Oil Spills are bad enough – but how do you pray about a Tsunami?

It hasn’t been a year since the Gulf oil spill, which we rightly saw as the worst environmental disaster in memory.  At that time I wrote a piece trying to come to terms with that situation: “How Do You Pray about an Oil Spill?” And now I sit pondering a disaster that could turn out to be exponentially greater than the BP/Halliburton fiasco.  I am doing so at my dining room table, in a part of the world that is seismically if not politically stable, many miles from the nearest nuclear facility.  I am looking out at a landscape where the first birds of spring have arrived and are singing up a storm: Robins, redwing blackbirds, a cedar waxwing and (I think) a pine warbler (see pic below and tell me if I’m right, birders!)  just this morning.  The contrast between my window and the stories on my computer screen could not be more different, and I am forced to ask the same question I asked last summer: How do I pray about what is now happening in Japan?

Let’s start by experiencing the disaster just a little bit.  The clip below is one of the first live reports of the wall of water and debris engulfing the flat land bordering the sea in Miyagi Prefecture north of Tokyo.  I don’t expect you to watch all 18 minutes, but take it at least through the first four or five, remembering that every house, every vehicle being swallowed has people in it.

[Click here to go the clip - embedding has been disabled.]

My first reaction to this is that Hollywood’s disaster flicks don’t come close to duplicating the real thing.  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything even in fiction like this monster as it races across the landscape, belching smoke and flame, swallowing everything in its path.  My second response is similar to how I feel when I stand at the base of Niagara Falls – very small and inconsequential.   Look – everything human is being obliterated.  Our greatest works hardly slow it down; instead, as human artifacts are swallowed they become part of the monster, swelling its size and increasing its power to destroy.  There is powerful metaphor here – read on.

This 20 minute disaster by itself is enough for a lifetime.   But this is only the middle act of a three-part tragedy.  To this we have to add, on the front end, approximately three minutes of the worst earthquake in recorded Japanese history, and on the back end a still unfolding nuclear disaster whose effects could last from decades to centuries.

Now would you like the really bad news? This is happening in Japan.

This is one of the wealthiest, most technologically advanced countries in the world.  Japan is not only the source of many of our cars and electronic gadgets – she is the most prepared-for-disaster country in history.  Japan knows earthquakes as Oklahoma knows tornadoes.  Building codes are possibly the strictest in the world.  Public education, early warning systems, disaster drills:  Everything that could be done in anticipation of a disaster was being done.  There is no way to blame this tragedy on greed (the Gulf oil spill), poverty (Haiti), or political ineptness (Hurricane Katrina).  No – it seems like this is one tragic event that was going to happen and there was nothing anyone anywhere could have done to prevent it or to adequately prepare for it.

An article in the New York Times on disaster preparedness sums up the situation nicely:  No matter how high the levee or how flexible the foundation, disaster experts say, nature bats last.

[Note for international readers: That last phrase comes from the American sport of baseball, in which teams have to take turns at bat, the only time a team can score runs.  The home team always bats last and therefore always has the last opportunity to win the game.   In the great game of life on earth, we human beings are the visiting team, and nature will always have the last say.]

So let’s get back to the original question:  In this situation, where the best that human society can offer is less than inadequate, how should we pray?

First, we need to put God back into the picture. “Nature” is a euphemism – God is the reality.  Nature does not control the movement of tectonic plates, the displacement of billions of tons of sea water.  But God does.  Isaiah 40 might be a useful chapter to run to in these times of trouble and chaos:

²¹ Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
²² He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,
and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,
and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
²³ He brings princes to naught
and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
²⁴ No sooner are they planted,
no sooner are they sown,
no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

Does putting God at the center of the Japan disaster make you a bit uncomfortable?  It should.  “Fear God” is a common exhortation in the Bible for good reason – over familiarity with the God of earthquakes and tsunamis is not a good idea.

