Surely these deadlines aren’t onerous for America’s second windiest state.  Even our name is a Native American term for “People of the South Wind.”  The bill also grants vague exemptions for “firm transmission” (i.e. standards don’t go in effect if there aren’t transmission lines available) and “excessive costs.”  There were a couple of occasions last summer when the nation of Germany reached the 50% mark in obtaining its electricity from renewables. Germans are the largest ethnicity designation of Kansas citizens.  Perhaps we could take some inspiration from the Old Country.

The second bill,  House Bill 2306, introduced last week,  is also not particularly plain-speaking.  In a tone of academic fairness and objectivity, it mandates that science classes in the state must “provide information to students of scientific evidence which both supports and counters a scientific theory or hypothesis.”  The teaching of certain “scientific controversies” should be objective and include “both the strengths and weaknesses of such scientific theory or hypothesis.” Lest you think they are referring to evolution or the existence of extraterrestrial life, the only controversy identified in the bill is “climate science.”

And that leads us to the one bill that is plain-speaking.  The first line of House Bill 2366 reads, “No public funds may be used, either directly or indirectly, to promote, support, mandate, require, order, incentivize, advocate, plan for, participate in or implement sustainable development.”

How does one outlaw sustainable development?!   Why would one outlaw sustainable development?

Actually, whenever I am tempted to say with exasperation, “Oh bloody Kansas,” I remind myself of what The West, the PBS documentary produced by Ken Burns, said of my beloved home state, namely that no civilian population suffered more for the cause of abolition than Bleeding Kansas.  Additionally, for the longest time, we were a hotbed of progressive populism.  Our most favorite Favorite Son—Gen. Dwight David Eisenhower—embodies what it means to war against totalitarian oppression.   In other words, when it comes to these three environmental bills, “we’re better than that!”

So I’m taking a new tack, based on my reading of theologian Walter Brueggemann’s book The Prophetic Imagination.  I’m not looking for you to join me in ridicule, scorn, exasperation, or even anger.  Instead I mourn.  Like Daniel in Daniel 9, I seek out the sackcloth and ashes,  and confess my sins and the sins of my people.  I cry out to God that our consciousness in Kansas seems as enslaved to Koch Industries (based in Wichita, by the way) as ever as much as the minds of the Israelite brickmakers were enslaved to Pharaoh.   So please, if you are tempted to roll your eyes at me and my fellow Kansans, include some tears as well.

Lowell Bliss is the director of Eden Vigil, and heartily endorses the work of Kansas Interfaith Power & Light, the organization which alerted him to this pending legislation.  (If you are from Kansas, please consider writing your representative in opposition to these bills, thank you.)

Headlines from November, 2010:  Carnival Splendor finally reaches San Diego dock; passengers begin to disembark.

and from February 15 (today), 2013: Carnival Triumph Cruise Ship: ‘Blessed’ Passengers Return Home With Stories of Horror

Jesus rebuked people in his day who were able to predict the weather but unable to understand the signs of history right in front of them: “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ ³ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times. 

Perhaps it is time we learned to interpret some of the parables that are right in front of us.  You think?

We covered the original Carnival Splendor debacle here.  Today’s story is almost identical.  Fire in the engine room, life support systems throughout the ship are disabled, 4000 passengers and crew find themselves helpless and miserable.

A couple of highlights from my original blog post fit with this latest story as well:

Some on the internet have taken to mocking the reports of an ordeal – but I’m not one of them.  I’ve checked the floor plans for this ship – it looks like a good third of the staterooms are on the inside, with no views, no natural light, and no ventilation if the air conditioning system breaks down.  The plumbing runs on a vacuum system – gravity won’t help if the power is out.  And considering the presumed average age of people who take these cruises, most are retired, and therefore  have plenty of health issues.  So put yourself in an interior cabin on a lower deck with no light, no air, no water, no toilet, no elevator to get to the upper floors where your food might be waiting for you, and no way to climb the stairs.  I would say this easily falls into the category of an ordeal.

How is this a parable?  We are all living a on cruise ship – a space vehicle we call Planet Earth.  And we do not realize until something like this happens how dependent we are on a thousand invisible ‘systems’ that keep us comfortable, allow us to function and be productive, that, in fact, keep us alive.  Again from the earlier post:

The “engine room” of our planet consists of topsoil, and healthy forests and a balanced atmospheric system, and all of these have sub-systems that in many cases we are only now beginning to understand.  The system provides us with oxygen, water, food –and everything we do, from walking in our gardens to listening to a concert to driving to work to worshiping in church depends on this system.  If the system fails, we’re in big trouble.  [My colleague Cal DeWitt does a great job of summarizing the provisions provided by this planetary engine-room in his book Earthwise.]

Like the Carnival Splendor [and now, Carnival Triumph (great name!)], the engine room of planet earth is failing. This isn’t alarmism, and we’re not talking about “might fail” or “will fail in the future” but “is failing now.”

One of the younger passengers, interviewed by the LA Times, learned some important life lessons from her cruise on the Triumph:

But she learned how to survive, and something else.
Before leaving the port Friday, headed for a local hotel, Allie said she was newly grateful for “food, warmth, water and plumbing.”
“You kind of know what you have when it’s gone,” she said.

I see two lessons from this parable:  First, divides immediately appear between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’.  Some people have windows that open, and are on deckts high enough to escape the sewage problems.  Many others are in the bowels of the ship with experiences more like this:

Gill and his wife Cindey Gill had a stateroom on the first level, but “sewage came up through the shower drain, pooling in the sink and squishing in the carpet,” she said, forcing them to seek out places to stay on upper levels.
“Some of the people in the upper areas had plenty of air, but down below, it was unlivable,” he said.
“It was like a sauna of sewage,” Cindey Gill said.

At the risk of beating the same drum over and over again, this situation mirrors the global environmental crisis perfectly:  Many of us live comfortably, but that comfort is being had at the expense of millions or billions of people in other countries, who absorb pollution from our cheap electronic devices and suffer the early first effects of climate change in their own backyards.

The second lesson from this parable is that human beings can – and often do – behave selflessly and honorably in the face of enormous challenges:

When they noticed no one from Carnival was stepping up to help the elderly and sick get around, they and other passengers offered to help, Gill said, carting mattresses and bedding up from the lower decks.
“It was the people on the boat that saved Carnival,” Gill said as he stood in the port parking lot after disembarking, luggage in tow, his wife beside him in a Carnival robe.
On Monday, he started gathering with a prayer group, where people worried about getting sick at sea, about their kids and jobs back home. By Wednesday, they had attracted 200 people. Gill said he was discouraged to see people get drunk and disorderly — and he’s no teetotaler, he had a beer that night too.But he was encouraged to see so many fellow passengers help out.
“In an adverse situation, most people will rise to help — that’s just the human spirit,” he said.

So, what lessons do you take away from this?  There is the obvious lesson of staying away from Carnival Cruise Lines for a while – but we can’t really “stay away” from cruising on Planet Earth.  We can prepare to act selflessly and honorably as some of the passengers did when the planet’s systems start to fail.

But we might also want to start asking whether it might not be worthwhile to start repairing our planet’s life-support systems so as to avoid the problems in the first place.  That is what creation care should be all about!

Here’s an interview with some of the passengers: