American(Environmental) Values
Jim Farrell
Sunday, April 6th 2008

We figure and find stories, which can be thought of as maps or paradigms in which we see our purposes defined, then the world drifts and our maps don't work anymore, paradigms fail, and we have to reinvent our understandings, and our reasons for continuing. Useful stories, I think, are radical in that they help us see freshly. They are like mirrors in which we see ourselves reflected. That's what stories are for, to help us see, and reinvent ourselves.

- William Kittredge, “Doing Good Work Together”

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Our readings this week, as you might expect, are about resurrection, about coming back to life. Usually in the church, we think about resurrection as coming to life from death, as Jesus did. But I’d like to think about what it might mean to come back to life in a different and broader sense—coming back to the biosphere, which is the sphere of life. With Earth Day coming up in a few weeks, I’d like to think about American values and American environmental values, and about the ways that we might align ourselves with values that support the teeming life of our blue-green planet.

Let’s start with American values—both expressed values and operative values. When you ask Americans about their environmental values, we say that we love nature and the natural world. We believe in conservation and environmental protection, and say that we would be willing to pay more for green products. These are our expressed values. Expressed values are the ones that come from our mouths. Operative values, however, are the ones that are expressed by the rest of our bodies. Operative values are the ones we do, the ones we put to work. And all of them—all of our values—are environmental values. That’s where I’d like to focus today. I’d like to describe a few of our everyday environmental values, and pose a few possibilities for a re-valuation of these values.

1) Comfort

Just to be perverse, I’d like to suggest that America’s primary environmental values are comfort and convenience. From the time that we’re born in the hospital and wrapped in blankets, and placed on a soft mattress in a climate-controlled room, we expect to be comfortable. And we apparently will do whatever it takes—including altering the atmosphere of our planet—to stay comfortable. Most of us live in houses that are heated and cooled for maximum comfort, and we wake up snug in our beds under blankets we call comforters.

We also expect to be socially comfortable. We expect to get along and get ahead. We want to be agreeable companions for the people around us, which means that we don’t want to cause or experience discomfort. And that means, sadly, that we don’t talk about a lot of important issues. If we did, we might replace comfort with a value we might call “comfearth,” spelled “c-o-m-f-e-a-r-t-h.” Comfearth would be the quantity and quality of comfort that’s consistent with the comfort of a planet with a biosphere. In the short run, we might have to wear more layers in the winter. We might have to sweat in the summer. We might have to use our legs for walking or biking. But in the long run, we might take comfort in knowing that we can live harmoniously with the rest of creation.

2. Convenience

The second environmental value, convenience, is a preference for saving time by spending money. We shop at what we call “convenience stores;” we buy gas for the cars that are a convenience, and we buy foods that are processed and packaged for quick consumption, either at fast-food places or at home. It’s a way of getting someone else to do our work for us—often, oddly, so that we can do other work—and that someone else is often a multinational corporation. So when we opt for convenience, we generally opt for the environmental values of corporate America. Saving time, therefore, does little to save the planet, as all of our conveniences add up to one big “inconvenient truth.”

As a substitute for the value of convenience, we might consider “timeliness.” Instead of saving time, we might try to savor it. Timeliness would mean spending more time on more important things, and less time on less important things. It would mean having time for things that are now inconvenient—like slow time with family or friends—a walk, a brunch, a quiet conversational party. It would even mean time to do a job right, instead of just fast. Timeliness would help us to calculate the cost of things in terms of time, as Thoreau did. “The cost of a thing,” he calculated, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Or to modify Thoreau, “immediately AND in the long run.” So timeliness could keep us connected to future time too. In a culture of timeliness, we would not consider ourselves “on time” unless we were making time for both present and future generations. In farming, for example, or in eating, we wouldn’t be on time unless we were making topsoil as fast as we use it. Timeliness is not the same as time management, because time management represents the individualization of responsibility, only asking us to save time within the parameters of corporate culture. Real timeliness would require a politics of time, in which Americans organized to set limits on the time pressures that cause us so much stress (as we did a century ago in the campaign for an 8-hour day). Real timeliness would change the culture of time.

3) Materialism

Materialism is a third American environmental value. Americans like stuff, and we make many of our meanings with things. We don’t have much faith in the unseen. We like to see virtues and values embodied in things. So love isn’t love without all the Valentine’s Day paraphernalia. Success isn’t real until it’s certified by stuff. Advertisers tell us that an essential element of good parenting is good purchasing. And if I believe in the environment, I’ll probably wear a T-shirt that says so.

Materialism is why Americans consume ten times more stuff than people a hundred years ago, why we’ve used more materials since 1945 than all other people in the history of the world combined. Even though most of us are nominally Christian, we seem to forget that the gospel promises an abundance of life, but not a life of abundance.

A new and improved materialism—an ecological materialism—might promote a reverence for materials, and for the stuff of creation. This new materialism might revive such old-fashioned ideals as thrift, frugality and sufficiency. It might encourage us to design products for repair and re-use, and to consume materials fully before discarding them. And it might encourage us to de-materialize our happiness, recognizing that we don’t need belongings to belong, and we don’t need a lot of things to be fulfilled. A new ecological materialism might also include a sense of justice, replacing “more for me” with “enough for everybody.”

