Light in Darkness - Edwin Firmage Photography

Transcription

Light in Darkness: Embracing the Opportunity of Climate Change1
by Edwin Firmage, Jr.2
I
Most of you know me, if you know me at all, as an environmental activist. A few of you may know
me as an outdoor photographer. But tonight, in view of the season, I’d like to put on another of my
hats. Long before I took up cameras and activism, I was a student of the ancient Near East. My
special focus was Israel and the Bible. And I’d like to start off my presentation tonight by talking a
bit about the Bible. Ironically, academic study of the Bible was at least indirectly the beginning of the
end of my active involvement in organized religion. So, I think it’s only fair to forewarn you that I
stand before you tonight as that oddest of creatures, the agnostic preacher. But in part because of the
crumbling of belief, and also for other reasons, my Bible study was the start of everything good that
has followed, including the photography and the activism. What’s more, although I now approach
the Bible very differently than I did as a Mormon missionary thirty years ago, the Bible is if anything
more significant to me now. For me, as I hope for you, the Bible remains a foundational cultural and
spiritual document, and it can inspire us whether or not we are believers.
1
Section I is based on a presentation delivered at the Unitarian Church, Salt Lake City, UT, December 18, 2009. Section
II borrows heavily from a petition called “A Call for Leadership” that I drew up for the University of Utah in February
2009 but only circulated among a small group of friends at the U. due to the apparent unwillingness of faculty to speak
out and draw down the ire of the Utah Legislature. A copy of the petition is available on my website: http://web.me.com/
efirmage/Edwin_Firmage_Photography/Blog/Entries/2009/2/2_A_Declaration_of_Energy_Indepenence_files/A%20Call
%20for%20Leadership.pdf. Sections III - VI are new to this essay.
2
EDWIN FIRMAGE, JR. makes his living, or tries to, as a fine art photographer in Salt Lake City, Utah (res est sacra
miser). He studied classics at Princeton and holds an M.A. in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from
U.C. Berkeley, where he was a Mellon Fellow. From 1986–1989, he was a Rotary Foundation scholar at the Hebrew
University, Jerusalem. He is the author and publisher of Red Rock Yellow Stone, an award-winning combination of
photographs of the American West and haiku from Japan. For more about Mr. Firmage, visit his web site,
www.edwinfirmage.com.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 1 of 81
My essential message to you this evening is that climate change is the problem: the ecological
problem, the social and economic problem, the health problem, and the moral problem not just of
our time but of all time. For reasons that I’ll explain in Parts III through VI, I think that churches
have a uniquely important role to play in addressing this problem of problems. But whether or not
climate change is the problem, it is certainly a problem, and a big problem for churches, as it is for
every other institution. It therefore seems reasonable, if perhaps somewhat old-fashioned, to consider
what light the Bible might shed on this issue for religious institutions that in theory, if not always in
deed, honor the Bible as a foundational document. So, with that justification for my playing
preacher, let me turn to the good old book, that book “so little read in so many places at so many
times” (omas Greene).
‫קּומי אֹוִרי ּכִי בָא אוֵׂרך ּוכְבוׂד יהוה עָלַיִך זָָרח‬
‫כִי־הִּנֵה הַחׁׂשֶך יְכַּסֶה־אֶֶרץ וַעֲָרפֶל לְאֻּמִים‬
‫וְעָלַיִך יִזְַרח יהוה ּוכְבוׂדוׂ עָלַיִך יֵָראֶה‬
‫וְהָלְכּו גוׂיִם לְאוֵׂרך ּומְלָכִִים לְנׂגַּה זְַרחֵך‬
I begin my remarks tonight with these beautiful and familiar words first spoken 2,500 years ago by a
man living somewhere in the Near East, perhaps in what we now call Iraq, perhaps in what we now
call Israel. He spoke a long time ago in a far away place and in a foreign tongue, and I recite his
words in his tongue to remind us that these words do come from another world. Yet they still have
meaning for us today:
Arise, shine, for thy light has come, and the glory of the
Lord is risen upon thee.
For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross
darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee,
and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the
brightness of thy rising (Isa. 60:1-3).
e speaker of these words called himself Yesha‘yahu. He was third of Israel’s prophets to call himself
by that name. Yesha‘yahu, or ird Isaiah as scholars know him, wrote at the end of the biblical
period. As one of the last of the writers of the Bible, he could look back over hundreds of years of
thought and action inspired by Israel’s unique faith. As one of the last of the prophets, he saw himself
and his people at a turning point in time when at last the promise of God’s covenant with Israel
would be fulfilled, mutually fulfilled.
If the Bible has a red thread, an organizing principle, it is certainly the notion of the covenant. What
is the meaning of God’s covenant with Israel and of Israel’s with God? To understand, we must go
back to the beginning of Israel’s history, as Israel’s priests did when they were putting the Torah in its
present form. For them, the story begins with God’s creation of mankind in his image:
‫נַעֲׂשֶה אָָדם בְצַלְמֵנּו ּכְִדמּותֵנּו‬
Let us make mankind in our image, according to our
likeness (Gen. 1:26).
For Israel’s priests, the resemblance between God and man was both physical and spiritual. It was
this resemblance that made it possible for God at a later date to tell Israel, “You must be holy,
because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2). Without such a resemblance, such a
requirement would be impossible. But even at the beginning of history, before ever speaking a word
to this effect, God expected mankind to model its behavior on his.
It didn’t. God’s first attempt to create a holy following failed. e generation of Adam and his family
ended in disaster, interestingly, in a climatic disaster. Clearly, if people were going to become holy,
God would have to do something more than simply turning them loose on their own recognizance.
And so, after wiping out all life on earth except the beings saved in the ark to get a fresh start, God
gave mankind its first instructions in how to behave. He told Noah that men may not kill each other,
because they are the image of God. And he told Noah that while people would now be allowed to eat
animals as opposed to just plants for food, the life of these animals, as embodied in the blood,
belonged to God and to God alone.
is was the first simple statement of ethics and the first dietary law of the Bible (Gen. 9:3-6). Once
again, however, humanity failed to live up to its promise and its obligation. Humanity again filled
the earth with violence, and even proposed to take heaven by storm by building a gigantic siege
tower. God responded by scattering humanity to the winds and making it difficult for them to work
together. Students of foreign languages will be forever grateful for this difficulty.
And so, God made a third attempt. He again singled out one good man, and he made a promise to
this man of a sort that he had not made with Noah or with Adam. God bound himself to this man as
a friend and asked the man to bind himself to God, with the promise that God would be a friend
not only to the man but to his offspring. In time, God took the offspring of his friend, Abraham,
and set them down at the foot of Sinai for a lecture like no other in history. In painstaking and
unprecedented detail, God laid out for the Israelites what it means to be holy. And no aspect of life
was too trivial for consideration. Diet, clothing, hygiene, behavior, governance — God spelled it all
out for them so that there would be no room for excuses. is was Israel’s Torah, the Teaching, the
basis for the agreement between God and his people. If they would follow his Teaching, he would be
their God, and would dwell among them, literally. In Israelite thought, the giving of the Torah at
Sinai is the epitome of God’s relations with mankind, for at Sinai God at last gives mankind the
knowledge of how to become like God.3
3
In this reading of Israel’s prehistory, I follow Martin Buber, “Abraham the Seer,” in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed.
Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1968, 22-43. I discuss the relevance of the primeval history to the Holiness Code
in my own article, “Genesis 1 and the Priestly Agenda.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 82 (1999), 97-114.
Obviously, this reading of the Torah is 180 degrees different from the traditional Mormon view. But this is the plain,
holistic reading of the text, which is to say, the intent of the text according to its final compositors.
So, when Yesha‘yahu tells the people that their light has come, he means that God has come to dwell
among them. And that can only happen because the people have finally chosen to live by God’s
teaching. is is the mutual meaning of Israel’s covenant.
In the thinking of Israel’s prophets, and perhaps also of its priests, the unity of God and his people
at the end of time is what will inspire the rest of the world, the nations and their kings, to come
knocking on Israel’s door in search of the same blessing. is is the biblical paradigm of Zion, the
kingdom of God, the exemplary city on the hill that brings about the final transformation of
humanity into the true image of God.
e key to the transformation of the world is therefore that Israel takes its divine mission to heart. As
Jeremiah says, “I will put my teaching (torah) inside them, I will write it on their heart, and I shall be
their God and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33). In this culminating chapter in the story of God’s
relations with men, “they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother,
saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of
them” (v. 34). Bringing the story full circle, Jeremiah reminds his people that the person telling them
this is “the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day...and the moon and the stars by night...” (v.
35). Such is the story of God and his people from the creation to the fulfillment of creation in Zion.
is is the essential, unifying message of the Bible throughout its long history.
is is therefore the theme that Jesus too comes preaching, “Now after John the Baptist was put in
prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, e time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:14-15).
Jesus’s gospel wasn’t new. He didn’t need to explain the kingdom to his fellow Jews, because they
already knew what it meant. e gospel, the good news, of Jesus of Nazareth is the old priestly and
prophetic ideal of the holy nation, the Zion society, that is built upon the premise that mankind is
under divine injunction to be holy, to realize in themselves the divine likeness that is theirs in
potentia. is ideal is personified in Jesus. But it is also present “whenever two or three are gathered”
in his name (Matt. 18:20). It is an inner, individual reality, as all righteousness must be (Jesus’s whole
moral teaching underscores this point). But it is also a collective truth. For Jesus, or any other
individual, to be the sole, essential, or isolated embodiment of the ideal, renders the notion of a
kingdom meaningless. us, Jesus can also say, “e kingdom of God is entos hymon” (Luke 17:21)
and mean both “among” and “within you.”4
is biblical ideal of a kingdom of transformed, godlike people distinguishes the Judaeo-Christian
tradition from all others. It is the ultimate biblical value.
It was this ideal that brought my ancestors here to the desert of the Great Basin 150 years ago, in
what they believed was the end of time, the “latter days,” a turning point, like Yesha’yahu’s, when all
of God’s purposes for mankind and the world would be fulfilled, those purposes that have inspired
people wanting to call themselves saints since Yesha‘yahu’s day and beyond.
For my ancestors, those would-be saints, as for their biblical role models, there was ultimately no
distinction between sacred and profane.5 All of life was encompassed by the injunction to be holy,
from how you make your clothes to how you raise your food to how you make your living —
absolutely everything was part of the gospel of the kingdom. Mormons could easily have agreed with
4
For a good, critical discussion of the range of meanings, see Joseph Fitzmyer, e Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV.
Anchor Bible 28A. New York: Doubleday, 1985, s.v.
5
With regard to the Hebrew Bible, in the strictest of priestly terms, there was of course a distinction between the holy
objects of the sanctuary and the profane world outside, as there was between the borrowed holiness of the priests and the
non-holy world of the people. But this technical distinction is obscured by the overarching notion of the mandate for the
people to become holy and by the fact that their trespasses, their violations of the code of holiness, directly affected the
purity of the sanctuary. In other words, like the priests, the people also had obligations of holiness, and would suffer realworld consequences for their failure to live up to these. e most serious of these consequences was the total withdrawal
of God from their midst. For God to dwell anywhere among men required a general setting of holiness. So, what makes
biblical religion unique among its ancient peers is the degree to which it blankets the everyday “secular” life of the people
at large. is tendency continues into the post-biblical and rabbinic periods, as the Pharisees, and, following them, the
rabbis extend the reach of the requirements of holiness ever farther and deeper into daily life. Orthodox Judaism is the
outgrowth of this tendency. On the Pharisees, see G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era.
Cambridge: Harvard, 1955, I: 60ff. In general, see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice & Belief 63 BCE - 66 CE.
Philadelphia: SCM Press, 1992.
Josephus, “Moses did not make religion a department of virtue, but the various virtues — I mean,
justice, temperance, fortitude, and mutual harmony... — departments of religion. Religion governs
all our actions and occupations and speech; none of these things did our lawgiver leave unexamined
or indeterminate...” (Against Apion 2.170-173).6 e Mormon symbol for this all-encompassing
mandate of holiness was the all-seeing eye above the beehive with its busy little bees and the
inscription “Holiness to the Lord.” Today, you see that inscription, though not that image, only on
Mormon temples. But in earlier times, you might also see it on a warehouse or a ward house; it
didn’t matter. Both were all equally the province of God.
ere is in all of this long story of the Bible and its legacy an astonishing integrity, as of a man’s life
that makes sense as he looks back on it in old age. Although what we now call the Bible, the so-called
Old and New Testaments, was written by
many hands over many centuries, it has
meaning as a whole that unites the many
disparate and not always mutually consistent
parts. And the same can be said of the
history of “God’s people” after the Bible. For
example, this integrity embraces the
Photo: Edwin Firmage
Christian tradition of monasticism, which
likewise sought to create a community of holiness that linked the mundane aspects of life such as
growing food, making clothes, and generally being self-sufficient, with the spiritual quest. By
embracing the monastic tradition, the biblical paradigm encompasses the heart and the soul of
medieval Christianity. e biblical Zion paradigm is also the inspiration for the Puritan tradition,
and through it for not a little of the American religious experience, whose most extraordinary
manifestation is the religion of the Latter-day Saints.
6
Quoted in Sanders, op. cit., 51.
e question I would now like to put to you is whether this biblical paradigm embraces us here
tonight. Speaking for myself, you may be surprised to hear, I answer emphatically Yes, despite the
fact that I haven’t worshipped in a Mormon or any other chapel for 25 years, and despite the fact
that I don’t even believe in God, at least in the sense that my ancestors or my fellow Mormons today
do.
What draws me to the biblical tradition of Zion is that it is a defining, and, in some ways, definitive
expression of the human imagination. It recommends itself, even imposes itself on us, not because it
comes from an omnipotent, graybearded, cosmic tyrant, but because it is the summary of our own
search for meaning and grounding in life. It is an expression of the human need, if not the divine
imperative, to be sanctified. And what is the sanctification that we seek? It is a comprehensive
goodness, a life lived in accordance with principles of fairness, compassion, and community with
others. It is a life based on the rejection of arrogance and superpower. e great biblical imperative is
that “You shall have no other Gods before me.” In my secular interpretation, this is our way of
warning ourselves against the idolatry of the self and the worship of our wants and desires. e
biblical paradigm of Zion is a way of life that knows contentment. It’s a way of life that is at peace
with the world, in both the human and the physical senses of the word.
is is not the American way today. We have been at war with the physical world, our own world no
less, since the day we set foot on Plymouth Rock. No nation in history has enjoyed such natural
bounty, or destroyed it so quickly. In just three centuries, we have consumed our way through a
continent of resources, a continent of virgin hardwood forest that we simply burned, a continent of
prairie that was an American Serengeti, a continent of wildlife where salmon were so common they
were called poor man’s hamburger. We brought the beaver to the edge of extinction. We slaughtered
60 million bison and left their carcasses to rot. We dammed almost every river and stream in
America, destroying riparian ecosystems by the tens of thousands. We’ve scraped mountains to the
ground. We’ve and drained and developed wetlands. We’ve poisoned our air with acid and soot and
our water with mercury. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, or a metaphor to say that we have waged
war against our own world, just as we have waged war against the native human inhabitants of this
world, with equally deadly results. And always, this has been a war without terms, without
compromise. e natural world will surrender to us unconditionally.
Punctuating this perpetual natural war have been spasms of smaller-scale war instigated by us and
directed at other people beyond our borders: Mexicans, Spaniards, Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
Cambodians, Laotians, Iranians, Grenadians, Panamanians, Iraqis, and Afghanis. We also fought a
Baneberry “underground” nuclear test, Dec. 1970
large-scale and astronomically costly cold war
with Russia, which sent probably hundreds
of thousands of innocent people to their
death as “collateral damage” from proxy
wars, political subversion and revolution,
environmental destruction, economic
deprivation, and nuclear fallout. Although
Russia never dropped a bomb on us, we
exploded over 900 nuclear weapons on our
own soil, 100 of them in the open air.7 at’s
fifty times as many as we dropped on our
mortal enemy, Japan. We even contemplated
the possibility of waging nuclear war at an
“acceptable cost” of tens of millions and
7
http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/publications/historical/DOENV_209_REV15.pdf. e total breaks down as follows: 17
tests on American sites (CO, NM, AK, MI, NV) outside the Nevada Test Site (NTS), 904 at NTS, 3 in the South
Atlantic, 106 in the Pacific, and 24 tests conducted in conjunction with the U.K., for a total of 1,054. Of the 904 at
NTS, 100 were above ground. e Baneberry underground test shown here was a ten kiloton bomb the size of President
Bush’s proposed “bunker buster” weapons. It was buried 900 feet below ground but still resulted in a radioactive release
that reached more than 10,000 feet into the atmosphere. In 2003, I wrote about the dangers of Bush’s “bunker busters”
in a short piece that is available on my website: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Supporting_Documents/
Writing_on_the_Environment_files/Oppose%20Nuclear%20Weapons.pdf.
perhaps hundreds of millions of lives. In saying that the biblical way embraces me, I am saying that I
reject the American tradition of war. And I reject much of what we call the American dream, which
has been the American nightmare for uncountable billions of other living things that we have
destroyed. Our way today seems to me to embody precisely that worship of the self and of the selfish
that is the great sin in biblical thinking, and it seems to be tending toward the same sort of result that
biblical arrogance did. If there is a Jungian archetype for cataclysmic, self-induced destruction, we are
living it.
e more I think about the problems we face today, therefore, the more I find myself, kafir though I
am, gravitating towards the way of life pioneered by my ancestors and their biblical models. Does the
biblical tradition of Zion, and perhaps more specifically the Mormon tradition of Zion, have
anything to say to us arrogant Americans in Utah today? At the heart of my emphatic Yes is the
notion that inspired Yesha‘yahu 2,500 years ago, the idea of a community that embraces the principles
of fairness, compassion, and dedication to the common cause against the worship of self and
superpower.
