Earth Day 2007

Cindy BK
Originally uploaded by paynehollow.

We heard two stories at our Earth Day service, both telling the story of Easter Island. In the first story, we heard something approximating what some consider to have really happened there.

In short, the people of Easter Island - Rapa Nui - overconsumed. They kept cutting down their trees to build homes and to make canoes from which to fish - both of which they needed to survive. And they kept growing, which meant they needed to cut down even more trees for survival.

Eventually, they just used up the bulk of their resources and their civilization imploded under the weight of their own consumption.

The second story we heard was what might have been. What might have happened at Rapa Nui if they had realized that they couldn't keep consuming more than they produced and they changed their ways. It was a more hopeful story.

Obviously, given the choice: Would you like to live without limits and eventually die and destroy everything in the whole world except perhaps the roaches or would you like to live wisely and within reasonable boundaries? - most of us would choose the second option.

The problem is, no one ever offers us the choice. We just live life as it comes to us, making what seems like either the wisest of easiest answer at the time problems arise.

This sort of laissez faire life – taking whatever comes to us without much thinking or planning, has led to a world of problems. We know the problems – pollution, breakdown of community, consumerism – I won’t belabor that. Because it’s easiest to take life as it comes to us, we tend to just be part of the larger problem. It’s not that we intentionally set out to pollute or destroy, it just sorta happens that way.

But Jeff Street has never been about doing what’s expedient, about taking the easy way out. We’re not lemmings running toward oblivion! We are a bunch of salmon here, swimming upstream...