First Universalist Society of
Ecology Analogy
Andrea Abbott
April 29, 2008
Many years ago, when I
was first working as a prison librarian, I worked in a small substance abuse
correctional facility. The program there
was modeled on the twelve steps and I asked to attend one of the groups in
order to more fully understand what went on around me. I received permission from the group members
and went. During discussion one of the
inmates revealed something he had done which had caused his family a great deal
of pain. He was obviously distressed and
remorseful for what he had done and was really upset. The counselor, himself a recovering
alcoholic, said to him, “Good, sit with that.
You need to sit with that.” I
realized that my first reaction was to want to comfort him, praise him for
starting on the road for recovery, reassure him that his efforts would not be
in vain and here was his counselor wanting him to stay in the moment and really
feel the guilt and despair. It takes a
lot to break through the fog of denial that addicts develop to hide their
addiction from themselves, or, as one counselor said to me, “Addiction is the
disease that fights its own cure.”
People who have done terrible things to others and themselves are able
to use the kind of corkscrew logic that is a feature of this disease to hide the truth from
themselves.
Just to let you
know at this point that this is not going to be about addiction, at least not
that kind of addiction. What I really
want to do is to talk a bit more about the environment, inspired as I was by
the service last week. After the
service, I found that bit of my past coming back to me and I wondered why. I think it might have been because our
dependence on oil has so often been analogized to an addict’s dependence on
alcohol or drugs. Going a step further,
our consumer lifestyle has been compared to addiction; indeed, addiction is a
really important word in our culture and the suffix “aholic” has been added to
many words: shopaholic, chocoholic. I laughed, too, and added some that seemed
more pertinent to me: bookaholic,
icecreamaholic, cutelittlechinafigurineaholic. However, there are two things we could ask
about this. One is, is this a cheapening
of the experience that addicts go through?
Or, alternatively, does this use of the phrase truly describe what our
culture is? Are we a culture of people
devoured by cravings, unable to fulfill our needs in any sane or measured
way? Interestingly, some of the joke
words turn out to cross the boundary from humor to tragedy. Shopaholics find themselves caught in a cycle
of spending and credit which ruins lives as much as heroin. There are now
programs for this.
Perhaps the key
word in this is “consumer”. What a
horrible word! It sounds like a huge
maw, endlessly devouring everything in its path. Is this really what we have become? Is this our only function? The word is everywhere. Be an intelligent
consumer. Consumer power. The strategy of the boycott is directly tied
to the idea that power can come from the refusal to consume. What about the movement that says we should
set aside one day, one day, not to shop.
What about our concern that marketing is targeting younger and younger
children?
One of the first
events I attended here was the video called Affluenza, which Janice Ludington
showed after church one Sunday. It was a
sobering account of the amount we both spend and waste and the effects of this
on our environment. It’s worth seeing
again. I know many people in this
congregation are concerned with the effect their buying choices have on the
survival of the planet. I know that many
of us are following the three step plan
It’s important to remember that an analogy
between substance abuse and the exploitation of the environment is only that,
an analogy. There are other analogies
which can be used which do not call up images of personal dysfunction. What if our dependence on oil is not caused
by some sort of species wide genetic defect, or greed, or laziness, or
assumption of privilege? What if it’s a matter of individual guilt? Could
it be that some of it is structural and that some of it is not in our control
as much as we might wish? Perhaps we resist this idea because that which is not
in our control is frightening.
We know that the
automobile altered the American landscape forever. Suburbs, drive ins, malls, commuting to work
longer and longer distances, business travel, holiday travel as a common
activity for more than the rich, all these were dependent on first the car and
then the airplane. I blush when I tell
you that I commute 28 miles to work, one way, each day. I blush further when I tell you that I drive
to Dewitt to my one trusted hairdresser.
I could control the second trip.
The first is, by now, pretty well built in. Again, what is within our control, what is
not? In the past, no one would even
think of applying for a job that far away from home. Now, I know people who drive much farther
than that to work. What difference will
gas prices or energy shortages make in our lives? What effect will this have on employers who
count on a mobile work force? Again,
what is within our control, what is not?
Beyond personal
decisions, what decisions are made for us by others? Are we really free to choose a place to live
which will reduce our dependence on oil?