To be meaningful, the biblical ideal of righteousness must be embodied in community and not just in
isolated individuals. In fact, in the Hebrew Bible, the focus is almost entirely on community. What
concerns priests and prophets alike is Israel’s righteousness, not that of isolated individuals. God’s
promises and punishments therefore apply to the people as a whole. If they will be righteous, he will
dwell among them and be their protector. If not, they will perish en masse. ere is no promise to or
concern with individuals as such.8 is collective gospel continues in the post-biblical ideology of the
Messiah, the royal descendant of David, who will lead God’s people in their ultimate resurgence.9 e
8
e focus on the individual, and especially on the salvation of the individual, that is characteristic of modern
manifestations of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is the child of the Greco-Roman period. For an excellent treatment of
the subject, see A. D. Nock. Conversion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933, Reprinted 1972. Jesus is thus a
transitional figure. He comes announcing the kingdom of God, but his teaching focuses on the individual.
9
e post-biblical Messiah is of course modeled on the biblical king of Israel, who is God’s mashîah, or anointed
representative (cf. 1 Sam. 9:16; Ps. 2:2, etc.). But it isn’t until Israel has lost her independence as a nation that her future
king, or more correctly her divinely appointed regent, begins to take on the character of the Messiah.
Messiah is not a personal but a national savior. In short, the Hebrew Bible is a teaching less for
individuals than for a people. It is a handbook for creating a holy nation.
e early Mormons sensed this intuitively if not explicitly. Unlike most of the rest of religious
America and very much unlike other settlers of the American frontier, the Mormons thought from
the beginning in collective terms. e heart and soul of early Mormonism was the sense of being
called to build a new society, Zion. is objective of building Zion, or as Mormons called it the City
of Enoch, was what created the first Mormon communities in Kirtland, Ohio, Independence,
Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois. From the start, Mormons felt compelled to build new community.
ey were not content with simply becoming converts to a new religion and living where and more
or less how they had lived before, with just a change of ideology. ey were not content to be so
many independent selfs trying to live righteously on their own. us, religion, as other Americans
tended to practice it, held no interest for the Mormons. ey weren’t out simply to live a pious life
but to create a new world. is Zion mentality ultimately brought them West when it proved
impossible to build their ideal community among other Christians. And, the Zion mentality is in
large measure responsible for the success of the Mormon saints in an environment that few thought
inhabitable.
Common faith gave the communistic Mormons what modern communists lacked, a basis of
voluntary but total commitment, of genuine and total passion.10 eir common faith gave them
something that frontier expedience, however great, also could not: it made their experience
meaningful. It did this by putting their experience in a context that linked them in common cause to
each other and to generations past and future without end. It made their life a living sacrament.
In a Mormon temple marriage, bride and bridegroom kneel facing one another across the altar.
Behind each of them is a mirror, and the two mirrors, reflecting one another, create a series of
10
For a brief resumé of the subject, see Appendix 1.
kneeling couples that stretches on in each direction into eternity. At the center of this procession is
the couple being married now, in the only moment in this eternal stretch of time that is theirs.
Eternity ends and begins in this moment. It is in the nature of a sacrament to focus eternity in the
present moment. To live sacramentally, therefore, as the early Mormons tried to do, is to act in each
moment with the awareness of an eternity leading to and from this moment. One brings to this
eternal present not only the awareness of eternity but its incarnation.
is sense of the sacramental in the everyday, this exaltation of the everyday, is what the religious
world view, and above all the Zion world view, even if it is secularized as in my case, offers that no
mere ideology can provide. My emphatic Yes is therefore a cry to bring a kind of Zion to life in our
time, a self-sufficient, morally driven, sacramental community that at least on essential points of first
principles is, as Mormon Scripture puts it, of one heart and one mind. In such a community,
stewardship of the earth would be top of the list of first principles, because without a sustainable
relationship with earth life itself is not possible.
Is my hope for a Zion community in 21st-century Utah any more than the pipe dream of Yesha‘yahu
or Jesus or St. Benedict or Brigham Young? Probably not. We don’t seem to be able to stick with this
vision long enough or with sufficient dedication to build the new society that these followers of the
biblical way had in mind. At the same time, I must also confess that I put even less hope in
civilization as it stands. And it seems to me to stand on the brink of self-induced catastrophe. If there
is any hope for our civilization, it is the hope that inspired the biblical tradition of Zion.
As the boy in the Passover Seder asks, How is this time different from all others? Why should there
be any more hope now for the establishment of Zion than in the days of Yesha‘yahu or Jesus or
Brigham Young? e answer is that we, in ways that go beyond mere religious belief, really do live in
the last days. If these aren’t the last days of history or time, they are the last days of civilization as we
know it. ere is an apocalypse on our doorstep. It’s called climate change.
Apocalypse is much more than an old-fashioned word for disaster. We do face disaster, and on a scale
beyond anything we have ever experienced. But we face apocalypse in the truer meaning of the word,
which is literally “uncovering.” e apocalypse of climate change is the uncovering of the fact that
our present way of life is utterly — root and branch — unsustainable. Climate change is the coming
together, the perfect storm, of the many different manifestations of our worship of self and
superpower. Climate change is the result of the reckless pursuit of narrowly defined self-interest at
others’ expense. It’s the result of the injustice of six percent of the world’s population consuming a
quarter of the world’s fossil fuels and producing 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the
result of the hypocrisy of this six percent wagging the finger at the ird World about emissions and
doing nothing about their own. It’s the result of a health care system that spends billions treating
heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, the diseases of an indulgent lifestyle, while leaving the lifestyle in
place. It’s the result of the worship of consumption, in which no product is too inexpensive and no
true cost too invisible. It’s the result of an attitude that views living systems of all kinds, including
our own bodies and minds, as mere resources to exploit for profit. Climate change isn’t just another
in a series of problems. It’s the sum of all of the many problems that we have faced and failed to solve
or refused to solve in our idolatry of the bottom line.
Standing against this tendency of our civilization is the biblical notion of Zion, the righteous — I
use this hopelessly quaint term deliberately — righteous society that embodies our deepest
aspirations for individual and social transcendence. While these two aspects of our humanity have
always been in conflict, they come to blows now as never before in the problem of climate change.
e next few decades will either be the moment when humans at last take something like the path
we imagined for ourselves 3,000 years ago in ancient Palestine, or they will be our undoing. Climate
change will be the catalyst for deep individual and societal transformation, or it will be our Deluge,
our Babel, and our Exile. is is the moment when myth becomes history. We will create Zion or we
will create the Apocalypse. e choice is ours.
In this endeavor, we will succeed together or fail together. Climate change is the result of systemic
problems in our society, and it will only be averted by a systemic response. is means that if all we
can muster is random, individual transformation, we will fail. If, for example, it’s just
“environmentalists” putting up solar panels and getting rid of their cars, we will fail. If it’s just the
wealthy doing the environmentally responsible thing, we will fail. If it’s everyone acting on his own,
we will fail. is is something that everyone must do, and something that we must do together, with
common purpose.
e change we need is as radical as it is universal. As I discuss in great detail in Section III, one of the
ironic recent discoveries of climate science is that the kind of piecemeal conservation that we have
practiced thus far is actually contributing to climate change. When just a few people do all of the
right things or a few more people doing bits and pieces of the right things, all society as a whole gets
is modestly improved efficiency. But a more efficient version of the present system is precisely what
we do not want. A more efficient system that is still essentially devoted to utilizing earth’s resources
for profit is not progress. We need a complete turnaround, societal repentance, a new collective
mind. With 6.5 billion people on earth, soon to be 9-12 billion, we must forever abandon the old
way of doing things.
Climate change is thus the ultimate test of our ability to pull together and fundamentally to change
how we live, permanently. is is precisely what Zion is all about, for Zion is not individuals living
righteous lives but the righteous society. It is as far from individual righteousness as the latter is from
individual evil. For many Americans, Zion, the ultimate integral community, is as foreign as the
moon. But it must be our model nonetheless.
e good news, and really the only good news, is that times of crisis are the catalyst of change, for
individuals and for society. And this is why I turn to you all here tonight. In my opinion, it is in our
communities of faith that the transformation of individuals and society must begin. It is in
communities that have some understanding of and commitment to the biblical paradigm that this
transformation can start, if it can start anywhere. I don’t say that this is the only place where the
transformation can happen. Anywhere that you have a community deeply committed to the
underlying principles of Zion there is hope for transformation. But this is not what our present
American political system is committed to, nor is it what American business is committed to. Both
of these are alike and interchangeably committed to profit and self interest. Looking at American
society at least, the only place I see communities that could rally around the idea of Zion is our
churches.
e degree to which politics and business as usual have betrayed us became abundantly clear in
Copenhagen. What happened, or rather didn’t happen, in Copenhagen, even with Barack Obama in
the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, is the truest expression of the
degree to which American culture has been enthralled by the darkness, the cosmic evil, and I do not
speak in metaphor, that is today’s American capitalism. Copenhagen was an apocalypse, a sneak
preview of the Apocalypse that will surely come if people of faith do not stand up for the alternative.
By standing up, I don’t simply mean vocal protest, though that in itself would be a step forward, for
there is precious little protest going on in America right now.11 I mean first and foremost individual
and collective commitment on the part of people of faith to live the principles of Zion here and now,
and to live them radically. And to the age-old principles that Yesha‘yahu would have known we must
now add a new one: carbon neutrality. Until every church and every member of every church is
carbon-neutral, we Christians are not living the gospel that we profess.
e imperative for our time, as for Jesus’s, is to repent and believe in the kingdom. e Greek word
that Mark uses for Jesus’s call to repentance is metanoeite, literally to get a new mind. Jesus invites
11
After the notion of Israel’s calling to be a holy nation, nothing is more uniquely characteristic of the Bible than the
prophetic anger directed at those who fail to live up to this calling. e commandment to be holy effectively becomes a
mandate never to be content with the way things are. e prophets are thus the social Ur-conscience of the West, the
inspiration for reform down the ages. I discuss the need for prophetic protest now in Section IV.
those who would be his followers to realize that the world has changed, and that a new order, the
kingdom of God, now governs how they should act. In Jesus’s teaching, the individual new mind and
the new kingdom go hand in hand. Followers of this way are in fact the very temple of God (1 Cor.
3:16), the source from which the kingdom takes its strength. e news of Jesus’s kingdom was an
invitation for people to believe that a radically different way of life was possible, a way that valued
people as a manifestation of God and not simply as human resources. Even I as an unbeliever can
subscribe to this. I believe that we can become whatever we imagine we can become.
e central problem of climate change has nothing to do with the environment. Ours is not an
environmental problem in the way that living in the desert or in the jungle is an environmental
problem. Nothing we are experiencing or will yet experience as a result of climate change is dictated
by factors outside our control, not yet anyway. Ours is a problem of impoverished imagination and
will. We cannot think outside of the desperately narrow little boxes that we mentally and physically
inhabit. And the manifestation of our lack of imagination is neurosis on a scale never before seen in
history. Our neurosis, indeed I would call it psychosis, is so profound that we cannot even see that
we are in crisis, despite the fact that evidence of the
Fig. 1
crisis is all around us in plain sight. In the next
section of this presentation, I’ll have occasion to say
something about these obvious evidences of climate
change and their implications.12 To wrap up this
section, however, I’d like to return with you to a
very different time and place and invite you imaginatively to enter into its spirit. In 1857, Mormon
apostle Heber C. Kimball delivered the following sermon here in Salt Lake. It evokes the kind of
spirit that we must have today as we face the challenge of mustering the faith to live according to our
truest principles.
12
Fig. 1 source: NOAA State of the Climate Global Analysis 2007, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/index.php?
report=global&year=2007&month=ann, visited 12/20/09.
We dedicate and consecrate the wine or water that we partake of in the sacrament, and we
also dedicate the bread to the Lord; and it should be just so with everything; it should all
be dedicated to the Lord; and upon all that we do and put our hands unto, we should ask
his blessings. We should never meddle with anything on this earth that we cannot lay our
hands upon and bless and dedicate and consecrate to the Lord...
Brethren, go out and dedicate your gardens, and when you get a tree that you want to set
out, dedicate the ground, the root, and the elements that you are going to place around it,
and ask God to fill it with warmth and with power to vegetate. Dedicate the seed that you
are going to put into the earth, and then dedicate the earth, and nourish it when it springs
forth...and do not say that it cannot be quickened, for I say it can...
e Lord will now bless our labor; he will bless the fruits of the earth, he will bless our
tanneries, he will bless our sheep, our flocks, and everything we undertake to handle and
manage...and we will dedicate and consecrate them to God, and we will ask God to fill
the earth with the resurrecting power; for life is the resurrecting power...and it is that
power which brings forth vegetation; it is the same power which brings forth food and
raiment; and by the same power we shall be brought forth in the morning of the
resurrection...13
Like its Mormon and its biblical precursors, our consecration too must be complete. And our
transformation must be complete. As a catalyst for such change, climate change is a godsend. It is the
biggest challenge we have ever faced as a species. It will therefore be our doom or our finest hour.
13
“Increase in Saving Principles,” Journal of Discourses. Liverpool: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854-1886, 21: 187,
189-90.
II
e end of the world is nigh, and it’s already been published in Nature.
— Mark Lynas14
So, what is climate change?15 Simply put, it is increasing global temperatures and their related
climate and environmental effects. Climate change isn’t a theory about climate, and it isn’t
Fig. 2
projections of things that could happen. Climate
change is a present reality. It’s a measured, tested,
visually verifiable reality. Since the beginning of the
industrial revolution, global average annual
temperatures have risen by 1.3ºF. is is a fact, and
it’s not open to dispute. In Figs. 1 and 2, you can see
this measured fact for yourselves.16
e climate change we’re witnessing today is caused
by human-generated carbon dioxide or CO2. CO2
makes up only four hundredths of a percent of earth’s atmosphere, and human-generated CO2 makes
up only 3.4% of all CO2 generated each year. But human CO2 is nonetheless important. Natural
14
Author of Six Degrees. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008. e quotation is from Lynas’s website: http://
www.marklynas.org/2007/3/15/to-the-end-of-the-earth-six-degrees-in-the-sunday-times, visited 1/3/10.
15
e following section summarizes a much longer discussion of present and future climate change effects in a document
entitled “A Call for Leadership,” which I prepared in early 2009 as a petition to the administration of the University of
Utah. e petition is available for download on my website: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Edwin_Firmage_Photography/
Blog/Entries/2009/2/2_A_Declaration_of_Energy_Indepenence_files/A%20Call%20for%20Leadership.pdf. e
petition was met with glacial indifference, not least by faculty members who fear to anger Utah’s reactionary state
legislature, which controls the university’s purse.
16
Fig. 2 source: Wikipedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg,
based on instrumental data compiled by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia, visited 12/19/09.
CO2 is balanced by natural sinks that recycle it, keeping historical CO2 levels at 180 to 280 parts per
million (ppm). Human-generated CO2 has no natural sinks, so extra CO2 accumulates in the
atmosphere. Today’s CO2 concentration is 385 ppm, a level not seen in at least 800,000 years, and
this number is rising rapidly, and
Fig. 3
could reach over 900 ppm by
2100. is rise is unprecedented
and unnatural. ese historical and
present CO2 concentrations are
also facts and are not subject to
dispute. You can see this for
yourselves in Fig. 3.17
What makes rising CO2
concentrations dangerous is that
they give us too much of a good
thing. Earth is a warm and
hospitable place for life because the atmosphere, like the earth’s surface, is full of water. Water vapor
is the most important and abundant greenhouse gas
Fig. 4
by far. It works by trapping a portion of the energy
coming from the sun. But a lot of reflected solar
energy still escapes back into space — just enough to
keep things here from endlessly heating up. Life on
earth as we know it exists because of the balance that
earth has struck between too much and too little
17
Fig. 3 source: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), based on research by Oak Ridge National
Laboratory, http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/historical-trends-in-carbon-dioxide-concentrations-and-temperature-on-ageological-and-recent-time-scale, visited 12/19/09. While this graph goes back only 400,000 years, ice core analysis from
Antarctica can now take us back 800,000 years, over which time the generalization made here stands.
trapped energy. What human CO2 does is to throw this balance off kilter by plugging up holes in the
absorption spectrum of water vapor and preventing more of that reflected solar energy from escaping
into space, as you can see from Fig. 4.18 is is the cause of climate change.
Who says so? Virtually every credible climate scientist on earth, and every national science
organization on earth without exception. For over two decades now, scientists around the world have
coordinated their efforts to study climate change under the auspices of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which comprises scientists from 130 countries. e IPCC’s
latest summary of climate data, which was issued in 2007, involved over 450 lead authors (all climate
experts), 800 contributing authors (also climate experts), and 2,500 peer reviewers, making this one
of the most thoroughly scrutinized subjects in the history of science.19
e IPCC concludes that the evidence for climate change is “unequivocal,” and that the cause is
“very likely” us. “Very likely” is defined to mean that the odds are greater than 9 in 10. is is the
considered judgment of 97% of the world’s climatologists.
Now, it may be that the scientists are wrong. But, if you consulted ten doctors about a health
problem, or ten investment consultants about a business deal, and nine of the ten gave you the same
advice, whose advice would you follow?
In fact, the evidences of climate change are all around us, and you don’t necessarily have to be an
expert to see them. Let’s go through these quickly, starting with the temperature increases.
1. Increasing air and ocean temperatures. As I said, global annual average temperatures have increased
1.3ºF since the beginning of the industrial age. It’s important to note that this is both a global and
18
Fig. 4 source: ephere, http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/253.html, based on Climate Website of the German
Museum.
19
is is the assessment of America’s Union of Concerned Scientists, whose review of IPPC methodology is very useful.
e review is available online at http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/ipccbackgrounder.html.
Fig. 5
an average figure. Regionally, there’s
considerable variation from this number in
both directions. In some parts of the world,
such as the western United States and the
Arctic, temperatures have risen between 2.5º
and 3.5ºF.20 In general, the Northern
Hemisphere has experienced more warming
than the Southern, as you can see from
Fig. 5.21 It’s also important to note that
global warming doesn’t necessarily mean that temperatures increase continuously. As you can see
from Figs. 1-3, there is enormous fluctuation in year-to-year temperature. Climate, in other words, is
not the same thing as weather.
