Laudato Si Sunday reflection: Realities vs. ideas

Today's reflection is brought to you by
Sirach 35: 15-17, 20-22, 26.

You,
O God,
are the just one.

We are all your favourites.

But your ears are especially attuned
to those who have been wronged,
and you hear the humble
ahead of the proud.

Perhaps you are hearing your voiceless creatures,
those who are losing their place in your creation
because of human beings and our greed.

Help us,
help us,
help us,
in your kindness,
to do what is just.

Show us how to live more lightly,
to let your creation evolve as you would have it,
and to use technology only as necessary.

Your mercy is as welcome in time of distress
as clouds of rain in time of drought.

Let us trust in your goodness,
rely on your mercy,
and become your justice
through wise choices in our lives.

Make our actions speak louder than our misplaced technologies,
our realities more important than ideas.

+Amen.

* * * * * * *

Over the past two months, these Laudato Si Sunday Reflections fell by the wayside so that I could participate in some climate action of my own. I took a refresher course on waste reduction, helped to plan a Climate Vigil, attended two School Strikes for Climate, and worked for my local Green party candidate. It was an amazing and uplifting two months, for the most part, but there's still so much to do!

When I took this picture,
I didn't realize that Greta
and her Youth for Climate Justice entourage
were just behind me and to the right...

And all the while, I've been walking, figuratively and literally, with Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist who is doing her utmost to wake the world to the climate emergency that we find ourselves in. People don't like the truth she is telling, it seems, but the part of our common home that is California is burning yet again, there have been frightening reports of other ecospheric issues, and our lifestyles simply must change to keep our climate from warming more than 1.5 degrees. The polarization in our discourse around how to actually do that is a sign that people everywhere are afraid, for one reason or another. These days, I'm puzzling over how we can move through the fear toward actual solutions.

This week's section of Pope Francis' letter to the world, Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, includes "The Globalization of the Technocratic Paradigm," paragraphs 106-110 . It looks at technology's role in our present ecological crises (the paragraphs can be accessed by clicking here and scrolling down).

For a long while, it seems, we have been dreaming that technology will be the solution to all our problems. We heard that dream again in our Alberta Budget this week when the Finance Minister talked a lot about using "clean technology" to green our petroleum industry -- rather than reduce our use of the fossil fuels that are warming our planet. Clearly, the government has bought into the idea of technology as saviour.

But Paragraph 106 notes that technology depends upon human beings who, "using logical and rational procedures, progressively and rationally gain control" over our surroundings through "a technique of possession, mastery and domination." More and more of us -- especially our young people -- are finally realizing that that there is no "infinite and unlimited growth" when it comes to the earth's energy and resources and their renewal. Mastery and domination are a dead end if we end up overheating the only planet we have.

While it is true that we have come a long way in knowing how to build and create and impose order with our machines and computers and factories, we have not been able to foresee the ways these technological advances have endangered our existence. Technology is just one kind of knowledge, and "technological products are not neutral, for they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups" (paragraph 107).

And who are those powerful groups? Can we trust them to improve life for all species on our earth? Not so far. When scientists began to notice that our climate was heating up, big corporations produced 'experts' to undermine the truth their own researchers had uncovered. Money and power are more important to them than facing up to reality, so they manipulate knowledge to confuse the public with arguments that climate change is a hoax, wasting precious time we could have been using to find and develop alternate energy sources.

For many of us, knowledge and technology have become so integrated into our daily existence and so indispensable in our daily tasks that "It has become counter-cultural to choose a lifestyle whose goals are even partly independent of technology, of its costs and its power to globalize and make us all the same" (paragraph 108). But where technology and its particular kind of knowledge are destroying habitats and species, we need to stand against it, to be counter-cultural.

But it's never easy to buck a trend, is it? This week, I succumbed and joined the cell phone universe -- but only for texting my kids and making the calls I would have made on our now non-existent landline. I refuse to live through cellphone technology because I tend to agree with the last line of paragraph 108 -- so many of the motives behind our technologies are about power, and "Our capacity to make decisions, a more genuine freedom and the space for each one's alternative creativity are diminished" by such power.

And what is this power? Jesus knew. He talks about it in Matthew 6: 24 when he says, "You cannot serve both God and wealth." Our society is hung up on wealth and materialism, and the economy has become the bottom line to the point that we've lost the big picture -- that we were put on this earth to look after one another. As the Pope and friends say at the end of paragraph 109, "We fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning, and social implications of technological and economic growth."

Paragraph 110 says it straight out: "technology makes it difficult to see the larger picture." And that larger picture is life as we know it, "appreciation for the whole, for the relationship between things, and for the broader horizon" that shows us our place in the vast goodness of all that God has made. Technology is not "the principal key to the meaning of existence" but by thinking that it is, we have come to a place of "environmental degradation, anxiety, a loss of the purpose of life and community living."

Electronic waste at the Edmonton Waste Management Centre

So how do we put technology in its place? Perhaps we can begin by turning it off more often, and by living with less of it. Here I'm talking about the devices that surround us -- phones, computers, TVs, things that distract us or divide us from our families and communities. We can also give more thought to the use of all the machines/technical components in our lives.