Is there such a place? We chose
to live in a small village, because we wanted to be able to walk to what we
needed only to find that there was no local stores left and the only
supermarket was quite a walk indeed. I
don’t need to talk about the lack of public transportation in
I have been
hearing lately that people are returning to the cities. New home buyers are looking for places where
they don’t have to commute two or three hours a day to work. New communities have been built on the model
of small towns with stores and recreation areas part of the mix. I hope that this means my town may also be
retrofitted. Maybe, in this new/old
world, neighborhoods will become more than a collection of the same houses in
the same place. Perhaps the increase in
gas prices, or the threat of an energy shortage, will compel people to make
decisions that are healthy for their inner lives as well as their pocket
books. Perhaps their decisions will
reduce the harm visited on the planet.
The analogy of
addiction is only one way to think about the environment. The cover of Time magazine this week, which
is attracting a good deal of controversy, shows the famous statue of the
raising of the flag on Iwo Jima with a tree substituted for the flag (and a
green rather than a red border) with the words, How to Win the War on Global
Warming. That’s a different way to look
at the problem, from addiction to war.
War implies all sorts of things.
The one condition necessary for war, however, is an enemy, so I was
curious about the enemy in this case. It
appears that the old Pogo cartoon is correct in this case, “We have met the
enemy and they is us.” The cartoon, by
the way, shows the title character, an ethical possum, in a stream surrounded
by old cans and papers. Published a good 40 years ago, it still applies. However, the “us” in the article is not so
much the consumer as the manufacturer.
The enemy is the complex web of infrastructure and economics which
surrounds this debate and takes it beyond the hands of individuals. If we are
addicts, we are addicts in an enabling world. The changes we need to make will
require more than individual decisions.
They will require commitment and lots of steady pressure because, in
this war, some people will be casualties. How do we together shield the more
vulnerable from shouldering a burden too great, while the powerful jockey to
continue or increase their profits? Is
it possible to have a war where everyone wins?
What would a conscientious objector look like in this war? War also implies big guns, heavy hitters, a
nation united in a cause. But it also
means violence and ruthlessness, hierarchy and unseen generals plotting
strategy while common soldiers make the ultimate sacrifice.
Analogies are only
that—analogies. They can be poetry,
enriching us, extending our understanding.
My love is like a red, red rose says a lot that my love is a complex
physiological, psychological and chemical response doesn’t. But analogy can also make us think and act in
certain ways. Addiction means shame,
passivity and helplessness. Addiction,
or the recovery from addiction, can also mean a commitment to truth, the
discovery of spirituality, finding a sense of community. War means destruction, brutality, hatred. War can also mean courage, personal sacrifice,
devotion to a common cause.
What is it that
makes people change? What summons up the
courage to face reality and deal with it?
In the case of addiction, it is usually the sense of hitting bottom,
wherever that is for each person, the loss of something vital such as a
marriage, children, career, one’s health.
It is usually a profound loss that follows many years of smaller losses
which the person rationalizes away.
Sadly, some people never are able to recover.
In the case of
war, change comes about through the recognition of a threat, and a threat to
something or someone important. People
rally together in the face of such a threat.
Forces are mobilized, people gladly volunteer. Sacrifices are expected and given both by
those who fight and by those who go without at home. If we are addicts, where
do we find the courage to change, if we are soldiers, where do we find the
courage to fight? Both war and addiction have been used as
rallying cries to make us change the way we live, but are they the analogies
that will speak to us? Are they helpful,
hurtful, or do they leave us unmoved?
Something will
have to change. And it will have to be
both grassroots change in which people personally sacrifice for the next
generation, and a change led by the forces of those in power to provide
structures so people can make these changes. We will have to break through layers of denial
and find the love and passion to carry us forward into a world we can barely
imagine.
Better than the
analogies of addiction or war, I like Margaret’s analogy of a family. The Earth is our mother, we are her children,
as are all things on this small planet.
Can the threat of loss of our family, the only family we can ever have,
can this summon the love that is greater than the forces of fear and hate? Can this analogy fuel our determination to
get it right this time, no matter what the cost? Parents sacrifice for their children, and we
will have to do so for our own children as well as those we have never seen and
will never know. Brothers and sisters
come together in times of trouble and we will have to meet members of our
family we didn’t know we had, meet them in common cause. We can often find amazing courage when
something we love is under threat. We
can find amazing sources of wisdom when everything depends on our
judgment. Global crisis is a new
situation. We have nowhere to escape,
nowhere to run, no one besides ourselves to look to. We can react in fear, or we can react in
love. Let us work for love.