I have felt a connection to Unity College ever since I became chaplain to the Maine Warden Service. After all, many of the wardens I work with in the field received their undergraduate education here, and Unity students reliably show up to help us during search and rescue operations in the Maine woods. It is good to have an opportunity to thank you for what you have done and will do for Maine and for the world.

Whether you are an embryonic conservation law enforcement professional, or a Birkenstock-and-socks tree-hugging environmentalist, or any of the other species that this ecosystem permits, I know that there really is Unity in your diversity. Each of you loves the land, and each of you seeks to serve. So it is an honor and a homecoming to be here with you this afternoon.

This has been a difficult spring for those of us whose attachment to the natural world is both love and a labor of love. In the Gulf of Mexico, an oil spill that threatens to dwarf the Exxon Valdez disaster which, in 1989---when you were mere gleams in your fathers’ eyes----spilled 257,000 barrels of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. That was the environmental horror show that people my age remember clearly: Clean beaches covered with a thick layer of solidifying oil and the corpses of seabirds, and sea otters pawing at their oil-filled eyes so desperately they blinded themselves. If what is happening in the Gulf is similarly discouraging to you, your despair will be familiar to us.

Kate Braestrup

I am sometimes asked to talk with groups of young people about being the chaplain of the Maine Warden Service, and in order to explain why I am called to do what I do, I will pose an open-ended question: Nothing matters more than [BLANK]. Fill in the blank.

When doing this with kids, I generally get a nice range of nouns: Nothing matters more than my mom, or my dog, friendship, life, justice…lunch. Even young children know that the correct answer, if there is one, is not going to be something like “nothing matters more than money” or “nothing matters more than me”.

At least one kid in any given classroom will answer the question with Nothing Matters More Than The Earth. She will sit up straight to say it, and her little face will mimic the sober virtue she has doubtless seen in her parents, her school, her church.

The conviction that one is personally virtuous---or at least relatively virtuous---produces a pleasant sensation---you can see that pleasure in the child’s face, too. Since I am a minister---a religious person--- people generally assume I’m unusually virtuous, and though I know they are mistaken, I like the feeling.

But any religion worth its salt should not claim to make us feel nice. A religion should tell us the truth. But recognizing the truth is a virtue, so even if the truth we are telling each other is painful, there will be some pleasure in the telling of it.

At my church, spiritual home to many environmentalists, we can sing hymns in four part harmony about the suffering and imperiled earth.

“The earth is perishing. The earth is dying,” we sing. Look at the images flowing north from the Louisiana Coast. That’s the truth. Isn’t it? 

Did you know that one of the most popular bottled waters, worldwide, comes from the pacific island of Fiji? This means that a warden service chaplain, thirsty after a day spent in the Maine woods, can drink water that, after millions of years of cycling through clouds, rain, seas, aquifers, organisms, brooks, rivers, snow, glaciers and more clouds, finally happened to fall on the island of Fiji. There, it was poured into a plastic bottle and ---in what is surely the strangest new wrinkle in the water cycle since the invention of the mammalian bladder---it is shipped nine thousand miles to the shelves of a convenience store in rural Maine. 

It takes me about ten minutes to drink a bottle of water. Luckily, Maine has a bottle bill, so my plastic bottle has at least some chance of being recycled once or twice before it enters the waste stream. At that point, the best case scenario is that my bottle will be buried in a landfill where it will remain for millennia, squashed a bit, but otherwise intact. The plastic bottle that served its ten minutes of useful life transferring water into my mouth will sit in that landfill for all eternity…or at least, for as much of eternity as human beings can even begin to fathom. Which is about, oh, two years. Give or take.

Do you ever find other human beings really depressing? Human beings often do. Even when we are quite fond of the human beings in our immediate vicinity, we frequently despair of humanity as a whole. If you don’t believe me, go to church.

One of my little enjoyments, as I drive around the state, is to note the sentiments on church marquees. My favorite recent example is this one. Services at 9 and 11. Sunday school from 8-9… CASUAL, UNCOMMITTED CHRISTIANS MAKE GOD VOMIT.

My friend Mike isn’t a casual Christian. He says he’s not a Christian at all, in fact, but he is a nice, well-educated, decent sort of person. “Human beings are the worst thing that ever happened to this planet,” he told me the other day. “Humanity is like a disease. We’re like HIV. We’re like cancer.”

At the time, he was discussing the disaster in the Gulf with a religious person---me---but Mike claims to have no religion at all. Still, he is a passionate environmentalist. He was expressing his environmentalism in traditionally religious terms, that is, in terms that do not refer to fact but to value.

“We suck.” Mike declared. “Earth would be much better off without us.”

“Huh…” I said. “So you’re saying the planet would be better off without me?”

