A Message for the Future
Elly Fong-Jones February 25, 2018
I came up to the pulpit today to talk to you about climate change, because it is the most pressing and critical issue facing us today, but also to talk about what we can do about it, because this is a UU congregation and we believe in the power of action. First, though, I'm going to talk to you about sending messages to the future.
If you were to travel to the town of Carlsbad, in New Mexico, and hike thirty miles east through the desert, you would come to a cursed place. It's called the WIPP - the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - and it's a coffin, dug deep into the bedrock, for nuclear waste. The radioactive leftovers entombed there are deathly poisonous, and will be so for millenia to come.
The people who built this place had to confront a difficult fact: it is not likely that our country or our culture will survive as long as our atomic poisons. It is not even a certain thing whether our species will last that long. At the time the design of the WIPP started, in the 1970s, these things were true - and things have since gotten far, far worse.
So, the engineers who built this place in the 1970s had to plan as though it would outlive not only their bodies but their language and their culture and their understanding of the world. They went off and studied and thought hard about it, and they came back with a simple idea. They would use words, yes, and pictures, but they would also make the very place itself imposing and hostile. They poured and set gigantic flat slabs of bare concrete, baking in the New Mexico sun - an ugly, almost hateful landscape to drive people away from the dangers hidden underneath. Amidst these slabs, they left a message in every language they knew, repeated over and over, and the message begins with these words:
This is not a place of honor.
Now, this sounds quite bleak, and in a sense it is, but there's also something profoundly hopeful and, well, human there. Think again about those engineers: they were buildin a fortress to protect people who were not only strangers to them, but utterly unlike them in every imaginable way. They painstakingly built a cage in the desert for the toxic remnants of one of our worst inventions. They did this because it was the right thing to do, but in doing so, they left a message for the future: We cared about you. We did this to protect you.
Now, let's talk about climate change a bit. These are the simple realities of climate change: the time for a gradual course correction has passed. The time for the long view, for incremental change and improvement, is behind us. We are now in a crisis - a society stumbling towards an abyss of its own making. Without drastic changes, from us as individuals, from our communities, and from our species, we will not live another handful of centuries.
Please sit with that for a moment. Our culture, our people - every dream ever dreamed, every song ever sung, every story ever told - will die out. The spark of our existence will be snuffed out. We are choking ourselves to death on our own dust and our own fumes.
But there is yet hope. It is not too late for us to change. We can still step back from the abyss, grit our teeth, and make the changes the future demands of us. We are too late for it to be easy, but we are in time for it to be possible. It will hurt - let there be no mistake about that - but we can do it and we must do it.
We will give up our cars. It will not be fun. It will simply become untenable for us to keep having them, and when that happens, either we'll be ready with our bikes and our trains and our comfortable walking shoes, or we won't. We can keep our cars for a time, but the price is breaths stolen from our grandchildren's lungs.
We will give up meat, and cheese, and milk. It will not be fun. Either we will give it up voluntarily, or we will be forced to when the coming apocalypse of our own design drives livestock animals into extinction.