This leads directly to our second item:

We need to understand our frailty and adopt an attitude of humility. There’s a line I use often in my talks that applies here:

“The entire human enterprise depends on two things: Six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”

No matter how clever our inventions, no matter how beautiful our artwork, no matter how profound our works of literature or how powerful our weapons or how vast our (imaginary) wealth, we are in the end biological creatures who suffer and die quickly without air, food and water.  Our frailty is evident in every disaster – water and food become matters of top priority, and lack of these is often a major reason for breakdowns in security and social norms.  But absent a disaster, we human beings act like teenagers who are invincible and will live forever.  Could there be a better description of an economic system built on the premise that perpetual growth is possible, desirable and inevitable?

Perhaps James’ caution could apply here:

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.

And we need to admit the reality of our sin and repent. Think back to the image of the tsunami wave racing across the landscape, engulfing cars and buildings and then carrying them along, adding them to itself and using them to consume and destroy yet more cars and buildings.  There is a powerful metaphor here:  All of our economic, political and social structures have been built, like the Tower of Babel on a foundation of arrogance and greed.  We have in fact “added house to house until there is no more room and we live alone in the land” (Is 5).  We have “destroyed the earth” and unknowingly lived on the blood of millions trapped in poverty.   And the system we’ve built for our comfort and prosperity is in the process of destroying us, more slowly but just as effectively as that tsunami wave whose destructive force was magnified by the cars and houses it had swallowed.  (See previous posts that relate here and here and here and here.)

Biblical repentance calls for a change of attitude as well as change of direction.  “Go and sin no more,” says Jesus to an admitted sinner.  Can an entire global society learn to “sin no more”?  I’m not sure we can, but I suspect this is the great challenge of our time.

And this brings us to our one hope in all of this:

We can appeal to the mercy and grace of a God who is not only wrathful but also loving:

¹³ “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, ¹⁴ if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. [II Chronicles 7:13-14]

And while we confess and pray, we can also hang on tight to the words of Jeremiah at one of the darkest periods of Israel’s history that are the source of one of our greatest hymns of prayer and praise:

⁹ I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰ I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹ Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
²² Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³ They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
²⁴ I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”   [Lamentations 3:19-24]

And so I turn from visions of disaster and tragedy to think again of the warbler I saw this weekend, who has survived a long, hard  winter and a flight of thousands of miles, and who spends his morning singing praises to his creator, and mine:

Is it a warbler?  Let me know…

This won’t be a surprise to those who paid attention to some of the serious weather events of 2010:  When Russia’s wildfires exploded, we heard that Russia would be banning wheat exports for the immediate future.  Then Pakistan lost an entire rice harvest and a good deal of wheat due to the worst flooding in that nation’s history – requiring Pakistan to import more than it normally would have done.  And now Australia’s floods are affecting not only coal but  wheat and other commodities.

We had a food-price crisis in 2008 – (see chart) – but that one appears to have been driven by a speculative and greedy market where investors who had no interest in food were grabbing futures contracts in the hope of exploiting the competition between eaters and drivers  in the rise of biofuels, particularly ethanol.  The Great Recession seemed to have provided some relief for eaters, and prices dropped back toward normal.

[Washington Post Graphic - click image for full size]

I’m not an expert – but this year’s food crisis seems to be different.  It is being driven by a disruption in supply, not by speculation in the market, and if this is the case, we need to be listening to people like Lester Brown who says “The new reality is that the world is only one poor harvest away from chaos.”

If you are an eater 0r a driver, you need to educate yourself on this story.  The Washington Post has a good story from last Saturday.  A couple of excerpts:

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently warned that in December its food price index surpassed its previous peak of early summer 2008, fed by particularly sharp increases in sugar, cooking oils and fats. Corn and soy prices were also moving up quickly, with corn hitting a 29-month high Friday.

In Bangladesh, rice prices jumped 8 percent in December. In India, the price of onions soared 80 percent in just one week.

“Now everyone is having fears of going back to the levels of 2007-08,” said Sudakshina Unnikrishnan, a Barclays Capital commodities analyst.

