Being in Nature

I’m glad we’re off to Mill Creek Park for our picnic today! That park is one of the things that I really love about Youngstown. It has become part of my spiritual practice, to go over there two or three times a week, if possible, and walk the paths.

Being outdoors, in nature, has been shown to be helpful for one’s mental health. A study in the UK showed that taking walks in woodlands reduced depression in nearly three quarters of participants. In the control group, which walked in indoor shopping malls, fewer participants had reduced depression, and some found their level of depression increased.[1] As a man who hates shopping malls, this is not one bit surprising.

Even a window on nature is helpful. Studies in hospitals have found that patients who are in rooms with windows looking out on natural scenes need less pain medication, are more cooperative with staff, and are discharged more quickly than those who see something unnatural like a brick wall.[2] In the hospital where I worked as a chaplain, we even considered putting photographs of nature scenes in patient rooms, which we learned has a similar effect. We were warned that paintings or watercolors (as opposed to photos) apparently don’t work.

Our Unitarian ancestors did not have access to this kind of science but they did have religion! Unitarian Universalism is made up of numerous intertwined theological strands, including Unitarian Christianity, Humanism, Paganism, Process Theology, among others. Of these, one I find most attractive is the Transcendentalist movement, that radical offshoot of Unitarian Christianity. The Transcendentalist movement got its start with Emerson’s publication of his essay Nature, from which we quoted earlier. Much of what we hold dear in our UU movement we owe to Transcendentalists: our attention to social justice, our belief in the primacy of each individual’s own search for meaning, and particularly the respect for nature as a source of spiritual inspiration. As religious movement, we have inherited the Transcendentalists’ high reverence for the natural world. We tend to respect the world more than many other faiths, which see the world is merely the stage on which humans and god or the gods play out their various roles. God, for UUs who seek god, is found in nature, among the rocks and trees, and in the ecological interrelationships among the organic beings within an ecosystem. For the Transcendentalists, that god is one, that god is everywhere, and that god is within everyone.


It’s been hard to watch the unfolding of the oil spill that continues in the Gulf, after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon platform, as pictures roll in of birds covered thick in oil, beaches ruined with slick, and satellite images of the blackened gyre that continues to form and spin, difficult to stop after repeated attempts. Carol Howard Merritt, a friend who once served a church in Louisiana, says that when she saw those pictures, she “felt that the soul of our nation was drowning in the muck, along with our precious wildlife. … Looking at those white graceful egrets covered in slick, black oil reminds me of what we have done. There is something majestic hidden in that marshland, something that we have destroyed. In many ways, our soul lives there, and it is irreparably damaged.”

I feel a strong sense of personal remorse about this incident, since many in my family work in the ‘oil bidness’ as they say in Texas. I did too, briefly, in college, where on a co-op job, I helped design oil refineries for one of the big Houston firms. I don’t think any of my family truly believes in the ‘drill baby drill’ craziness of Palin and the Tea Party crowd, but there is a confidence among many in that business that oil extraction can be done safely, responsibly, and in an environmentally sound manner -- until this.

But even now, at a distance from the oil business, it would be easy to be contrite; as I drive my second-hand Prius and buy locally grown produce through the CSA. But I know better. We are all deeply intertwined in this, we all contribute to these problems by virtue of being alive in this country, with its addiction to oil. Even though most of us work for a better world, we are complicit.

Thich Nhat Hahn tells us:

"I am the forest that is being cut down.
I am the rivers and the air that are being polluted,
and I am also the person who cuts down the forest
and pollutes the rivers and the air.
I see myself in all species,
and I see all species in me. [4]

Last Sunday we had a little musical revue here, “Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long”, based on some of Ogden Nash’s writing from the early nineteen sixties. Some of his poetry almost makes me nostalgic. Bacteriological warfare. Conquering space. Intercontinental ballistic missiles blasting the air with roars and whistles. Nuclear fallout. Bacteria issuing forth to prowl.

A half century ago, and our problems seemed so easy then!

Our world is more complicated now. It seems that as we solve one of those old problems, two new more intractable problems take its place. Bacteriological warfare may be banned by treaty, but genetic modification of living organisms can be done in a well equipped high-school.[5] The threat of full scale nuclear war between superpowers may be decreased, but the new danger is a small-scale nuclear exchange launched between small nations with deep grudges. Even a relatively small war involving primitive nukes has the potential to create a nuclear winter that would starve much of the human race and perhaps end civilization as we know it.[6] And I haven’t even started to consider the problem of global climate change.

Underneath all of these problems is the problem of greed. We want too much, more than the earth can deliver. According to a research organization called the Global Footprint Network, we’ve been running a deficit with the earth since 1986. As they put it, “Today humanity uses the equivalent of 1.4 planets to provide the resources we use and absorb our waste. This means it now takes the Earth one year and five months to regenerate what we use in a year.”[7]

Population is a big part of this problem, certainly. We’ve grown from about 3 billion people in the good old days of Ogden Nash’s poem, to nearly 7 billion now. Projections suggest we’ll reach over 9 billion by 2050.

