Author, activist says environment is "a moral crisis"
5/23/2001
WASHINGTON (UMNS) - Author and activist Bill McKibben has termed the environment "the moral crisis of our time" and called the energy plan proposed by the Bush administration "tragic."
McKibben was one of several speakers at a May 20-23 environmental justice ministry conference here sponsored by the Environmental Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches (NCC).
The more than 350 registrants were mainly from the mainline Protestant and Eastern Orthodox NCC member communions, but there were also about 10 Roman Catholics, a few Jews, a Muslim and a Buddhist, according to the Rev. Richard Killmer, who staffed the conference.
"By 1995, [scientists] were able to say conclusively that human beings are heating up the planet," said McKibben, a United Methodist layman, who explained that when he wrote The End of Nature in the late 1980s, the idea was still an unproven theory. That piece and most of his writing since then has dealt with climate change or global warming. The five years since 1995 have been the warmest ever, he added.
This global climate change is causing increased flooding because not only are the polar ice packs getting thinner but the oceans' surface water is warming and water expands as it warms, he said.
He spoke of low-lying Bangladesh, which he had visited last year, as an illustration of the effects of flooding. Located on the delta of two major rivers, Bangladesh has depended on an annual gentle flood to make it one of the most fertile areas on earth, McKibben said, but in 1998, the warmest year on record, two-thirds of the country was submerged for about three months and one whole cycle of crops was not planted.
As a result, a population-dense country that usually can feed itself could not, and for the first time Dengue Fever came to Bangladesh. Spread of this potentially fatal disease is one of effects of global warming predicted by scientists, McKibben noted.
Worldwide, one out of every 20 human beings were forced from their home by flooding that year, McKibben reported, a total of about 320 million human beings whose lives were disrupted by flooding. He related the flooding in Bangladesh and other locations around the world to energy consumption in the United States, where, he explained, about 4 percent of the world population produce about 25 percent of the carbon dioxide that causes global warming.
"We are responsible for Bangladesh's flooding," McKibben said.
Dealing with the environment raises deep moral questions. In the biblical account of creation, "the world began - not with us - but with everything else," McKibben noted.
Now, the world is in the midst of the greatest extinction of species since the dinosaurs vanished with many other species 65 million years ago, he said.
"If people three generations ago had done this to us, we would loathe them," he asserted.
He noted that both former President George Bush and President Bill Clinton pledged to hold carbon dioxide emissions at the 1990 level but failed to do so. Emissions were 12 percent more in 2000, and, McKibben said, the present administration wants to make it worse by relaxing clean air standards and increasing energy consumption.
McKibben termed the energy plan proposed by current President George W. Bush on May 17 "tragic" because it "locks us into ever-increasing production of carbon dioxide." The plan means "more carbon liberated from under the earth and put into the atmosphere," with the resultant global warming. An increase of even five degrees over a century is a future too terrible to contemplate, he warned.
"This cause is as important as the Civil Rights Movement was decades ago," he declared. Conference participants were urged to get more people involved in working against ever-increasing energy use and global warming.
Religious groups must take up the issue of energy consumption, he said, because they are the only influence positing a meaning of life other than accumulation of goods, the only large institution that remains potentially subversive to the belief in consumption as the ultimate goal. But, he warned, if the faithful lose these battles, "we begin to forget why we were religious in the first place."
He suggested the sports utility vehicle (SUV) as a symbol for what's wrong. "It's a very real part of the problem," he said, explaining that if one family replaces a car like a Taurus or Escort with an SUV, the difference in gas consumption in just one year is the equivalent of leaving their refrigerator door ajar for six years.
Raising the mileage that SUVs get by just three gallons would save more petroleum that the largest estimates of how much oil is under the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, he added.
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