Rising food prices may have been an ingredient in the instability in Tunisia that drove that country’s president, Zine el-AbidineBen Ali, from office Thursday…

Lester Brown has a report out this week on the topic:

Whereas in years past, it’s been weather that has caused a spike in commodities prices, now it’s trends on both sides of the food supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side, the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced countries, and—due to climate change —crop-withering heat waves and melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future…

…The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.

The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this would lead to—that threatens our global future. Unless governments quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will only trend upward.

Brown’s latest book, World on the Edge, is available here.

So what should a Christian response be? We need to open our eyes:  Big things are happening in our world, but Jesus warned us, didn’t he?  We need to practice stewardship in our own lives so we will be able to help others.  There are good biblical examples for this with remarkable parallels to our own day (rich Christians in one part of the world helping those in another part).  You can help practically by supporting organizations like Care of Creation - our Farming God’s Way program has great potential to increase food supply by making God’s earth healthier.

And some of us may be in a position to do more,  If we have the ear of those in authoriy, or the authority ourselves to modify policies or to move corporations who can make a difference, then the example of Esther probably applies.  Who knows but that God has placed you in the position you are in today for ‘such a time as this?’

Cheez-its that taste medicinal. Metallic cornflakes. Eggo waffles that remind you of “stale straw”.  Meat that calls to mind cardboard or damp dog hair.

If the recent government effort to reduce salt in processed foods is successful, this is what we will have to eat.  Or so says the food industry according to an astonishing front page article in yesterday’s New York Times (free subscr reqd).

Compared to reducing fat and sugar, for which substitute ingredients have been found, eliminating salt and sodium is turning out to be a major challenge for these companies.  Why is that?  It turns out that without salt – lots and lots of salt – we eaters might discover that the stuff that is being sold to us as delicious, tantalizing and even healthy “food” is really nothing of the sort.

It’s a marketing problem.  Without salt to hide the true nature of these products, we might not buy them.   Why not?  It turns out they don’t taste very good:

As a demonstration, Kellogg prepared some of its biggest sellers with most of the salt removed. The Cheez-It fell apart in surprising ways. The golden yellow hue faded. The crackers became sticky when chewed, and the mash packed onto the teeth. The taste was not merely bland but medicinal.

“I really get the bitter on that,” the company’s spokeswoman, J. Adaire Putnam, said with a wince as she watched Mr. Kepplinger struggle to swallow.

They moved on to Corn Flakes. Without salt the cereal tasted metallic. The Eggo waffles evoked stale straw. The butter flavor in the Keebler Light Buttery Crackers, which have no actual butter, simply disappeared.

“Salt really changes the way that your tongue will taste the product,” Mr. Kepplinger said. “You make one little change and something that was a complementary flavor now starts to stand out and become objectionable.”

Let me be clear:  I cook, and I use salt in my cooking.  Salt is about as natural a substance as you can find.  There is nothing wrong with salt – in reasonable amounts.  It is a useful seasoning.  It’s an important preservative, going back to Bible times.  Salt was so common that it makes an appearance in Jesus parables and his followers are even told that we are “the salt of the earth“.  Salt is one of the things that you must have for your body to function normally.

On the other hand, we also know that too much salt causes all kinds of problems, most significantly, hypertension or high blood pressure.  Again from the Times article:

By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But the question here is not “to salt or not to salt”.  It is somewhat simpler than that: We now know from the food companies themselves that without salt their food is not really very good.  This is not a diatribe from a health nut.  The industry itself is pleading with the government:  “Our food is so bad that if we aren’t allowed to load it up with salt, people won’t eat it.  You have to let us keep the salt.  How else can we sell the stuff?”

The question is this:  If the companies themselves think the product is this bad, why are we still buying it?

Instead, get yourself out to that Farmer’s Market this week.  Then come home and cook some real food!

To explore this topic further, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s short book, “In Defense of Food” – available here from Amazon or at your library.

Maybe not the best way to start off a conversation with your seat partner on a plane.  But I could hardly help myself.  (If you have been following my musings for a while you will know that I tend to get into some interesting conversational situations on planes!)

