North Carolina Council of Churches
December 11, 2006
Presentation to the NC Legislative Study Commission on Global Climate Change
By The Reverend Michael H. Cogsdale,
President of the North Carolina Council of Churches, and
Rector of Saint James Episcopal Church, Lenoir, North Carolina
Text: Genesis 1…God saw how good it was…God said: Let us make humanity in our own image…Let them have dominion over…all living things…God looked at everything God had made, and found it very good.
I am grateful to have this opportunity to come before you this morning. We at the North Carolina Council of Churches deeply appreciate your service to the citizens of our beloved state. We at the Council have advocated for the establishment of this Commission, we have cheered the quality of its appointments, and we have been close observers of its deliberations during its first year of study.
I am not here as an expert on the science or economics of climate change, but as one who would humbly comment on the ethical demands posed by the threat of global warming on our citizens, future generations, and by extension upon you as our governmental representatives. I speak you today as the President of the Executive Board of the North Carolina Council of Churches representing the Council’s 25 denominational bodies and roughly 1.5 million people of faith here within our state.
Over the past ten years I, like a lot of other individuals in our state, have begun to intuitively and intellectually sense that there is something very wrong with our climate. The scale of such concern has grown among the people that I serve. It seems to me that the battle to address this issue is no longer among the fringe of our society. In my view, it is now firmly within the mainstream political, social, and religious agenda of our state. My children – ages 16 and 13 – know this: The snow that I enjoyed as child just doesn’t seem to be a plentiful in their eyes, and I live at the base of the North Carolina mountains. Even some of the oldest members of my parish will concede that something is not right with the environment. I want to assure you that I serve both liberal and conservative folks. My parishioners are far from being wild-eyed fanatics about the environment. Even my Rotary Club, which I have been a member of since 1990, is coming to be more and more of one mind regarding this issue. What encourages me the most is the fact that more folks than ever before are open to conceding that the spotlight in now clearly upon humankind, and our relationship to the earth. I believe people know that we must act, and act now before we move closer to a tipping point from which the earth cannot return.
Over the past 20 years or so, mainline denominations have come to a new appreciation for the natural environment and our relationship to it. We have moved from a perspective that extolled dominion over nature and subduing the earth toward a renewed understanding of our sacred writings that call for a new commitment to the stewardship of creation.
For too many of us, for far too long, we have simply assumed upon the generosity of our Creator, while taking too little responsibility for the care of Creation. The idea that nature exists solely for the benefit of humanity, which was thought to have derived from God’s command to Adam to “have dominion over” the rest of creation is no longer accepted as the dominant view within mainline Christianity. We do not worship a God who is wholly transcendent, who is separated from the world with no continuing interest or involvement in its non-human elements.
Over the past 5 or 6 years, this new awareness has expanded to include the dangers posed to God’s creation by climate change—most mainstream religions in the US, along with many evangelical faiths, have spoken directly to that threat.[1][1]
Some of the themes represented in those statements include some of the following thoughts: We are facing a global crisis like none previously known by humankind. It is time to join with our Creator in preserving and renewing Creation. Unless we act, the changes could be irreversible, and therefore our action or our inaction will affect millions in future generations. Although the effect will be felt worldwide, it is the weak and the vulnerable of the world that will suffer most. The US has a special responsibility to address this crisis because we emit so much of the world’s greenhouse gases –we are 6% of the world’s population and emit 25% of its green house gases. We must act because we have the technological capability to act.
In our own state, when my own children, ages 16 and 13, reach my age, I have to wonder if the beaches where we built sand castles together as a young family will have disappeared altogether because the sea level is likely to rise by 6 inches. And will places where we visit each summer, like Bogue Banks and the Outer Banks no longer exist? What will the road from the lighthouse at Cape Hatteras up to Nags Head be like if indeed the sea level is rising in ways that we have not yet begun to imagine? Some models predict that rising temperatures in the Southeast will rise by 1.8 to 3 degrees F. during the next 30 years.[2][2] In 30 years my oldest child will be younger that I am today. Such a rise in temperature will not only affect the environment, but also the economy at large and the public health my children, and my grandchildren – as it will yours. Global warming is personal—my relationship to Creation is tied to my relationship to future generations, and the life they will live.
