Not long ago I was walking through Davis and on B street I saw a sign above a storefront that said:” The inconvenient store.”  I should have associated that odd name with “convenience store.”  Instead it made me think of Al Gore’s film an “inconvenient truth,” about human made climate change.  It just shows that the whole climate change question has become part of our consciousness. However it does not go much beyond that.  None of us have taken it very seriously it seems. One who has is a man named Bill McKibben. I am reading his book right now entitled “EaArth (no not a misspelling-it has two a’s), making a life on a tough new planet.

“Imagine we live on a real planet,” McKibben starts off. “Not our cozy, taken-for-granted earth, but a planet, a real one, with melting poles and dying forests and a heaving, corrosive sea, raked by winds, strafed by storms, scorched by heat.  An inhospitable place.”  McKibben is convinced we are headed in that direction. This is why we he gives the place a different name.  His words reflect a growing new acknowledgement among experts in the field of climate science that we are really too late.  Accelerated climate change as a result of human activity is inevitable.  The ice caps and glaciers will melt at exponential rates and droughts and floods will become more likely.  As an illustration of changes: in the middle of this last month for a few days the high in San Diego was 53 and the high in Chicago 82.  That’s not a common occurrence. It may become more so.  Crop cycles will become unreliable.  Almost one third of the world’s people live in China and India alone.  Once the ice on the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau that feed the Ganges and the great rivers of China melt, great floods are expected, followed by an enormous shortage of water.  Last week the State Department predicted that water shortages will lead to tensions between states and nations.  Arizona and California and Mexico have already had disputes about the water from the Colorado.  Alabama and Georgia haggle over water rights.  What would Southern California do without water?  Yet there are organized groups in this country who want to put the denial of human induced climate change in the curriculum. Not only is this ignorant and wrong, it is sinful.  Is our unwillingness to recognize the events that are taking place not a sin against our Creator and against the generations to come?  Those generations will face a new reality partially because of our inactivity.  The earth will be different. This is unfair.

This month two events take place two weeks part. One is Easter when we recognize the new life in Jesus Christ that brings us forgiveness and hope for our new life. It is when we celebrate that death and sin have been vanquished.  The other is Earth Day when we celebrate the bounty of God’s s earth and we acknowledge the peril of our shortsightedness in our stewardship of that earth.   If these two happen in one month, can they not be connected?  Why do we see sin only as personal transgressions, the hurt we do to each other, and we see our mistreatment of the earth a practical matter or a comfortable debate topic around the barbeque on a summer’s evening?  Are we not hurting farmers in parched East Africa and city dwellers in Bangla Desh now that the country has learned to protect itself against floods but may have to start all over again with updated sea level rise predictions?  It will take politicians making bold decisions to keep the damage from becoming unmanageable, but it is clear that we cannot turn back the clock. With the rising of Christ may our sense of responsibility for those who will inherit the earth from us be reborn. May our leaders take courageous actions and may we all take smaller ones. May God guide us. Aart