I was on my way back from a week of meetings in Plainview, Texas.  Now, I realize that bringing an environmental seminar to the high plains of east Texas is not the normal thing to do.  People there are warm, friendly – but pretty convinced that “environment” means “liberal” and “government” and that sort of thing, and they’re not interested.  But things are changing.  For one thing, these folks are running out of water, and they know it.  The roadside is marked by abandoned pivot-wells.   Fields have been converted to dry-land farmi ng or back to grassland.

Plainview can claim a couple of points of distinction: It’s the home of Wayland Baptist University, my host for the week (and a very welcoming host, I should add!), and one of the largest Baptist educational institution in the country.  It is also the county seat for Hale County, which I was told is this year ranked #1 among all United States counties in agricultural production – this would include cotton, of course, but also milo (sorghum), corn and cattle.  Industrial food giant Cargill runs a number of feedlots and at least one meat-packing plant in the county.  [They used to be a source of peanut butter, too - until the salmonella scandal of last spring closed down the plant there.]

I admit it – having had the opportunity to hear Michael Pollan speak at the University of Wisconsin just before this trip, I was kind of preoccupied with the topic of industrial agriculture and industrial food anyway.  So when my seat partner told me that he works with a manufacturing company in Lodi, Wisconsin, that produces industrial food processing and food packaging machines, I really couldn’t help myself.  “I’m trying to put you out of business.”

That kind of intrigued him, I think.  “What do you mean?  What do you do?”  So I started to tell him about Care of Creation, my concern for local, healthy food and so on.

About this point in the conversation we were joined by a third guy who sat in the seat in between us.  “What takes you to Madison?”  “I work with Tyson Foods.”

So I had another victim, and the conversation continued -

And then the surprising punchline.  Both of my partners said the same thing: “Farmer’s market?  Buying local?  But that’s how we eat!”

So I guess I have good news:  The industrial food system is collapsing from within!

When even its sales force, those who should believe in it most – are abandoning their own products in favor of healthy, nutritious food grown and sold in their own communities – there is hope.

In my hometown lives a baker.  The very ordinary name of his business (“Madison Sourdough”) hides the fact that he’s a European trained master pastry chef.  Croissants, danish, brioche – the stuff is, if not worth dying for, certainly worth driving several extra miles across town early in the day to grab the last items before someone else gets them.

Still-life with Brioche by Chardin (Wikipedia Commons)

Now, I’ve been a fan of most of what he makes for quite a while, but his brioche are some of the best pastry I’ve ever eaten.  Which has led to a couple of very interesting conversations:

About a month ago my faithful readers may recall I was in Washington DC during the time of the Inauguration.  One of the mornings there I found myself, with Daughter #1, in a very authentic french patisserie in Bethesda Maryland.  Guess what was in the pastry case?  Brioche!  But these looked a bit different from those I’ve become accustomed to  in Madison.  A long conversation with the woman who ran the shop followed.  She had baked everything in the shop herself.  She had serious doubts as to whether the so-called brioche from Madison was the real thing, and in what would have to be described as a passionate defense of her craft, grabbed a brioche, sliced it in half, and stood there while we sampled it, with the following (please imagine a strong French accent):  “If this is not the best brioche you’ve ever had, I want to know it…”

Not wanting to offend, and appreciating the free pastry, we agreed with her – it was certainly pretty close to the best we’d ever had.

Fast forward to this morning, and the serving counter at Madison Sourdough.  I simply had to tell my baker friend the story of his competition in Bethesda.  Before I knew what was happening, he had a brioche on the counter, as well as a croissant.  He sliced them down the middle and proceeded to instruct me.  [Please insert strong midwestern accent here].   “The layering in this croissant is so **** perfect I could win a prize.”  And more of the same.

And I walked out with what I had ordered, plus the remains of the examined brioche and croissant, two more croissants for good measure – and a couple of pieces of chocolate.  Because “the way a french baker starts his day is with a croissant, a piece of chocolate and a hot cup of coffee.  The coffee melts the chocolate in your mouth.  THAT is how a croissant should be eaten.”

