January 7, 2024

First Church in snow  (2024)The new year is here and we even have a little snow. You will see several snow photos in this week’s Support Page as we (mostly) embrace the coming of white to Houlton and the surrounding area. We also return to our topic theme of the year, EarthCare and our role as contributing global citizens. The title of Sunday’s talk is “The Big Question; What Can We Do?” One of the books we are using as a resource for our study and conversations is Not Too Late; Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua.

For this Sunday’s discussion we are looking at three short essays in the beginning of the book that are listed below. I have also included a portion of one of the essays in this week’s Support Page as Study Material in case you do not have a copy of the book. Houlton was not the only winter location that experienced a green Christmas this year. It was hard not to notice all the reports about unusually mild weather conditions in the northern hemisphere during the holidays. I’ve included two articles from The New York Times as it relates to lack of snow and our climate topic. 

Essay #1  Here’s Where You Come In   by Mary Annalise Heglar    page 19

Essay #2  We are Not Doomed to Climate Chaos  by Edward R. Carr    page 28

Essay #3  A Climate Scientist’s Take on Hope   by Joelle Gergis    page 38  

YouTube Channel content for this week is a New Year’s Service as Dave shares 

“Odds and Ends” from the expiring year; personal reflections, poems, stories as well as our annual tradition of recognizing those who have passed during the year and a Yule Log ritual. The link for YouTube is listed below. Please join us for one of the services.

In Ministry,

Dave

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)

HERE IS THE ZOOM LINK FOR SUNDAY COFFEE HOUR:
Topic: UUHoulton coffee hour & check-inTime: Jan 7, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/89792563015?pwd=2Yrqd76hvdKZc2DE7rp2nx5bLQux9h.1
Meeting ID: 897 9256 3015Passcode: 779220

Calendar of Events @UUHoulton

Jan 7 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Jan 7       Eclipse ’24 planning meeting during coffee hour

Jan 8    UUHoulton Board Meeting  6PM

Jan 13 LGBTQ+ Luncheon at noon

Jan 13 Houlton Coffeehouse   (Open-Mic Night)Jan 14 Sunday Service:  Rev. Dale Holden

Jan 14 UUHoulton Social Action Group Meeting during coffee hour Jan 16 Meditation Group  4PM   (online)

Jan 21 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson

Jan 28     Sunday Service:  Randi Bradbury & Ira Dyer

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 (AKA US Route 2), Houlton, Maine 04730

EarthCare Study Material A Climate Scientist’s Take on HopeJoelle Gergis

As a climate scientist, people often ask me what is the single most important thing they can do to address the climate crisis? My answer is simply this: recognize that you are living through the most profound moment in human history. Averting planetary disaster is up to the people alive right now…Recognizing you are part of a timeless tug of war for social justice electrifies the present moment in a way that brings meaning and purpose to our lives. 

The truth is that some of the changes we have now unleashed in frozen places and oceans are irreversible and will be with us for centuries. We have set in motion the melting of mountain glaciers, permafrost, thaw, ocean acidification, and sea level rise that will be with us long after we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s an appalling reality to come to terms with – the Earth’s equilibrium is now shifting in a fossil fuel-cooked world. But just because the situation is dire doesn’t mean it’s too late to try to stabilize things. How bad we let things get is still in our hands. Additional warming will be determined by future emission. That is, what policies governments around the world choose to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and restore ecosystems will directly lead to destabilizing the Earth’s climate. Or not.
The good news is that there is no evidence to support the notion that we are currently facing runaway climate change or the inevitability of an unlivable future. Once emissions start to stabilize, temperature follows suit…The IPC report explains that every single metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere lessens the severity of the impacts we bake into the system. Our assessment meticulously describes how every fraction of a degree of warming matters – the scale and severity of impacts begins to compound and cascade with higher levels of warming. As we have already seen, 1.2 degree C of warming has caused dangerous and widespread disruption to nature and human societies.. Imagine the impacts that will unfold with 1.5*C, 2*C, or even 4*C of global warming. We are currently failing to outpace escalating and compounding risks in many parts of the world, particularly in Africa, South Asia, Central and South America, the Arctic, and small island nations. The situation progressively worsens once we reach 1.5*C, when the adaptation limits of many ecosystems are reached. Between half and two-thirds of all species across terrestrial, freshwater, and marine systems have already shifted their geographic ranges in response to the global warming we’ve experienced so far. Beyond 2*C, the IPCC says that adaptation is simply not possible some low-lying coastal cities, small islands, deserts, mountains, and polar regions of the world.
What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and succeeded against all odds. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is a series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo. Right now, we are living through the biggest social movement of our time. A time of true global citizenry, driven by our duty to protect the planetary conditions that sustain us all. The question is, How are you going to show up in this moment? 

