Yesterday, my church - Jeff St - celebrated our annual Earth Day service. I know, Earth Day was last month, but we always celebrate in May. The better to increase the likelihood of good weather so that the service may be held outside.
It was a beautiful day.
We had two storytellers do an excellent job of telling the Easter Island story. The first story was Easter Island's story as it appeared to have happened (they collapsed under their own overconsumption). The second story was a more hopeful What Might Have Been vision.
What might have happened with the people of Easter Island if they had only learned to live with Enough?
Additionally, we had a blessing for a group within our church that is in the process of establishing a community on a farm just across the river from us.
More photos and the blessing can be found at the Jeff St blog.
5 comments:
I think my daughters were disappointed that the blessing of the bikes was omitted.
Byron of Nothing New Under the Sun also reflected on Easter Island/Rapa Nui today in his XI post for his "Would Jesus Vote Green?" series. See:
http://nothing-new-under-the-sun.blogspot.com/2007/05/would-jesus-vote-green-xi.html
I wouldn't be surprised if the Blessing of the Bikes made a return next year. We just couldn't pull it off this year.
There's some sort of environmental Sunday in the United Methodist liturgical calendar, but I can't remember when. It's not on Earth day, though.
All the evidence (and oral tradition) points to Rapa Nui's overconsumption not being the general population consuming things (large houses, large canoes, eating too much or things too fragile for the environment to sustain) but rather is was supporting an idle class of people, especially religious people, who were simply drones and parasites on the society.
They deforested the island in order to transport those statues from the quarry.
It isn't a matter, as is often proffered, that if they had just individually lived more modestly, they would have retained their island paradise. Not so. What they needed to do was to drown all the clergy, pontificators, interveners, coordinators, and general do-gooders. Or if there had been pacifist among them, give the above list of rogues a planting stick and a fish net and tell them that everyone would like to hear the plan while their blisters are healing.
We, of course, should be doing the same thing.
E, we don't really know exactly what happened at Easter Island - it's speculation based on some existing evidence that they overconsumed resources - I don't know that anyone knows exactly how it played out.
And so I was using this as a parable of sorts. The larger truth is, we can't overconsume - eating up more than we replace. That much is a mathematical reality, it just can't be done indefinitely.
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