4) Cheapness

Cheapness is another essential value of Americans. In a materialistic culture, we like stuff, and we can buy more stuff if it’s cheap. So we’re very conscious of price, and we love to get things “on sale.” But our price fixation helps us forget about cost—the real cost, social and environmental, of the cheap stuff we buy. In Wal-Mart America, when we prefer low, low prices to high, high standards, we buy into a world that exploits people in other countries, pollutes the air and the countryside, and ravages the earth for raw materials. In the long run, cheap stuff is really expensive. Twenty years from now, in a time of intense global weirding, today’s two-dollar T-shirt won’t seem like such a good bargain.

Instead of cheapness, we might consider the value of value. We already talk about a good value. But in a culture of permanence, a good value would mean more than mere cheapness. A good value would be one that reinforced the values we care about. A good value would add value—and not just money—to the lives of the people who produced it. And it would add value to the ecosystems that provided the energy and materials to produce the product.

In our individual purchases, we might try to put our money where our values are. But no amount of good purchasing will achieve the changes we need to sustain the life systems of planet earth. We can’t shop our way out of this crisis—unless we change the market itself. If we want to shop for a better world, we’ll need to shop for a better market. And that means realizing that there’s no such thing as a free market, and that markets can adapt to the directions of democracy. We already use taxes and subsidies and regulations to guide the market, but we often use them mainly for the benefit of corporations—like the 18 billion dollars that we give to oil companies that made more than 100 billion dollars in profits last year. If that money went into retrofitting houses, or public transportation, or an infrastructure for local foods, we’d have a chance of making a market in which our purchasing power might change the world not by degrading it, but by making it more congenial for all of the life forms that we depend on, directly and indirectly.

5) Ignorance

Another American working value is ignorance. Even though Mr. and Mrs. America routinely send their kids to public schools and to college, Americans seem to value ignorance, in three different ways. First is the ignorance of not knowing, or not knowing much. That’s standard ignorance, and we have a lot of it in America.

A second form of ignorance is knowing a lot about a little. In a culture of specialization, many of us learn a lot about the stuff that helps us make a living, at the cost of learning about the stuff that helps us make a life, or about the stuff that would help us sustain the teeming life of the planet. We focus on the know-how needed in our jobs, and forget about the know-why of our larger vocation, which is to do creative and sustaining work in a creation that is, as God said in Genesis, very good.

The third kind of ignorance is intentional. It’s when we know something, and actively choose to ignore it. Global weirding is a good example. We know it’s happening—although most of us are ignorant about the precise processes—but we’d rather ignore it, because it is, as Al Gore says, an inconvenient truth. Three years ago, NASA scientist James Hansen said that we have ten years to begin reducing our carbon footprint. But most of what we have done since then is just hot air, which is, unfortunately, mostly carbon dioxide.

If we hope to sustain ourselves on this planet, we need to get smarter, but we also need to replace the operative value of ignorance with the practice of wisdom. This would require several different kinds of thinking that are marginalized in most of American life. First, wisdom involves thinking in time, looking back to history for stories that can help us shape our future, looking for the histories of hope that show us that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Wisdom also involved looking ahead, practicing a kind of thinking called “possidiction,” imagining alternative futures and working to make those possibilities into realities.

Second, wisdom involves empathy as a way of knowing, feeling the social and environmental impacts of our lifestyle and acting carefully to improve them.

Third, wisdom—and especially ecological wisdom—involves systematic thinking, thinking about the intricate interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds. We don’t just nourish ourselves with food, we also nourish a food system. We don’t just drive cars, we drive a transportation system. We don’t just live, we interact in a million different ways with a natural system that we hardly ever bring to mind. Wendell Berry says that “to think about one thing is not to think at all,” and Frank Lloyd Wright advised his students that “To think `in simple’ is to deal in simples, and that means with an eye single to the altogether.” Once we get our eyes open to the altogether, we’ll realize that we live not in a world of things, but in a world of relationships. We live in a planet where our everyday actions have global consequence—which is terrifying, until you remember that those same actions, if re-formed, can have a global consequence for good.

Conclusion

In my dictionary, the word “resurrect” has two meanings. It means bringing back to life, but it also means “to bring back into practice, notice or use.” We can participate in the resurrection if we bring back into practice values that we’ve forgotten, if we bring back to notice the ways in which our values threaten life, and if we bring back to use the environmental values that we have spoken but not acted. Instead of thinking of resurrection just as a return from the dead—a nice trick if you can do it—we can think of it as a resurgence of life and of values that give life to us, and to our plant and animal partners on this magnificent planet. We can celebrate not just the resurrection of the body, but the resurrection of the body politic in the ecological revolution of the 21st century.

This is not a new idea—it’s an old idea that we’ve forgotten. It’s so old it’s even in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy (30: 19-20), where God says, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” That’s one way that all of us can practice the resurrection of this Easter season.

Amen.

Copyright 2008.

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