Change happens gradually, then suddenly. It’s never too late to be part of the social movement that will help heal our world.

Joelle Gergis, PhD, is an award-winning climate scientist and author, based at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. Her latest book is 

Humanity’

s Moment; A climate Scientists

 Case for Hope.

Waiting for Snow in the Netherlands

Jan. 3, 2024

New York Times

by Benjamin Moser

Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
Long before I knew his name, I knew Hendrick Avercamp’s paintings. They show a merry Christmassy world of funnily dressed people disporting themselves on frozen canals: paintings I knew from jigsaw puzzles and holiday cards. Here was a young couple gliding over the ice, love in their eyes; there were people exercising picturesque professions — a skate sharpener, a bird catcher, a chestnut seller.But if you kept looking, you found a good-natured scabrousness. Behind that spidery tree was a man defecating, and over there was a woman who’d slipped and exposed her red buttocks, and there, beside the village inn, was a drunken fool being fished out of the ice. No other artist ever captured winter fun as well.These scenes were so iconic, so Dutch, that I felt a bit bereaved, when I moved to the Netherlands more than 20 years ago, to realize that the world they showed was gone — and that thanks to climate change, it wouldn’t be coming back. Even the Elfstedentocht, the skating race through the 11 historic cities of Friesland that is one of the country’s most beloved national traditions and has been held 15 times since 1909, was passing from memory. The ice has to reach a certain thickness for it to be safely held, and the ice no longer reaches that thickness. What I found, in place of the sparkling white winters of the old paintings, was month after month of tepid drizzle.It’s hard to overstate how excited the Dutch still get about the Elfstedentocht. Spirits rise as the mercury sinks. There are daily meteorological reports from little towns that are rarely mentioned in any other context. The race has its own vocabulary, in the Frisian language that the non-Frisian Dutch find adorable: “It giet oan” means the race is on — or, if the ice isn’t thick enough, “It giet net oan.” Since I moved to this country, only the latter has been heard. A whole generation has grown up since the last race, in 1997, though it almost happened in 2012. Every year, when it gets cold, the possibility of the race comes roaring through our screens.What nobody can bring themselves to say is that the Elfstedentocht is gone.Over.Foarby.Living in a country protected from the sea by huge manufactured barriers, we are starting to understand that even these heroic constructions will not be strong enough for climate change. I’ve often imagined the collapse of dune and dike and the cultural losses such a cataclysm would bring. If the western Netherlands — all those cities, at or even below sea level, with all those museums and libraries — were swept into the sea, which treasures would we miss most? (I’d stuff the Frans Hals group portraits, in his museum in Haarlem, into my little lifeboat.)And when we imagine the losses to cultural heritage that global warming entails, we often think of things we’d try to rescue or buildings we can’t move or a few striking images: snowless Alps, drowned Venice. We don’t always think about the immaterial losses that warming will bring — or, in the case of the Elfstedentocht, that it already has. When the freak hurricane, the unexpected drought or the unbearable heat wave passes, we get on with our lives, unable to admit that some things are not coming back.That’s why it’s always so poignant for me to hear about the Elfstedentocht. Nobody can stand to say that it’s over. You’d hate to be the prime minister who told everyone to forget about such a beloved national tradition. Instead, barring some freak storm, it just somehow will never happen again. Years will pass. (Twenty-six already have.) Younger people, for whom the tradition means nothing, will eventually forget about it. The race will fade from the communal memory, and with it, a whole way of life — a whole way of structuring and giving continuity to human experience — will disappear.How can such nonmaterial losses be commemorated? As long as we are unable to see them as losses, we can keep refusing to see what has caused them and keep hoping that they still, someday, might be reversed. The Elfstedentocht is like a relative whose small plane went missing a few years ago and whose loved ones still hope that he could, one day, stumble into town. They all know he’s dead, of course. But it feels too cruel to be the first to say it — too painful to erect a gravestone without so much as a corpse.This denial has consequences. For the past few years, we have heard about the passing of another way of life in this country — the life of the country’s farmers. The word “farmers” sounds idyllic. But Dutch animal agriculture, which is stunningly productive and even more stunningly polluting, is mainly the province of heavily industrialized and heavily subsidized agribusiness. These corporations are a source of great cruelty to animals and also a source of precisely the same gases that have poisoned our entire world. There’s nothing traditional about mass factory farms. But their lobbyists have been able to convince a large percentage of the population that attempts to reduce pollution are an attack on a traditional way of life. Caroline van der Plas, the leader of the pro-farming party, told The Guardian in late 2022: “In the outlying areas, you often hear that in The Hague there is no eye for the human dimension and the small things that are so important in the countryside.”Maybe if we could find a way to mourn the Elfstedentocht, we could understand that there is a price to refusing to see what inaction on the climate has cost us. If we refuse to look at it head-on — to name and remember these losses — we’ll find ourselves like those older people in Friesland, glued to the weather reports, measuring the thickness of the ice, sharpening their skates for a race that will never come again.