Our religious leaders also remind us that this crisis is not only about us here in the US —but that it is also global and it’s about justice, and about how the poor and the most vulnerable will be impacted. Recently the United Nations Environmental Program documented the first formal displacement of an entire population of people because of climate change. A village on a small island nation was forced to move its village 500 meters inland after trying to adapt to the effects of a warming climate for nearly two decades.[3][3] Granted the village was small, but its story is bound to be repeated as indigenous communities around the globe are faced with similar threats to their survival.
While it is true that we in NC and in the US will not be impacted to such a degree, those of us from communities of faith know that we must work for the common good, not just our immediate communities. As we have come to realize - now more than ever – the people of the earth reside on an increasingly small globe. The commandment to love our neighbor especially includes the poor of this world who will have little resources to face the potential impact of climate change. This sense of oneness between human beings and their relationship to the earth is an important corrective, both to the idea that humankind has been placed in the world to dominate nature and take from it, rather than to conserve or protect it. One day we will be asked to give an account of how we have cared for something that it not ultimately ours – Gods creation. The Hebrew psalmist tells us this: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” We cannot any longer afford to take and take from the earth more than we need; thereby, upsetting the delicate balance of the earth’s natural environment. To do so is a spiritual problem that wrongly robs others of what is also rightfully theirs, and needed to maintain a modest level of human dignity.
As I have said there is a growing awareness in the faith community that global warming is real and that it will most certainly have devastating effects on the people of this and future generations. We are responding to the call to act, and act now.
Our NC Council of Churches Climate Connection program is affiliated with a national initiative called The Interfaith Power and Light Campaign. This organization now counts among its members 22 state-wide ecumenical and interfaith groups who have joined together in a national religious response to global warming—a response which includes promoting renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation. Across the US, folks of all faiths are coming together to talk to each other, to pray and study together, and to support each other in their efforts to put their faith into action.
Recently, in an initiative sponsored by Interfaith Power and Light, more than 4000 faith congregations throughout the US, and more than 100 congregations across NC, viewed the film An Inconvenient Truth in fellowship halls and houses of worship, and the response conveyed to us from all quarters was this: “We must act on this knowledge!”
As I speak to you today I express the concern of these thousands and of countless other citizens who see the care of Creation as a religious duty.
We see that people of faith want to respond, and that they genuinely understand the relationship between protecting creation and their love for the Creator.
Yet in a world where the hope for restoration of our creation seems to be shriveling daily with images of disappearing ice caps and rising sea levels, solving the problems can appear beyond human capabilities. Therefore, we see that the challenge for church leadership is to provide a voice of hope, while channeling the desire to care for creation into actions, that when combined with others of similar sentiment, will achieve the necessary ends.
Our faith and our relationship to our Creator requires us to respond. Some of the things our judicatories and congregations and their members are doing are as follows:
Re-visiting their own teachings and educating themselve about the relationship between love for God and care for Creation. An example: A group of clergy and laity in the Episcopal Diocese of WNC exploring ways to more fully incorporate their denominational teachings on environment.
- Forming regional interfaith coalitions on climate change issues. Example: In Asheville, five faith communities distributed 500 compact fluorescent lights (cfl) along with our literature on energy conservation during their Thanksgiving Day Parade.
- Forming Creation Care committees. Some examples:
- Myers Park Baptist Church in Charlotte.
- St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Raleigh
- Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Durham
- Church of Reconciliation in Chapel Hill
- The Catholic Diocese of Charlotte has recently formed a diocesan-wide Environmental Justice Advisory Committee
- Conducting congregational energy audits, and using this information to reduce energy usage. Some examples:
- St. Philips Moravian in Winston-Salem changed out all their incandescent bulbs in 2005 following an energy audit.
- United Church of Chapel Hill has bought dimmable CFL’s for the chandeliers in their sanctuary.
- Taking pledges to cut their energy usage by 10%. Example: See the card in the folder. We just began asking folks less than a month ago to take this pledge, and we have received more than 100 responses to date, with more arriving daily.
- Replacing light bulbs with compact fluorescent lights (cfl’s). Some examples: Several Christian congregations are using our Advent prayer/action guide and replacing a light bulb with a compact fluorescent light (cfl) as each new Advent candle is lit. In Asheville, the Jewish Temple is organizing a cfl replacement program around the lighting of candles on Hanukah.