Why am I sharing this?

Here are two craftsmen in a world of high-tech, efficient production who are doing something ancient and ordinary and who not only love doing it but are passionate enough about their craft to wax eloquent and give away samples to try to persuade me of what they already know:  They are creating something good and beautiful and tasty.  They are both luddites in the best sense of that word – people who reject the relentless advance of ‘progress’ because they understand that sometimes an advance is really a retreat.  Long may they prosper – and all of their brothers and sisters with them wherever they may be found.

And they are prospering – at least my friend in Madison is doing so.  In this time of recession, *his* business is up.  Significantly so.

If there is a path forward in our chaotic and unhappy world, it may well start here:  With a man – or woman – who is doing what he loves, to the best of his ability, and giving joy and happiness to the people around him.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a piece of chocolate and a hot cup of coffee waiting for me.

[Almost anyone who has spent time in Pakistan or parts of India recognizes the term 'neem hakeem' - means a doctor who isn't quite up to par.  Thus one of the most popular folk proverbs in the area:  A 'neem hakeem' is a danger to your life...]

Today’s ‘Neem Hakeem’ lesson is via a story on NPR over the weekend.  People are dying – literally – because of their headphones.

Strangled by the cords as they doze in class, maybe?  Victims of brain cancer because of electromagnetic radiation?  No – run over by buses, trains and other large and noisy vehicles:

Lisa Carolyn Moran, 20, a University of North Carolina exchange student from Scotland, was listening to an iPod while jogging when she stepped into the path of a bus in Chapel Hill last May. Joshua Phillips White, 16, was wearing earphones and walking on a train track in Cramerton, N.C., last November when a freight train hit him from behind, killing him; police said he apparently didn’t hear the locomotive approaching. Alan Eaton-Chandler, 17, was killed under the same circumstances just last Tuesday when he was hit by an Amtrak train in Comstock Township, Mich. And Vicky Baker, 39, was talking on her cell phone when she was struck and killed by a train in Albertville, Ala., in December.

There’s more than one lesson here:

First, the obvious:  If we want to live, turn down the volume!  Although Beethoven is not the worst thing to be listening to when your time comes (so an ad campaign in San Francisco on this topic) one doesn’t really want Beethoven to be hastening one’s time.

No, there’s a more important, deeper lesson here, and it comes from the humble Twinkie, that iconic symbol of junk food.  Few would argue that Twinkies and the like are bad for your health.  But how are they bad?  Two ways:

First, the stuff that they are made of – preservatives that allow them to “last” for months and years – isn’t very good for you.  In fact, it’s probably terrible for you.  Put it this way, the ingredients that kill the bugs that would ‘spoil’ the product and shorten its shelf-life do so because they are poisons for the bugs:  Are they going to do anything to extend your own life.

But there’s a more insidious effect of Twinkies:  They represent ‘empty calories’.  Your body thinks they are food, and makes you feel full.  Every poison-filled – excuse me, ‘preservative laden’ Twinkie that you eat means there is a nutritious, healthy, life-extending piece of food that you are not eating.  There’s a lot of research available that suggests that many of our modern health issues (obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure) are due to this substitution of empty calories in place of nutritious food.  [A good source of an overview of this situation is Michael Pollen - 'Omnivore's Dilemma' and 'In Defense of Food'.]

So what’s this got to do with headphones?

The obvious danger is in the NPR story – not paying attention can get you killed.  Just like the preservatives in the Twinkie can do unknown damage to your body.

The less obvious danger is the equivalent of those empty calories.  If I spend my entire day listening to my own soundtrack, think of all the things I’m not listening to (besides the buses and trains trying to run me down):  Birds, wind in the trees, other people walking beside me.  We need to be in touch with God’s creation – its part of what makes us human.

So listen to the Neem Hakeem:  Turn off the music for a while and listen to the music of God’s world.  You’ll be just amazed… !