October 22, 2023
UUHoulton Theme for the YearOur theme for the new year is exploring “EarthCare* in the Midst of Environmental Change.” We wanted to build upon our theme of belongingness from last year and expand our sense of belongingness to include the entire planet (and perhaps the cosmos!).
What does it mean to feel as if you are connected to the earth and a member of the global community? What are the responsibilities of being a good steward of the planet and how can we contribute to its balance and well being? Our relationship to the world and our responsibility as a global citizen has a spiritual aspect as well as practical.
A couple of weeks ago we introduced the theme in EarthCare; Part One and this week in EarthCare; Part Two we look at “The Role of Hope” in being an EarthCare worker and participant. One of the books we are featuring this year is “Not Too Late; Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility” edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, a collection of essays by leading environmentalists, activists and visionaries.
This week we are looking at the first essay by Rebecca Solnit titled “Difficult is Not the Same as Impossible.” If you do not have a copy of the book I’ve included several passages from the essay in today’s Support Page. This service will be in our cozy parlor (re-arranged with a new look). It was starting to get a bit cool in the historic sanctuary.
YouTube Channel content for this week is a service led by Rev. Mary Blocher titled “The Power of Humility.”
Humility involves relationships with ourselves, others, and if we choose, the God of our understanding. We will be exploring the principle of humility as it applies to these three relationships in our lives. The link for YouTube is listed below. Please join us for one of the services.
There is also a LGBTQ+ Luncheon in the church basement this Saturday October 21 at noon for members of the community, supporters and allies. Food will be provided but please bring something to contributor if you like. There is no fee for the event. Welcome!!
* variations of the theme include “EarthCare and Building Eco-Community” and “EarthCare; Making Things Better.”
Have a good weekend!
In Ministry,
Dave
There is also a LGBTQ+ Luncheon in the church basement this Saturday at noon for members of the community, supporters and allies. Food will be provided but please bring something to contributor if you like. There is no fee for the event. Welcome!!
THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE:
HERE IS THE SERVICE LINK FOR THIS WEEK’S YOUTUBE SERVICE
(Please note it won’t be active until 10AM on Sunday morning)https://youtu.be/yiTmIOvb-As
HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check-in
Time: Oct 22, 2023 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/82063622993?pwd=jJ3buiR2SrrHwblGs0Ha5Ea9Aahb2s.1
Meeting ID: 820 6362 2993
Passcode: 980633
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
Oct 21 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 noon
Oct 22 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson
Oct 24 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
Oct 29 Sunday Service: Fred & Leigh Griffith
Nov 5 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson Pledge Drive Kick-Off Pot-Luck downstairs after the service Silent Auction Fund-Raiser (Please bring an item or items to donate to the Auction)
Nov 7 Meditation Group 4PM (online)
Nov 11 Fall Festival (times and details to be announced)Nov 12 Sunday Service: Randi Bradbury & Ira DyerNov 18 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PMNov 19 Sunday Service: Rev. Mary BlocherNov 21 Meditation Group 4PM (online)Nov 26 Sunday Service: George Peabody and David Hutchinson
Virtual Offering Plate
If you would like to send in your pledge or donation simply drop an envelope in the mail. The address is listed below. You can also send your donation electronically with our new payment system on the church website. Simply go to uuhoulton.org and click “Donate” on the menu and it will explain how the system works. You can set up a regular monthly payment plan or donate in single transactions. Thank you for your generous support!
UU Church of Houlton 61 Military Street
EarthCare (Part Two)“The Role of Hope”
Excerpt from the essay “Difficult is Not the Same as Impossible” Rebecca Solnit
It is late. We are deep in an emergency. But it is not too late, because the emergency is not over. The outcome is not decided. We are deciding it now. The longer we wait to act, the more limited the options, but scientists tell us there are good options and great urgency to embrace them while we can…We are deep in an emergency, and we need as many people as possible to do what they can to work toward the best-case scenarios and ward off the worst. Involvement depends on having a sense of personal power – the capacity to make an impact. Inseparable from that sense is the hope that it matters that you do it. Many in desperate circumstances have believed that it matters even when they didn’t believe they could win (and sometimes they won anyways or they inspired someone else to win). A lot of stories in circulation endeavor to strip you of hope and power, to tell you it doesn’t matter or it’s too late or there’s nothing you can do or we never win. Not Too Late is a project to try to return hope and power through both facts and perspectives.
The world is now both better and worse than we imagined twenty years ago. The parts that are better are better largely because of grassroots campaigns, popular movements, and Indigenous uprisings by people who believed it was worth trying to act on their beliefs and commitments. These are connected to the way that new ideas about justices equality, kindness, about interdependence as the first lesson nature teaches us, appeared on distant horizons like clouds and then soaked into the soil of the collective imagination like spring rain. (Many of these new ideas were really old, discarded, discredited ideas that came back because we wanted or needed them or were more able to hear the people who had never forgotten them.)
Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it. It means facing difficulties and accepting uncertainty. To hope is to recognize that you can protect some of what you love even while grieving what you cannot – and to know that we must act without knowing the outcome of these actions.
This book is to help you recognize where the possibilities lie and what your role in them can be. We hope it reenergizes you if you’re already engaged or brings you onboard if you’re not. There is nothing more important in this time.
To hope is to accept despair as an emotion but not as an analysis. To recognize that what is unlikely is possible, just as what is likely is not inevitable. To understand that difficult is not the same as impossible. To plan and to accept that the unexpected often disrupts plans – for better and for the worse. To know the powerful have their weaknesses, and we who are supposed to be weak have great power together, power to change the world, have done so before and will (do so) again. To know that the future will be what we make of it in the present. To know that joy can appear in the midst of crisis, and that a crisis is a crossroads…We need to remember our own heroic nature, our capacity for courage, compassion, and action, to remember those who came before us who took action against the odds and sometimes won. Even when they didn’t, they inspired others at the time or long after to live by principle rather than by merely what is possible. Often, they changed what is possible, in part by refusing to accept what were supposed to be the limits.
Rebecca Solnit Not Too Late (2023)
EarthCare Practice
- Science & Technology
- Ethics & Moral Case
- Philosophy & Spiritual Psychology
- Action & Application
The New York Times has a weekly feature on “Environmental and Climate” issues edited by David Wallace-Wells and David Gelles. It’s a great resource regarding recent developments in these crucial areas. From time to time I’ll include several articles as they relate to our year-long study project.
| Gazing into the future should really make us sweat |
08.02.23 | By David Wallace-WellsOpinion Writer |
| On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit — the first time that had happened in 31 days. The temperature of pavement in the city measured up to 180 degrees, and local burn units are full of patients who simply fell to the ground and were burned, as though Maricopa County’s whole surface were a skillet on the stove. The I.C.U.s are filling up, too, and the region’s iconic saguaro cactuses are crumpling and collapsing in the heat. On the same day last week that President Biden offered only a few meek remarks about extreme heat and just a few million dollars in new funding for heat forecasting, the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, leaned into a typically vehement formulation. “The era of global warming has ended,” he said. “The era of global boiling has arrived.” |
| It was, worldwide, the hottest month on record. June was the hottest June on record. August appears poised to be the hottest August. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat. |
| But what else do you expect as greenhouse gas emissions continue? On opposite ends of the planet, temperatures recorded in the North Atlantic and sea ice measured near the South Pole, tracked so far from recent trends that you might embarrass yourself simply stating the size of the anomaly — a four sigma eventin the temperatures of the North Atlantic, meaning that, given a stable climate and a normal distribution of chance, it should be expected about once every few hundred years and perhaps a six sigma event for Antarctic sea ice, meaning we should expect to see it, at least according to the simplified math, only once every 7.5 million years. |
| At a certain point, that math just gets silly, telling you perhaps more about the improper way you might have structured the comparison than about the size of the anomaly itself. But you can measure the anomalies in other ways, such as by noting the hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing or 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile or that there is an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent. And the fact that we are seeing these gob-smacking anomalies at all is a sign that the historical framework implied by terms like “seven sigma” and “500-year storm,” imperfect in the best of times, no longer applies to the world we live in now. |
| The environmental journalist Juliet Eilperin called the ocean temperatures “beyond belief”; The Washington Post reported that they had “baffled scientists.” Contemplating the trajectory of Arctic sea ice, the atmospheric scientist Zack Labe wrote memorably about how often he finds himself answering questions about the state of the science these days by saying, “I don’t know.” And for all the uncertainty, many of those watching the changes unfold have a queasy intuition that we may be entering a new climatic regime — and perhaps inching closer to some quite concerning tipping points. |
| “Shocking but not really surprising,” is how NASA’s Gavin Schmidt put it. “Even the things that are unprecedented are not surprising.” That is where we are all living now, in a climate that is both shocking and unsurprising. For several decades, those anxious about global warming have lived in fear of climate prophecies. We are beginning to simply live within them, a process that looks from some vantages like a horror story and from others surprisingly normal. |
| There are different ways to measure the changes, some less hair-raising than others. In a report published July 25, the World Weather Attribution network examined recent heat waves in the United States, Europe and China, finding that all but the Chinese event would have been impossible without climate change. In a stable, prewarming climate, the heat wave that baked China would have happened once every 250 years; now, the network said, it should be expected every five years. The episodes in Europe and North America, once impossible, should be expected once every 10 to 15 years. I’d bet on these frequencies being underestimates. Last summer there were 100 million Americans under heat advisories, and heat across Europe was called record-breaking then, as well. (On British television, a broadcaster complained that her meteorologist guest was being too gloomy about the heat; “I want us to be happy about the weather,” she said. In the weeks that followed, several thousand Britons died in the heat.) |
