GLOBAL WARNING ...

By RAY WADDLE
The news last week was not happy – the earth is heating up and we’re to blame.

What many suspected and some denied and everybody feared is now virtually certain – earth is dangerously warming from carbon emissions, declares a consensus of scientists from the world over (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

If true, it will trigger violent storms, heat waves and tropical diseases. Ice will melt and oceans will rise, destroying islands and coastal cities. The world will swell with refugees from flood or famine, burdening the poor, causing instability and war.

I called local eco-dynamo Joyce Wilding, looking for hope.

“If (climate change) doubters who go to houses of worship will recognize this as a moral issue, then we have a chance,” she said this week.

For years Joyce has been talking locally and nationally about an ecological crisis to anyone who’d listen. Many didn’t. Now they might.

“People say, ‘It’s too complicated, too painful, like the end-times,’ -- well, so was the Plague! This Intergovernmental Panel report creates a bridge to the theme of our time: we must change the way we live.”

“We” means governments, businesses and citizens, especially people of faith. Commentators are puzzled: what will it take for worshipers of the Creator God to mobilize their vast numbers, stand up for God’s creation and influence public policy? Yes, there are more ecological-religious coalitions than ever, but they’ve not ignited a moral surge that would transform political action.>BR>
It drives Wilding crazy.

“There’s still an attitude -- ‘I’ll build as big as I please and drive what I please because God wants me to be rich,’ ” she says.

“I want to hear more sermons on this. Every seminarian ought to be trained to talk 15 minutes on moral issues of environmental degradation and not be afraid.”

Wilding is a Southerner, retreat leader and lay educator who spent 22 years as a management consultant. Around 1991, she discovered a new calling – the awesome interaction of science and religion, the scandal of pollution as an offense against God.

“My life changed. Once you get it, it won’t let you go.”

Now she organizes science/religion programs at Sewanee and environmental initiatives for the Episcopalians’ southern region. She takes heart that some CEOs now talk about the morality (and profitability) of energy renewal and conservation. But we must all go on a Low Carbon Diet. Drive less. Use less paper. Conduct home energy audits. Learn where the drinking water comes from, and where the sewage goes. Explore web sites of the Regeneration Project, Forum on Religion and Ecology, Evangelical Climate Initiative, National Religious Partnership for the Environment.

Joyce Wilding is still hopeful, so I am too.