Climate is about larger, more permanent phenomena. When defining climate, you look not at
individual events or individual years, but at trends. Temperature trends indicative of climate change
include the fact that seven of the eight warmest years on record in the American West and five of the
ten warmest years nationally occurred between 1999 and 2007, with hottest-ever summers being
recorded in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in 2007.22 And this is not a purely regional
phenomenon. All ten of the ten warmest years on record globally have occurred since 1995.23 In
2003, Europe experienced a record heat wave that claimed the lives of 35,000-50,000 people,
20
On western U.S. climate, see Hotter and Drier: e West’s Changed Climate. Rocky Mountain Climate Organization
and NRDC, 2008, available online at http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/west/west.pdf, visited 12/20/09.
21Fig.
5 source: “Global Warming,” Wikipedia, based on NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, http://
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Map.jpg, visited 12/19/09.
22
For national data through 2007, see NOAA’s State of the Climate National Overview, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/
sotc/?report=national&year=2007&month=13&submitted=Get+Report, visited 12/20/09.
23
See the Global Temperatures summary in NOAA’s 2007,http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?
report=global&year=2009&month=13&submitted=Get+Report. is trend continues into 2009, with projections that
the 1998-2008 decade will be the warmest on record worldwide, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?
report=global&year=2009&month=13&submitted=Get+Report.
making this the biggest natural disaster in modern European history. In the Arctic, temperatures are
higher now than they have been at any time in the last thousand years, and they’re rising two times
faster than the global average.
Oceans, because of their greater heat capacity are even better barometers of climate change than air.
Here the trends are nothing short of astonishing, and I want to stress, because climate change
skeptics always focus on the use of predictive models, that these too are measured phenomena, not
projections. Arctic ocean temperatures have risen as much as 9ºF in some areas since 2000.24 And,
again, this is not a regional blip. In the waters around the United Kingdom, seven of the ten warmest
years since 1870 have occurred in the last decade.25 It takes a great deal of heat to raise overall
temperatures in vast bodies of water like the oceans. So you can imagine the sort of sustained
warming of the planet that is represented even in a seasonal and regional nine degree (!) rise in Arctic
water temperature much less a permanent 1.8º F rise in global ocean temperatures.
2. e length and intensity of the fire season. e fire season in the Western U.S. today is two and half
months longer than it was from 1970 to 1986.26 Fires now are also more intense, destroying six and
half times as much forest as in the 70s and 80s. And fires are four times as frequent. ese — I stress
the point again — are facts of measured data, not models or projections. e fire years of 2004,
2005, 2006, and 2007 were each successive record breakers.27 In 2006 and 2007 alone, nearly 20
million acres of forest were destroyed. at’s ten times the area of Yellowstone National Park.
24
A. Proshutinsky, et al., “NOAA Arctic Report Card: Update for 2009,” online at http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/
reportcard/ocean.html, visited 1/20/10.
25
Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, http://www.mccip.org.uk/arc/2007/Temperature.htm, visited 12/20/09.
See also the European Environmental Agency’s “Rising Sea Surface Temperature: Towards Ice-free Arctic Summers and a
Changing Marine Food Chain,” at http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/coast_sea/sea-surface-temperature.
26
A. L. Westerling, et al., “Warming and Earlier Spring Increases Western U. S. Forest Wildfire Activity.” Science 18
(2006), 940-943, available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5789/940, visited 12/20/09.
27
Yearly wildfire data available on the National Interagency Fire Center’s website: http://www.nifc.gov/fire_info/
fires_acres.htm, visited 12/20/09.
3. e spread of pests such as the pine bark beetle. Fires are not the only threat that climate change
poses to our forests today. With warmer winter temperatures, pine beetle populations, once
controlled by deep winter cold, are exploding all over the Northern Hemisphere. In British
Columbia, for example, 33,000,000 acres of lodge pole forest, 40% of the region’s total forest, have
been destroyed or severely damaged by pine beetle, with projections from the Canadian government
that British Columbia could lose nearly 80% of its forest cover by 2015!28 Tree mortality rates in the
U.S. have more than doubled over the last few decades.29
4. e melting of arctic permafrost. Permafrost contains almost two trillion tons of carbon, an amount
equal to that of the world’s rainforests.30 As it melts, permafrost emits CO2 or CH4 (methane). e
latter is 20-25X more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.31 In Siberia, 1,000,000 km2, an area the
size of France and Germany combined, has melted in the last four years.32 In places, methane is
bubbling out of solution so energetically that the water does not freeze even in winter. is is not a
model or a projection, but present reality, and this one fact alone may spell the end of life as we
know it on earth. While Judge Dee Benson doesn’t think we’re in a crisis that merits civil
disobedience, we are and it does. It merits revolution.
28
“Pine Beetle Moves South in B.C.” Vancouver Sun, 9/18/07, available online at http://www2.canada.com/
vancouversun/news/story.html?id=08c2bac3-bcb3-4090-bb08-43f375d8caa7&k=31916, visted 12/20/09.
29
Phillip J. van Mantgem, et al., “Widespread Increase of Tree Mortality Rates in the Western United States.” Science 23
(2009), 521-524. Summary available on at: http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=08c2bac3bcb3-4090-bb08-43f375d8caa7&k=31916, visted 12/20/09.
30
Edward A. G. Schurr, et al., “Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global
Carbon Cycle.” Bioscience 58 (2008), 701-714, online at http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1641/B580807?prevSearch=
%5Ball:%2520schuur%5D%2520AND%2520%5Bpublisher:%2520bioone%5D&searchHistoryKey=&cookieSet=1;
Amy Mayer, “Permafrost in Flux: Tracking Carbon in the Alaskan Tundra.” Bioscience 58 (2008), 96-100, online at
http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1641/B580203?prevSearch=%5Ball:%2520schuur%5D%2520AND
%2520%5Bpublisher:%2520bioone%5D&searchHistoryKey=, visted 12/20/09.
31
See the wonderful collection of useful documents in the Max Planck Institute’s Atmospheric Chemistry Department’s
website at : http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/253.html, visted 12/20/09.
32
“Climate Warning as Siberia Melts.” New Scientist, August 11, 2005 at http://www.newscientist.com/article/
mg18725124.500, visted 12/20/09.
5. Loss of Arctic summer ice. In addition to being home to animals such as the polar bear, Arctic ice
helps to moderate global climate. It reflects 80% of incident energy back into space, while water
absorbs 90% of this energy. Loss of ice thus leads to increased air, water, and land temperatures
throughout the region. Not surprisingly, these have been accompanied by record breaking ice
shrinkage in 2005 and again in 2007. According to one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic,
this area could be ice-free in summer as early as 2013, decades before the IPCC’s current projected
dates. Like the melting of permafrost, with which it’s inseparably connected, the melting of summer
ice is a tipping point that could trigger runaway temperature increases beyond anything yet imagined
by the IPCC.
6. e loss of glaciers worldwide. Globally, since 1945, the mean mass balance of all glaciers has
declined by about 20%, and rate of shrinkage appears to be increasing. Regional decreases are often
significantly greater. In Europe and the Caucasus, glacial cover decreased by about 35% between
1850 and 1970 and by another 22% between 1970 and 2000. Of Glacier National Park’s original
150 glaciers, only 35 remain today, and these are expected to disappear by 2050. Over the course of
the 20th century, Central Asian glaciers have declined by 25-35%, the glaciers of Afghanistan by
50%.33 e glaciers of the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau are the water tanks of Asia, providing water
during the dry season to two billion people in China, India, and Southeast Asia. e loss of glaciers
could cause glacier-fed rivers such as the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow
33
Global Glacier Changes: Facts and Figures. World Glacier Monitoring Service. United Nations Environment
Programme, 2008, at http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/pdfs/glaciers.pdf, visited 12/20/09 and 1/31/10. While
controversy now surrounds the prediction of the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, it is a fact
that glaciers everywhere are rapidly shrinking, and that this shrinkage is the result of the still modest rise in average global
temperatures of just 1.3ºF. e U.N. study quoted here is a useful corrective to the over-concentration on individual
glaciers of the Himalayas that has followed in the wake of the 2035 prediction controversy. Individual glacier behavior
depends on many factors other than climate, including latitude, altitude, precipitation, local topography, surging,
calving, and debris cover. As in the issue of climate change itself, one must look at general trends across a region and
across multiple regions to see the big picture. e U.N. study, which looks at 36,000 length change observations and
3,400 mass balance measurements from 1,800 and 230 glaciers respectively, clearly shows that the trend in Central Asia
and across regions worldwide is toward significant and rapid retreat. e U.N. concludes that this “may lead to the
deglaciation of large parts of many mountain ranges by the end of the 21st century.” If, as seems likely based on the
presently increasing rate of temperature rise, we find ourselves in a world that is 11ºF warmer (or more), this prognosis
appears, if anything, to be conservative.
to seasonally run dry. is prospect should keep you up at night, because it spells disaster for the
entire world.
As you can see, there are many different indicators from all over the planet that global warming is a
present, and a very frightening reality. And all of this from a mere 1.3ºF rise in average temperature.
But we’re just getting started with global warming. is past year, even in the midst of the worst
economic recession since the Depression, world pollution increased 2%, and it has been rising at an
annual rate of 3% or more for some time. At present, the world’s biggest polluters, the U.S. and
China, have yet to adopt any meaningful steps to eliminate carbon emissions. In fact, in China, a
new coal-fired power plant goes into operation every week or two. e implications of the
combination of continued growth in carbon emissions and the political stalemate on meaningful
change are what I’d like to turn to now: the coming effects of climate change.
1. Increased ocean acidity. e pH of the pre-industrial oceans was 8.179. Current ocean pH is 8.104.
At the present rate of increase, ocean pH is expected to be at least 7.824 by 2100, a change of
225%.34 Elevated ocean pH and temperature are suspects in the worldwide decline of coral reefs,
25% of which have disappeared in the last 50 years.35 Another 32% are at risk by 2100. Twenty-five
percent of all ocean life is sustained by coral reefs. Where will ocean life gets its food in 2100 if 50%
or more of our reefs are gone? And where will we get our food if ocean life is threatened? I also
remind you that 50% of earth’s oxygen comes from the oceans. If we kill these, we kill everything.
2. Loss of the Amazon rainforest. e Amazon is home to 20% of all species on earth, and produces
20% of the earth’s oxygen. Loss of the Amazon would be a catastrophic blow to the biosphere, and as
things are going now, the Amazon will disappear before the end of this century. In 2005, the
34
pH is logarithmic scale, so small numerical changes represent large natural effects.
35
John Weier, “Mapping the Decline of Coral Reefs.” NASA Earth Observatory, March 12, 2001, at http://
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Coral/, visited 12/20/09.
Amazon experienced record drought due to elevated Atlantic Ocean temperatures that prevented
trade winds from bringing in moisture. Two to three years of such drought could be catastrophic.
e Hadley Centre projects that the probability of 2005-level drought in the Amazon will rise to
50% (that is, once every other year) by 2030 and 90% (every year) by 2100. Besides species
extinction and decreased planetary oxygen levels, loss of the Amazon will have other effects that are
in themselves climate-changing factors. If the Amazon dries up as predicted, it will be the world’s
largest tinder box, a two million square mile megafire waiting to happen.
3. Mass extinction. According to a study by the University of Leeds in England, one in three plant
and animal species could become extinct by 2050 on the basis of mid-range climate models.36 Fifty
percent could disappear in worst-case scenarios. Right now, we’re on a worse than worst-case
trajectory. According to the IPCC, if temperature rises exceed 6ºF, the extinction rate could climb to
70%. You have to ask yourself at what point does a system so damaged collapse entirely? People who
look at climate change as a matter for future generations to solve obviously do not understand that it
won’t be their great great great grandchildren but their kids who will face a dying biosphere. I may
even live to see it.
4. More severe and more frequent extreme weather events. One of the best, if necessarily oversimplified,
summaries of climate change that I’ve seen is by Stephen Schneider, the editor of the journal Climate
Change. “Global warming intensifies the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to
have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long dry periods. Where the atmosphere
is configured to be wet, you will get more rain...Global warming will intensify droughts and it will
intensify floods.”37 Many scientists suggest that global warming will bring more frequent and more
severe extreme weather. While one cannot say that the occurrence or severity of any one storm such
36
Chris D. omas, et al., “Extinction Risk from Climate Change.” Nature 427 (2004), 145-148. Summary at http://
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6970/full/nature02121.html, visited 12/20/09.
37
“Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts.” Washington Post, 8/20/2007, online at http://
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967.html, visited 12/20/09.
as Hurricane Katrina, the sixth-strongest hurricane ever recorded, or Hurricane Rita, the fourthstrongest, we can expect an increase in the intensity of such storms. Hurricane Katrina was the
biggest natural disaster in American history, causing $150 billion in damage. How many such
storms, especially if they become frequent, can our system handle before it collapses?
5. Rising ocean levels. As agents of destruction, future Katrinas will have an advantage over today’s
because they’ll start at one to seven feet higher due to sea level rise. Over the last hundred years,
oceans have risen at the average annual rate of 1.8 mm/year. Since 1993, that rate has increased to
3.1 mm/year, or a foot a century. Since the pre-industrial era began, oceans have risen about
seventeen inches. According to the IPCC, oceans are projected to rise by as much as another two feet
by 2100. But this number is almost certainly far too conservative. e rise in ocean levels to date is
entirely due to the thermal expansion of water, and does not include increases from melting ice sheets
in Greenland and Antarctica. New data from these suggests an additional rise of three to five feet by
2100. Many of the world’s most populous cities such as Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tianjinn, are
located on coastlines or in flood plains. Millions of people in Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan,
and China live in flood plains. And how about New York, Washington, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles,
and San Diego? Do we imagine that we can dike every city on every coast?
6. Health effects. Warming climate enables insect-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and
dengue fever to spread into temperate regions.38 River and coastal flooding compromises drinking
water with sewage, heavy metals, and pesticides, and spreads water-borne diseases such as cholera,
typhoid, and hepatitis. Air pollution from smoke and ozone increases the incidence of asthma and
pneumonia. ere’s a precedent in America’s own recent past for the kind of health effects that global
warming portends. In the Dust Bowl, people experienced what was popularly called “Dust
Pneumonia,” a sometimes fatal irritation of the lungs induced by breathing the fine dust that was
38
See, for example, Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions. Harvard Center for Health and
the Global Environment and Swiss Re, 2005, at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6809/full/
408184a0.html, visited 12/20/09.
ubiquitous during the area’s frequent dust storms. When climate models suggest permanent Dust
Bowl level drought in the Southwest, you have to ask yourself whether Dust Pneumonia will become
part of our everyday vocabulary, and whether our health system will be able to cope, not just with
ten years of health consequences, as in the Dust Bowl, but with permanently elevated levels of lung
and heart disease and heat-related illnesses. Will our health system generally be able to cope with
possibly epidemic levels of infectious diseases, some of them new?
7. Loss of food production. A few lucky humans can escape the heat in air-conditioned homes. But
farms can’t be air conditioned. And the projected temperature increases bode ill for a planet that
must have more food, not less. Over the next century, ignoring climate change, earth’s population is
projected to grow from 6.5 to 12 billion. at means we need to double our food supply. But a
growing food supply is not what the climate models hold in store. ey suggest a greater than 50%
decline in India’s wheat-growing capacity by 2050 and a loss of more than 30% of Africa’s maize
Fig. 6
crop, its most important agricultural product, by 2030 (IPCC). Overall food production in Africa
could be cut in half by 2080. And don’t imagine that this is a ird-World problem. As Fig. 6 shows,
temperature increases in our own Breadbasket will be pushing plants to the level of breaking point.39
In the coming century, the climate of Illinois will become like that of Texas, and Texas will become
an oven. Increased temperatures are a direct threat to the stability of agriculture, and they bring with
them other effects. Summer heat combined with pollution creates ozone, and ozone is extremely
detrimental to crops. Increased danger from weeds, pests, and disease is also a likely correlate with
higher temperature, as are extreme weather events that will locally devastate crops.
8. Water shortages. One in six people worldwide depend on water from glaciers and snowpack, and
glaciers especially are in steep decline. In areas affected by drought, including the western U.S., water
resources could drop by 30%. And even in areas where presently enough water is available, we could
face shortages. According to the IPCC, hundreds of millions in Africa and tens of millions in Latin
America who now have enough water will be short of it in 20 years. By 2100, according to the
IPCC, as many as three billion people may be threatened by water shortages.
Let me bring this particular threat home. From 1999 to 2005, the Colorado Plateau experienced its
worst drought in 500 years, reducing Colorado River flow from 15 million acre feet/year to 3.8, and
dropping Lake Powell to one third of capacity. at was five years of severe drought starting from a
full reservoir. Two to three more years of such drought would have brought Lake Powell to “dead
pool,” the point at which no water can leave the dam, the point at which the Grand Canyon has no
water. We know from tree ring studies that severe droughts lasting longer than five years have
occurred, and that is without climate change.40
39
Fig. 6 source: United States Global Change Research Program, http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/
scientific-assessments/us-impacts/climate-change-impacts-by-sector/agriculture, visited 12/19/09.
40
For this and the following material on the Colorado Plateau, I’m heavily indebted to James Powell, Dead Pool: Lake
Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West. Berkeley: University of California, 2009. I called attention to
Powell’s book and its implications for Utah and the LDS Church in an op-ed published in the Salt Lake Tribune, January
9, 2009, available online at: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Supporting_Documents/Writing_on_the_Environment_files/
West%20Hurtling%20toward%20Water%20Crisis.html.
