A Truffula Seed

This is an initial draft of a sermon I plan to deliver at UUCS in early April.

CENTERING THOUGHT:

While western colonialist culture believes in “rights”, many indigenous cultures teach of “obligations” that we are born into: obligations to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the Earth itself. When I orient myself around the question of what my obligations are, a deeper question immediately arises: from this moment on, knowing what is happening to the planet, to what do I devote my life? –Dahr Jamail

READING:  [Excerpts from] The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss, ending with the line,

"UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.

"So catch!" cried the Onceler; he let something fall.
"It's a truffula seed, the last one of all.
You're in charge of the last of the truffula seeds.
And truffula trees are what everyone needs.
Plant a new truffula. Treat it with care.
Give it clean water. And feed it fresh air.
Grow a forest. Protect it from axes that hack,
Then the Lorax and all of his friends
may come back."

SERMON:

I've always been a Dr. Seuss fan.

So when I first encountered The Lorax, in 1971, shortly after great national awakening of Earth Day 1970, it resonated deeply. I remember a party with my college friends, where I brought my copy to show them, and a flamboyant, theatrical young woman in our group named Nancy entertained us all with a dramatic reading. When she got to the moral of the story, the party fell silent as she paused dramatically on the half line:

"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It's not."

Dr. Seuss was right, of course. Nothing has gotten any better--only a whole lot worse, since that evening some 48 years ago. Unlike Dr. Seuss's penitent villain, the Oncelers of the real world--from Monsanto to Exxon Mobil to Donald Trump--have yet to repent, even as the "grickle grass" grows up all around us: toxic pollution of land, air, rivers, and even the ocean; deforestation and desertification; loss of biodiversity;  and above all, the looming spectre of accelerating climate change from fossil fuels that threatens our common future. Yet the Oncelers still rule, with their unshakeable faith in the economics of "biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering!"

But the Onceler is not just the villain. He is also the penitent first-person narrator, telling his sad story to the little boy--the stand-in for the reader--below his dark, isolated tower. And in making this narrative choice, Dr. Seuss knew exactly what he was doing.

We are all, after all, Oncelers--not just the rich and powerful. From the time of the Agricultural Revolution, some 12,000 years ago, we have drawn a conceptual barrier--that had not previously existed in any human tribe-- between "man" and "nature"; between the "civilized" and the "wild." On this side, in our cities and cultivated fields, we were safe. Outside of these--the "wild," was a place of both danger and opportunity. The danger came first from wild animals who would threaten us or our crops--whether lions, tigers, bears, wolves, or deer, rats, mice, and swarms of locusts all feeding on our crops. The opportunity came from the fact that the Wild was lawless--a place where no constraints applied, and we could find some new "resource"--whether forests, minerals, or--significantly, other arable land we could raid and steal from those already there, clearcut, and plant with monocultures to feed our growing population.  The entire history of our agro-industrial civilization--from the walls of ancient Babylon to Trump Tower--could be seen as the inexorable working-out of this basic Onceler ideology--that "nature" is nothing but a "resource" for human expansion, and it has no value at all until it is transformed into commodities for sale and profit.

So when the Onceler arrives to set up shop amid the beautiful Truffula Trees, waving in the breeze and nurturing a rich ecosystem of "brown barbaloots, "humming fish" and "swomee swans," he, like our ancestors and most entrepreneurs today, sees it as nothing but a "resource" to turn into hot-selling commodities like "thneeds" as quickly as possible.

While the Onceler represents the powerful corporate and industrial interests who have everything to gain and nothing to lose from plundering the planet and exploiting its inhabitants in order to maximize their profits, the Lorax--the fuzzy little guy who "speaks for the trees" and pesters the Onceler to no avail, is an apt image of the environmental movement, in which I have been an active participant throughout my life. But the nagging Lorax only creates contempt and resentment in the Onceler, who shrugs him off, while he keeps "biggering"--until the last Truffula Tree falls.

So it is with the Environmental Movement, which after a few early victories such as banning DDT and the Endangered Species Act, is now again on the defensive, first ridiculed and marginalized on Fox News by corporate toadies like Rush Limbaugh, and now in full retreat under the onslaught of Trump and his billionaire minions in the fossil fuel industry, who have launched an all-out attack on every environmental regulation they could find.

 So I would like to focus on the final passage--where the now-repentant Onceler entrusts the young boy--a stand-in for the reader--with the very last truffula seed of them all. This precious truffula seed is the key to the boy's understanding of the word inscribed on the pedestal in the midst of the gloomy, dying landscape: UNLESS. The hope it embodies is entirely conditional: a seed must be planted in good soil, in the right climate conditions, nurtured with "clean water and fresh air," and protected "from axes that hack" if it is to be viable.

This truffula seed--and not the futile nagging of the Lorax himself--is thus the key to the allegory in Dr. Seuss's tale. But is there a viable truffula seed in a time like ours, when everything seems to be falling apart at once?

Many proposed solutions for our current global crisis are floating around these days. They fall into three broad categories: technological fixes, political action, and personal or community-based initiatives. Unfortunately, none are very convincing.

Technological fixes, like proposals to geo-engineer the atmosphere or extract excess CO2, are prohibitively expensive and would require an unprecedented level of cooperation among the world's governments to pull them off. And even then, as completely untested technologies, they might backfire badly. Also, they embody the same kind of linear mentality that caused the problem to begin with: shield the atmosphere from excess solar radiation, and then we can carry on with business as usual, drilling more oil and gas, plundering our resources for commodities, cutting down forests to build more suburbs, and "biggering and biggering..."

Political solutions, like the Green New Deal, are courageous and inspiring, but face a huge uphill battle against entrenched corporate interests with vast pools of money to buy off politicians and saturate the airwaves with hysterical propaganda about "socialism." And even if, against all odds, this bold initiative passed, it would face entrenched and ongoing opposition from those with a vested interest in the status quo.

