The first weekend in the month of May is packed with seasonal activity; the local canoe race, cinco de mayo, may the fourth be with you (Star Wars) as well as Beltane maypole celebrations. We’ve been using our traditional maypole for over fifteen years now, and if you look closely, you will notice how slender the ribbon-wrapped pole is in the photo.
This year during the eclipse we used the maypole as an Earth Day flag pole and people commented on how many layers of ribbon were wrapped on the pole! That’s a lot of weaving and dancing around the pole. This year we have a special Beltane ritual planned (in doors) in the church basement after the regular service and a potluck meal (more details below).
This Sunday’s service is a continuation of our EarthCare theme with part eight of our study series titled “EarthVision; Looking Back and Looking Ahead.” You will find study material included in today’s Support Page and we are covering pages 151-182 in our study book “Not Too Late.” Our theme for the year is winding down, as we only have two sessions remaining in our series, highlighted by a Dr. Mark Horvath lecture on May 19 titled “What a Fossil Fuel Free World Would Look Like in 30 Years.”
I also have a special children’s story this week about “sharing what you love.” YouTube Channel content for this week is a service by Jodi Scott exploring the nature of light guiding us along the way. Like a heliotrope flower our human tendency is to turn toward the light that is shining. The title of the service is
“ Stepping Forward into the Light and Into Your Power.” Or as she says, “a.k.a. what’s next, post-eclipse?” We hope you can join us for one of the services.
In Ministry,
Dave
Beltane Ritual and CelebrationMay 5, Sunday Morning after the service
We’ve celebrated the maypole and Beltane tradition at UUHoulton for numerous years now. Join us this Sunday after the service for a Beltane ritual led by Fred Griffith, Leigh Griffith, Jodi Scott and Beth Walker in the church basement. There is also a potluck luncheon so please bring something yummy to contribute to the happenings.
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 zoom coffee hour & check inTime: May 5, 2024 11:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81880286111?pwd=vlN8YurDY0xe0DGbPOF0y8YHvB0tlk.1
Meeting ID: 818 8028 6111Passcode: 162132
Calendar of Events @UUHoulton
May 5 Sunday Service: David Hutchinson Beltane ritual after the service downstairs
Potluck luncheon in the church basement
May 12 Sunday Service: Joshua Atkinson
May 14 Meditation Group 4PM (online)May 18 LGBTQ+ Luncheon 12 Noon
May 18 Houlton Coffeehouse 7PM Open-MIc
May 19 Sunday service: Mark Horvath & David Hutchinson
May 26 Sunday Service: Rev. Dale Holden
May 28 Meditation Group 4PM (online)June 2 Flower Communion Service David Hutchinson New Members Recognition Sunday Potluck BBQ Party following the service
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 (U.S. Route 2), Houlton, ME 04730
EarthCare Study Material:
Imagination is a Muscleby Adrienne Maree Brown
Imagination is a muscle that, for many of us, will atrophy if we don’t use it, especially under the pressure of constant fear. Fear and imagination often can’t be in the same room…A component that’s necessary is there has to be something that people can do at an individual level that feels meaningful, and that combines with having a large-scale analysis of what’s going on that is collective. When I think about what we need to do related to climate catastrophe and climate change, the stories I think we need to tell are ones of what it is like to be in a relationship with the Earth. What is it like to live on an abundant Earth? What are communities that are thriving by being in relationship to the Earth? What does enough feel like?
We have this idea that there’s scarcity and shortage. But if you’ve ever put a seed into the ground, you see what a fecund world we live in. It’s over-providing. Every time I’ve tried any gardening experiment, I’m like, “Okay, now there’s too much of everything,” and we must jar it and try to distribute it among everyone. That’s the nature of the Earth that we live on. That’s the story that we want to tell. And if there’s places that are not experiencing that abundance, that is because of human impact, not because of the nature of the planet itself.
I think you have to be dosing yourself with pleasure to maintain hope, All along your life you must find the small pleasures that keep you in touch with what life actually feels like, and help you slip under the lie that we’re in a total crisis and there’s nothing good happening…Particularly around the climate right now, if you don’t let the despair flow through and let it in and grieve about what we have lost – if we don’t let that come, it’s going to find other ways to surface itself. I keep telling people, sometimes I’m crying in the shower because I love the Earth so much, and I want us all to put it first. And then I let that despair focus my writing and focus my offer in the world. I want my lineage to be a lineage of someone who fought hard for human existence on this planet. My despair and grief and fear and anger informed that, and they’re powerful parts of that fight, just as m much as my love.