| But the World Weather Attribution report also characterized the heat waves in another way, incorporating a critique made by Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute last summer to measure the simple size of the temperature anomaly attributable to climate change, too. By this metric, the network found, warming had added just one degree Celsius to the temperatures in China, two degrees to the heat waves in North America and two and a half degrees to southern Europe’s. |
| The coolheaded climate scientist Zeke Hausfather tried to quickly contextualizethe recent string of anomalies to show that, in fact, they were, while alarming, nevertheless within the range of expected outcomes, given the present level of global warming. Well, at least two of the three anomalies he examined — the Antarctic sea ice was still quite off the charts. (About those, one scientist told The Guardian that “something weird is going on”; another said that the abrupt changes were “very much outside our understanding of this system.”) |
| But even if, in most cases, the science is vindicated by this summer’s extremes, that isn’t ultimately all that reassuring. Forecasts for warming have long scared many of those who really looked at them, and so it’s not exactly comfortable to know that we are merely coasting along the high end of those forecasts today. As the climate stalwart Bill McKibben put it to me recently, when it comes to global warming, “‘I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the language.” |
| “The speed of us passing limits is mind-bending,” wrote the Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, with whom Hausfather shares a Substack, in a short reflection on why climate impacts seemed to be escalating so quickly. “When the Earth warms the next 0.1 degrees Celsius, an entirely new group of thresholds will be passed, bringing great harms to entirely different groups of people,” he wrote. “Many of them will not expect it, having been lulled into complacency by the fact that they hadn’t been negatively impacted by warming up to then. Is that you?” |
| As the extreme events have piled up this summer, I keep returning to a conversation I had last fall with the Texas Tech atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of several U.S. National Climate Assessments and the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy. |
| “The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” she said, describing a suite of projections now showing expected temperature rise this century of two to three degrees Celsius rather than four to five. But the bad news was that we had been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she said, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.” |
| In a long essay I published soon after that conversation, I emphasized that good news — that thanks to the technological and economic miracle of renewables, a global political awakening and an understanding that some earlier assumptions about future energy use were too pessimistic, we had about cut in half our expectations of warming in less than a decade. |
| This summer, I’ve been thinking more about her bad news — that even accounting for rapid global decarbonization and a drastic cut in expected global temperature rise, we may still end up in a world defined by impacts long called catastrophic. For now, it seems scary enough to say, we don’t really know. |
| The pope’s warning to a warming world |
| By David Gelles |
10.05.23
| In 2015, Pope Francis offered a sprawling meditation on man’s place on Earth and the spiritual implications of human-caused global warming. Eight years later, he appears to have little patience for such ruminations. |
| In an updated environmental treatise published this week, the pope names and shames the countries and industries he sees as bad actors and makes an urgent plea for collective action. |
| “With the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” he writes in “Laudate Deum,” which was issued at the start of a major gathering of bishops and lay people at the Vatican. |
| He specifically takes aim at citizens of richer countries and the “irresponsible lifestyle” of the developed world. |
| “If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact.” |
| Although the new work is slender compared to “Laudato Si’,” his encyclical on the environment, it offers a comprehensive overview of climate science, the energy transition and the global political landscape. |
| In clear, precise language, the pope identifies the burning of fossil fuels as the primary driver of climate change, details the effect on the planet and people, dismisses those who deny the crisis, and accuses wealthy individuals, corporations and countries of selfishly turning a blind eye. |
| “The United Arab Emirates will host the next Conference of the Parties (COP28). It is a country of the Persian Gulf known as a great exporter of fossil fuels, although it has made significant investments in renewable energy sources,” the pope writes. “Meanwhile, gas and oil companies are planning new projects there, with the aim of further increasing their production.” |
| Celia Deane-Drummond, a theologian and director of the Laudato Si’ research institute at the University of Oxford, said it was a remarkable document, capturing the pope’s urgent sense of concern in the face of a tepid global response. |
| “He’s quite exasperated by what hasn’t happened,” she said. “This is kind of one last attempt to shake people up.” |
| With his latest missive, he has moved from grief and exhortation to a more strident position |
| By David Wallace-WellsOpinion Writer |
10.11.23
| In 2015, Pope Francis came out as an environmentalist, with his landmark encyclical Laudato Si, later called by Bill McKibben “the most important document yet of this millennium” and by Pankaj Mishra “arguably the most important piece of intellectual criticism in our time.” |
