Taking Out the Trash

a sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Daniel ÓConnell to the

congregation at Eliot Unitarian Chapel in St. Louis, MO on Earth Day, April 22, 2007

In December of 2005, a group of researchers plunged into the most remote regions of the Foja Mountains on the island of New Guinea in the South Pacific — an area of some 740,000 acres that has never been visited by humans.

Even the local people, the Kwerba, have made their living only on the edges of this massive area of pristine forest, so a 12-person expedition of American, Australian and Indonesian scientists were the first Westerners to penetrate the Foja range the 1970s, but that was a different area of the same range.

Upon arrival they were greeted by a bizarre-looking orange-faced honeyeater bird — the first new species of bird found in New Guinea since 1939.

During the rest of the month-long expedition, the researchers discovered more new species, including the first recorded population of golden-mantled tree kangaroos in Indonesia, 20 new species of frogs, numerous species of birds, five new species of woody plants and four new species of insects.

One of the organizers said:

“Large mammals that have been hunted to near extinction elsewhere were here in abundance. We were able to simply pick up two Long-Beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal that is little known,” said

“It really was like crossing some sort of time warp into a place that people hadn’t been to.

“We were like kids in a candy store. Everywhere we looked we saw amazing things we had never seen before.”

“The dripping moss forests of the Foja Mountains are one of the last places on Earth where humans have failed to make an imprint,” said an expedition co-leader.

Discoveries like the ones made in Indonesia are important, telling us that there are still a few places where human knowledge doesn’t extend, where human footprints haven’t marred the landscape, and where we are not at the top of the food chain.

When a never-before-seen bird lands in the middle of your camp or a new species of amphibian chirps on the forest floor, we come to realize that we haven’t fully figured out the world just yet and probably never will.

This reality becomes even clearer to us when earthquakes and hurricanes hit and when drought or flood devastate the landscape. We’re reminded of the interconnectedness, not the separateness, of humanity and the earth. All of creation, from the tiniest tree frog to the brainiest Science teacher to the mightiest mountain peak, share a common destiny.

Even the close connection of the Hebrew words for humanity (adam) and ground (adama) reveals the deep relationship that we have with the earth. In a sense, the more we discover about our environment — what’s in it and how we care for it — the more we discover about ourselves.

I imagine the researchers surprise and delight to find such an Eden. Imagine. Walking through a forest. No beer cans, no trash. Just the cycles and rhythms of nature. This is so rare, it made the cover of National Geographic magazine.

In December, in my “What’s For Dinner” service, I talked about waste and poisons in the food production process, and why it’s good to think about eating organic and especially local produce.

Today, we look at the other end of the process– what happens when we’re done with things.

I happened to visit www.myfootprint.org. Which attempts to estimate your ecological footprint. In other words, how many acres of land in resources does it take to support your lifestyle. It asks you simple questions about your food consumption, how you get around town, your house, that kind of thing.

My total footprint was something like 17 acres. The average ecological footprint in the U.S. is 24 acres per person. I think the main reason my footprint’s smaller is that almost all the driving I do involves other people.

But here’s the thing. World wide, there are 4 and ½ biologically productive acres per person. And I’m using 17, the average American is using 24. This means that if everyone lived like me, we would need 4 planets to provide all the resources.

I like the recycling center in Kirkwood. At my house, we have 2 bins for paper, and in the garage, 3 bins for metal, plastic, and glass. A couple times a month, I’ll take the bins to the recycling center. But every once in a while we also take ripped clothes, phone books, cardboard boxes. It’s amazing what you can recycle there.

And the important thing about recycling, I’ve discovered isn’t that it is necessarily cost effective, although often times it is. The important thing about recycling is diversion. Diverting stuff from landfills.

One exercise you might try is estimating how much you divert now from landfills by recycling, and how much you could divert if you really tried– recycling all your paper. And especially the dangerous stuff.

Here at Eliot Chapel, Board Member Bob Coulter and others are investigating how Eliot can join the Green Sanctuary program. This is similar to the process we went through to become a Welcoming Congregation for Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual, and Transgender folks. You do some exercises, do an audit, run programs with the congregation. It looks pretty interesting.

I am particularly aware that here at Eliot we’ve had a number of old computers die. They are sitting downstairs in the storage room. There are really dangerous chemicals in old computers. Plus, some of the metal, glass, and plastic can be recovered rather than buried in a landfill.

Fortunately, there is a program in St Louis called E-cycle St Louis. You can visit their web site at http://www.ecyclestlouis.org. They have a variety of locations, including Webster, and you can take just about anything with a power cord down there. There is a small charge for things like computer monitors, but you’ll know you’re being environmentally responsible.

So, sometime before the year is out, we’ll load up all that old computer stuff, and take it down to be “e-cycled” in a responsible way.

It may seem like more work than heaving this stuff into the dumpster, but I say it’s the UU thing to do, to act in accordance with our 7^th Principle– respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

Diverting hazardous waste from landfills is pretty important. Landfills produce methane, toxic gasses, and can leach poisons into our ground water.

There are landfills in the U.S. that are as tall as 22 story skyscrapers. In Virginia, there is a park called Mount Trashmore, because it is built on top of an old landfill.

Since the dawn of time, humans have dug holes, put junk in it they no longer wanted, covered the holes up, and moved away. This is one reason archeologists know so much, they can dig up trash from thousands of years ago, and tell a lot about what people ate, how they got their food, that kind of thing.

But there are a lot more people now, and ever more toxic chemicals in the packaging, extraction, and manufacturing process. They didn’t have to dump radioactive waste in the olden days.

