That Twinkie Wrapper from 1972

You know that allegedly science-based parable about the frog in slowly heated water that will boil to death, not knowing what is gradually happening to it, rather than leap out when the water gets too hot? Well, the parable is false. A frog will jump out when the water gets too hot. But, if you substitute a human being for the frog, apparently you are closer to truth.

The newest climate study is out from a couple hundred scientists working through 14,000 studies. Human-caused climate change is happening faster than anticipated. The consequences are already hellish. Increasingly large fires creating more local weather changes. Floods. Storms on steroids. Drought. Habitats baking, roasting, and boiling. Permafrost melting and releasing carbon plus God-only-knows what kinds of bacteria and viruses.

Considering the world’s responses to COVID, most definitely including the U.S., I’m inclined to use language that is inappropriate for theologians not named Stanley Hauerwas or Nadia Boltz-Weber. We inhabitants of planet earth are… in a spot of bother.

Broken politics is not the only problem, although that problem is huge. But the lack of a culture of respect for each other, and for what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “the democracy of species,” is the parent from which our broken politics is the child. Too many of us don’t give a crap about each other, let alone the other living beings or our shared home.

University of Chicago ethicist Dr. Laurie Zoloth, on the university’s “Big Brains” podcast, said regarding societal responses to COVID: “To live outside of our sense of duty to one another is a sort of horrifying prospect.” She was reflecting on the pandemic as the first time in history the whole world was dealing with the same problem.

Our sense of duty to each other? We are boiling ourselves alive and making the planet worse for successive generations to the extent that we are threatening the prospect of there being future generations.

Climate activist Bill McKibben wrote about how inadequate the call to personal responsibility is. Necessary, but not sufficient. He thought about those who accuse him of leaving a carbon footprint, whether through his air travel or using a plastic pen. It is nearly impossible not to participate in economic and social systems based on petroleum products. The governments and businesses of the world, and yes each one of us, is/are addicted to petroleum products. What is required to save the planet from homo sapiens is massive systemic change.

Fast.

And we the nation, we the people, we the oikoumene (whole inhabited earth) are not mentally ready.

At home, my wife is fine-tooth-combing through our plastic usage. I already bring reusable bags when I shop for groceries, including mesh bags for produce. Cheri found and purchased soaps, hair products in cake form, laundry and dish detergents as tabs and delivered in cardboard, and toilet paper not wrapped in plastic. Toothpaste tabs that neither leave a tube nor microplastics that foul the oceans and marine life. She has even begun to take all the plastic that can’t be recycled (and we are suspicious about the amount of plastic actually being recycled) and making bottle bricks.

Seeing the bits of plastic she is compacting into the bottles, and hearing her say frequently to our daughter “that single-use wrapper will still be here in 400 years,” reminded me of one of my high school eating habits. Nearly every day, along with the bologna and cheese sandwich on white bread (how am I still alive?), my mom included a package of Hohos, cupcakes, or Twinkies. (Thankfully, as a track and cross-country runner I burned through whatever calories I consumed!) The shelf life of Twinkies is a longstanding social meme—another fiction, actually. But its wrapper, that will last half a millennium.

Lunchtime dessert for one day. Wrapper in the environment for 20 generations.

If you are sick of the “resistance” to “government overreach” regarding the pandemic, of hiding behind the partial truth of “personal responsibility,” or angry cries of “freedom” as an absolute for the unmasked who are demanding that the rest of us suck in whatever they are expelling from their lungs—just wait until the day when a government declares a state of emergency when tens of millions of human beings are roasting on the inside or their cities are disappearing like Atlantis. I expect resistance akin to what I imagine would happen if the Second Amendment was deleted.

We are connected to each other. My actions affect you and vice versa. There is only one human race and we have only one home: the earth. When it comes to climate action, there is no place to hide. There is no America First or China First or Whatever First.

We need to see and act on our sense of duty to each other. As Dr. Zoloth said, otherwise, the consequences are horrible.

Ready for massive systemic change, chosen or not, at a speed the human race has never experienced? Ready or not, here it comes.

Dr. Gary Peluso-Verdend is president emeritus at Phillips Theological Seminary and is the executive director of the seminary’s Center for Religion in Public Life. The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author. Learn more about the Center’s work here and about Gary here.