Benjamin Moser, the author of “The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters,” wrote from Utrecht, the Netherlands, where he lives.Environmental Newsletter from The New York Times

Where did our snow go?

Almost no one in the United States experienced a white Christmas. Ski areas in the West are closed. The Great Lakes began the year with the lowest amount of ice in at least 50 years. Midwesterners are jogging in T-shirts in the dead of winter.

Record warmth and changing precipitation patterns mean most of the United States is not getting its usual snowfall.

The balmy start to winter isn’t just hurting skiers and ice fisherman: The snow that blankets mountain ranges in winter serves as a vital reservoir, cooling rivers, propelling hydropower systems and feeding irrigation channels needed for the nation’s apples, blueberries and almonds.

It is also giving many a new appreciation for living in a time of rapid planetary warming.

“It’s a big cultural shift to experience 50 yesterday and how disorienting that is from a geographic perspective,” Jessica Hellmann, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, told my colleagues Ernesto Londoño and Michael Levenson (50 degrees Fahrenheit is about 10 Celsius). “It’s a visceral feeling of what climate change looks and feels like for people who are accustomed to living in a particular climate.”

In the Northeast, a warm start to winter is starting to feel normal. Last year, New York City didn’t see any meaningful snowfall. It has now been nearly 700 days since Central Park registered an inch of snow.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, “total snowfall has decreased in many parts of the country since widespread observations became available in 1930, with 57 percent of stations showing a decline.”

Weather is complicated, and there’s no single factor that can explain why it is that so little snow is falling in the U.S. these days. But it’s clear that the combination of record heat driven in part by man-made emissions and an El Niño that began last year are major factors.

‘What we expected’

Let’s start with the heat. The hottest year in recorded history was 2023, and large areas of the United States experienced searing, sustained temperatures.

Judson Jones, a reporter and meteorologist for The Times, said it was no surprise that the overall warming trend has continued into the winter months.

“When the winter is warmer, there’s less likelihood that you’ll get snow,” he told me.

Real time data from the Department of Agriculture shows that, across vast parts of the Western U.S., the snow pack is more than 50 percent below normal.

The onset of El Niño, a naturally occurring phenomenon that sees the Pacific Ocean release huge amounts of heat, also had meteorologists expecting an unusual year of weather.

“It’s kind of what we expected,” Judson told me. “Because of this current El Niño pattern, we expected less precipitation, especially where you would normally see it across the central U.S.”

To be clear, the rain is still falling, but it’s concentrated further south, especially in the Southeastern United States. And when precipitation has moved north, the temperatures have been relatively balmy.

“These big storms that are often called Nor’easters haven’t materialized this year,” Judson said. “The cold air just hasn’t been in place.”

‘Be patient’

Winter is not over, of course, and the weather could change.

The right mixture of Arctic air coming in from the north and moisture surging up from the south could yet deliver major snowfall. But that combination is increasingly what Judson called a “Goldilocks window.”

In fact, forecasters are predicting that this weekend may bring the first meaningful snow of the year to the Northeast.

“It has to be the perfect place,” he said. “The cold air has to be just right. And if that happens, you can get some big snows.”

Indeed, in the event that a major snowstorm does materialize, it could be a doozy. Warmer air holds more moisture, and just as we’ve seen rainstorms dumping more water in a short amount of time, the same could be true for a blizzard.

“Be patient,” Judson said. “It may just be fewer but bigger storms that dump more snow.”

Downtown Houlton on January 1st

View from the back lot on New Year’s Day(photo by Christoph) 

New Year’s Brunch!   Yummy…(photos from Ira’s phone)

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 in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its third monthPrayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in GazaPrayers for those affected by the mass shooting in Lewiston in OctoberPrayers for the homeless and hunger challenged during the cold seasonPrayers for those affected by the earthquake in Japan earlier this week

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.