Bad enough, but things used to look more dour. The amazing thing that has happened is that birthrates have dropped from almost five children per woman in the middle of the last century to about two and a half children per woman, with trends continuing down. Often this is the result of women simply having more control of their lives, and being allowed to make their own choices. Programs such as microloans so they can start small businesses and achieve some financial independence help. Better access to contraceptives helps, too. Slowing population growth is great news, but it has national economists in many countries apoplectic because how can you have GDP growth without population growth? Some are even pushing policies to increase birthrates.

The other half of the problem is increasing desire for material wealth worldwide. One interesting comparison is made by Oregon State University statistician Paul Murtaugh, who studied the carbon footprint of having babies in different parts of the world. He concludes that today, one American baby with its descendants will have the same carbon footprint as fifty-five babies with their progeny in India.[8] Fifty five! That’s a huge difference!

But the more pernicious problem is that these consumption patterns are changing. As the head of one non-governmental organization put it, in a Mother Jones article: "The irony is that just as some Americans are starting to learn to live more like traditional Indians—becoming vegetarian, buying locally, eating organic—aspiring middle-class Indians are trying to live more like over-consuming Americans. The question really is, which kind of people do we want less of?"[9]

And the related question is, can we decrease our overconsumption faster than our population growth, so that we are able to reach a sustainable state? Because if we don’t do it, the earth will do it for us, and it will not be pretty. As Tony Barnosky, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley put it, "A lot of things have to die, and a lot of those things are going to be people."

Environmental sustainability is a difficult problem that will require great creativity and courage of thought as well as concerted action if we are to resolve it. When we face difficult problems we are wise to turn to the wisdom of those who preceded us and the lessons of past experience for guidance. In particular, we might look to our own Unitarian history.

The Transcendentalists were able to take on some difficult problems in their time. They opposed slavery in a time when slavery was almost universally accepted. They opposed American wars of expansion, in particular the war which acquired Texas from Mexico. They worked for women’s rights, at a time when women had no vote or property rights.

I have no doubt that the Transcendentalists would be at the forefront of modern eco-justice work. They understood innately the interconnection of all life, and would see that our actions here could cause harm to others elsewhere.

We are part of life and it is part of us. This is, I think, the essence of the spiritual intuition of many of the Transcendentalists. This sense of loss of ego or of false separateness, of being connected with the all, is a strong strand that runs through Unitarianism and reaches down to us today and has become a core theology for many of us.


So today is the last worship service of our regular church year.

I ask you to do two things this summer, that are really two forms of the same thing. The first is to come to Sunday worship here at UUYO this summer. We are changing what we do in our summer services, and holding worship, rather than talks. Worship is attending to things of worth, and we hope to have Sunday morning experiences that are worthy of your presence. This is experimental, and I know we will have successes and make mistakes. Help us as we explore this new way of doing things, help us to make it better, to make it more worthy.

The second thing is to take yourself out into nature, when you can. Even on some Sunday mornings, if you must (I can’t believe I’m suggesting this) take yourself out, and attend to things of worth, by being in nature.

The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore speaks from joyful experience, “The stream of life that runs through my veins … is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks in tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.”[10]

It is not just that we are interconnected, as our seventh principle suggests, we are embedded in life. Being in nature reminds us of this deep connection, this unity of life, that the Eastern mystics knew and the Transcendentalists came to understand.

Seek your own interior spiritual understanding, follow your own intuition about the nature of things. Follow Thoreau’s lead, and “Make time for intelligence with the earth”. Perhaps from the earth you will learn what you are called to do, to preserve all of us, to save our unified soul, and to create a sustainable world. May it be so.

Notes:

1 “Ecotherapy – the green agenda for mental health” http://www.mind.org.uk/assets/0000/2138/ecotherapy_report.pdf
2 Research on the importance of nature to well-being and functioning
http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/flourishing-lives.php?p=cGlkPTE3MiZpZD02Njk=
3 http://tribalchurch.org/?p=1618
4 Thich Nhat Hahn, Plum Village Chanting and Recitation Book, 2000, p. 33
5 “Do-It-Yourself Genetic Engineering” NY Times, Feb. 10, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14Biology-t.html
6 “South Asian Threat? Local Nuclear War = Global Suffering?” Scientific American Jan. 2010,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=local-nuclear-war
7 Global Footprint Network http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/
8 “Population: The Last Taboo” Mother Jones, http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican?page=3
9 http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/05/population-growth-india-vatican?page=3
10 Rabindranith Tagore, "Stream of Life", Gitangali, verse 69.