May 1, 2016 Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor “A May Day Sermon: Profit vs Environment”
Gus Speth, a US adviser on climate change said “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
This week we marked the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, in what is now Ukraine. It was the worst nuclear accident in history though it only killed about 20 people initially. It was not, of course, the explosion that gave the world a reason to panic. It was the resulting release of radiation. Conservatively, there have been 4000 deaths from cancer caused by the radiation leak though other health organizations say that it may have shortened the lives of a million people.
I remember the news reports of the accident and I can even remember my fairly reflexive feeling that it was an accident caused by the indifference of the Soviet government toward their own people. Russians were not careful enough, they did not value the lives and health of their people, especially those who lived in the vassal states of Eastern Europe.
Of course, what would not have occurred to my young Kentucky mind was the fact that we cause more than 100,000 deaths every year in the USA because of our long standing policy of mining and burning coal. In fact, when you factor in the health costs, burning coal produces the most expensive electricity on the planet. This fact has been demonstrated by research conducted by the Harvard Medical School.
We have always found it to be absurd that the Soviets valued political power in their tyrannical communist country more than it valued people but even we tend to not question the fact that our capitalist country values economic profit more than we value the lives of our citizens.
We have not been able to touch the coal industry in this nation until fracking made natural gas seem to be less expensive…. Again, without any real environmental concern about the consequences of fracking.
When we look across the pond, we can sadly observe the kind of fatalism that has existed in communist nations. They seem to quietly accept the totalitarian government control that limits their freedom, their opportunities, their creativity, their travel, their religion and that excuses government corruption by turning a blind eye to the poverty of the population.
We have a harder time seeing how huge blocks of our own population engages in the same kind of fatalism. My mother’s people came from Appalachia and in the extreme poverty of that coal mining region of the world, the people politically defend the coal industry in order to keep jobs that are keeping them both sick and in poverty.
I don’t know much about Harriet Tubman, the abolitionist who has been chosen as the first female and the first black American to be featured on our currency. But this one quote stands out for me, when Tubman was being praised for having freed so many slaves through the underground railroad, she replied, “I freed a thousand slaves but I could have freed thousands more if only I could have convinced them that they were slaves.”
This election cycle has been hard on me personally and it got harder this week as any glimmer of hope for the Sanders campaign was snuffed out. As you have heard me say, I love Barack Obama and I have been embarrassed for my nation that he has been the brunt of so much entirely racist and otherwise unfair criticism. But more even that the race-baiting of right wing critics, I have been infuriated by references to Obama as a left wing socialist.
The single greatest challenge to American democracy in our generation is the income gap between the rich and the poor. The resources of our nation are rapidly being passed into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Just 65 people, 65 individuals, no more than could ride on a single school bus, now own more than the rest of the world combined… 65 people own as much as the other 4 billion people. And the transfer of wealth from the lower and middle class to the top has been faster under Obama than under any previous president. He is not only not a socialist; he has been the most dangerous capitalist in our lifetime.
As Warren Buffet has observed, there is a class war going on in our nation and rich people have already won. At least in the Sanders campaign there was sincerity of intent to correct this lethal economic trend before greed creates a permanent peasant class in America. But, if I may borrow an image from Jim Hightower, voters are as confused as a Billy goat on Astro-turf.
Corporate profits have trumped our obvious concern for preserving our environment. Though my kin in Appalachia wanted to defend their coal mining jobs, the coal companies have continued to make the jobs worse and worse. There is now not a single union coal miner in Kentucky.
Today is May Day, a worker’s holiday in most of the world but not here in the USA where our government has specifically worked hard to prevent May Day from becoming a recognized holiday. President Eisenhower tried to associate it with communists and named May 1st, “Law Day,” as a refutation of the godlessness, and lawlessness of organized labor and their socialist/communist ties.
Along with many other industries, the mines have managed to break the unions, cutting pensions, health benefits and salaries and they are even considering importing miners from Kazakhstan who are more accustomed to being abused. A few years ago, when 29 people died in a mining accident in West Virginia, there was finally some teeth to an investigation that revealed that more than 50 people had died due to safety violations in the company managed by Donald Blankenship.
