Near the very end of the Torah, after Moses has given all of God’s commands to the people of Israel, he frames the future as a choice between two paths:
“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live…” (Deut. 30:19)*
Today, we too have a choice between two paths, one of life and one of death. Like our choices always are, these paths are both this-worldly and spiritual.
The way we have been living on God’s earth is hurtling us towards ecological and civilizational destruction. We are already starting to see catastrophic results from a 1-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures from pre-industrial levels. We are currently on track for 3-5 degrees by the end of the century. The human costs will be astronomical.
But this is also a spiritual crisis. We have lost our sense of mutual interdependence with one another and with the natural world that is our home and sustenance. Too often we have forgotten our love for one another, wreaking ecological destruction for our neighbors and for future generations, all the while crying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
We the privileged rarely realize the true costs of our conveniences. The sticker price at Walmart, The GAP, and the gas station never takes into account deforestation, dangerous labor, health problems from poisoned water and air, or the loss of homes, lives, and livelihoods to a rapidly warming planet. We usually just get the good end of the deal.
Those who can seem to keep taking and taking, and when the bill finally comes due, we are rarely the ones around to pay it. But the bills are piling up, and we can’t escape them any longer. Unprecedented fires are ravaging the western United States; more and more powerful storms are hitting the Gulf Coast; ice sheets are melting; the seas are rising; more extreme heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding are becoming the new normal. The ones hit hardest are the poor and the marginalized, but none of us can escape paying forever.
When it comes to our climate crisis, we know the problem: we have and are continuing to put too much carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, largely by burning fossil fuels for power and transportation.
We also know a huge part of the solution: stop doing that. We are more than capable – financially and technologically – of transitioning to wind and solar energy and to electric vehicles for transportation.
We have so much of what we need to change things. But which path will we take?
My friends, choose life, that we and our offspring may live.
* If you think I’m misusing this verse, I invited you to peruse my past posts. Since December, I’ve posted almost exclusively about the environment, especially our climate crisis, and its theological significance.