Today, Lake Powell is about two-thirds full, and drought conditions continue. A return to severe
drought could drain Lake Powell, and quickly. e most thorough study of the Colorado basin to
date, inclusive of climate change, suggests that the combination of drought and continued growth
Fig. 7
could lead to water shortages
severe enough to depopulate the
West’s megacities. By 2022,
according to a conservative
climate model, Phoenix, which
gets 60% of its water from the
Colorado, could become a ghost
town. Nor will Phoenix be the
only casualty. Las Vegas gets 90%
of its water from the Colorado,
and Los Angeles over 50%. All
southern California agriculture
depends on the Colorado.
Not only are we doing nothing to prevent this climate-induced water crisis, we are building as if
there is no tomorrow. Phoenix, Las Vegas, and our own St. George are among the most rapidly
growing cities in the U.S. rough our growth-for-growth’s sake and growth-at-all-costs policies, we
are setting ourselves up for a compounded disaster that will make the experience of the Okies look
like a cakewalk. During the Dust Bowl of the 30s, 2.5 million Americans were displaced. Many of
the displaced, as readers of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath will recall, ended up in California. But today’s
West is full. ere’s no place and there are no resources to accommodate environmental refugees.
What will happen, then, when not 2.5 but 10-20 million residents of the Southwest are forced from
their homes because there simply isn’t enough water?
To close out the water issue, I’d just like to show you graphically what our future in Utah under
climate change looks like (Fig. 7 above).41 It is as bleak as the color scheme of this writing on the
wall.
9. Social unrest and instability. Environmental changes on the scale evident in the foregoing will put
unprecedented pressure on the world’s poorest countries, which are entirely unequal to the task of
responding either to the environmental changes or the consequent social upheaval. For the ird
World, future climate change will be cataclysmic.
But the impacts, direct and indirect, will not be limited to the ird World. e U.S. has just spent
$3 trillion protecting its oil interests in the Gulf. What will be the cost of keeping a hungry and
destitute ird World from destroying itself and the U.S. in the process? How, for example, will the
U.S. react to and be affected by a war between nuclear powers India and Pakistan over dwindling
water in the Indus or between China and Russia over the water and food resources of Siberia? And
how will even we, the richest nation on earth, cope with the many demands on diminishing dollars
for agriculture, health systems, coastal cities, desert cities, power systems, and a military all under
unprecedented stress?
10. e one-two punch. Tough as any one of these challenges would be, we will not face them one by
one but simultaneously, and with increasing intensity and frequency. ings don’t just get worse
under climate change, they get exponentially worse. And I haven’t even mentioned one other gigantic
factor that we’ll have to deal with while all this other stuff is going on: the end of oil or “peak oil.”
While there is considerable debate about the real extent of oil reserves, a growing number of oil
experts believe that world production is now in or shortly will be in irreversible decline. A U.S.
Energy Information Administration study found that non-OPEC and non-Russian production
41
Fig. 7 source: United States Global Change Research Program, http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/
scientific-assessments/us-impacts/regional-climate-change-impacts/southwest, visited 12/19/09.
worldwide peaked around the year 2006, production in some countries such as the U.S. having
peaked long before that (1970 in the U.S.). How long will reserves last? At present official but
unaudited and highly suspect numbers and at the present rate of production, the reserves of Saudi
Arabia, the world’s largest producer, are sufficient to last for another 70 years.42 But the true size of
Saudia Arabia’s estimated reserves and those of other OPEC producers are questionable. In the
1980s, OPEC introduced a country quota system that sets each nation’s output based on its reserves.
Immediately, estimated reserves rose sharply, raising questions about whether the new numbers have
any basis in fact under the ground. In 2007, Sadad al Husseini, a former VP of Exploration for
Aramco, asserted that 300 billion of the world’s estimated 1200 billion barrels of oil reserves should
be considered speculative and not available for production. In a best case, at least with today’s
extraction technology and at officially stated reserve levels and current rates of production, reserves
will last another 50 years or so. If actual, usable reserves are as low as Al Husseini states, they may not
last through mid-century.
ere is uncertainty here at many levels. Not all oil in a field can be economically harvested. Rising
prices and improved technology may make previously uneconomical extraction worthwhile. And,
there is always a possibility, though it is unlikely, that major new sources will be found. All of this is
true. But history is a caution. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, and in spite of then record-high
prices in the wake of the oil crisis of 70s and great improvements in oil exploration technology, U.S.
oil production has continued to decline. Another problem with the notion of the previously
uneconomic becoming attractive is that other factors such as the effects of global warming may take
options off the table that could otherwise be considered. We may simply not have the means,
however willing we are to pay the higher price.
42
For a useful summary, see Wikipedia, “Oil Reserves,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves, visited 12/20/09.
In 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy published a report entitled Peaking of World Oil Production:
Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, also known as the Hirsch Report.43 e report concluded
that with emergency-level action, “the fastest humanly possible,” and extraordinary government
intervention the world could transition to an alternative, oil-less economy in 20 years without
substantial negative impacts. With less than 20 years, the impacts rise. But 20 years is a best case in a
world that is rapidly becoming less than the best of all possible worlds. Hirsch did not include in his
time estimate the possible impact of other factors such as climate change that might compete for the
attention and dollars that will be required to meet even a 20-year figure. What will happen, for
example, if, under severe climate stress in the year 2025, America experiences two Katrina-level
hurricanes, one that destroys half of the city of Houston and another that levels Miami Beach, while,
simultaneously, wildfires escalate out of control in the Oakland Hills, destroying 30% of the cities of
Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville, and Glenn Canyon Dam reaches “dead pool,” which necessitates
the immediate creation of new and extremely expensive diversion tunnels around the dam? What if
such catastrophes are regular occurrences during the time that the Peak Oil transition is in process?
e point is that our ability to respond to Peak Oil without societal upheaval will be constrained by
factors that we cannot now anticipate that may make 20 years seem wildly optimistic.
Given the time, effort, and contingencies involved in making a successful transition to an oil-less
economy, and since we do not and probably never will know precisely what the true state of world
reserves is, and therefore what our likely deadline is, it would be highly imprudent to suppose that
the need for action now is anything but acute. One of the most sobering findings of the Hirsch
Report, based on several case studies, is that it will likely not be evident even as little as a year before
production peaks that peak is imminent. In other words, “the world will have less than a year’s
warning.” According to Hirsch, the relative risks of premature action and failure to act in a timely
manner are asymmetric. “Mitigation initiated prematurely would result in a relatively modest
43
Available online at http://www.acus.org/docs/051007-Hirsch_World_Oil_Production.pdf.
misallocation of resources. Failure to initiate timely mitigation with an appropriate lead-time is
certain to result in very severe economic consequences.” is is global warming all over again.
So, we come to this: Humans are creating a new world order, and it’s not an order under which most
humans, or indeed most life forms, will be able to survive. ese are not changes that we will be able
to fix after the fact with technological wizardry. e CO2 that we put into the air today will remain
there for hundreds of years, and the effects of this gas on our climate will therefore persist for
hundreds of years. e only cure for climate change is prevention. What’s more, half measures are as
good as no measures. If only half of Antarctica melts, we’re still facing global catastrophe. If only the
Colorado dries up and not the Ganges, we’re still facing catastrophe.
Of all of the dangers facing us, none is more insidious than that form of self-delusion that says that
we can and should move deliberately, cautiously, and incrementally toward sustainability. is is our
business-as-usual approach to things, and for many things it’s the right kind of approach. For climate
change, it spells disaster. is is the kind of change that our churches, and universities, and, yes,
environmental organizations have so far adopted. And it is a moral outrage. What we face today is
not primarily an environmental problem; it is a moral problem. It is in fact the moral problem. How
we respond to this moral problem will be the measure of our species. So far, we rate an F.
III
So, how do prevent climate change? According to the IPCC, we need to implement IMMEDIATE
and DRAMATIC reductions in greenhouse gases: 50-85% GLOBAL reductions over 2000 levels by
2050. What do these numbers mean? At 50%, the probability of holding temperature increases to a
hopefully livable 3.6 to 4.3ºF increase above pre-industrial levels, is 50%. At 85% reductions, the
probability of staying in that 3-4º range is 85%. Clearly, given the stakes involved, mandatory global
85% reductions over 2000 levels by 2050 should be considered an absolute minimum. is is a far
cry from Utah’s voluntary 25% by 2025 over 2005 levels or the Obama administration’s pitiful plan
for 17% by 2020.
Now, the implications of these global reductions by 2050 are even more radical for the U.S. For the
world to reach 50% by 2050, the U.S. must reduce its emissions by 88%, and for the world to reach
85%, the U.S. must reduce by 96%! Effectively, we Americans must set ourselves the minimum goal
of zero carbon emissions by 2050. So, within just 40 years, at most, Americans must replace every
gas-powered engine, every natural gas powered heater and power plant, and every coal-fired power
plant with a clean, non-emitting alternative. We must reinvent agriculture to work without cheap
fossil fuels. We must reengineer our transportation system to work without trucks and airplanes. And
we must do all of this in less than 50 years. If this imperative, this minimal imperative, doesn’t scare
the hell out of you, you aren’t listening, because this means reinventing America in just 40 years.
But many believe that the 2007 IPCC goals are not aggressive enough. e 2014 report is almost
certain to up the ante, and others have already done so. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute
and longtime researcher on climate change believes that the world target should be 80% by 2020.
For what it’s worth, I happen to agree with Lester, because every indication from the science is that
reality is outstripping the projections. What we thought was “worst-case” is in fact far from worst.
An example is the melting of both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Far from giving us an unnecessary
scare, as climate change skeptics claim, science is falling behind reality.
e need for urgent and extreme action emerges from tipping points such as the melting of the
permafrost. Once permafrost begins melting on a large scale, it has the potential to set in motion
feedback loops that will create runaway climate change that we will be unable to stop
REGARDLESS OF WHAT WE DO. e feedback loop works like this. Increasing global
temperatures cause permafrost to melt, releasing additional natural (not man-made) carbon dioxide
and methane into the atmosphere. ese in turn cause temperatures to rise even faster, causing more
permafrost to melt, and so on. e biosphere as a whole could become a gigantic feedback loop.
Most general climate models to date assume a static biosphere. But, the biosphere’s ability to absorb
CO2 is in fact climate-dependent. At present, about half of anthropogenic CO2 is absorbed by the
biosphere (land and oceans). e land component of this form of carbon sequestration, however,
may become a casualty of climate change. A study by the Hadley Center suggests that the land could
become a net source of CO2 by 2050, and that as a result, atmospheric CO2 concentrations may be
250 ppm higher than predicted by static biosphere models.44 An additional temperature rise of 2.7°F
over and above that predicted by static models (an increase of 75%) would accompany these higher
CO2 concentrations, and this additional rise kicks in further climatic changes. e caution of the
tipping points is that this is one time when we either do things right the first time, or we die. We will
not get a second chance.
So, as we contemplate what our agenda will be, let’s agree on two basic points. We need dramatic
change, and we need it now. Is anyone doing this? Are there any groups that we could point to as
models?
44
Peter M. Cox, et al., “Acceleration of Global Warming Due to Carbon-Cycle Feedbacks in a Coupled Climate Model.”
Nature 408 (2000), 184-187. Summary at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6809/full/408184a0.html,
visited 12/20/09.
Yes, to a degree, in isolated pockets. In May 2007, for example, an F5 tornado tore through
Greensburg, Kansas, wiping the town off the face of the earth. Instead of returning to business as
usual, the town voted to use the opportunity of rebuilding to make Greensburg a model of
sustainable living. And, as American towns go, it is indeed a model. I urge readers to look at
Greensburg’s website to see what a town with vision can do. HEAL Utah, on whose board I sit,
recently hosted Greensburg’s mayor, Bob Dixson, and we have put videos of that event on our
YouTube website.45 ey’re inspiring.
For the most part, though, America is trapped in denial. Recent polls have found that about half of
the populace does not believe that climate change is real, and only about a third believe that it is
caused by human activity. Fewer still understand that this is in fact the biggest challenge humans
have ever faced, and that it is the moral imperative of all time. Now more than ever in human history,
we need unity in common purpose. We need the sort of unity that brought Americans and
Americans and their allies together during World War II.
Our political system today, however, is not about unity. It is more partisan than ever. It’s driven not
by notions of public service but by special interest, corporate bribery, and demagoguery. It’s heroes
are figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. Americans wanting change, if not
necessarily action on climate change, hoped to see a radical about face with Barack Obama. But so
far, even with a Democratic Congress, he has failed to deliver on the issue of climate change, and
appears to be hopelessly bogged down in a stalemate of parties that he seems unable to break. In the
fullness of time, when the American people finally wake up to their plight as agents and victims of
climate change, the politicians will presumably snap out of their ideological funk. But that will be
too late for our planet.
45
Fall Party Mayor Dixson IV.m4v, Fall Party Mayor Dixson II.m4v, Fall Party 2009 Mayor Dixson III.m4v, Fall Party
2009 Dixson I.m4v.
e private sector too will eventually adapt, but not fast enough to avoid passing the tipping points.
Right now, the market cannot even begin to adapt because the true cost of the way we live is invisible
to the market. At the moment, our economic system externalizes, that is hides, true costs, and so
there isn’t an economic imperative powerful enough to cause deep, structural change of the sort we
need. We have, for example, no carbon tax that reflects the cost of the CO2 we emit, the cost that we
will pay either in reengineering our society to prevent climate change or in dealing with the
consequences of our failure to reengineer society. Without a significant carbon tax, there is no hope
of large-scale shifts in the American economy. For example, when gas prices reached an
unprecedented $5 a gallon, Americans began to change their driving habits, but only modestly. e
reason is that gas was not nearly expensive enough, and it didn’t remain expensive.
Even with a carbon tax, however, change will probably not come swiftly enough to prevent us from
passing the tipping points from which there is no return to life as we know it. If, for example, an
improbable carbon tax were passed today that doubled the price of electricity in America, it seems
likely that we would only modify our behavior to the degree that we did when gas prices doubled,
which is to say, not nearly enough. Conservation, at least as we know it now, is simply not enough.
In fact, conservation as we know it is actually counterproductive. In the fall of 2009, Utah climate
scientist Tim Garrett published an article in the journal Climatic Change showing that conserving
energy promotes economic growth, which leads to the consumption of more energy and therefore the
production of more greenhouse gases.46 Garrett’s paradoxical conclusion is that conserving energy
promotes climate change. Talk about cognitive dissonance!
Cognitive dissonance is good, though, if it forces us to think more clearly. Garrett’s article has
certainly given me food for thought. My reaction to Garrett, after due reflection, is threefold. First,
46
“Are ere Basic Physical Constraints on Future Anthropogenic Emissions of Carbon Dioxide?” Climatic Change 21
November 2009, available online at www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf.
Garrett puts a scientific face on a fact that conservationists have known for a long time: we can’t
conserve our way out of climate change. We need far more radical transformation.
Second, the deeper question is whether energy conservation, though clearly not enough, is
nonetheless worthwhile, even essential. Before examining that issue however, I first of all want to
address those on the political Right who deny that climate change is real or human-caused and who
see in Tim Garrett’s work a scientific justification for their refusal to embrace energy conservation
and alternative energy. Far from providing ammunition for this attitude, Garrett’s message is that
conservation is good for the economy. It’s the energy equivalent of increased worker productivity. If
you can produce more with less or even the same with less, you increase the efficiency of your
business, creating a greater margin for profit. So, as billionaire George Soros has been saying for
years, truly clean forms of energy such as wind, solar, and geothermal could be the motor of the
world’s economy. Republicans, therefore, of all people, should embrace clean energy and energy
efficiency as tools to promote growth, which is after all their highest good.
What Garrett has given us is a gift like the gifts the Greek gods were accused of giving, a gift such as
Pandora, that comes with a strong consumer warning. Tim’s gift is a Zen slap in the face, a wake up
call to reality. And, reality has a way of being uncomfortable. For far too long, environmental
organizations like the Sierra Club have been behaving like good corporate citizens and urging
eminently reasonable, responsible, and, as it turns out, remunerative actions like “conservation” in
the form of replacing lightbulbs, caulking windows, and buying efficient appliances. But that
approach, as Garrett observes, while it salves our conscience and makes us more efficient has done
nothing to stop our progression toward climate catastrophe.
At some level, we knew all of this before Tim Garrett had the temerity to point it out. For the last
decade at least, environmentalists have seen that the incremental, evolutionary, no- or low-impact
measures deemed to be “reasonable” aren’t working. We’ve seen this, but denied the implications.
We’ve also been living in denial about the fact that as long as economies and populations continue to
grow, anything other than the total and immediate replacement of fossil-fuel-based power with truly
clean alternatives is as good as nothing. e evidence of our denial is greenwash, or should I say
hogwash, such as Barack Obama’s voluntary 17% reductions over 2005 levels by 2020. e evidence
of our denial is climate stalemate of the sort that made the Copenhagen climate talks an utter failure.
Finally, then, and here I part company with Garrett: we need a new vocabulary and a new ethic.
What we’ve been engaged in isn’t so much conserving as economizing, half measures concerned first
and foremost with the bottom line. For example, the EPA, with the full blessing of environmental
groups, has encouraged the creation of the “Energy Star” brand of appliances and even homes that
are more energy efficient. e pitch of the EPA is to the budget-conscious consumer in all of us. We
should caulk windows and add insulation so as to reduce heat loss and save money. We should turn
down the temperature on our thermostats and water heaters so as to reduce oil and natural gas
consumption and save money. We should install Energy Star appliances to reduce power use and save
money, and so on. ese are all reasonable, cost-wise things to do. And they do save energy, and
therefore reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But for all that, this isn’t real conservation. ese efforts
reduce the harm the we cause by our lifestyle but they do not eliminate it. Real conservation is about
eliminating the harm. If your lifestyle is unsustainable because it consumes more resources than the
environment can handle, slowing the rate of consumption will not prevent you from ultimately
crashing and burning. You’ll just do so a little later than you might have otherwise. True conservation
is about preventing the crash and burn altogether.