“Well…” said Mike.

“Better off without my kids? Without your kids?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Mike.

“Maybe we should knock off those Anti-Retroviral drug treatments and just let AIDS take its course? Maybe world hunger is just the planet desperately trying to heal itself. Maybe we should hope that weapons of mass destruction just go right ahead and proliferate, since they could be the planetary equivalent of radiation and chemotherapy?”

“That doesn’t follow at all!” Mike was getting angry.

Well, but it does follow. Just as a preacher can’t assert that non-believers are going to hell without expecting to offend actual people, an environmentalist can’t describe humanity as a planetary virus akin to AIDS without suggesting that the planet would be better off without, well… you.

The Book of Genesis in the Bible describes human beings as the most important things in God’s creation because human beings are God-like in our cleverness and beauty.

Mike-the-Environmentalist would say that human beings are horrible…but ironically, we remain similarly important, similarly God-like. No mere worms writhing blindly on the crust of an uncaring earth: We are the destroyers of worlds, we are legion, we are the living end! The story of the world, the story of the cosmos, the story of life itself turns out to be history---our story---after all.

As a assertion of what matters most…as a set of values, that is, rather than as science, environmentalism carries the same risks as any other religion. It offers the false comfort of moral as well as intellectual superiority without necessarily requiring useful action. Apocalyptic pronouncements from either the religious or the environmental true believer can make us less inclined to seek change. If I’m going to hell anyway, why not commit a few more sins? If the planet is doomed… why not drink the water in the prettiest bottle? 

And because, like any religion, this religion likes to divide the sheep from the goats---the educated Us from the ignorant Them--- it does nothing to further the sorts of conversations we could be having if we gave up this attitude of noble sorrow and admitted that it is humanity and not the planet, that is sick to its stomach and in need of saving.

I’m an environmentalist.

Okay, I’d like to make a few, teensie-weensie improvements to the environment. Though I am sure evolution or God put a lot of time and effort into creating viruses, its okay by me if AIDS goes extinct. Smallpox and rabies can disappear too, though personally I would like to hang onto the Piping Plover.

But for the most part, I think earth is a fabulous planet just the way it is, and I truly believe we ought to get our act together and stop trashing it.

Look around! This environment suits us. The aesthetics are agreeable, the amenities are good. We like a planet with a temperate northern hemisphere, a toasty equator and a couple of nice, clean polar ice caps.

We like having a few snowy spots as well as tropical forests, and diverse ecosystems are entertaining, even as they contribute to our material well-being. After millennia of strenuous study and experimentation, we have learned how to take this planet’s offerings and turn them into wonderful things: poetry and crayons, good beer and chocolate, music, democracy and love.

Love. “The earth is the place for love,” the poet Robert Frost wrote. “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

 Nothing matters more than… love, I say.

“Don’t worry,” I told my friend Mike. Lovingly. “The earth has endured much bigger injuries than us. From the earth’s point of view, human beings aren’t AIDS or cancer. We’re more like a bad case of acne. And one day, there will be a cure.”

He didn’t seem comforted.

“And when we are gone, the sun will rise and set above the waters, and the wind will whisper through the branches of the trees. The wolf will feed upon the haunch of a still-living fawn. The baby cuckoo will casually kick its doomed nest mates over the lip of the nest it has usurped from them, the ichthumanid wasp will insert its egg into the soft and helpless body of a caterpillar and a baboon who finds an infant antelope in the grass will scream in excitement and tear it to pieces. If there is life, there will be suffering and there will be death. Without human beings there will be no witnesses.”

“That doesn’t cheer me up,” said Mike.

I know. If nothing matters more than life… well, each life and all life ends. If nothing matters more than the earth, well, with or without us the sun shall cease to shine and the earth shall cease to be. If nothing matters more than love? Then we should try to survive as long as we can, and love as much as we can, because as far as we know, we are the only creatures that actually try to see, know and love the whole world, even if we aren’t as good at it as we would like to be.

And we have spent so much time, human time I mean, creeping ever so slowly along the moral arc of the universe, willing it to bend toward justice, longing to find ourselves on the downhill run toward that world where we really do know how to exercise responsible dominion, and love our neighbor as ourselves---such simple things, and so damned hard! and if we---casual, uncommitted or wrapped in self-righteousness---if we blow this…if we cure the planet of ourselves as if we were a bad rash instead of the only known witnesses to the miracle of this creation, well, brothers and sisters, I’m telling you…

God will vomit.

Let your heart be broken, by all means, by what we do to what we love…but do not despair. Go forth, each of you, not as a zit but as a child of God. May the works of your minds, your hands and your hearts be blessed and a blessing; May God be with you and love shine through you. May your life bring you joy.

Thank you.