Home of Parrish W. Jones

Genesis 9:1-7
Revelation 22:1-5

“The universe is doomed.” Words of this sort we hear and scoff. They come from doomsdayers who either think that the Bible tells us that the universe will destruct and end. Or they may come from hyperbolic environmentalists. We chose to ignore such prophecies because they will seldom take place in our time. However, these words were spoken by a 19th Century German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz, and are based on the apparently inexorable Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law says that everything in the universe is moving toward a state of disorder resulting from the expending of energy which is lost to useful purposes.

Yet, the scriptures imply something much grander. The Genesis story begins in chapter 2 with a grand vision of the world in which we live. One not unlike I have spoken of the last few weeks. However, that grand vision becomes darkened and destroyed by the sin of humanity. Instead of living in the Garden of Eden, sinful humanity is damned to the dark corners of despair as it makes a living in a world against which it is always in struggle. Human sin persists and things only get worse. It appears that there is such a horrible defect that all will be lost, the good dragged down with the bad. The cry goes out for redemption against the evil of the world. The cry is answered in the story of Noah and his ark.

The words of our lesson are the words of the Lord following the receding of the flood waters. Noah and his sons are told to be fruitful and multiply. We have most often understood those words in terms of reproduction. However, they speak to the other concerns of the Lord. The Lord wanted the whole earth to be fruitful. It was the humans who were given the task to redeem the earth. Humans were assigned to the work of building the fruitfulness of the earth. This work we call redemption.
Can you imagine the terrible environmental disaster which the flood had created? The pictures of Guatemala and Honduras after Hurricane Mitch surely would pale in apparent disaster. Noah and his family had a daunting task.

There are times I feel daunted in the present age. What part do I really play in creating a better world, of redeeming our earth from the terrible forces of human sin? We have not been inclined to apply the word sin when speaking of the environment. If God gave us the charge, the commission, to be fruitful and multiply not just our own kind but the whole of nature, and we have done something else are we not sinning. We have not followed the will of God.

We see all around us the scars of our sin. The landscape is scarred by years of abusive environmental practices. It is too easy to blame those who stripped the earth for coal. I hear many speak of that. Yet, we are all villains because we use the energy the coal provides and the products its energy produces. We also eat the food produced by farmers who use environmentally abusive practices.

The answer of many has been to lobby for government regulation. As individuals in business or in agriculture, it has been difficult to deal with these regulations. The cost of regulations seem a heavy price and we despair and fight and reach out in anger.

Those of us not involved in that aspect wonder if turning down our thermostat, turning off lights, composting our trash, recycling cans, glass and plastic really does any good except to make us feel less guilty. Yet, anything we do to help improve the fruitfulness of the earth is a good thing. Anytime we return food scraps, compostable containers and the like to the earth, we have done a good thing. But lest we be discouraged, today I want to tell you about some big guys whose minds are being changed and converted to a new way.

A leader in this is William McDonough, the dean of Architecture at the University of Virginia. McDonough has worked with large corporations often challenging them to rethink what they are up to. These include Interface, one of the largest carpet producers in the world, WalMart, Nike, GAP, and many more. All have begun adopting environmentally fruitful approaches to business.

McDonough begins with the triangle we see here. He insists his clients think about this. It denotes the three principles he believes have to be accounted for before any building, community, home, business, can be built.

Ecology is at the top because it speaks of the whole. It is the study of the household, the whole of everything. He realizes that no house shall stand that is economically unsound nor that is ethically remiss and does not consider the people who live there. He views any regulation as a failure to properly consider the three aspects of this triangle and design accountably. Thus he has worked to come up with new design concepts that are environmentally fruitful, socially responsible, and economical for the builders and the owners.

For example, he designed a building for GAP which cost only slightly more than what traditional construction and architecture require. The building recycles water, provides sunlight and constant fresh air to every work space, used recycled and renewable materials, is highly energy efficient, and, get this, the company said after six months. “This building was a gift to us. We are saving so much energy, the employee output is so much greater, and the attitude of those who work here so positive that we figure we are actually already making money off this building.” Imagine a capital expenditure for what most in industry consider a necessary loss that can be a profit center.

What is behind this?

Several things: But let me make it simple. The design principles make great sense. You’ve heard of the Industrial Revolution and of the Environmental Movement. Let’s look at the design principles that are the foundation of the two.

The design principles of the Industrial Revolution would have looked something like this had anyone thought to write them. Of course, had they done so, the principles would have been rejected out of hand.

• puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
  measures prosperity by activity, not legacy
  
• requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
  
• produces materials so dangerous that they will require constant vigilance from future generations
  results in gigantic amounts of waste
  
• puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
  
• erodes the diversity of biological species and cultural practices.

• releases fewer pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
  
• measures prosperity by less activity
  
• meets or exceeds the stipulations of thousands of complex regulations that aim to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
  
• produces fewer dangerous materials that will require constant vigilance from future generations
  
• results in smaller amounts of waste
  
• puts fewer valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
  
• standardizes and homogenizes biological species and cultural practices

This model, says McDonough, “tells us to restrict industry and curtail growth—to try to limit creativity and productiveness of humankind. But the idea that the natural world is inevitably destroyed by human industry, or that excessive demand for goods and services causes environmental ills, is a simplification. Nature—highly industrious, astonishingly productive and creative, even ‘wasteful’—is not efficient but effective.” (Atlantic Monthly, Oct., 98). The linear notion that everything is on a single track to death once it is born is a mistake. Nature as we saw the last few weeks is not like that. Nature is full of waste, but it is always recycling the waste into energy for reuse. Why can’t we do that?

McDonough responds that we can if we develop our design principles around Eco Effectiveness. These principles look like this:

• introduces no hazardous materials into the air, water, or soil
  
• measures prosperity by how much natural capital we can accrue in productive ways
  
• measures productivity by how many people are gainfully and meaningfully employed
  
• measures progress by how many buildings have no smokestacks or dangerous effluents
  
• does not require regulations whose purpose is to stop us from killing ourselves too quickly
  
• produces nothing that will require future generations to maintain vigilance
  
• celebrates the abundance of biological and cultural diversity and solar income

He calls the principles the design for the next industrial revolution. Are they simply pie in the sky by and by notions. The answer is, “No!” They have already been put into effect in Chattanooga, Tennessee which was once listed as the worst place in America to live because it was so badly polluted that even the industries which polluted it wanted to get out. Today, it is a model of eco-effectiveness.

Let’s look at a building built on this model. This is the Environmental Studies Center at Oberlin College. This building collects its own energy and resources for operation. It collects water, uses it filters it and reuses it time after time. It produces more oxygen than it uses and has several byproducts of its operation which are contributions to the campus life. It produces laboratories for science and flowers for cafeteria tables, offices, and sweethearts. How does it do all this. Creative design. The water is filtered through gardens which remove the impurities and then turn it around to be reused in sinks and toilets and laboratories. The gardens use the water, the carbon dioxide in the building and produce oxygen. Solar cells and passive solar heat produce the heat and electricity. The greenhouse water filter also helps with heating and cooling. The house literally breathes like a plant. What was the cost? The college figure it paid the college to build it. Imagine that buildings with an immediate return on investment.

The question: "Can we redeem the earth and make it a highly fruitful instead of wasteful place?" has an answer. The answer is, of course, “Yes!” God has called us to that task. We are not alone. The big guys are helping out. Us little guys can enter in.