The TV commercials tell us that household dirt should be quickly whisked away into a “garbage pail lined with a lemon-scented bag, preferably via single-use mops, disposable dust cloths, and paper towels, which will protect [your] family from the germs that fester in [your] kitchen sponge.” 123.

It’s like they want every place to be like Disney world. There are no trash carts anyone can see. All the trash is put down chutes, which go down to a subterranean system of tunnels. Supplies are delivered, trash is taken away, characters move– all underground– so it doesn’t distract us from our experience of the Magic Kingdom, where there is no trash to take out.

As the father of two girls, age 11 and 7, I watch a fair amount of kids movies. And I have to tell you that there are more ecological themes in them than ever before. The movie Happy Feet is about a dancing penguin who journeys to try and stop pollution from killing off the fish they need. And there are many others.

If you’re interested in the human effect on the environment, you owe it to yourself to see the award winning documentary movie starring Al Gore– of all people– called an Inconvenient Truth. How many of you have seen it?

I was talking to a 19 year old man last week, and he said the evidence was inconsistent on human effects on global warming. I told him this is what politicians said, and that in the last umpteen years there have been something like 946 scientific papers written on global warming and guess how many of them doubted human activity was causing global warming? How many of the 946 papers? Um, None.

Part of the blurb for the film says:

Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. http://www.climatecrisis.net/aboutthefilm/.

Fortunately for you and I it will take about 50 years or so for the American Southwest to turn into a dust bowl. We probably won’t get hurricanes here in Missouri, and so forth. But what about people we care about who don’t live here? What kind of world will we leave our children? What can we do about it?

U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin tried to answer this question when he called for an Environmental Teach-in or Earth Day to be held on April 22, 1970. Unitarian Pete Seeger was a keynote speaker and performer at the event held in Washington DC. Over 20 million people participated.

Today, Earth Day, is now arguably the most celebrated secular holiday in the world.

Senator Nelson stated that Earth Day "worked" because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities participated.

The first Earth Day is commonly credited with creating contemporary environmentalism, as well as spurring the growth of such spiritual paths such as Wicca and Neo-paganism.

Earth Day's leading organizer said he wanted Earth Day to "bypass the traditional political process." But Earth Day's effect on the political process– was immediate and powerful, including the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

Political change can happen. Consider the thinning of the ozone layer. Laws were passed to ban CFC’s and the thinning stopped or slowed down dramatically.

What we can do now? We can reduce certain consumption, we can reuse material, we can recycle, and most of all– we can think about what we’re buying.

Maybe the single biggest thing you can do to help the environment is to buy toilet paper made from recycled paper. And put it in the commode, not in the trash. TP direct from trees has a yield of 43 to 47%. But made from recycled paper the yield is between 85 and 95%. 139.

Two brands worth considering are Marcal and Seventh Generation. Marcal is cheaper. You can get it at Sam’s and at Costco, the price is better (online) at Costco. People shy away from buying TP made from recycled paper– as if it weren’t just as clean as paper made from boreal, old growth Canadian forest.

If you use TP at your house you are doing one of 2 things: you are either participating in cutting down trees for commode paper, or you’re not.

This is your spiritual homework– start to buy and use TP made from recycled paper. Really. It is an important spiritual discipline you can do.

Recycling metal is really important because it requires 80% less air pollution and 40% less water use to do it than metal ore out of the ground.

How important is recycling household goods in the scheme of things? According to Elizabeth Royte, author of Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash:

Across the nation, more people recycle than vote. Recycling is a religion for some, and setting out bottles, cans, and newspapers is redemptive– a spiritual balm for our collective solid waste guilt.

[It seems] we are powerless to replenish the ocean’s fish stocks, to scour chemicals from our rivers, to combat rising atmospheric temperatures, to halt the spread of exotic weeds and the global decline in bio-diversity, but we can, by God, continue to sort our garbage, to make our offerings at the curb [or recycling center].

“Of all the waste generated in the United States– including mining and agricultural waste, oil and gas waste, food processing residues, construction and demolition debris, hazardous waste, incinerator ash, cement kiln dust– municipal solid waste [the stuff you and I produce] represents a mere 2 percent.” 275.

Let us recall that for every 100 pounds of product that’s made, 3,200 pounds of waste are generated. 283.

But– if I keep my car 2,000 pound longer and don’t buy a new one as soon, I make a bigger difference than just the 2 percent

What would happen if we slowed the pace of buying, if we kept our furniture, appliances, and cars for life, [or if not for life, then how about] twice as long as we do now? 284.

So does it really make a difference for us to reduce, reuse, and recycle? Yes. There are tons of things you can do to make small changes that lead to bigger changes. It is easy to do the research, to figure this out, you just have to go do it. Make it a family activity.

So, yes, reducing consumption, recycling everything we can, using things until they’re worn out– all that really does make a difference.

Science and technology created a lot of this mess, and it is doing something to help.

Cargill Dow is turning refined corn sugar into plastic bags that biodegrade after a month in a compost pile. “Changing World Technologies” is building a plant in [Carthage,] Missouri that, through thermal conversion, can transform old tires, plastic bottles, sewage, or slaughterhouse scraps into fuel oil. 286.

Waste to Energy programs, where certain kinds of trash is burned in very specific ways to produce megawatts of energy look promising. Ideas about Zero Waste, about Producer Responsibility, new ideas & new technologies– can help if they don’t create too many additional problems themselves.

There’s a lot of Earth Day activity happening all over the world today. There’s a bunch of stuff happening in Forest Park today until 6 pm.

As religious liberals we are called on to examine the impact we have on the world, and the impact it has on us. This Earth Day, let us do something good for and upon the earth.

Please join me in our Closing Reading "We Belong to the Earth," #550.

And now, let us rise and sing, Blue Boat Home, #1064.