Related articles and links |  1 of 4

I'm looking forward to Christmas—no dread of the busyness, no fear of drowning in the commercialism. I know what Christmas Eve will be like: we'll cut the tree in the afternoon and bring it in and decorate it. We'll go to church, where I will sweat with my Sunday-school class as they try to remember their lines for the pageant, and then I'll relax in the knowledge that it is the small mistakes (the drooping halo, the three-year-old shepherd using his crook as a hockey stick) that really stick most fondly in people's minds. We'll come home, read the Christmas story once more, put up our stockings, and go to bed. In the morning, we'll open the stockings and find the candies and pencils and tiny jokes inside; we'll exchange one or two homemade presents—photo albums, raspberry jam made in the summer's heat—and then we'll go outside to play in the snow, or into the kitchen, cooking for the great dinner ahead. In other words, a completely normal Christmas minus the mounds of presents.

The story of how my family arrived at this quiet and beloved Christmas (which means, of course, a much quieter December than most of our friends experience, without a single trip to the mall, and a January without a credit-card debt) has to do with many things: with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, with our worries about what a consumer culture meant for our daughter—and with the conviction, nurtured by our church, that there was more real joy to be had from Christmas if only we could unplug it: more real connections with that glad day in the past, and more real hope for a troubled future.

To understand what I mean, you need to begin by looking hard at what we've done to this planet. We all know that you can guess with some accuracy a human being's behavior by looking at his physical and social surroundings. If a parent is self-absorbed, lazy, or forced by economic pressure to be absent, then a family often falls apart. On a slightly larger scale, when a community's institutions—schools, parks, churches—begin to wither, you know its people have succumbed to a kind of privatized selfishness.

And if you look at the largest measures of environmental health, you can make similar judgments. The ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide, the steadily rising rates of ultraviolet radiation, the fast-growing list of extinctions: these testify not so much to technological failure as to human failure. We need to confront that failure in the hopes of building something new and joyful in its place.

We need to begin with a few basics. I find as I travel that there is a tendency, even among those who care about such issues, to underestimate the pressures on the natural world. We tend to list "the environment" as one issue alongside a hundred others—drugs, the deficit, and so on. But it is much more than that; it is less an issue than a context, the basic context in which we all must live our lives. And it is coming unraveled.

In the next 50 years we will probably see Earth's population hit its maximum. Toxic pollution, fossil fuel use, ozone depletion, soil erosion, and a dozen other phenomena that environmentalists have been warning us about will put enormous pressure on this planet.

In the area I study most closely, global climate change, the world's scientists are now in agreement that we have begun to warm the planet. This warming is in its very early stages—1995 was the warmest year to date, but it only reflects about a fifth of the warming the scientists say we will see by midcentury—and already you can begin to see what happens. Over 700 dead in a short Chicago heat wave. Highest grain prices in 20 years on the Chicago Board of Trade as the farmers of the world's farm belts struggle to feed an expanding population while simultaneously coping with yield-destroying high temperatures.

next page... |  1 of 4

share this page

December 9 1996, Vol. 40, No. 14