Unitarian Society of New Haven
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
March 11, 2018
Reading “The Pulse of Life” by Jennifer Johnson
https://www.uua.org/worship/words/meditation/pulse-life
Reading “Remember” by Joy Harjo
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/remember-0
Sermon
It is so easy to forget.
It is so easy to forget who we are, where we come from, that we were once wild.
I have never felt closer to my animal self than in the act of giving birth.
“You were born to birth,” a woman I met a few months
before my due date told me.
Her voice echoed in my mind and in my body that day
I labored to bring Arden into the world.
“You were born to birth!” I heard again and again,
and in response, deep resonate sounds came out of me,
sounds I’d never expected to hear out of my own mouth.
It was, in a word, awesome.
How do we remember?
What do we remember when we remind ourselves that “we are earth,”
that “the pulse of life is beating in each and every one of us.”
As Unitarian Universalists, we hold as our seventh shared principle
“respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”
But what does it mean to remind ourselves of the fact that
we are, indeed, a part of the web, inseparable from it,
that “we are the universe and the universe is us?”
What do we learn when we heed the truths that our precious Earth holds
and offers to us?
The first truth I want to lift up is that of balance,
our theme for the month of March,
and something so many of us struggle to find, to grab hold of,
to maintain in our lives.
Let me share with you two stories of Nature reclaiming her balance –
one true to life and one imagined.
The first is true.
When wolves were exterminated from Yellowstone National Park
through hunting and predator control, the elk took over. [i]
They grazed freely on the hillsides and riparian areas during the approximately seven decades the wolves were absent.
Without the pressure of predation by wolves, the elk behavior changed.
They moved around less and devastated trees and plants
through over-browsing.
Humans tried to control the elk population, but were unable to do so.
Finally, it was decided to try reintroducing wolves to the Park in 1995.
Almost immediately, the reintroduction of just a few wolves
had remarkable effects.
They killed some of the elk, of course,
but that was not the extraordinary thing.
The wolves also changed the behavior of the elk,
which began to avoid certain areas of the park
where they were likely to be caught, especially the valleys.
As they did, the vegetation returned.
Trees began to grow again: aspen and cottonwood and willow.
In a period of just a few years, forests and recovering stands
drew song birds and migratory birds.
Wolves are also a natural predator of coyotes,
and when they began to kill the coyotes,
the mice and rabbit populations increased,
allowing for more hawks and weasels, foxes and badgers.
Carrion feeders fed on the carrion the wolves left:
ravens and bald eagles and bears –
the bears were also eating the abundance of berries that had grown up as well.
Along with the wolves driving an increase in the diversity of flora and fauna, they also changed the physical landscape of the Park.
They indirectly changed the flow of the rivers.
The rebounding vegetation along the riversides
drew beavers returning to eat and use the trees to build dams.
The dams created pools, homes for fish and muskrats and otters,
amphibians and reptiles and ducks.
Rivers narrowed, they meandered less, more pools –
and thus, more habitats – formed.
Why? Well, the increase of vegetation and regenerating forests
on the hillsides led to more stable conditions, fewer mudslides,
and the rivers became more fixed in their courses.[ii]
The interaction of animals along a food chain like this
is known as a “trophic cascade.”
“Trophic cascades,” British writer and environmentalist George Monbiot says, “tell us that the natural world is even more fascinating and complex
than we thought it was.”
Not only is she fascinating and complex,
but Nature, when left to her own devises,
with just a gentle nudge by human beings
to fix what we broke in the first place,
will relatively quickly regain her balance.
This story of what George Monbiot and others call “re-wilding,”
the mass restoration of an ecosystem, has a dual lesson.
On the one hand, it reminds us that we human beings are incredibly powerful, with vast potential for destruction of the natural balance,
the way of the world.
And, on the other hand, we are less powerful than we might think,
and Nature, when we work with her intentionally
and then get out of her way,
has the wisdom and wherewithal to restore that balance.
The second story of nature reclaiming her balance
comes from journalist Alan Weisman,
who puts a new spin on post-apocalyptic imagination in his book,
The World Without Us.
The premise is an unexplained extinction of humanity.
He wipes us out in the first chapter.
Then, he asks: once human beings no longer exist,
what will happen to everything we’ve built?
What will the world look like without us?
He starts by describing the degradation of our houses:
“On the day after humans disappear,” he says,
“nature takes over and immediately begins cleaning house – or houses, that is. Cleans them right off the face of the Earth. They all go.”
Most of our homes would only last 50 years, 100 tops,
in a world without humans.
Water, animals, insects, plants would take over and break everything down, leaving, most likely, only the bathroom tile,
a fossil-like reminder of what once was.[iii]
The city without us fares no better – or no worse, I should say.
Within two decades of humans’ disappearance,
the 4,5,6 lines on the East Side of Manhattan have caved in,
and Lexington Avenue becomes a river.[iv]
Plastic though, plastic is forever – or nearly forever.