Personal solutions fall into two categories: green consumerism and adaptation. Green consumerism refers to the notion of personal responsibility--if we each make changes in our purchasing habits to reduce our ecological footprint, the net effect will be to reduce overall carbon emissions, and thereby save our planet. In theory, this is true. But as Bob Dylan once said, "Most people don't do what they believe in; they just do what's most convenient, and then they repent." And of course, a multi-billion dollar advertising industry is out there brainwashing us day and night with appeals to convenience--spelled P-L-A-S-T-I-C--regardless of environmental consequences.

This leaves adaptation, whether it is cities spending billions to wall in their waterfronts to protect against sea level rise, or smaller-scale "transition town" movements, where people teach each other the skills they will need to grow their own food, build their own houses, create their own currency, and so forth--to secede, in effect, from the rest of the dying world.  But such transition towns could quickly devolve into entrenched, embittered survivalist communities, bristling with weapons behind high walls and barbed wire. Who wants to live like that? As Robert Frost once said, "Something there is that does not love a wall."

So what is left?  In this time of rapidly accelerating climate catastrophe, as we collectively face a terrifying future of combined environmental, social, and economic collapse, what can we do? How do we navigate the treacherous waters between the alluring Scylla of television-induced denial and the Charybdis--the vortex--of despair? Where can we find this precious Truffula Seed of resolution, and how can we nurture it?

If I had an easy answer to this dilemma we all face, I would already have collected my Nobel Prize. I don't. So I think we all need to find our own Truffula Seed--our own still center from which to face the day, beyond false hope, and beyond abject and useless despair. So I will offer my own Truffula seed. If it works for you, plant it and cultivate it; if not, improvise.

My Truffula seed is a dicot, in that it consists of two complementary commitments we all can make. The first is a formal statement of a Gaian Categorical Imperative--an ethical code to live by:

"In everything you do, strive to assume responsibility for the health, competence, and resilience of yourself, your community, and our living Earth--simultaneously."

Health, competence, and resilience are the three essential survival values of every living system at every scale from the simplest one-celled organism to the blue whale--to us. Health is internal homeostasis--being well. Competence is the ability to thrive within, and serve the needs of, an existing, predictable community--doing good work. And Resilience is the ability to adapt to unpredictable changes in the world around us--keeping in touch.

 If we benefit ourselves in ways that are destructive to our community, we will probably end up in jail. If we benefit our communities in ways that are destructive to the planet, we may become billionaires--but our children will curse our bones. Only when we benefit all three--ourselves, our communities, and our planet--are we doing truly good work: learning, teaching, healing, and creating.

The second commitment is a simple slogan, a plan of action for the first. Here it is:

"Grow gardens; grow community; grow awareness."

Growing gardens improves our own health and that of the Earth by reducing our dependence on topsoil-destroying, pesticide-dependent corporate agriculture. It also strengthens our bonds with our neighbors and community. As Permaculture teacher Geoff Lawton once said, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden."

Growing community improves our individual and collective competence.

Growing awareness enhances our resilience, both individually and collectively.

Our garden begins, not in our backyard, but in our heads. It begins
by reclaiming the present moment. This was a core teaching of the eminent Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. In all our anxiety about our future, we forget the simple fact that the present is all there is. The past is gone, and the future hasn't happened yet.  Both past and future are what the Buddhists call "mental formations,"--fabrications of the mind with no basis in reality. The past is irretrievable; all we can do is learn from it. The future is imaginary. We have no way of knowing for sure what will happen even tomorrow, to say nothing of ten or twenty years from now. We know, however, that our future--and that of our children--will be shaped--and constrained--by decisions we have made in the past, but also--more importantly--by the decisions we make in the present moment. So how do we reclaim the present moment?

By breathing, observing, and letting go. We breathe in order to observe; we observe in order to let go; and we let go in order to breathe. The minute we do so, we calm down, our breath becomes more slow and even, our heartbeats more regular. Simply breathing reconnects our minds and our bodies, bringing us back to the present moment. Our breath is our home base, connecting us to the Earth and to one another.

Then we can turn to our day's agenda, by renewing three simple vows.  The radio host Garrison Keillor had a wonderful sign-off on his morning radio program, "Writer's Almanac" which I have adopted for my own generic daily agenda:  "Be well; Do good work; and Keep in Touch."

Be well--take care of this precious body while you have it. One good way of doing this is by growing fresh, organic vegetables in your own gardens. This enhances your health, competence, and resilience simultaneously.

Do good work--focus mindfully on the tasks at hand, for the best interests of yourself, your community, and the planet as a whole. This is a good way to build competence and grow community.

Keep in touch--take care of everyone, and abandon no one. This is a great way of developing your own and others' resilience and growing awareness.

So I would like to leave you with a simple guided meditation that I use in my own daily meditation practice, to maintain my equanimity and focus no matter what happens in the world around me. It consists of ten verb phrases, on the breath, divided into two sets of three and one of four.

The first set helps us re-inhabit the moment:  Breathe, Observe, Let Go.
The second (with gratitude to Garrison Keillor) helps us reclaim the day: Be well, do good work, keep in touch.
And the third consists of four general life goals around which we can orient ourselves--the only things worth doing with our lives:

Learn, Teach, Heal, and Create.

This is my Truffula seed--my way of reconnecting every day with my still center and renewing my own commitment to growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. It is yours to use if it works for you; if not, improvise.

So I would like to try a guided meditation today. Please sit up, straight and relaxed, settling into your breath as we contemplate and practice these injunctions on the breath:

Breathing...observing...letting go...
Being well...doing good work...keeping in touch
Learning...teaching...healing...creating...