Adrienne Maree Brown nurtures Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination, and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute. esil.org
Conversation Between the Two Editors:
Rebecca Solnit & Thelma Young LutunatabuaRebecca: What if the climate crisis requires us to give up the things we don’t love and the things that make us poorer, not richer…Many years ago, my wonderful Utah-environmentalist friend Chip Ward used the phrase “the tyranny of the quantifiable,” and I’ve borrowed it and worked it hard ever since. What you say, Thelma, is that we are told that we live in an age of affluence and abundance and we should fear change. There is plenty of quantifiable abundance out there – as stuff, disposable stuff, fast fashion, cheap furniture, rapid travel, packaging and litter and garbage heaps and the plastic patch in the Pacific. The carbon dioxide we’ve added to the upper atmosphere is in its own way a kind of garbage dump, a residue of our fossil-fuel consumption. But this age is poor in so many ways. There is so much loneliness and disconnection, from love, friendship, community, from the natural world, from moral and visual beauty, so much hopelessness so many who don’t have enough in a world full of people who have too much. What if that is what we need to renounce? What if the climate crisis requires renouncing not this version of wealth but its underlying poverty? What if we measured our wealth in other ways, as confidence in the future, as the clarity of the air and its breathability, as pride in one’s community and country as integrity in our material and moral lives, as having seen the summer’s shooting stars or throwing moon-viewing parties or watching the migratory birds arrive, as friendship and the sense of safety that means help is there when needed, as honor and dignity and a meaningful life?
Thelma: I agree, we need different ways of measuring. One of our other contributors, Adrienne Maree Brown (please see above), often speaks about how we need to be better at learning to be satisfied. When do we say, “enough is enough, and I feel full?”
Rebecca: We also apply the lessons of money and material objects to the things of the spirit – it is true that if I take your belongings I have more of those things, that if I give away my own possessions or money I have less. But to give more love, more praise, more joy, does not deplete me, and to give creates the mutuality that means these things will be given back to me. And if the climate teachers one thing it’s that everything is connected…Climate chaos is a catastrophe but also a teacher, and its first lesson is that everything is connected, which is both the beautiful dream of mutuality and the nightmare of runaway consequences. We need to learn to see that interconnectedness and as we both believe so deeply, this is why this crisis, like every crisis, is in part a storytelling crisis.
Thelma: If we can shift our task list toward mutuality, we will start feeling the spaciousness of the journey ahead. Once we shift our worldview to center relationships, we will also better be able to grasp what needs to be nurtured to grow and what can be let behind. Through tackling the climate crisis, I hope it will lead us down eye-opening paths of abundance. Hopefully the next generations will hear more elaborate songs from nature, know better ways to repair and share, and find a more sumptuous and intertwined way of being.
The Climate Crisis Calls for Wisdom—Not Artificial Intelligence
Mar 23, 2024
We’re getting right to the nub now.
This week the World Meteorological Organization officially certified 2023 as the hottest year in human history. Just to put on the record here what should have been the lead story in every journal and website on our home planet:
Andrea Celeste Saulo, secretary general of the WMO, said the organization was now “sounding the red alert to the world.”
The report found temperatures near the surface of the earth were 1.45°C higher last year than they were in the late 1800s, when people began to destroy nature at an industrial scale and burn large amounts of coal, oil, and gas.
Last year’s spike was so scary that NASA’s Gavin Schmidt—Jim Hansen’s heir as keeper of NASA’s climate record—wrote in Nature this week that it raised the most profound possible implications. Please read his words slowly and carefully:
It could imply that a warming planet is already fundamentally altering how the climate system operates, much sooner than scientists had anticipated. It could also mean that statistical inferences based on past events are less reliable than we thought, adding more uncertainty to seasonal predictions of droughts and rainfall patterns.
Much of the world’s climate is driven by intricate, long-distance links—known as teleconnections—fuelled by sea and atmospheric currents. If their behavior is in flux or markedly diverging from previous observations, we need to know about such changes in real time.
And now, with equal care, read the words of the biggest oil producer on earth, the CEO of Saudi Aramco, who was in Houston last week for the annual hydrocarbon festival known as CERAWeek.