Weisman quotes research scientist Anthony Andrady
who studies plastics and the environment.
No one knows how long plastic might endure,
because all of the plastics that have been produced in the past 50 years
are still in the environment.
But Andrady has faith in microbes and their learning capacity.
“Give it 100,000 years.” he says.
“I’m sure you’ll find many species of microbes
whose genes will let them do this tremendously advantageous thing…”
(They will l earn to break down plastic.)
“Today’s amount of plastic will take hundreds of thousands
of years to consume,” he says, “but eventually, it will all biodegrade….
It’s just a matter of waiting for evolution to catch up
with the materials we are making.”
And, then there’s geologic time.
Again, Anthony Andrady: “The upheavals and pressure will change it (plastic) into something else, just like trees buried in bogs a long time ago—
the geologic process, not biodegradation, changed them into oil and coal.
Maybe high concentrations of plastics will turn into something like that. Eventually they will change,” he says,
“Change is the hallmark of nature. Nothing remains the same.”[v]
Now, 100,000 years is a very long time.
Still, I find this idea (perhaps, disturbingly) comforting.
There is great relief for me in thinking about the natural world
taking over again,
remedying in a geologically short amount of time,
most, if not all, of the damage we have done.
There’s relief in knowing that the edifices of our lives,
even of our species, are not forever,
that nature is strong and resilient
and will take back the world we once thought was ours for the taking.
There is a poetic justice in Weisman’s description
of the flooding of city subways and the collapsing of buildings.
There is a re-balancing of what has gotten so off kilter
in the past 10,000 years of human history.
Why these stories? Why now?
Because they offer us what we so desperately need right now: hope.
According to George Monbiot, “the story of re-wilding tells us
is that ecological change need not always proceed in one direction.
It offers us,” he says, “a hope that our Silent Spring
could be replaced by a raucous summer.”
So much of our conversation around the natural world,
the environment, even the national parks,
is fraught with despair and doom.
The situation feels hopeless;
continued destruction of the remarkable planet we call home feels inevitable.
In classic human form, it seems we will destroy the Earth
until we destroy ourselves.
The idea that the world without us would re-wild itself
in a matter of few decades,
and the truth of the transformation of the Yellowstone ecosystem
in just a few years, tells us, again,
that we are not as all-powerfully destructive as we thought.
It adds a new possibility to the conversation.
A glimmer of hope.
This is no excuse for environmental complacency, it is, rather,
a call to remember that the pulse of life beats on
and that we are invited, as we always have been, to be a part of it.
Which leads us to the second truth the world offers us: the power of re-wilding.
We’ve learned what can happen when an ecosystem is re-wilded.
Re-wilding is possible when humans make small interventions:
take down fences, prevent commercial fishing,
block drainage ditches,
reintroduce some plants and animals, and then get out of the way
and let Nature get back into balance[vi]
or chart a course into the future that we might never have envisioned.
The truth is, most of us could use some re-wilding too.
Re-wilding ourselves is an intentional process of returning to our roots, remembering who we truly are, and getting out of our own way.
Personal re-wilding is about taking an action that gives our own nature more freedom to regain an old balance or pursue a new, unimagined one.
It’s about making conscious decisions that unlock a more abundant—and sometimes even more uncertain—realm of possibilities.
This makes me think of a memory I had long forgotten.
As I child and a teenager one of my favorite activities during the summer months
was rock hopping in the South Toe River in western North Carolina.
There’s nothing like jumping from rock to rock
with pools and rapids underfoot,
always on the lookout for your next toe-hold,
never quite sure where the river will lead you,
a hair’s breath from being soaking wet, and feeling so very alive.
What are ways in your life that you can remind yourself that you, too,
are wild?
That nature’s balance is available to you—
to your body, your mind, your spirit?
Is it getting outside more?
Is it trying something you’ve been holding back from?
Something new? Something unexpected? Something that scares you?
Is it learning—or re-learning—the stars’ stories?
Remembering the moon or birth or falling in love?
May it be that we remember, deep in our bones, the wild ways of the world.
May it be that we give thanks for Nature’s powerful resilience.
May it be that we work with her to regain and reclaim her balance.
May it be that we heed the lessons of that balance after imbalance
and the abundance of re-wilded spaces and lives.
May we feel the pulse of life in our beings;
may our heartbeats join the rhythm.
May we remember where we come from.
And may we have hope in where we are going.
Amen.
[i] https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem
[ii] https://www.ted.com/talks/george_monbiot_for_more_wonder_rewild_the_world
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
[iii] “Unbuilding Our Home.” Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007. pp.17-23.
[iv] “The City Without Us.” Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007. pp.24-46.
[v] “Polymers are Forever.” Alan Weisman, in The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2007. 140-161.
[vi] https://www.ted.com/talks/george_monbiot_for_more_wonder_rewild_the_world