MMUUS Earth Day Service The Air

MMUUS Earth Day Service      The Air

On this Earth Day service, we give thanks and celebrate the life-sustaining air that surrounds us. We live in an extremely thin layer of air surrounding the earth no thicker than a coat of paint compared to the size of our earth. Only a few miles above us in space, there is no air and the temperature is close to absolute zero and a few miles into the earth, temperatures are thousands of degrees hotter.

Ancient people were very aware of all of the things that happened or were carried in the air like clouds and rain and snow and, of course, the violent weather when great storms and lightning occurred, presumably caused by angry gods. Or times when there was no rain and droughts withered away the crops.

An often underappreciated quality of air is its ability to carry sound by allowing waves of energy to be transmitted by vibrations in the air. Imagine a world where you couldn't hear speech or music. Evel Knievel is quoted as saying, “I decided to fly through the air and live in the sunlight and enjoy life as much as I could.”

And today, of course, we know about the important life-sustaining qualities of air and the oxygen we must have to survive. But lately we have also become aware of many other things in the air, most of which we are responsible for. One of the consequences of becoming an industrialized society is that much of our industry sloughs off vast quantities of byproducts into the air many of which can be quite harmful. One of the success stories in our world society is that we collectively became aware that refrigerants from air conditioning equipment were endangering the ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that protects us from dangerous ultraviolet rays and we collectively came together, in what is called the Montréal protocol, to reached an agreement to stop using those materials.

And now we, as a society, are taking action to deal with the harmful effects of many other things that we, and our chimneys, vehicles and industries, are putting into the air. History is replete with stories about cities where the air became so polluted it seemed like it was almost nighttime and people could hardly breathe. Our own Pittsburgh was like that decades ago and many cities in China are currently in a desperate situation to control their own air pollutants and have a proliferation of “Oxygen Bars” where people go because of potentially harmful reduction in oxygen levels.

Along with many other countries, we became concerned enough about what we were doing to the air, that, in 1970, President Nixon proposed and Congress passed an act establishing the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. Since that time our air has in large measure improved but with one notable and serious exception: we finally became aware of the devastating effects that burning vast amounts of hydrocarbons like coal, oil and natural gas are having on our atmosphere. The huge volume of carbon dioxide they create is causing our entire Earth's atmosphere to overheat in a process referred to as the greenhouse effect.

So we are starting to address that concern and that the typical American family creates an average of 48.5 tons of carbon dioxide every year, five times that of the rest of the world. Most of us are aware of the problem, the consequences of inaction and the need to take action. So it’s a little ironic that with the coming sea level rise, Beacon Hill in Boston, where the UU headquarters used to be, will, in time, become Beacon Island, and the new UU headquarters in the tidal flats below will eventually be underwater and abandoned.

Not to be out done by the Italians--who produce only 22% of the carbon dioxide per person that we do--our Green Sanctuary Committee is starting a program using a website called the “Cool Climate Calculator” to help us learn what our individual carbon use is—it’s called a carbon foot print---and, importantly, the site has an interactive list of actions we can take to reduce our carbon foot prints including for each action, the cost and any cost savings. We will start soon; so look for an announcement in the newsletter. There will be a table in the Social Hall after the service to help people get started

We give thanks for and celebrate our life-sustaining air we live in and breathe.