When he was made aware that his mining operation was polluting the municipal water where he lived in West Virginia he had a separate water system built for his own home, at company expense, without doing anything for the rest of the people in the area who were being poisoned. He told one reporter, “I don’t care what people say because Donald Blankenship will go to his grave with more money than any of you.”
When he was finally forced to resign from the Massey Energy Company, he gave himself a $12 million golden parachute. I don’t know if it would have happened if the price of coal had not been so undercut by natural gas, but at least Blankenship has been put on trial and convicted of many crimes for which he will serve six years in prison unless he manages to win on appeal. In spite of having taken millions in profit by sacrificing the lives of dozens of employees, he has been ordered to pay a fine of $250,000.
A quarter of a million dollars, out of the millions he has been paid, and a possible prison sentence of 6 years for killing more than 50 miners and poisoning the water supply of a million people.
If some Muslim extremist had attacked West Virginia, killed 50 people and poisoned the water supply for the community…how might we have responded?
So, you see, when crimes of this magnitude are done by a group of people whom we call “terrorists” we are literally willing to go to war. When, however, it is done in the name of business, to cut costs, to make a bigger profit, to pay a CEO multi-million dollar bonuses, we can hardly muster the moral outrage to discuss it.
The corporate bosses in the energy field, to quote Jim Hightower once more, think that they are all top dogs and all of the rest of us are just fire hydrants. And we Americans, especially religious people, have been taught to simply accept this kind of treatment without question, as if, somehow, exploitative capitalism, reserving almost all of our nations resources to the tiniest fraction of our population, was the will of a benevolent God!
But I don’t want to get lost in derogatory accounts of corrupt individuals. We have a systemic problem in our country that consistently puts profit over the environment. We are being led to believe that we cannot both have a thriving economy and a healthy environment.
You can feel the frustration in the quote we used as our wisdom lesson today from Gus Speth, a US advisor on climate change, who said “I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems.
I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
The spiritual communities in our nation, our churches, our synagogues, our mosques, are the places that must teach the morality of a well-reasoned relationship between the economy and the environment. Capitalism doesn’t have to be evil, but unbridled capitalism is no different from cannibalism. There is a way to regulate the economy to serve the majority of the population and not just the few who have already won.
It is happening in other nations so you know that it can happen here but democracy lends itself to the influence of money in political donations. Ask yourselves, why do they have such effective high speed passenger trains in England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, even in Russia and China and around here we only have trains in a few population centers and they don’t work very well?
Our nation was, at one time, on the cutting edge of train travel. We were the world leaders in establishing a network of railways and passenger trains that, in many ways, turned this patchwork quilt of several regions into a single nation. But the manufacture of cars and trucks became a major economic interest and the auto and trucking industry literally bought up railroads and advocated for shutting down lines. So we hear loud objections to subsidizing Amtrack as if our nation’s interstate highways and city streets all just magically appeared without any infrastructure investment.
Freight can be moved on rail for one fourth of what it costs to move the same goods in a semi-trailer truck, and that is without even estimating the increased danger of having so many trucks on our roads or estimating the cost of damage to the roads. But when you think about the environmental impact and the depletion of the oil reserves in the world it becomes insane. We could save billions of dollars, add centuries to the world supply of oil, while saving the planet and saving thousands of lives in roadway accidents if only we could break the lobbying power of the auto and truck industry to return to passenger and freight rail.
Our inefficient, expensive, and dangerous addiction to automobiles and trucks is not because science has failed to give us an alternative. It is because capitalism and political donations have become more powerful than logic and morality and that, men and women, is where we come in.
Do not accept the status quo as a necessary precedent of the future. Do not accept the transfer of wealth into the hands of the few. Do not passively accept the spoiling of the environment and the impoverishment of our children and grandchildren. Vote, speak, write, work, sacrifice because the modern world is still waiting to be born.