- Acting on their new knowledge in the public arena. An example: At the Utility Commission public hearings in Raleigh and Asheville in May of this year that were attended by an unprecedented number of ratepayers, at least 12 of the citizens who testified were members of faith congregations related to the Council, and they spoke with the message that “we want to stop the wasteful consumption of energy, and address climate change through clean, safe generation, efficient use and conservation." Many others of our members told us they wrote the Commission chair conveying the same message.
Many of us can sense deeply within that we are at a new place in the history of humankind where we are being called to a fundamental change in our relationship to nature and to creation. As I re-read, and re-ponder, Genesis 1, I am struck, to my core, with the knowledge that God loved the world and saw that it was good even before the creation of humankind. It was good before we ever came on the scene. We are only part of it, but we have a very special, solemn responsibility to carry out.
That awakens in me what all religious traditions have taught, that I must “walk humbly” before my Creator and Creation. I believe that we are the generation that must re-learn that. God never gives dominion to any creature, which has not received his image. The God I worship is a God of love and mercy. The God of creation will not place the ultimate reins of government into hands that have no heart for something that He has created and loves. I believe our authority to govern comes not only from the consent of the people but also from the very God in whom we profess our faith. I ask you to listen deeply to what your heart is telling you. Jesus told his disciples, “In as much as ye did it to one of the least of your brethren ye did it to me.” Could he have been referring as much to our hurting globe as much as he was to us human beings? Could it be that that the sun and the moon, the wind and the stars, the fish of the beautiful Albemarle Sound, or the majestic forests of our Western mountains, the bear, the wolf, the native flowers of our state, dare I say the acid-rain scarred tree tops of Grandfather Mountain near my home are also our brothers and sisters in communion with our Creator?
I like what the Episcopal Bishop of Iowa recently said to his diocese, “For, I am convinced that it is our Creator who is waking us up to the impossible at this eleventh hour. We, who are the first generation to see the planet from beyond itself, still have choices to engage our creativity and imagination in new ways.”
You may say that what I have presented here are religious sentiments that have no place in the world of politics. I will not offer apology for my idealism. I’m a preacher – it is my call. But let me remind you that our "constituents" are also the General Assembly’s constituents. The people I serve are the people you serve. I know they talk as if they care only about the price of gasoline and not the fumes that make the smog in our cities or the carbon in the atmosphere. But they do care, and they expect us to care, too. This is the work that God has now called us to.
We hope that the measures that you recommend will be significant, not timid. That you will set goals that will really address the problem, even if those goals require some sacrifice. Maybe religious leaders feel more comfortable asking for noble responses from people, than do lawmakers. We commonly call for generosity, self-restraint, caution, or courage. For all of us, though, since global warming is a huge problem, it stands to reason that there must be big solutions that will call for us to change our ways. The familiar patterns of get and spend, rugged individualism, Me and Mine, won’t work here. The task will call for the best we have, but I have confidence that our people will give their best to it when they see us doing the same.
We ask that the economic interests of the state’s weaker, poorer and less politically empowered citizens will be kept in mind as you ponder our choices. We’d like to see solutions that employ not just the highly skilled in one or two counties but that provide living wages for the large numbers left behind by lost industries and dwindling supplies of fish or degraded agricultural land. I live in a county – Caldwell - that certainly fits that bill. Yes, its good to serve the economic interests of the state’s most enterprising entrepreneurs, but it is also good to enlarge the opportunities of the state’s citizens who are less skilled and less privileged.
We ask that the solutions for this problem be based on a long-term appraisal of nature’s laws rather than on short –term economic gain. The remedies for one crisis should not cause another crisis.
I will close by saying this: We are blessed to live where we do, and to live in such a wonderful country such as the United States. Let’s view our good fortune as a blessing from God to be used for the good of all. Recently this summer I spent several days helping host some Anglican Christians from the northeastern part of India. When we were touring Western North Carolina, they expressed over and over that we were a country richly blessed with many resources. Never did they suggest that we should suffer from any embarrassment or remorse over our many resources when compared with the people of other countries. Their hearts seemed to convey, “Do not be ashamed of God’s blessing, but know God intends you to pass it on. Do not tell them only about our poverty in India but what we are doing with what we have.” God has indeed blessed us. Now we must pass it on. Perhaps our acts of mitigation should be in proportion to our good fortune rather than to our sins. We are blessed to live in this nation and we are so blessed to live in a state as beautiful as North Carolina. I deeply love this state, and this country in which I live. I know you do also. Thank you again for letting me speak before you. Please be assured of our prayers for your good work. May God bless you and your families.