Here is the reality of our lifestyle in America. We consume four to five earths’ worth of resources. As
a model for the world, this clearly is not a lifestyle the world can live with, yet at the moment this is
the lifestyle the world is emulating. China wants the American dream, and so do India, Africa, and
Latin America. Long before they get there, the biosphere is going to collapse. Clearly, even if
Americans conserved 25 to 50% across the board relative to present levels, and we’re nowhere near
that kind of number despite the EPA and the Sierra Club, it would not be enough. Our “reasonable,”
piecewise, economizing approach will therefore not work in the long run, and it cannot therefore be
regarded as true conservation, which presupposes that you’re doing things in such a way that you at a
minimum maintain the present biological status quo.
So, what would a truly conservative approach to energy use look like? Well, instead of looking for
ways to reduce the electricity required for air conditioning, we would eliminate the need for it
altogether. And this is absolutely possible today. rough intelligent design that incorporates “passive
solar” ideas and good engineering, it is possible to build homes that do not require any air
conditioning even in hot climates. In fact, this has been possible for a long time. I have been in old
pioneer adobe homes here in Utah that are comfortable in midsummer without the use of any hightech engineering. e same kind of radical, but often technologically simple solution is available for
heating. ere are towns in Germany today where people live in homes that require no heating or air
conditioning at all.47 In winter, they retain latent heat that is generated by household appliances,
computers, TVs, showers, baths, and the bodies of the occupants. In really frigid areas where latent
heating cannot deliver enough warmth, geothermal heat pumps could be used. ese can both heat
and air condition homes and provide hot water using a tiny fraction of the electricity required for
conventional systems, and the small amount of electricity needed could be provided by a limited
solar panel array that would not add prohibitive costs to home construction. ese are radical and
yet eminently doable changes that would be part of a truly conservative lifestyle. Such changes would
bring about dramatic greenhouse gas reductions that mere economizing has not.
ere is, in other words, a way out of Tim Garrett’s paradox of “conservation.” e solution to the
paradox is to realize that what Garrett regards as conservation isn’t conservation at all but false
economy, and that there is a form of conservation capable of achieving radical results. is true
47
“No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses.’” New York Times, 12/26/2008, available online at http://
www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?_r=1.
conservation also won’t single-handedly get us out of climate catastrophe, but it could get us well on
the way, and it could do so quickly. If, for example, the federal government or state and city
governments were to pass zero-energy requirements for heating and air conditioning on all new
homes, we would see instantaneous and significant reductions in energy use. If governments
mandated zero-energy retrofits whenever existing homes are sold, we would get an even bigger bump.
Nonetheless, Americans especially have turned their back on such alternatives, sometimes out of
ignorance, sometimes out of greed and short-sighted “economy,” sometimes out of sheer bloody
mindedness. I recall a recent letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, written by a man who was
outraged by the world’s “Lights Out” initiative, in which people were asked voluntarily to turn off
their lights for one evening. Even the LDS Church complied. But the writer of the letter, who thinks
that climate change is a hoax, turned on every light in his home in protest. e great tragedy of our
time is that self-serving Republicans have politicized the issue of climate change and whipped up
public frenzy to a point that people, like the writer of that letter, simply cannot see what is staring
them in the face. Real change on the climate front, like real change on so many other fronts, is
stalled by a morally bankrupt political system whose leaders cannot rise above their own self-interest
and who are bound by their own self-imposed ideological straightjackets. So, how do Americans
break this impasse and start moving forward? How do we turn away from disaster?
IV
‫וְאָזְנַי מַמְצִיאוׂת יוׂם יוׂם קוׂל צַעֲֵדי מְבַׂשֵר‬
Day by day my ears invent the steps of a messenger of good tidings.
— Yehuda Amichai48
As I see things, one group, and perhaps the only group, capable of breaking this impasse and forcing
radical change is our churches. America’s churches are a solution in several ways. First, action by
churches to meet their own climate D-day would in itself be a real step forward. e LDS Church,
for example, is one of the largest builders and furnishers of buildings in the United States outside the
federal government. It could single-handedly change the economics of solar power and geothermal
heating and air-conditioning systems in the U.S. e LDS Church is also one of the country’s largest
food producers. It is the country’s largest producer of nuts (no pun intended), and it is one of the
largest ranching operations, with 500,000 acres of ranch land in Florida alone. is is a church with
the potential to make markets. is is a church with the potential to bring new, clean energy
businesses to life. And there are other churches with this kind of scale, who acting singly, but
hopefully together, could transform the political and business climate surrounding the issue of
climate change.
Our churches can be catalysts of change, agents that cause other agents to undergo radical
transformation. For a conservative organization like the LDS Church to make a commitment to
energy independence within ten years, which is something I proposed to then counselor omas S.
Monson back in early 2007 (I’ve since cut the suggested time period to five years in a long proposal
that I sent President Monson in Jan. 2010), would send a shock wave through the Republican Party,
48
From his “Jerusalem 1967.” Hebrew original and English translation in Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems. Riverdaleon-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1992, 46. Trans. mine.
which has chosen, rather strangely given the potential that clean energy has to revitalize the U.S
economy, to align itself with dirty and dead-end industries such as coal and oil. Today’s Republicans
have turned their back on their own tradition of conservation and environmental responsibility, as
represented by figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, who created the National Forest Service as we know
it, and Richard Nixon, who created the EPA and who approved an important extension to the Clean
Air Act (1970) and the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments (1972). As a catalyst, the
Church could help to bring the Republican Party to a realization of its public responsibility.
And, last but not least, speaking of Teddy Roosevelt, churches can be the bully pulpit that convinces
the mass of ordinary Americans to change their personal lives. I don’t think that I exaggerate when I
say that if the LDS Church, for example, were to go green tonight, we would see a different set of
leaders in Washington tomorrow. And, we would find a radically different approach to climate
change here in the West. ere is indeed much that a church like this could do to change the world,
and to be that Zion on the hill, that city of light that a world in darkness needs.
What we need today from our churches is the message of a radically different way of living, a new
“kingdom” based on notions of true sustainability. Practically speaking, the message we need to hear
from our churches is that standing between us and everything we want for ourselves and our children
is the mortal sin of climate change, from which we will either turn away now or perish. And what we
need to see from our churches is action to back up their words.
e good news about climate change is that it is, at the moment at least, a solvable problem. We
have the knowledge and the technology and the money to fix this problem now. All we need is will
and imagination. In view of the moral bankruptcy of our political process and of corporate America,
I can think of no more critical mobilizer of public will and no better seed communities for
imaginative role modeling than our churches.
But, while I hope to see every church engaged in an all-hands-on-deck effort, there is one in
particular that I speak to here. Of the many religious communities that I could point to with some
hope, none is more pre-adapted, in theory anyway, to the present crisis than the Mormons, a people
who espouse the ideal of becoming one in heart and mind and who have already bound themselves
under sacred covenant to create a place in the here and now fit for God to inhabit. If there is any
church whose active involvement is needed now to change the world, it is ours. e world needs to
see the gospel of Zion in action.
And so does the Church, for while the Church cherishes the Zion ideal in theory it does not do so in
practice. One has only to look at the Salt Lake Valley during a winter inversion, or drive down State
Street any day of the year, or look through the barriers of gated communities of millionaire Saints to
see this. Now, you may say that winter inversions are a force of nature beyond our control. But it is
not the inversions that create air pollution. We do, and therefore we can solve this problem if we
choose to. Doing so will not be easy. It will mean, for example, dramatically reducing our
dependence on automobiles in the Salt Lake valley. at is a big but not insuperable challenge. It
could be done by greatly expanding our present public transportation system. It could be done
through negative economic incentives such as significantly increasing the gasoline tax and using the
proceeds to fund clean transportation initiatives. It could be done by making public transportation
free. All of this can be done, but, as with climate change, which is Salt Lake’s air pollution problem
on a global scale, there is little political will to do it. e bottom line is that Mormons in Salt Lake
breathe terribly polluted air because they choose to do so, in part through action and in part through
inaction. And the Church is as guilty as anyone in allowing this state of affairs to continue. Indeed,
because the Church is in a unique position to influence public opinion and legislative action, it is
more guilty than most. Where much is given, much is expected.
e Church would perhaps answer that this is a “political” problem, and as such not a proper
domain on which to speak or act. But this excuse does not convince. It’s true that living sustainably
has become a politicized issue. But that is not the same thing as a political issue. ere is no partisan
necessity for Republicans and Democrats to disagree about cleaning up our air. Everyone needs this,
as they need food and shelter. As necessities of ordinary life, indeed as the foundation of life itself,
clean air, clean water, and healthy food are not political issues. None of our environmental problems
are in fact political, although they are politicized. In any event, however, the mandate of the Church
is to create a place in the here and now that is fit for God to inhabit, regardless of political
complications. And Salt Lake City today is far from Zion. Are we not ashamed of our dirty air when
we bring visitors here? And if we’re ashamed of this filth before mere tourists, should we not be a
hundred times more stricken as we present this valley to God for his approval?
By choosing not to get involved, the Church abnegates its moral responsibility to be a good shepherd
not only for a spiritual flock but for flesh and blood mortals who will breathe and be killed by the
dirty air the Church chooses not to speak about and act upon. According to the Utah Physicians for
a Healthy Environment, a thousand people along the Wasatch Front die prematurely each year as a
result of the dirty air we breathe.49 eir deaths will of course not be attributed to air pollution. e
cause of death will be pneumonia, asthma, or heart attack. And in this way, even our death is treated
as an externalized cost, the ultimate expression of the degree to which our society turns life into
money. “You can have anything in this world for money,” including a free conscience.
Sadly, the list of ways in which the Church is failing in its pastoral responsibility is long. I’ll give just
one more example. In December 2009, my father, Ed Firmge, Sr., sent a letter to the First Presidency
requesting that they take a strong stance against the storage of depleted uranium in Utah. ere are
many reasons why the Church should do this. First, there is the fact that without such action Utah
will in all likelihood become the dumping ground of choice for all of America’s depleted uranium,
49
UPHE has compiled a sobering list of studies that demonstrate the many, often deadly, effects associated with dirty air:
http://uphe.org/library.php. Perhaps the most sobering revelation of these studies is that some of the effects are genetic.
We are raising a generation of children who will pass on the consequences of our neglect of their health to every
subsequent generation. e fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth stand on edge.
700,000 tons of which are waiting a for a disposal site as I write this. anks to Energy Solutions
and inaction across the board in Utah, Utah is now the dump for 99% of America’s low-level nuclear
waste. Energy Solutions has recently begun importing depleted uranium in quantity, and no one in
Utah at present, beyond a few activists such as my friends at HEAL, is protesting. ere is the fact
that depleted uranium, unlike low-level waste, becomes more radioactive over time. ere’s the fact
that, again unlike low-level waste, it will remain radioactive for billions of years. ere’s the fact that
the place where depleted uranium will be stored, Energy Solutions’ Clive facility in Utah’s West
Desert, lies at the bottom of a lakebed that has been filled with water many times in the last few tens
of thousands of years and that is likely to be filled again, climate change notwithstanding, at some
point in the next few tens of thousands of years. As a result, what is misleadingly billed as an isolated,
arid, and geologically “safe” site, will be destroyed by wave action, inundated, and dispersed through
the length and breadth of the next Lake Bonneville and beyond. Lake Bonneville came to an end
14,500 years ago when over three hundred feet of it broke through Red Rock Pass near the UtahIdaho border sending the largest flood in North American history tearing through the Snake River
plain to the Pacific Ocean. Red Rock Pass remains a possible outlet for future Lake Bonnevilles. e
deadly legacy of Energy Solutions and of popular LDS greed (Energy Solutions has bought favor
from about three quarters of the Utah legislature) and official LDS inaction could therefore find itself
spread over not just the entirety of western Utah but also southern Idaho, and the Columbia River
basin. e greatest effect, however, will certainly be the blighting of the eastern half of the Great
Basin, Brigham Young’s kingdom. And we are not talking about destroying a marginal salt water
ecosystem. Lake Bonneville was a fresh water lake, and its successor will also likely be a fresh water
lake, which could be the basis for a thriving desert society in the Great Basin, but not if it is filled
with radioactive waste.
Ed Sr. had good reason to hope that the Church would be willing to act on this threat to the wellbeing of our region’s future inhabitants. It was he, after all, who singlehandedly convinced the
Church years ago to speak up against the MX missile system proposed for this same area.50 And it
was this statement against the MX missile system that provided the precedent and the conceptual
framework for the Church’s 2006 statement against the storage of high-level nuclear waste in the
West Desert.
e First Presidency’s response to dad’s request this time — how much things have changed in 30
years — was that the Church cannot act on every such issue and that its principle mission is to teach
the gospel of Jesus Christ. is is certainly among the oddest statements I’ve ever heard from the
Church, because it juxtaposes preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to stewardship of the earth and
care for the physical as well as spiritual well-being of its inhabitants. To my way of thinking, these
things are inseparable. How can the gospel of Jesus Christ be separated from anything that is good,
much less anything that is essential to the well-being of God’s children? Is not our physical health an
essential part of the life God intends for us? Is not insuring our physical health what the Word of
Wisdom is all about, this revelation which more than any other Mormons point to as evidence of
Joseph Smith’s inspiration? And as for the notion that the Church has other priorities, I would
assume that if the Church can find time for its crusade to protect Utahns from booze, it might also
find some time to speak about the dangers of nuclear waste, air pollution, and mercury in our water
and food. While preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Church somehow finds time and means to
rebuild downtown Salt Lake City to the tune of five years of concentrated work and a price tag of $1
billion or more. So, you’d think that the Church could take a few minutes to write a statement about
cherishing the earth rather than treating it as a waste dump. e $1 billion that the Church will
spend on downtown Salt Lake City will be long forgotten and unimportant a thousand years from
now. But the depleted uranium (and mercury and CO2?) that the Church, by its deliberate inaction,
allows to pollute our earth, will still be here. roughout their millennial presence, they will threaten
the life of our descendants.
50
Edwin B. Firmage, “MX: Democracy, Religion, and the Rule of Law — My Journey.” Utah Law Review 2004: 1,
13-56.
By refusing to tackle these temporal problems head on, the Church effectively tells God that it’s up
to him to solve the problems that we have created. is is the height of arrogance. It is also fraught
with danger, for when has God ever been willing to let us off the hook because the problems we have
created are big and hairy? Hasn’t it rather been his modus operandi to let us perish when things reach
such a point? Is that not the lesson of Genesis and of the Prophets? e lesson of Scripture is that
being God’s chosen people means that you have a heavier burden of responsibility. Yours must always
be the high road, the hard road. And if you are not cut out for such hard work, God will find
someone else who is. I would therefore say to Church leadership, look around you and identify the
seemingly intractable problems that politicians shy away from and that our political process seems
unable to handle. ose are your problems. If our economic system, for example, can’t eliminate
poverty, then that is your problem. If the political process can’t deal with climate change, then that is
your problem, and you need to solve it. In God’s scheme of things, there is no such thing as a
political problem. ere are only problems, and they are all moral.
e Church may reply, “Well, Brother Firmage, by that logic the Church should be involved in
almost everything.” My reply is, “Absolutely.” at is what building a Zion society is all about. As in
biblical times and Brigham’s day, there can be no ultimate distinction between sacred or religious
space and secular space. It’s all sacred. It’s all important. I say this knowing that there will be
occasions when a publicly engaged Church will do or say things that offend me. So be it. Unlike my
liberal friends who would just as soon see the Church shrink into self-imposed exile in its own land,
I would welcome a vigorous, vocal, and bold official Mormon presence in Utah’s day to day life, as
was the case in Brigham Young’s day. e retreat of the Church into its own self-imposed
insignificance on most temporal issues is a cause for sorrow, not rejoicing. All I would ask of a
socially reengaged Church is that it act prophetically. Brethren, let your tradition and your Scripture
dictate your course of action. If you do that, I have confidence that you will be more right than
wrong in what you do.
In speaking and acting prophetically on issues of the day, the Church will in fact be ceasing to play
political games. At present, the Church is perceived — accurately, I believe — as an extension of
Right Wing American politics. e Church officially denies the connection, and encourages
members to vote their conscience. en it turns around and installs the former head of the
Republican party in Utah as the editor of the Church-owned Deseret News. One could cite a hundred
other examples of actions that belie the Church’s professed political neutrality. e Church is also big
business. As my mission president once remarked to me about some issue we had been discussing,
“It’s just business, Elder Firmage, and the Church is big business.” To be a big business in America
today is by definition to be political. e Church’s statement, therefore, that it doesn’t get involved in
political issues is patent nonsense.