Are our time- or labour-saving devices really saving us time or labour? Or have we been brainwashed into believing that they make a difference in our lives as they guzzle gas or energy and create unnecessary pollution? (We often forget the pollution it takes to manufacture these items... never mind the waste when they stop working.) Do we really need the latest techie gadget or gizmo, or is it one of those market items that will end up in our landfills sooner than later? How many single purpose appliances are filling our cupboards and using unnecessary resources? Is that whisk-o-matic doohickey for frothing my hot chocolate really necessary? No matter what our sense of entitlement or our marketers tell us, we need to consider the realities of our lives and whether our knowledge or technology will really work for us -- or against our earth.

"Realities are more important than ideas," say Pope Francis and friends in the last line of paragraph 110 -- and they are 110% right.

Simple Suggestion #167... Visit/tour your local waste and/or recycling facility

Did you know that this is Environment Week? It's a time to think about ways to live more lightly in our environment and reduce our ecological footprint... in particular, the things our lives leave behind, a.k.a. waste.

Recently, my hubby and daughter ran into a garbage parade in St. Petersburg. They probably would have missed it but for the drummers who created a soundscape that Lee and Christina followed, only to find a group of people dressed up in all sorts of garbage-y looking costumes (a plastic bag-wearing lady on stilts, some men dressed in piles of newspapers or recycled bottles, and a host of others) pushing a great ball of glued-together trash down the park path.

The green squad, as Lee called them, seemed to be doing their best to get their community to think about waste. I remember reading somewhere that Moscow's landfills were supposed to be full by now, so it would have been interesting to find out about the waste situation in the Russian Federation. Of course, Christina and Lee were too surprised by the whole thing to think to ask questions. They took it all in, and took a few pictures just for me, because they knew I'd find it interesting.

Here in Edmonton, we have our own green squad of sorts -- a group of volunteers known as Master Composter/Recyclers who do their best to reduce waste and to educate others to do the same. As one of that crowd, I'm always rubbing shoulders with other MC/Rs who have done some pretty amazing things in order to cut down what goes into their garbage cans each week. They go beyond the usual composting and recycling in order to have less waste before they even start an ordinary day. As far as I know, the group hasn't tried a garbage parade yet (though the City's Michael Recycle mascot makes appearances at different events). Hey, a garbage parade could be fun, and get folks thinking...

But there's nothing to get us thinking about reducing waste like people who know how to do it... or like a tour of our local landfill and waste management service. Just seeing the amount of stuff that gets "dumped" in a short period of time makes a person think about how terrible it is to have to throw away anything at all. If we want a healthier environment, reducing waste is key... and if we want to reduce waste, buying less is critically important -- less packaging, fewer chemically compounded items, and nothing that we don't NEED.

The City of Edmonton actually gives tours of its recycling facilities and transfer station, especially this Environment Week. And there are lots of other Environment Week activities going on, that you can read about by clicking here.

So, this week's simple suggestion is to educate yourself about where your garbage goes and how you can reduce it by visiting local waste and recycling facilities. Our environment will thank you.

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Click here.

Simple Suggestion #153... Be something of a 'best before' date skeptic

'Best before' dates are in the news here lately. I guess a lady in Leduc picked up some lobster paté at a Walmart and didn't look at the date on the can. She took it home, spread it on some crackers, and ate it, not realizing that it had been in its tin since long before July, 2011. Yikes!

I'm guessing all the local grocery stores are checking their inventory this week and tossing out stuff that's really old. But being a bit of a 'best before' date skeptic who hates to see anything wasted, I just hope they aren't taking those little dates TOO SERIOUSLY.

Even before the story about the lobster paté broke earlier in the week, I was thinking a lot about product expiry dating, and how much wastage it can cause. Back in January, Joel Salatin, organic farmer extraordinaire came to town, and he got me thinking. Michael at Earth's General Store asked Joel to speak to interested friends of EGS about his efforts to grow good organic food of all types at Polyface Farm, and provide some food security in his region of Virginia. He said many interesting things, but this really struck me:

The world, for all of our technology and refrigeration and plastic bags and vacuum-sealing and transportation and all of that, has never thrown away more human edible food than we do right now, today. Planet wide, we are losing roughly 50% of all the human edible food in all the world.... We have, in the developed world, incredible snootiness about what is edible...

He went on to comment about our refusal to eat fruit that has slight bruises, our anxiety and paranoia that our food might harbour dangerous bacteria, and the fact that if we weren't such picky human eaters who equate "safe" with "sterile" we could feed the world's population twice over. (We have more bacteria on and in our bodies than there is in most foods!)

So this week, I'm thinking about those 'best before' dates, and I've done a little research that has made it clear that when a 'best before' date has passed, most food isn't 'bad' yet -- it's just not at its optimum freshness -- which makes me sorry for the times I threw out salad dressings in particular, thinking they had expired, when really, they just weren't at their 'best.' So now, while I definitely wouldn't eat a can of lobster paté from 2011, I don't worry so much about foods that might be a week or two beyond their 'best before' -- like yogurt, milk, or cottage cheese (unless it smells sour). And can a bottled vinaigrette really go bad with all that vinegar in it? Vinegar is a preservative, isn't it?

So the next time you notice a 'best before' date that's passed you by, think about the possibilities. Is it a food that's not likely to harbour dangerous microorganisms? Can it be salvaged in some way? If not, can it be composted?

Just a little food for thought.

And if you've never heard of Joel Salatin and his Polyface Farms, here's a little teaser...

P.S. Looking for more Simple Suggestions? Try here.