We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas and instead invest in them adequately reflecting realistic demand assumptions.
That is to say, the powers that be want to abandon what the World Meteorological Organization, in their “red alert” report called the “one glimmer of hope”: that renewable energy installations rose 50% last year.
Understand that the battle is fully joined. The fossil fuel industry—as Exxon CEO Darren Woods helpfully explained—is in an all-out fight to derail anything green, because it won’t return “above average profits.” They have plenty of allies: Everyone noted former President Donald Trump threatening a “bloodbath” last week, but fewer noted the actual target of his wrath: electric vehicles. The Biden administration, after listening to the rhetoric at the Houston conference, backed EVs in a straightforward and earnest way today, announcing new rules that attempt to spur the rapid growth of a crucial climate-fighting technology. But of course that produced the requisite reaction: as The New York Timesreported:
The American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a lobbying organization, has started what it says is a “seven figure” campaign of advertising, phone calls, and text messages against what it falsely calls “Biden’s E.P.A. car ban” in the swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, as well as in Ohio, Montana, and the Washington D.C. market.
So, like it or not, the climate crisis is going to be a key part of this election campaign. The November outcome may hinge on whether Americans can imagine making even this small change in the face of the gravest crisis our species has ever wandered into: replacing the gas tank in a car with a battery. That doesn’t seem like much to ask?
It won’t solve the climate crisis, of course—nothing will solve it. But accelerating momentum towards green energy is the likeliest card we have to play in a world where people seem unwilling to moderate their demands for mobility, and indeed for consumption of any kind.
One particularly depressing set of statistics about that ever-increasing demand for more emerged last week, as the energy implications of artificial intelligence started to become clearer. Here’s what Bloombergreported on Wednesday:
John Ketchum, CEO of utility NextEra Energy Inc., told attendees that U.S. power demand, which has been relatively flat for years, is poised to increase by 81% over the next five years. Toby Rice, chief of the largest U.S. natural gas driller, EQT Corp., cited a prediction that AI will gobble up more power domestically than households by 2030.
As Elizabeth Kolbert explained in The New Yorker a few days ago, this “obscene” power demand comes because when you ask AI to, say, help you with your bracket for the NCAA tournament, it has to sort through all human knowledge ever. As even AI apostle Sam Altman explained at Davos this year
“I think we still don’t appreciate the energy needs of this technology.” He didn’t see how these needs could be met, he went on, “without a breakthrough.” He added, “We need fusion or we need, like, radically cheaper solar plus storage, or something, at massive scale—like, a scale that no one is really planning for.”
The truth is, there’s no way we can build out renewable energy fast enough to meet this kind of extra demand—it’s going to be at the bleeding edge of the technically and politically possible to power the things we already do, live drive cars and heat homes. And so, in a rational world, faced with an emergency, we would put off scaling AI for now. The irony, of course, is that’s it’s often been touted as a tool to help solve climate change. But we have the tools we need—plain old intelligence gave us cheap solar panels.
With the able technological assistance of my wife, I asked Anthropic’s AI bot Claude to comment. It was amazing how much he sounded like a PR man; after spinning a lot of jargon-filled guff about how “responsible AI can likely be part of the solution to environmental challenges,” he allowed as how he had no idea how much energy he was using. “In general, the electricity usage of large language models like myself is a relevant consideration from an environmental perspective, but quantifying the exact amount would require additional information I don’t have access to.”
Whatever. What we need is not more intelligence. We need more wisdom, to guide us through this pinch point in the human experiment. Including the wisdom to say no to some things, at least until the emergency subsides.
Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org and ThirdAct.org. His most recent book is “Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.” He also authored “The End of Nature,” “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet,” and “Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.”
Yay! Where are the burritos?
Early signs of spring in my mother’s flower garden and back yard.
posted by Dave
Happy birthday Lehua!!!
the shot behind the shot…
Prayer List
For those working for social justice and societal changePray for peaceful action and democratic process in our nationThe war in Ukraine continuesPrayers for those in Palestine and Israel as the war continues into its seventh monthPrayers for the worsening humanitarian crisis in GazaPrayers for those affected by the recent tornados in Nebraska.Prayers concerning the protests and turmoil on US college campuses
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 delusion.
Comments are closed