If Church leadership truly wants to avoid being “political,” then it needs to start being prophetic.
e biblical prophet (Hebrew nabî’, Greek prophetes, both meaning “spokesman”), as defined by the
example of Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jesus, is not a fortune teller but a speaker of the
truth, the truth of the responsibility of leaders to principle, of people to principle, and of leaders to
people. e biblical prophets spoke truth to power and truth to the people, without consideration of
the consequences, without worrying whether they were being political or politic. Not surprisingly,
because they told the truth, the prophets to a man were always in conflict with the political and
economic establishment. Abraham Heschel writes of them that “they are some of the most disturbing
people who have ever lived.”51 Samuel, for example, attacked the very notion of kingship, which was
the basis of government in most of the ancient world (1 Sam. 8:11-18). at may not sound radical
51
e Prophets. New York: Harper, 1975, II:xi (first published 1962). A full discussion of ways in which the prophets
were disturbing would be beyond the scope of this article. But take as an example the divine injunction to Hosea first to
marry a prostitute and have children with her (Hos. 1:2) and then to marry an adulteress (3:1), to symbolize Israel’s
infidelity to her covenant with God. Or take the injunction to Ezekiel to lie on his side for 390 days and make a meager
meal of water and bread baked with human feces in plain sight of people in the street to illustrate the fate that awaits the
people (Ezek. 4:9-15; when Ezekiel himself protests at the offensiveness of using human feces, God relents and lets him
use cow dung instead). ese men not only spoke uncomfortable truths but also illustrated them in ways that people
then as now would have found deeply offensive. ese men, who define what it means to be a prophet, would have
laughed at the notion that “political” issues were off the table. No subject was out of bounds for them, and no degree of
outrageous behavior to illustrate their point off-limits.
to us descendants of George Washington and omas Jefferson, but it was to many in the ancient
world. In most places, such talk would have ended your life on the spot. If we substitute the word
“president” or “executive” for “king,” Samuel’s radicalism may start to become evident even to us, for
the abuses he cites were not and are not unique to kings. Samuel could just as well be speaking of
any powerful, centralized government or organization. His condemnation of economic exploitation
would certainly apply to today’s high-handed American corporations that treat their employees like
serfs. Employees at Walmart, for example, had to sue the company for the right to go to the
bathroom!52 ey had to fight to get even modest health insurance. And, like generations of
American workers before them, they have had to overcome bullying to form unions. I have no doubt
about what Samuel or Hosea or Jeremiah would say to the CEO and shareholders of Walmart. In
1965, American CEOs earned 24 times the salary of the average employee. In 2005, that ratio was
262. At its peak, before 9/11 and the bursting of the mortgage bubble, the ratio was as high as 300.53
I have no doubt what Amos would say to the heads of the Fortune 50. But when was the last time
you heard a General Conference sermon about the evils of Walmart or Enron or AIG or Bank of
America or GM? When did you last hear an apostle, a modern prophet, attack the Republican Party
for its opposition to an increase in the minimum wage? I could go on at great length, but my basic
point is clear: to live in today’s society and refuse to become involved in the messy issues of daily life
is in and of itself a political decision of the worst kind. And it is not the sort of decision that the
biblical prophets would have approved of. In disclaiming the world of “political issues,” most of
which in fact have nothing to do with politics, the Church thus winks at abuses of power that have
always been the primary focus of prophetic action. How dare we, then, preach the value of justice
while we ignore the injustice that will be visited upon the world’s poor by climate change. How dare
we talk about love while our way of life guarantees that hundreds of millions will perish. e God
52
See the scathing exposé of Walmart and other American companies that use minimum wage labor in Barbara
Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
53
“CEO-to-Worker Pay Imbalance Grows,” Economic Policy Institute, at http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/
webfeatures_snapshots_20060621, visited 12/31/09.
who spoke through Hosea said, “I have hewn them in pieces by the prophets; I have slain them by
the words of my mouth” (Hos. 6:5). e words of our present prophets wouldn’t cut through butter
much less bone or sinew. e God they speak for is a silent one.
To preach a gospel of Jesus Christ without social and economic, and, yes, political consequences is a
contradiction in terms. And, if the prophets of the Bible are to be believed, it is an offense to God.
Isn’t this the plain meaning of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37)? Who are the real
villains of this story? e priest and the Levite, the General Authorities of their day. Who is the hero?
e outcast Samaritan, the man without a temple recommend. And what is the fault of the priest
and the Levite? It isn’t something that they did. It isn’t even something that they thought. It is
something they didn’t do, and didn’t even think to do. e priest and the Levite are models of orthodox
belief and conventional rectitude, models, in other words, of what the Church today would call “the
gospel.” ey think the right thoughts and believe the right beliefs. ey also do the right things, at
least as minimally prescribed in Scripture and tradition. ey observe the Sabbath, and do their
temple work. ey pay their tithing. In short, these are not bad men pretending to be good. By
ordinary standards, they are good. ese men would have no problem getting a temple recommend.
Indeed, they are the ones who would be giving out the recommends. But in Jesus’s story, they’re the
bad boys nonetheless. Of course, none of this is said in so many words. But what sense would the
story have if in fact the priest and the Levite were bad men or obvious hypocrites? So what if a jerk
walks past an injured man? You’d expect that of a jerk. You wouldn’t expect it of a General Authority.
at is Jesus’s point. In Jesus’s kingdom, goodness that ends at the boundary of the conventional is
not what’s wanted. If all you can muster is conventional goodness, you’re not part of this kingdom.
In Jesus’s day, as in ours, righteousness was conventionally measured in terms of orthodoxy and
religious observance. But in Jesus’s teaching, righteousness has little to do with either. While Jesus
does not reject orthodoxy or customary observance, the thrust of his teaching is that these are not
enough. Never once does Jesus tell a parable about the importance of proper belief. He seems
similarly uninterested in customary forms of ritual and worship. He does show interest in basic
morality. But this is typically just a starting point for uncovering a deeper kind of morality that his
hearers are ignoring, something that goes beyond the conventional. “And, behold, one came and said
unto him, Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto
him...if thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments. He saith unto him, Which? Jesus said,
ou shalt do no murder, ou shalt not commit adultery, ou shalt not steal, ou shalt not bear
false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother: and, ou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. e
young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth up: what lack I yet? Jesus said
unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt
have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he
went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions” (Matt. 19: 16-22). If Jesus were speaking to us
today, I suspect he would want to know what the Church is not doing. Or, to put it positively, what
the Church is doing that goes beyond the ordinary. If other good Christians are doing X, what more
than X is the LDS Church doing? And God forbid that the Church should have to confess that it
isn’t even managing X.
Like the Jewish church of Jesus’s day, ours is zealous in belief and zealous in conventional observance.
It spends millions, for example, sending its young men and young women and old men and old
women into the world to preach the gospel. e Church spends vast amounts of time and money
trying to get people to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that he restored the
gospel of Jesus Christ in these latter days. It works hard to get people to believe that the Book of
Mormon is Scripture. It cares a great deal that people recognize today’s successors of Joseph Smith as
prophets, seers, and revelators. is preaching and believing is what the First Presidency apparently
regards as the purpose of the Church. at is all fine and good. But to what end is all of this earnest
believing and preaching? If it doesn’t result in a dramatically different way of living, who cares what
people believe? In the kingdom of brick and mortar that the prophets preached and that was our
ancestors’ version of Mormonism as well, what mattered was less what you believed than what you
did and what you and others who shared your faith did together. What mattered was what happened
after the missionizing was done and people gathered to Zion. e point was ultimately not to tell
people about the gospel, but to show it to them by living it. e point was to build Zion.
And how do today’s ordinary Mormons, the ever so industrious evangelizers, live? Are we as a people
significantly better or indeed any better than the rest of America? Do we — I have to chuckle as I
write this — break the bounds of the conventional? Does Salt Lake City, Utah, distinguish itself
when compared with Portland, Oregon, or Madison, Wisconsin, or Boulder, Colorado, or any other
pleasant, well-run city in America? If 50% of Salt Lake City and 60% of Utah is LDS, and if Latterday Saints have, as we say, a saving truth, where is the living manifestation of this in Salt Lake City
today? Are we a living example of Zion? To this observer, at least, members of the Church today,
from top to bottom, talk like saints but live like Americans — like typical thoughtless, careless, selfabsorbed Americans, who have done more than any other people to bring the world to the brink of
catastrophe. We profess a belief in the kingdom of God, but, apart from missionizing, have done
nothing since the passing of the generation of first converts to make this kingdom a reality. For those
Saints, there was no dichotomy between preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and living it politically,
economically, and socially. For Brigham Young and his generation, there was no such thing as a
“political” issue that the Church could not and should not tackle. Economics was not off-limits as a
province of Church action. Social reform was not taboo. Indeed, radical economics and social change
were an essential part of Brigham’s gospel. For Brigham, everything had spiritual meaning, whether
you were talking about getting your endowments, darning your socks, or buying supplies from the
Church-owned co-op. Nor would Brigham have thought it an untouchable “political” issue to attack
the government and local business for wanting to turn his Great Basin kingdom or the earth into a
dumping ground. Everything that happened in the community of the Saints was subject matter fit for
the Church to speak and act upon. Brigham too believed that he lived in the last days, and this belief
was cause for urgency, not just to preach the gospel, as the Church does today, but to build a brick
and mortar kingdom that would last a thousand years. Is there anything in contemporary Mormon
society, except the temples that Brigham built, that is likely to last a thousand years? At the rate we’re
destroying things, we won’t last a century.
Today’s Mormon reality is that as a people we’re just average, unforgivably average, if you believe that
of those to whom much is given, much is expected. is is the inconvenient truth of contemporary
Mormonism. As a commercial institution, the Church has unquestionably succeeded. It belongs, for
example, by many estimates, to the Fortune 50. Not bad for an organization that was on the brink of
collapse in 1890. But the Church is not called to be a commercial success; it is called to be a model
of societal transformation. As a force for such transformation, even on the scale of Salt Lake City
much less the world, the Church has unquestionably failed. And, it has failed in spite of massive
missionary work. Why? Because when the missionizing is over, people are still untransformed. eir
conversion is a kind of head game only. Once I was a Democrat, now I’m a Republican. Once I was
Catholic, now I’m a Mormon. Conversion is an ideological shell game, because it is principally about
changing one’s beliefs. Until the conversion of the head becomes something deeper, something that
gets people out of their heads and out into the world, the Church is kicking against the pricks.
e tragedy of contemporary Mormonism, and the reason I think that it will ultimately fail unless
there is a course correction, is that the Church has chosen to withdraw into disembodied belief,
belief without social consequences, except in the bedroom. at is the end of Mormon uniqueness.
As I noted at the beginning, what made early Mormons distinctive was our social gospel, the belief
that we are called not only to live pious lives but to build a new world order. For our ancestors, this
was not just ideology, but a battle plan for constant, concrete, world-shattering action. It was this
vision and this kind of action that brought early Mormons into conflict with their neighbors in
Kirtland, in Independence, in Nauvoo, and in Salt Lake City. at vision and that willingness to be
different has all but disappeared as Mormons have assimilated into mainstream American society and
bought into the devilish notion that a Church’s proper role is limited to advice on “morality.”
Of all of Mormonism’s so-called “political” issues, the ones today’s ideologically obsessed and
sociologically inert Church seeks to avoid, none cries out for action like climate change. In its
reluctance to become engaged and in its silence on this issue, the Church shows how far it has come,
or, more accurately, regressed, from the brick and mortar gospel of its first generation. e Church’s
inertia in responding to climate change is a tragedy, not only because of the unimaginable human
suffering that will result but also because a bold, vigorous response to climate change could be such a
force for positive, spiritual transformation within the Church. For Americans, who generally live
wildly beyond their means, the social revolution that will be required to prevent climate change and
other ecological disasters that are in the offing will be the greatest shock we have ever experienced.
But Mormons have at least the cultural memory of a radically different way of life, the sort of life
that preventing climate change must entail. If any group of people in America can adapt to this way
of life, it is the Mormons. If we will embrace this opportunity, we will find that the exigency of
climate change is the greatest blessing in our history, for in our return to first principles lies the key
to the future success of the Church.
e key to success as a transformed and transformative organization is precisely that old-fashioned
Zion ideal that our ancestors lived and died for and that Saints in the interim have forgotten about
in their pursuit of comfortable American mediocrity. e LDS Church, as another moralistic,
conservative, evangelical religion, much less as a successful business, has nothing to offer the world.
As crass as this sounds in the context of speaking about Zion, let’s look at the issue from the point of
view of a marketing plan. e Church’s success will be limited by the degree to which it looks and
feels like the other religious “products” on the market. e more it does so, the lower, ironically, its
appeal. For the Church to succeed in a religious marketplace where people have many options to
choose from, the Church must define for itself a niche. ere is a superabundance of groups that
preach family values. ere are plenty of groups that are only too happy to persecute gays and
lesbians. ere are groups that teach sexual abstinence before marriage. ere are groups that have
better and more comprehensive dietary restrictions. Now, the Church can preach and practice all of
this, if it wants to, but wherein will it differentiate itself from the competition? e answer is obvious:
in its unique theology of Zion. If the Church will live that, it will become what people wanting the
truly good life will seek out. It will in fact and not just in word be the ensign on the hill, the beacon
in the darkness. And it will succeed.
Here, then, is the great paradox for Latter-day Saints. We can continue with our headlong
assimilation into the American religious mainstream and fail, or we can buck the system and succeed.
We can continue to eliminate every vestige of the church of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, from
polygamy to communitarianism to bold ideas about the nature of man and God, or we can embrace
the past that we’ve been fleeing since 1890 in our desperate attempt to convince Americans that we’re
just like they are. It so happens, however, that those long-discarded and now denigrated ideas like
communitarianism are in fact exactly what the world needs. Our poster boys, Mitt Romney and
Glenn Beck, can’t say enough bad things about “redistribution of wealth,” but that is exactly what
Brigham Young preached as an essential foundation of a Zion society. Until and unless we are willing
to embrace that inconvenient truth and the other radical social inconveniences of our particular
gospel, we have nothing to offer the world.
So, to summarize thus far, in climate change, the Church faces a seemingly intractable problem that
the political and business world cannot or will not tackle. It’s a problem with both temporal and
spiritual dimensions. It’s a problem that has Apocalypse written all over it. is looks like a job
tailor-made for prophets to handle. As the greatest challenge that our species has ever encountered, it
is also potentially the greatest gift we have ever received.
us, I come to this conclusion: it is in how the Church responds to climate change that the future of the
Church will be determined. I don’t mean simply that the Church, like every other institution, is
threatened by climate change. I mean that the present crisis is the ultimate turning point for the
Church, the moment in which it will at last start to live up to its theology or shrink into irrelevancy.
As the reality of climate change begins to dawn on an unprepared and sleepy America, the Right,
which has invested its entire energy in opposing efforts to prevent climate change, will lose its final
vestige of relevance. Churches, which by their action or inaction have allowed the agenda of the
Right to prevent needed social transformation, will be caught with their pants down and their
peckers dangling in the wind, a particularly unflattering pose for those who claim to be seers. For
such self-proclaimed watchmen on the wall, this will be their ultimate humiliation. e choice
before the Church now could not be clearer. It can continue on its present course as the kingdom of
devout inertia or it can return to its roots as the kingdom of faith in action.
According to LDS theology, we live in the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times, when all of God’s
purposes for earth and her inhabitants come to fruition. Chief among these, as far as Latter-day
Saints are concerned, is the divine injunction to build God’s kingdom here and now. is is not a
kingdom of words and ideas and moral concepts alone but a flesh-and-blood kingdom of
transformed people living their principles. And until such a society exists, until we build it, the
heavenly kingdom of God, or, as Mormons know it, the City of Enoch, cannot return to earth.
"And righteousness will I send down out of heaven...and righteousness...will I cause to sweep
the earth...to gather out mine elect...unto a...Holy City...and it shall be called Zion...
"And the Lord said unto Enoch: en shalt thou and all thy city meet them there...and we
will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other;
"And there shall be mine abode..." (Moses 7:62-64)
V
With this long prologue, I’d like now to offer a few elementary ideas about how the Church could
respond appropriately to climate change in ways that are consistent with the its theology and history,
and which could be the first baby steps toward building a Zion society in the 21st century.
1. Establish a five-year plan to make the Church energy-independent through the use of solar panels and
geothermal heating and air-conditioning systems. is plan would also include steps to make all new
church buildings maximally energy-efficient, thus reducing and even eliminating the requirements
for heating and air-conditioning. Among the changes to future church buildings would be extensive
use of “passive solar” design principles such as orienting buildings to minimize exposure to summer
sun and to maximize winter sun, designing interior spaces to create convection currents (thus
minimizing the need for fans), use of solar lighting, landscaping that focuses on providing shade in
summer and sun exposure in winter, etc. Behavioral changes would include greater use of buildings
during the day to take advantage of sunlight and minimize electricity requirements for lighting. e
plan would also outline stringent energy (and water) conservation measures to begin immediately.
Energy independence is not only a matter of protecting society from catastrophic climate change,
but a principle of self-sufficiency that is appropriate at any time. And, it is a principle of prudence,
when our electrical grid is vulnerable to volatile energy prices natural disasters, and terrorism.
2. Make this energy-independence plan public. Never has there been a greater need for visible
leadership. e Church as a conservative organization can do this better than any other. e Israelis
have a saying that, “Only Menachem Begin could go to Cairo.” It is certainly an irony that it was not
the progressive Labor Party that finally brought an end to Israel’s decades-long war with Egypt but
the party led by a man whom many considered little better than a Jewish terrorist. With progress on
climate change being blocked by almost monolithic opposition from Republicans at both the local
and the national level, I believe that only a powerful conservative organization can break the
deadlock.
Quite apart from the need to alter the political landscape, however, public action by the Church is
vital for the sake of its membership. If this and the other changes proposed here are to help kindle a
recommitment among members to build a Zion society, then the Church’s acts of leadership must be
bold and they must be public. e men in the pulpit need to speak with the energy and the
pointedness that Brigham Young did. at kind of energy has been missing from our pulpits for a
very long time.
3. Create an office of sustainability. e goal of this office should be to insure that the Church operates
on a 100% carbon-neutral and true-cost basis by 2020, thus more than meeting Lester Bush’s 80%
by 2020 goal. As I’ve already explained, this is not the way the Church or any other institution does
business today. As a non-profit, the Church of course has no reason to externalize costs. But to the
extent that it buys products and services from for-profit companies, the Church necessarily becomes
a party to the dishonesty that is inherent in today’s business world. In a real sense, our way of
externalizing costs is a form of living beyond our means. It is the most insidious form of “bubble”
economics, to which our society appears to be increasingly liable. True-cost accounting insures that
the Church is as honest in its dealings with the living planet as it encourages its members to be in
their day to day lives.
4. Make the existence and purpose of this office public. Only when members see that the Church itself is
committed to sustainable and honest living, will they feel compelled to make the same commitment.
In fact, as part of its publicity around this office, the Church should encourage its members to
institute similar programs in their own businesses.
