Violence as Protest

I read a story this week about a young man being arrested for defacing a famous painting in Canada’s National Gallery. He was protesting Climate Change and picked a painting by the famous Canadian painter Tom Thompson as the image shows here.

I find it troubling to see a public protest - even an individual one- resorting to violence. When the man did this, he knew that there was protective glass covering the painting and assumed he would still be arrested, but not guilty of actually damaging it. But would any other youthful protester know the whole story and simply imitate the practice with lasting consequence. My guess is that this will not please the visual artists who spread the message of climate through displaying depicting of the tragedies of our human impact on the natural world.

I’m more impressed by those who use non-violent methods - though some of them risk arrest as well. A young woman working as a barmaid in New York travelled to Standing Rock to support the Lakota people in their opposite to the Keystone Pipeline. The experience prompted her to run for the US Congress and Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez won the election to become the youngest person ever to be seated there. From there she went on to sponsor the Green New Deal in 2019, her first year of office. It took a while to for that bill to succeed but finally much of the best of it was incorporated in more recent legislation and passed.

The young man wanted to attract attention to something worthwhile - but how it is done also counts. I hope he learns to have bigger dreams of how he will change the world.

Interpretations

I’ve been reading Karen Armstrong’s latest book, Sacred Nature, Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World. One of her strengths is a thorough understanding of Christianity and her additional willingness to explore the teachings of other faiths and to share them. This book reinforces something that I have come to realize in my own explorations. Faith communities need to play an important role in the conversations around aspects of climate emergency and climate justice that cannot be provided by either science or environmental advocacy groups, important as both are. Ours relates to values, ethics, meanings and the rituals where we enact our understandings.

Armstrong has much in common with the views of Thomas Berry, though it is surprising not to find him listed in her bibliography -though his students, Tucker and Swimme are very much there though.

Other faiths have always the divine in nature and continue to do so. Christianity did in its earlier days, but diverged in the fourteenth century. Western people encounter the God of history, especially as it is understood in the Old Testament, rather than a God of nature. When we are encouraged to look at nature, we are encouraged to see beauty and look for comfort now - while forgetting the ugliness and discomfort that we have wreaked upon it through the notion of domination over it. What we may miss in the process is nature’s power to disrupt and destroy, which other faiths and cultures recognize more fully. Job, for Armstrong, is the Biblical figure who gets it right - but not without going through a major transformation. Armstrong sees it as a lens worth exploring.

Local & Global

This morning’s parish newsletter arrives as usual with a reminder of a coming Community Dinner. This is a project going back more than twenty years. Once a month we feed 80-100 urban poor - some occasionally homeless, but most with some kind of permanent shelter. What they don’t have on a welfare income is the ability to buy enough wholesome food. We try to provide that. It is the least we can do for these regular guests that we have come to know over the years - and sometimes they tell us their stories.

Stories count in the world of climate change and too often they are horror stories. The fires in Hawaii have hit home and in a recent Zoom meeting, people talked about the places they had been - now completely devastated. Being there in the past made it matter. They understood the loss.

What is difficult is the stories we don’t hear. I’ve been reading the book, Not Too Late, which is full of stories of parts of the world with which I have no direct connection. Many are heartbreaking as the people affected suffer the climate degradation caused by mining, deforestation and other forms of exploitation that lay waste their world, while we ignore them. What if it were mandatory for any community like mine to adopt a far off island where the people face the disappearance of their land through erosion and flooding and hear their stories regularly in their own words? It might knock some sense into us as we recognize what we are doing to our island home and its effects on our siblings.

Normal?

We have seen some encouraging return of audiences to arts events and other places where people congregate. During the pandemic there was a lot of hope for things to go “back to normal” - as though life in the twenty-first century ever had a degree of stability. Recent years were not without abnormal events - in New York in 2001, or 2020 with an insurrection in Washington, or the discovery of mass graves near Canadian residential schools. The world before the 1950s wasn’t exactly normal either, but the 50s remain a dream world to return to for many.

We are hearing “normal” preceded by “new” in descriptions of climate change now. There’s a deception in feeling that the heat, flooding and fires will stay at the same level as they are now. We just have to accept that and deal with it and that will make it OK.

What a cop-out. It shows how we resist facing the reality that there is only a now - and that a future that depends on what we do today. Doing the same things will not create normality, however dysfunctional. It will only make things worse.

An App for That

The other evening I sat on my balcony watching planes circle and appear to be going east when the airport was to the west - but it was a pattern that allowed them to form a line to come in as others could be seen heading out to the east until they disappeared at higher heights. New planes coming in dotted the evening sky and suddenly their landing lights appeared in a kind of fairy tale illiumination - until one thought of how much energy all this was taking as their passengers landed to consume even more as they boarded their cars, buses and taxis.

A better choice might be using apps to explore nature - even in an urban environment. Here are some:

Search your app store for a bird identifier software. You will find several of them Try E-Bird or Merlin from Cornell labs designed to answer the question, What’s that Bird? Most of us as children could name several - and now we can’t - either because we have forgotten. or because they are not around any more. Becoming conscious of other forms of life around us matters more for our future than watching planes come in. It’s a great story about citizen science,

PlantNet and Picture this does similar things for plants. There’s another one for trees. We need to become much more aware of our surroundings - and remind ourselves that technology is a means to the ends that we actually value.