| Last week, with a follow-up apostolic exhortation called Laudate Deum, the pope came even further out — as a climate alarmist, a techno-skeptic and a degrowther, sympathetic to activists and, most improbably, a reader of the feminist futurist Donna Haraway, the author of “A Cyborg Manifesto.” He also emphatically endorsed the “abandonment” of fossil fuels — outing himself as a “keep it in the ground” guy as well. |
| He is also much angrier than he was eight years ago. Since Laudato Si, the pope writes, “I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.” In his new exhortation, he invokes the immediate urgency of faster action, takes pains to offer point-by-point rebuttals of climate denial and climate complacency, including corporate complicity and widespread greenwashing, attacks the “technocratic” worldview he sees behind planetary exploitation, defends climate protesters by describing them as filling a vacuum of global leadership, and calls out “the ethical decadence of real power.” He describes unignorable episodes of extreme weather as the “cries of protest on the part of the earth that are only a few palpable expressions of a silent disease that affects everyone.” And he returns to a two-part mantra he says he reiterates often: “Everything is connected” and “No one is saved alone.” |
| This is quite radical language, even for a pope who has long plotted his own complicated course as an outspoken progressive, alienating many Catholics along the way. But he is also on a journey familiar to many of those most concerned about climate, from grief and lamentation through exhortation to a position of more strident and more pointed outrage. Last month, I wrote about the change in tone from activist groups and climate establishmentarians toward the fossil-fuel industry. In Laudate Deum, Pope Francis channels that frustration, too, but he is more focused and withering on the failures of climate geopolitics since the publication of Laudato Si. |
| A lot has changed between 2015 and 2023 when it comes to climate, and yet an awful lot hasn’t as well. Emissions from the global electricity sector may soon be reaching their peak, the energy research group Ember just announced, and the International Energy Agency recently declared that there was still a workable pathway to net zero emissions in 2050 — and that following it would save the world $12 trillion. |
| On the other hand, emissions are still setting records, and climate extremes and disasters, often powered or supercharged by warming, have come to seem like so many features of our news wallpaper. |
| Eight years ago, when Laudato Si was published, most anyone looking soberly at the state of the climate from any perspective would see the same story: massive changes to come and yet little being done, at any scale, to mitigate warming and limit the damage. Today, energy optimism is, broadly speaking, warranted. But so is some climate pessimism. |
| This is where the pope is. And he is not shy about saying so. “The necessary transition,” he writes, “is not progressing at the necessary speed. Consequently, whatever is being done risks being seen only as a ploy to distract attention.” To expect technical interventions alone to resolve the climate crisis is “a form of homicidal pragmatism, like pushing a snowball down a hill.” |
| If in Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrapped concern for the future of the planet in the plaintive language of spiritual sickness, here he wields a much more political, even legalistic tone. In his short exhortation, Francis devotes long stretches of text to “rethinking our use of power,” “the weakness of international politics” and “climate conferences: progress and failures,” before devoting an entire section to the question: What to expect from COP 28 in Dubai? |
| His answer? “To say that there is nothing to hope for would be suicidal, for it would mean exposing all humanity, especially the poorest, to the worst impacts of climate change.” But based on the recent past and the conditions of this U.N. climate conference in the United Arab Emirates and run by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, he does not seem especially hopeful. |
| “We must move beyond the mentality of appearing to be concerned but not having the courage needed to produce substantial changes,” he writes. |
| Once and for all, let us put an end to the irresponsible derision that would present this issue as something purely ecological, “green,” romantic, frequently subject to ridicule by economic interests. Let us finally admit that it is a human and social problem on any number of levels. For this reason, it calls for involvement on the part of all. In conferences on the climate, the actions of groups negatively portrayed as “radicalized” tend to attract attention. But in reality, they are filling a space left empty by society as a whole, which ought to exercise a healthy pressure, since every family ought to realize that the future of their children is at stake. |
| For those who have left that space empty, he is especially unforgiving. “To the powerful, I can only repeat this question: ‘What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power, only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?’” |
We are saddened at the UUHoulton community with the passing of Stephen Kinney’s mother earlier last week. Here is a photo of Stephen and mother in her Woodstock home.
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continues
Prayers for those affected by the recent earthquake in Morocco Prayers for those affected by the recent dam failure in Libya Prayers for a safe and bountiful fall harvestPrayers for Leigh as she recovers from a recent surgeryPrayers for those affected by the devastating earthquake last week in
western Afghanistan Prayers for those in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its third weekPrayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza
The Four Limitless Ones Prayer
May all sentient beings enjoy happiness and the root of happiness.
May we be free from suffering and the root of suffering.
May we not be separated from the great happiness devoid of suffering.
May we dwell in the great equanimity free from anger, aggression and exclusion.
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