5. Adopt a “Go-Organic” program for all Church and ranching operations worldwide, and make this
public. Agriculture contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions (about 18% of the total).54
e imperative for going organic derives not only from the need to prevent catastrophic climate
change (and with it the destruction of agriculture) but also from the fact that we will in any event
run out of oil in the coming century. is will force a revolution in farming whether we like it or
not, as Cuba experienced in 1990 with the sudden loss of Soviet oil. How Cuba reinvented
agriculture is a model and an inspiration.55 In Havana today, half of the food consumed in the city is
raised within city limits, and 80% of it is organic. is is a degree of true self-sufficiency that
American cities, the Mormon capital included, can only dream of. And yet, it was the norm in Utah
in the memory of people living today. As in so many respects, our sustainable future will resemble
our sustainable past more than it does the present.56
54
e percentage attributed to agriculture varies depending on what is included as “agriculture” and what is categorized
under some other heading, such as transportation or land use. At the low end of the scale, is the EPA’s 6%, which uses a
very restrictive filter for what goes in the agriculture bucket (http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads09/
GHG2007entire_report-508.pdf ). e Pew Center, using similar methodology, pegs the number slightly higher at 8%:
http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/facts_and_figures/us_emissions/usghgemsector.cfm (U.S.) e 18%
number is that of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/
2006/1000448/index.html. e difference between the high and low numbers lies in the fact that the FAO includes
emissions from all sources connected with agriculture, including transportation and land use and land change practices
(esp. deforestation), which the EPA treats under separate headings. While not applicable in all respects to the U.S., where
deforestation, for example, is not an issue, the FAO’s method is generally the more honest and accurate. Transporting
cattle, for example, is an inherent cost of today’s livestock industry. It would appear, for example, on the balance sheet of
any farm, and it should therefore be treated as an agricultural contribution separate from that of the larger transportation
sector, and so on down the line. Not to do so, again, externalizes the true environmental cost of, say, eating a hamburger
or a steak, which turns out to be quite high. ere’s a useful discussion of the issue at the University of Missouri’s
Agricultural Extension, http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G310.
55
See the documentary, e Power of Community (http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php). I cannot
recommend this extraordinary, life-changing film too highly.
56
For a fascinating look at the sustainable past that lives on in America’s Amish and Mennonite communities, see Eric
Brende, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Of particular interest is Brende’s
observation that in the 15 years that his particular community had been in existence, not one farm had failed, while oildependent, technology-heavy American farms were going out of business left and right (162). Indeed, the farmers of this
community were debt-free. Farm equipment powered by oil represents a modern farmer’s largest capital investment, and
correspondingly one of his greatest liabilities. Also of interest here is the life work of Joel Salatin, a pioneer in sustainable,
small-scale farming (http://www.polyfacefarms.com/default.aspx).
6. Reinstitute aggressive stake, ward, and home gardening programs. It isn’t only large-scale farming that
is unsustainable. It’s our very diet.57 e wisdom of the Word of Wisdom, with its counsel to eat meat
sparingly, becomes more evident every day. And yet, this, arguably the most important element of
the Word of Wisdom as regards both individual health and the environment, is not the aspect of the
Word of Wisdom that we focus on today. If we want to be healthy and to live sustainably, the core of
our diet should be what we raise ourselves, and this, for us, as for most people throughout history, is
grains, fruits, and vegetables, not meat. And Americans can do this as well as Cubans. During World
War II, for example, urban Americans planted “Victory Gardens,” where, it is estimated, we grew
40% of the food consumed nationally.58 e Church should encourage members to rip out their
lawns and create productive permaculture.
7. Establish a low-cost (i.e., at-cost) food co-op that parallels Deseret Industries. is co-op program
would provide mostly whole foods from the Church’s own farms where feasible (as in part of Utah,
California, and the Northwest) and from local organic farms where the distance to Church supplies
is prohibitive. e co-op program would also be a venue in which members could exchange their
own produce from home and community gardens. Healthy, basic foods should be accessible to
everyone in the community without having to spend a fortune. Sadly, today, “junk food” from
chains such as McDonalds is often cheaper than truly nourishing, unprocessed foods. Healthy food
is an even more fundamental necessity than clothing and the other goods that are provided by
Deseret Industries. What a wonderful thing it would be for the Church to become known as the
place where people can get back to this fundamental human value. Co-op outlets could be anything
from a Deseret Industries store to a local stake center. is is also a way for the Church to positively
57
Among the many books on this subject, I recommend the following: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food. New York:
Penguin, 2008; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: e Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Houghton Mifflin,
2001; Richard Robbins, Diet for a New America. Tiburon, CA: H. J. Kramer, 1998. Originally published 1987; Global
Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. 4th Edition. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2007.
58
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden, visited 1/19/10. In fact, Victory Gardens by other names (Potato
Patches, Liberty Gardens, Depression Relief Gardens) have been a feature of the American urban landscape for over a
hundred years. e story is beautifully told at Sidewalksprouts, http://sidewalksprouts.wordpress.com/history/vg/.
engage local communities and local skill sets everywhere. As Cubans discovered, not least of the
benefits of their urban gardening revolution was the way that it helped to foster the sense of
neighborhood community. e Church thus gets the additional benefit of strengthening and being
seen to be strengthening community. is is practical bridge building, as opposed to trying to
convince people through media alone that the Church is not divisive.
8. Reinvest in Utah agriculture. It’s vital that the Church, as the wealthiest and most powerful
organization in Utah and the one with the most at stake, help to preserve what’s left of Utah’s arable
land as a hedge against hard times and as a surety of self-sufficiency. e Church’s advocacy of
“provident living,” if it is to be meaningful, must go beyond mere penny pinching in the home. A
community that depends entirely or largely on distant farms and oil-based food distribution systems,
as ours in Utah does, is scarcely provident or self-reliant.
And even if we didn’t have environmental, health, and economic reasons to return to locally grown
food, there is a spiritual imperative. People need to be involved in raising their own food as a
principle of stewardship. We need to reconnect with the earth as the ground of being. Writing in
1947, John Widtsoe, Mormonism’s great exponent of desert agriculture, expressed the opinion that,
“e people who have descended from the pioneers still cherish the thought that the majority of the
members of the Church are farmers and hope that it may ever be so...e earnest belief in farming as
the cementing element in all social and economic progress is one of the major contributions to the
world of the people who settled the Western American deserts.”59
As an example, let’s consider Utah fruit. At the peak of production in the 1920s, Utah boasted nearly
2,000,000 fruit trees, most of them located in the stretch of land from Santaquin to Brigham City.
Of all places in the Intermountain West, it turns out, our ancestors picked the only ones where large-
59
How the Desert Was Tamed. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1947, 18, 20.
scale, sustainable fruit growing could be practiced.60 In the words of Sam Edgecomb, former head of
Utah State University’s horticulture department, “No place in Canada or the U.S. offered the
opportunities for fruit production that were offered here in Utah.”61 is unique resource is being
paved over for shopping malls that will not feed us when times get hard. And even as we plow under
the orchards, we now import apples from China and Japan. What a disgrace! What remains of this
precious land along the Wasatch Front (from Brigham City to Santaquin) should be preserved now.
And valleys once too cold for agriculture that will become prime agricultural land as climate warms
also need to be preserved. ese areas include Cache Valley, the Heber-Kamas-Coalville area, and the
corridors along I-15 and Utah Highways 24, 28 and 89, areas that even the federal government now
recognizes as the Mormon legacy.62
9. Lobby for no-growth policies in communities throughout Utah. “Growth for the sake of growth is the
ideology of the cancer cell,” as dear old Ed Abbey used to say. It makes no sense to implement energy
conservation and renewable energy efforts in part of a community only to have saved energy
swallowed up by continued growth. And the problem of growth extends far beyond energy, though
that is what drives climate change. Here in Utah, we are going to face an enormous challenge in
meeting our water needs and our need for locally grown food, which may well end up (and which
should end up) being the majority of the food we have to eat. Utah must have a population level that
can be sustained using local water and food resources, both of which will be under environmental
stress. If Utah is to be self-sustaining, and in my mind that is what true sustainability in Utah means,
it must preserve remaining arable land for food production. Indeed, some developed land may need
to be returned to agriculture. No-growth is a step in this direction. And it will have other immediate
60
e story, and the reasons for Utah’s uniquely fertile fruit industry, are found in Carrol Firmage, A Land of Milk and
Honey: Family, Food, and Faith in Utah (Master’s project, University of Utah, 2009). Carrol and I are presently working
on a joint history of Utah agriculture, of which her thesis is a part.
61
Quoted in Clarence Ashton, “Recent Developments in Utah County’s Fruit Industry and Its Future Possibilities” in
Eleanor Bishop, ed., Utah Fruit Tree Survey 1965. Salt Lake City: Utah State Dept. of Agriculture, 1965, 28.
62
As indicated in the recent historic highway designation of the same name.
benefits. e Wasatch Front already has some of the unhealthiest air in the U.S. e prospect of
adding another 500,000 people to the Salt Lake valley, as anticipated by some, staggers the
imagination.
An example of the desperate, if politically unlikely, need for no-growth policies is Washington
County, which until the recent recession was often first or second on the list of fastest-growing
metropolitan areas in the United States. At present, unlike other fast-growing desert areas such as
Phoenix and Las Vegas, Washington County is able to meet its water needs without the use of
Colorado River water. Given the likelihood (discussed above) that the Colorado will not be able to
support the present much less the future population of the Southwest, this is a state of affairs that
must continue. But this is not what Washington County leaders want. ey foresee as much as a
three-fold increase in the area’s population by mid-century. To power that growth after they have
exhausted local water resources, they propose to build a pipeline to carry Colorado water to St.
George. If they are successful, southern Utah is set for compounded disaster, because it is destroying
whatever native resiliency, whatever natural reserve, it would otherwise have to respond to climate
change. What’s more, if the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline is built, and if, as seems almost certain,
the promised water proves to be temporary, Washington County will be saddled with a $1 billion
debt that the local water utility will have to bear. In a word, the moment Washington County gets its
first drop of Colorado River water, it signs its own death warrant.
10. Establish a Perpetual Energy Fund to enable members to make their own homes energy-independent.
Apart from ignorance and inertia, the biggest impediment to the popular adoption of solar energy
and geothermal heat pumps is their high up-front cost, which for most existing home owners is still
prohibitive, though it is declining. My term Perpetual Energy Fund — the pun is deliberate —
derives from the Mormon institutions of the Perpetual Immigration Fund and the Perpetual
Education Fund that respectively helped Mormon immigrants get to Utah and to get an education.
What I have in mind is a Church-sponsored financial system that fronts money for clean energy
investments and that are paid back from what would otherwise go to the utility. is kind of thing
seems to me to be an incomparably better way to spend Church money and Church-raised
investment than building a new chapel. is is a real investment in the flock.
In parallel with the Perpetual Energy Fund for existing homes, the Church should encourage the
passage of city and state ordinances requiring all new homes in Utah to have both solar and
geothermal systems, the cost of which, when amortized over the lifetime of the home, make them
not only affordable but a sound economic investment. Builders presently have no incentive to install
such systems, because, as I noted above, there is no market-based mechanism for recognizing the true
cost of the alternative. As long as that remains true, the only way to get us moving is through
regulation. And here in Utah, that will require action by the Church, because our political leaders are
among the least environmentally savvy and progressive in the world.
11. Encourage members to dramatically reduce their environmental impact. is needs to be done not as
one instruction among many, but as part of a call for all hands on deck. It needs to be preached with
the intensity that drove Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball in their sermons of the retrenchment
movement in the late 1850s. e challenge we face today is in fact far more serious than any faced by
the early saints after their initial settlement here. But we are not presenting the situation as a crisis.
Indeed, Church leadership does not yet perceive that there is a crisis.
In fact, what we need is a new Word of Wisdom that defines us today and for the future as essentially
as its predecessor has for the last century and a half. What purpose is there in encouraging saints to
keep the present Word of Wisdom if they ignore the even bigger threat to their health that looms in
climate change? e message that members need to hear from the pulpit is that climate change is
real, that it is the problem of our time, that changing our way of life is not only a practical but also a
moral necessity, and that such change is part and parcel of building Zion here and now.
In the 2007 letter that I wrote to counselor omas S. Monson, I included a sample First Presidency
message that might launch a shift in the way the Church deals with the issues presented here.
“When Joseph Smith revealed the Word of Wisdom in 1833, he could scarcely have imagined how
this list of basic dos and don’ts for healthy living, given, as the Doctrine & Covenants puts it, “not by
commandment” but as words of counsel ‘adapted to the capacity of…the weakest of all saints,’
would subsequently define Latter-day Saints as a people. A century since the early Church’s most
distinctive practices such as the United Order and polygamy disappeared, what defines LDS people
today in the eyes of the world is the fact that we abstain from coffee, alcohol, and tobacco. In
addition to defining us as a people, as any peculiar practices might, observance of the Word of
Wisdom also in fact makes us healthy. No one imagines the Word of Wisdom to be the last word on
healthy living. But it commits us as Saints to being concerned about health. at commitment has
had unexpected, far-reaching, and defining consequences for us as a people.
“e story of the Word of Wisdom is a lesson for life. e simple things we do each day are often the
most important things of all. Taking care of our bodies, raising happy families, performing daily acts
of kindness — these are real Christian living. What these things have in common, and what defines
them as essentially Christian, is the attitude of love. As the apostle James said, pure religion is not a
matter of belief but of love in action (James 1:27). e prophet Isaiah, hundreds of years earlier, had
said much the same thing, ‘To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices’ — we might say
church meetings, fast offerings, or temple endowments — ‘…who hath required this at your hand?
…Learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the
widow’ (Isa. 1:11,12,17). Jesus’s final charge to the Twelve was simply ‘feed my sheep.’ e message
of these and countless, similar passages from biblical and modern prophets is that God is concerned
less with what we believe than with how we live. Are we in deed as well as in word good stewards of
the life He has given us?
“In that spirit, we encourage the Saints to take thought for their responsibility to the earth and to the
generations of beings of all kinds who have yet to inhabit the earth. We live in a time when our own
success as a species has put unprecedented stress on the earth, upon which we all depend for our very
life. From the beginning, God has taught us that the earth is not ours but His, and that our use of
the earth is conditioned upon exercising the restraint and love that God Himself shows to us and to
all of His other living creations. God’s gift of the world to us — our ‘dominion’ — is our chance to
prove that we can govern ourselves with forbearance and wisdom and treat the earth with love. Our
failure to do so carries its own punishment, as well as the anger of God.
“We offer the following suggestions as a word of wisdom for our time, as counsel for those who call
themselves saints. We encourage you to take these suggestions not as the limit of our responsibility
towards the earth but as the beginning of a life rededicated to wise and sustainable use of the
miraculous home that God has given us. e earth is here not for our profit but as a source of
happiness and well-being for us and for other living things, who, like us, are under commandment
from God to fill the measure of their creation. Let us become a people as noted for their prudent and
loving care of the earth as for their good health, for these two qualities of saintly living cannot
ultimately be separated.”
is message was the introduction to what I proposed could be a Church-published pamphlet listing
what I called “ten steps for good stewards,” ten simple, low- and no-cost actions that ordinary
members could take to begin reducing their carbon footprint. I won’t try readers’ patience by listing
or discussing them here, but the document is available online for anyone who is interested.63
63
[URL to be supplied.]
VI
Before wrapping up, let me anticipate and try to answer some objections to the agenda that I’ve
proposed here. e biggest likely objection, that this is a “political” issue and therefore outside the
proper bounds of Church action, has already been addressed at length. Let me take some of the lesser
objections one by one.
1. We’re in the last days. All of this, however, painful, is part of God’s plan. It has been foreseen by prophets
and can’t be stopped. ere are, of course, those such as myself who doubt that this has been foreseen,
who in fact would say that it is not foreseeable. But approaching the question from the vantage point
of LDS belief, I reply that we’ve been living in the last days since the Church was founded in 1830,
and that living in the last days has never been a legitimate reason for not doing the best we can. On
the contrary, living now, as one sees in the verse from the Book of Moses quoted above, is a mandate
to build a radically better society. And until that society exists, the end of this phase of earth’s
existence cannot come. We may be living at the end of time, but the final curtain won’t fall until we
finish the work that we’ve been assigned, which is to build Zion.
On a more practical level, consider the exemplary life of our pioneer ancestors, who were chased
from three cities before they came to Salt Lake, and who, even after arriving here, were often called
to leave yet again and settle some remote corner of the Mormon hinterland. Wherever they went, for
however short a time, they built to stay. ey built sustainable, beautiful communities. e women
of Nauvoo, for instance, ground up their china to make the temple walls sparkle, and they did this
knowing that they would soon have to leave the temple forever.
One of the most inspiring little stories along this line is that of Lorenzo Young, Brigham’s brother. In
the spring of 1848, a year after his arrival in the Salt Lake valley, Lorenzo planted seed for 40,000
apple trees. Shortly after the trees sprouted, the Mormons experienced the first of several infestations
of crickets, which ate all but 17 of Lorenzo’s 40,000 apple tree sprouts. Undaunted, in 1849 Lorenzo
decided to try a different approach. He returned to St. Louis and purchased 200 sapling trees, which
he planted in a special wagon filled with dirt. He then set off for Salt Lake. By the time he arrived, all
but three of his saplings were dead. Such was the heartbreaking, backbreaking beginning of Utah’s
thriving fruit industry. Lorenzo had every reason to give up, and could well have said, as I have heard
many Latter-day Saints say to me, that it doesn’t really matter what we do now because we live at the
end of things. God will take care of the present mess. is attitude is a denial of everything our
pioneer ancestors stood for. In short, my answer to this objection is to hold up the life of Brigham
Young and his fellow saints, for whom living at the end of things simply meant that they had to get
busy.
2. e Church is now a global institution and cannot think narrowly in terms of action focused on Utah.
e Church does indeed have a global responsibility, and what is proposed here is for the Church to
act globally. But, the Church is uniquely positioned to make a difference in Utah, where over 60% of
the residents are LDS. Nowhere else does the Church have such popular and political leverage. e
Church should do most where it can have the most impact, and that is here in Utah. More
importantly, by creating a model community in Utah, the Church achieves the most important
possible goal: to show the world how a community can become sustainable. A small number of
individuals can live sustainably in isolation. But that is not an answer for the world. e world needs
to see a way for everybody to live.
