By Rev. Richenda Fairhurst
Many United Methodist Conferences now have active creation care teams. The team in the New England Annual Conference, the New England Creation Care Circle, is among the first such teams, and members are active in local churches and with conference leadership. They also have a team specific to organizing a virtual Creation Care Café. The café meets every fourth Tuesday, at 7pm Eastern.
This month the internationally known New Englander, Bill McKibben, joined the Cafe for a presentation and Q&A. Many United Methodists know that Bill McKibben is himself a United Methodist layperson who sometimes teaches Sunday School, will occasionally take the pulpit, and believes in the miracle of energy from the sun.
Grace Pugh Hubbard serves as the Caretaker of God’s Creation for the New England Conference. She leads the conference Creation Care Circle, providing support to local churches, team members, and the conference staff.
“Bill McKibben is not only an international figure, but he’s from New England, growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and now residing in the Green Mountains of Vermont,” said Pugh Hubbard. “We are anxious to learn more about Creation Care and Climate Justice and having Bill speak in this localized space gave us a shot in the arm for continuing the good work.”
Pugh Hubbard gives a shout out to the Circle and Cafe team, also, for thinking “big” during a session of “bold dreaming.” She celebrates that effort and hopes it will encourage other conference teams across the greater church to be bold as well. She credits Rev. Ben Durfee and Rev. Kim Hornung-Marcy for leading the dreaming and invitation.
McKibben shared a homey and invitational talk from the driver’s seat of his car, as organizers often do in between in-person meetings and engagements–his next stop in California. His focus was to talk about “the situation that we are in, which is not particularly good, then talk about the ways that suddenly are opening up out of that situation.”
McKibben began by sharing the constancy of scientific understanding of climate change, and the work he himself has been doing “for the better part of 40 years.” The science is consistent, but not perfect, with the unfortunate truth that even as the impacts of burning fossil fuels are and have been known and observable since the 1980s, the negative impacts are unfortunately happening faster than they were predicted.
“The last three years” says McKibben, were “the hottest years in human history. Those records are going to be broken this year and next year.” He shares a sense of urgency as he refers to the coming El Niño extreme weather pattern “that’s going to break over our heads beginning this summer and will take temperatures on this planet to places they have never been in human history.”
He also speaks to the human toll of these climactic changes, a toll McKibben refers to as a bleak “moral math.” Saying, “there are millions on millions of people displaced around the world. The biggest impacts come in the poorest places” and are visited on those “who have done the least to cause this problem.”
He makes note of the global nature of these impacts, speaking first to the floods two years ago in Vermont, memorable to those attending the talk. He juxtaposes that lived experience with the simultaneous and devastating flooding in North Africa. “The rains opened up in North Africa and they had the biggest rainstorms of their history.” The flooding caused a dam in Libya to burst, which took the lives of thousands downstream. “When we see things like that, we are reminded of what a justice issue this is, the biggest justice issue of all time.” When it comes to culpability, the reality is that Africans are responsible for only about 3% of the additional greenhouse gasses that are in the atmosphere.
The problem extends to the very workings of the planet, including the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream is an enormous band of water that moves through the world’s oceans. It is an engine that helps distribute the warmth of the equator toward the poles, thereby bringing temperate weather into places like New England. This essential planetary activity is now in danger of collapse.
“We have very little time to deal with these problems,” says McKibben. Yet, there is good news, too: “There is much to be worth fighting for.”
This fight is finally taking off, and fast. “There is one big good thing happening on planet earth,” said McKibben. “The very rapid rise, very rapid, over the last 36 or 40 months in clean energy around the planet.” Solar and wind energy are “alternative no longer.”
McKibben offers a lot of examples. Over the last year, 95% of all new installed power was solar or wind generated. Huge gains in renewable power are taking place in Africa, China, Pakistan, California, Texas, and Vatican City. This, says McKibben, is only bad news if you own an oil well or a coal mine.
He closed his talk by mentioning the actions people can take. In addition to transitioning their own power use to renewable power, perhaps through something like balcony solar, people can make a difference by joining advocacy groups such as 350.org and Third Act. Both organizations have faith working groups, including Third Act Faith.
If there is one single take-a-way McKibben seems to want to share from the Tuesday night conversation it is that solar power is “the great gift that we’ve been given.” He asserts that we can and must “make extraordinary changes,” and that the sun “can provide us with all the energy that we could ever need.”
Pugh Hubbard shared her thanks on Tuesday, as well as her hopes in follow up to the Creation Care Cafe. “I hope that Bill’s words will give us a strong shake to realize that time is of the essence if we want to leave a world for our children.” The reality is our children are growing up in a time of great change. “Our local context is one of yearly flooding, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and loss of estuary/swamp land which is critical for carbon sequestration. Bill spoke to many global issues and his sheer genius was beautiful and awe-ing to witness. We’re so very thankful that he shared his incredible knowledge and his loving heart for the future of our planet.”
Rev. Richenda Fairhurst works at the intersection of faith and climate change. She has served churches in Oregon and Washington, is a UM Earthkeeper, and volunteers with the United Methodist Creation Justice Movement. She is a member of the board of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon where she chairs the Creation Justice Committee and Oregon Interfaith Power and Light. She is a member of the Pacific Northwest Conference. Find her at justcreation.org.