3. We can’t afford it. e Church is in the process of spending at least $1 billion on Salt Lake City’s
Downtown Rising project, which benefits mostly those living in Salt Lake. It’s a worthy project for
reinvigorating Salt Lake’s economy. But, it’s hardly a mission to save the world. If the Church is
willing to spend this much money on a business venture that benefits few, how can it possibly reject
a proposal that benefits an entire nation, and that could well, as a catalytic example, save the world?
is objection is a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
e bottom line in any event is that we can’t afford not to. e consequence of failure will be the
devastation of Utah and of the world and the loss of everything we think we’ve saved by refusing to
do anything now. At some point, as the effects of climate change and peak oil start to squeeze the
world, the Church, like all institutions, may find that it no longer has the means to act. e Church
must act now while it has the means. It must act now while it can still make a difference.
4. We’re already doing many of the things you talk about. Not by long shot. e Church, for example,
recently formed what it calls the Global Energy Management Committee, which is apparently
charged with creating an energy plan that includes renewables. And the Church has begun work on
three pilot solar chapels here in Utah. is is a good beginning. But the Church is moving far too
slowly and deliberately, and it is moving in secret. I doubt that any of the readers of this journal, for
example, will have heard of either of these energy initiatives of the Church. As I’ve said, it is
imperative that the Church act publicly if it intends to bring the LDS populace along with it on the
journey to community resilience. From my perspective, until the Church has a plan to become
carbon-neutral across the whole spectrum of its operations by 2020, it is not doing enough. Until the
Church is 100% carbon-neutral, it is not doing enough. And until all active Church members can
say that they too are carbon-neutral, the Church is not doing enough. If from this moment, the
Church erects a single new building that isn’t carbon-neutral, the Church is not doing enough. And,
if the Church isn’t shouting this message from the rooftops, it is not doing enough.
e Church has extensive and admirable welfare and preparedness programs. But these should not be
confused with the kind of community resilience that I’m talking about. e Church’s existing
programs will not begin to meet the long-term needs of members should systems begin collapsing as
scientists project. e only way to respond appropriately to climate change is to prevent it. To the
extent that members feel “prepared” for climate change as they’re prepared for a two-week power
outage, their preparedness is an impediment to the kind of change that must now occur. In this
respect, the Church’s existing programs may give a false sense of security. If they prevent the
sweeping changes I’ve talked about, they will have done the Church the greatest possible harm.
5. In spite of what you say, we don’t believe that climate change is the earth-shattering problem you say it
is, so we’re not going to put our money into preventing it. It may be that I and 97% of the world’s
climate scientists are wrong. But what if we’re not? By the time we accept beyond a shadow of doubt
that the scientists were right, we will have passed the tipping points. If that happens, we’re
committed to catastrophic change no matter what we do. e risks are therefore totally asymmetric.
If we act now, and climate change isn’t what we think it is, we’ve spent a lot of money to buy energy
self-sufficiency and community resilience. at’s by no means a bad deal. If, however, we don’t act
and climate change is catastrophic, we will live to see our civilization and all of the money we “saved”
disappear. e prudent decision seems utterly obvious.
Conclusion
Zion, by definition, is an alternative to business as usual. Amplifying on Kierkegaard’s ironic
observation that “Christianity has completely conquered — that is, it is abolished,” Harold Bloom
aptly remarks that you “become a Christian only in opposition to the established order.”64 For the
Church to realize its full potential, it must offer a clear alternative to our present way of life, not only
in “morals” but in every dimension of life. Plenty of other Churches are “moral” in the same way as
the LDS. What will make us different is the comprehensive idea of Zion as an alternative society.
Millions of Americans today, including many Mormons, are without access to affordable health care.
As a nation, we are increasingly subject to the diseases of excess and self-indulgence. Our air and our
water are polluted due to unprincipled devotion to the profit motive at all costs. Now, towering over
all of these ills is the specter of climate change, which is the biggest threat to human well-being ever.
For the Church not to speak out on these problems and especially on the problem of problems is an
abnegation of its prophetic responsibility.
Not least of the characteristics of the alternative lifestyle that the Church must represent is joy.
Latter-day Saints are unusual in regarding joy as one of the purposes of being. But, for joy to have
meaning, the Church must fight to insure that the bedrock of our well-being is not destroyed. We
need the joy that can come only from clean air and water, healthy food, and a beautiful environment.
Our dependence on fossil fuels threatens all of these. Climate change threatens life itself.
e world must therefore change, and the Church, as the institution that claims to represent God,
must lead the change. In this crisis or any other, slow, incremental change is not only inappropriate,
it is morally indefensible. Incremental change is the political and commercial norm, but it is not the
proper response to crisis and it is not the way of repentance. e Lord asks us not to gradually
64
Jesus and Yahweh. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005, 27.
abandon sin, but to forsake it all at once. “Come follow me...NOW.” “And another of his disciples
said...Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father. But Jesus said...Follow me; and let the dead
bury their dead” (Matt. 18:21).
e imperative of building the kingdom of God brooks no delay. God will not tolerate our
continued refusal to build his kingdom. Earth also has a non-negotiable deadline for us. We either
meet it, or perish. God and his creation call upon us to forsake our ignorance, selfishness, greed, and
arrogance, which are the root causes of the present crisis.
If we will do this, we can change our society in undreamed-of ways for the better. is is the silver
lining of climate change. Real transformation, whether of individuals or of society, always occurs in
times of crisis. We face the greatest crisis of all time. We therefore have an opportunity like no other
in history to create the new kingdom and the new man that Jesus preached 2,000 years ago.
‫כָל עֶֶרכ מוׂצִיא אֱלהִׁים אֶת סְחוׂרוׂתָיו‬
‫הַּמַבְִריקוׂת מֵחַלוׂן הַָראֲוָה‬
‫ ּפְנִנִים יָפוׂת‬,‫ לּוחוׂת ּבְּרית‬,‫מַעֲׂשֵי מֶרּכָבָה‬
,‫צְלָבִים ּופַעֲמוׂנִים זוׂהֲִרים‬
‫ּומַחֲזִיר אוׂתָם לְתוׂך אְַרּגָזִים אֲפֵלִים‬
‫ “שּוב‬:‫ּבִפְנִים וְסוׂגֵר אֶת הַּתְִריס‬
‫לאׁ ּבָא אַף נָבִיא אֶחָד לְִקנוׂת‬
Each evening God takes his shining wares
from the shop window —
mystical chariots, covenant tablets, pearls of great price,
luminous crosses and bells —
and returns them to dark boxes
inside and closes the shutters. “Again,
not one prophet came to buy.”
— Yehuda Amichai65
65
From “Poems of the Land of Zion and Jerusalem,” Amichai, op. cit., 85. e translation here is mine. I’ve taken a
small liberty with pnînîm yaphôt that I hope LDS readers will appreciate. It seemed particularly apt under the
circumstances.
Appendix 1:
A Profile of Early Mormon Community
66
Perhaps no other factor was more important in the ultimate survival of the Mormon people than
their collective identity, a sense of belonging to a peculiar community that borders on the ethnic. In
his study of the Mormon village, based on settlement records of towns such as Escalante, Ephraim,
American Fork, and Cardston, Lowry Nelson, son of Mormon homesteaders in Ferron, Utah, and
later professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, identified a number of attributes of the
typical early Mormon community, of which the following eight are perhaps the most crucial.67
1) At settlement, land was distributed equally by lot, with no preference being given on the basis of
ecclesiastical or social rank.
2) Holdings were small (< 25 acres) so that all members of the community could own land.
3) e Mormon pattern of settlement was unique in the West and especially unusual among farming
communities in dividing land into three different types. Each settler received a small holding,
typically 1¼ acres, inside the town for a residence, vegetable garden, and orchard. In addition, each
resident received another plot of about five acres outside the town for raising animals and grain. In
Salt Lake City, this outlying agricultural area was known as the “Big Field.” Finally, everyone in the
community had rights in common land still farther outside the town where livestock could graze.
is pattern of land use encouraged the development of tightly knit communities in which people
associated with one another on a daily basis in town. is form of town life stands in stark contrast
66
For this material, I am indebted to my wife’s master’s thesis, A Land of Milk and Honey: Family, Food, and Faith in
Utah, cited above.
67
e Mormon Village. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1952.
to that of much of the frontier West where homes were located miles from one another and where
town life took a backseat to farm life.
e notion of fundamental equality among the residents of a town was taken at times to strange
lengths. For example, to insure equal access to common land, residents of some towns mandated that
no one could use the commons before a certain date. On that date, the town would hold a dance to
which everyone was invited. Only when the dance was done, were people allowed to go out and
stake their temporary “claim” to a portion of the commons. In this way, everyone literally started
from the same point with equal odds of access to any part of the commons. After a certain point in
the fall, the commons was thrown open so that anyone could graze their animals anywhere.
4) All town residents shared responsibility for building forts, roads, irrigation ditches, and other
public works and public buildings.
5) In larger towns, the Church established cooperative wholesale stores to provide a market for
exchange. ese were not commercial stores in the usual sense. eir intent, as illustrated by the
reaction of Charles Smith to the introduction of the coop program, was in fact to prepare the saints
for the fullness of the communitarian Gospel, the “United Order of Enoch,” that was shortly to
come.
“I went to Ward meeting Bro A M Musser and G Q Cannon occupied the time. ey spoke upon this
matter of our trading with those who are not of us. He shewed the advantages from our cooperating
putting our means together...is movement was intended to make us more united to bring us closer
together, according to the pattern of the Gospel. Bro Cannon Said it was very evident that men were
Seecking to get rich and build themselves up, and to form that distinction of class in society, which
thing was an abomination in the sight of God. He referred to the Nephites shewing that when they
began to get rich they Drew off in Classes and despised the poor. is matter to which our attention
was now being called would bring about good results, and would prepare the minds of the people, to
receive further those principles that pertained to the order of Enoch...At the close of the meeting
subscriptions were handed in to carry forward the movement of a cooperative Wholesale Store.”68
6) Agriculture, which formed the basis for all Mormon communities, though it became in time a
business, was first and foremost a matter of subsistence and self-sufficiency. is modality continued
well into the 20th century. Writing in 1947 for the state’s centennial history, Arvil Stark, former
secretary of the Utah State Horticultural Society, observed, “In general, the commercial orchards are
small, averaging less than 5 acres in size and the fruit crop is usually associated with other kinds of
agriculture to make a diversified agriculture. In other words, farming in Utah is usually a way of life
rather than the highly specialized business characteristic of some other areas.”69
7) In most cases, towns were not created helter-skelter by individuals seeking their own place to settle
down. Instead, the Church would “call” people, that is, request them, to settle an area in order to
promote Mormon control of essential territory. Members of each “mission” were chosen for their
particular skills so as to provide an effective basis for self-sustaining communities all around the
Mormon pale. us, personal empire building was subordinated to that of the kingdom of God. It
was not unheard-of for people to be called to settle one area only to be asked in subsequent years to
move to another.
8) e culmination of the Mormon communitarian experiment was the heroic, if short-lived,
attempt at true religious communism known as the United Order of Enoch, or United Order for
short. In this system, individuals voluntarily gave all of their property to the Church and received
back what they needed to live on. All surplus was distributed within the community. is form of
communism was never universally practiced, nor was it mandatory even in places where it was
68
Diary of Charles Smith, 1819-1905, Typescript BYU, quoted in Leonard Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom. Lincoln,
NB: University of Nebraska, 298. Punctuation is original.
69
“History of Growing Fruit in Utah.” Utah: A Centennial History. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1949, 1:114.
attempted. Nonetheless, the attempt itself indicates the tendency within the early LDS Church
toward community.70
No detail was too mundane for consideration in Brigham Young’s United Order, because the Order,
as the truest manifestation of the Gospel, encompassed all aspects of life, even the trivial, and
ennobled them by putting them in the context of the bigger objective toward which the saints were
striving.
Instead of having every woman getting up in the morning and fussing around a cookstove...for two or
three or half a dozen persons, [Young] said, he would have a village dining hall a hundred feet long
with a cooking room and bakery attached. is would mean that most of the women could spend their
time profitably making bonnets, hats, and clothing, or working in factories. Confusion in the dining
hall could be avoided by installing a system by which each person could telegraph his order to the
kitchen, and this order would be conveyed to him by a little railway under the table. “And when they
have all eaten, the dishes are piled together, slipped under the table, and run back to the ones who
wash them”...In order to remove the laborious burden of big family washings, he suggested they have
cooperative laundries. ese would not only relieve the women from drudgery, but would also “save the
husbands from steamy walls, soap suds, and ill-temper.
e community would eat together, pray together, and work together...
“Half the labor necessary to make the people moderately comfortable” under their present
arrangements, he said, would make them “independently rich under this system. A society like this,” he
concluded, “would never have to buy anything; they would always make and raise all they would eat,
drink and wear...”71
70
See the chapter on Orderville in Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 1942, the
most beautiful evocation of Mormon life prior to WWII ever written.
71
Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 326, paraphrasing and quoting Brigham Young’s sermon of Oct. 9, 1872.
Part beer hall, part chapel, Brigham’s dining room and its toy railroad illustrate the degree to which
he was willing to rethink every aspect of conventional life, especially when it came to the family. is
vision of a Mormon communal utopia, though conceived with an entirely different purpose in mind,
and the attempts that were made to bring the vision into life anticipate the longer-lived, but also
only partly successful experiment of the Israeli kibbutz (literally, “collective”).
To these attributes of the Mormon village, I would add one more. Not unlike the kibbutzniks, but
modeling themselves on a much older Palestinian paradigm, the Mormons were also bound to their
land in a way that was in theory at least and often in reality quite different from that of other
Americans. To begin with, Mormons viewed themselves as players in a sacred drama, in which the
land and their relationship to it are defined by Scriptural precedent. ey thought of themselves
quite literally as the children of Israel, descendants of the Twelve Tribes being gathered in at the end
of time. To this day, Mormons receive “patriarchal blessings” in which they are told the tribe of Israel
from which they descend. us, their persecution in Illinois was necessary to separate these children
of Israel from “the world” (the flesh pots of Egypt, etc.). eir journey westward was the analogue of
Israel’s exodus, the Great Basin was their promised land, and Brigham Young their Moses. And here
in the Great Basin, they would not only settle and at last enjoy freedom from persecution but would
also build the Kingdom of God. is was no mundane search for a home but a mission imposed on
them by God. e city of the saints or rather the cities of the saints were therefore no ordinary
settlements but rather outposts of Zion, harbors, like Yehuda Amichai’s Jerusalem, on the shore of
eternity. Like the Israelites, the early Mormons believed that their occupation of this land was by
divine concession, and therefore subject at all times to God’s pleasure. Failure to live up to their part
of the covenant with God would jeopardize their entitlement to the land.
But the sense that God had called them to settle here also had a more immediate justification, for, as
I’ve noted, many were in fact called by their church leaders to settle specific areas. And those who
were not called to settle an area may have had reason nonetheless to regard their presence there as a
sort of divine test. As a result, many original settlers and their descendants remained even when
conditions deteriorated to the point of disaster. Describing the extraordinarily challenging years of
the Dust Bowl in Utah’s marginal areas, Brian Cannon writes:
...decades following his removal from the town of Widtsoe, one farmer recalled a promise made by
Mormon apostle Melvin J. Ballard to the community’s residents. e valley would be a Garden of
Eden if its inhabitants kept God’s commandments and stayed out of debt, Ballard had prophesied. If
they did not do so, it would be taken from them. Ballard’s words had infused the land with sacred
meaning, rendering the valley a symbolic link between the area’s residents and God. Remembering that
promise, the people clung to their land as long as they physically could. To move away was to admit
spiritual as well as temporal failure. Although all but two families eventually moved away, some
former residents of the area still remember that promise, speak of their valley reverently, make annual
pilgrimages to it, and speculate that it may one day blossom.72
In these ways and in the equally radical attempt to redefine marriage, early Mormonism was the
antithesis of the American dream. No sharper contrast can be imagined than that which existed
between the Mormonism of the United Order period and its contemporaneous American
counterpart, the Gilded Age. At the very point in time when capitalism and not-so-enlightened selfinterest were transforming America into an industrial and commercial paradise (if that isn’t a
contradiction in terms), Brigham Young was preaching sermons such as the following:
Let the calicoes be on the shelves and rot, I would rather build buildings every day and burn them
down at night, than have traders here communing with our enemies outside and keeping up a hell all
the time and raising devils to keep it going… We can have enough [hell] of our own, without their
help… We sincerely hope that the time is not far distant when the people will supply their own wants
72
“Struggle against Great Odds: Challenges in Utah’s Marginal Agricultural Areas, 1925-1939. Utah Historical Quarterly
54 (1986), 320.
and manufacture their own supplies; then and not until then will we become independent of our
enemies.73
Brigham’s chief enemy was capitalism, and his kingdom would be its ultimate victim.
In no other place in the West did Europeans create such a legacy of sustainable community. As a
result, it is quite nearly true that there are no Mormon ghost towns. e Mormons came to stay.
ey are the West’s ultimate “stickers,” as Stegner felicitously called them. In the years before WWII,
even with the encroachments of capitalist America, Utah had achieved a high degree of the selfsufficiency that Brigham Young so earnestly sought. e state produced, for example, enough food of
all types to meet its needs and more.74 And, despite being the second-driest state in the nation, it had
developed water resources more than sufficient for its needs, without the help of the Bureau of
Reclamation. Indeed, the Bureau’s efforts by comparison are a colossal failure. e Mormons actually
accomplished what the Bureau never did, despite its mandate to do so: a reclamation of desert land
for the small-scale farmer.
73
Brigham Young to H. S. Eldredge, November 20, 1858. Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, March 28, 1858, as cited in Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 196.
74
H. H. Bancroft, History of Utah. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1964, 720.

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