Light in Darkness: Embracing the Opportunity of Climate Change1
by Edwin Firmage, Jr.2
I“I howl like a wolf and mourn like an owl.”
Micah 1:8
Most of you know me, if you know me at all, as an environmental activist. A few of you may know
me as an outdoor photographer. But tonight, in view of the season, I’d like to put on another of my
hats. Long before I took up cameras and activism, I was a student of the ancient Near East. My
special focus was Israel and the Bible. And I’d like to start o! my presentation tonight by talking a
bit about the Bible. Ironically, academic study of the Bible was at least indirectly the beginning of the
end of my active involvement in organized religion. So, I think it’s only fair to forewarn you that I
stand before you tonight as that oddest of creatures, the agnostic preacher. But in part because of the
crumbling of belief, and also for other reasons, my Bible study was the start of everything good that
has followed, including the photography and the activism. What’s more, although I now approach
the Bible very di!erently than I did as a Mormon missionary thirty years ago, the Bible is if anything
more significant to me now. For me, as I hope for you, the Bible remains a foundational cultural and
spiritual document, and it can inspire us whether or not we are “true believers.”
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1 Section I is based on a presentation delivered at the Unitarian Church, Salt Lake City, UT, December 18, 2009. Section II borrows heavily from a petition called “A Call for Leadership” that I drew up for the University of Utah in February 2009 but only circulated among a small group of friends at the U. due to the apparent unwillingness of faculty to speak out and draw down the ire of the Utah Legislature. A copy of the petition is available on my website: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Edwin_Firmage_Photography/Blog/Entries/2009/2/2_A_Declaration_of_Energy_Indepenence_files/A%20Call%20for%20Leadership.pdf. Sections III - VI are new to this essay.
2 EDWIN FIRMAGE, JR. makes his living, or tries to, as a fine art photographer in Salt Lake City, Utah (res est sacra miser). He studied classics at Princeton and holds an M.A. in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology from U.C. Berkeley, where he was a Mellon Fellow. From 1986–1989, he was a Rotary Foundation scholar at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author and publisher of Red Rock Yellow Stone, an award-winning combination of photographs of the American West and haiku from Japan. For more about Mr. Firmage, visit his web site, www.edwinfirmage.com.
My message to you this evening is that climate change is the problem: the ecological problem, the
social and economic problem, the health problem, and the moral problem not just of our time but of
all time. For reasons that I’ll explain in Parts III through VI, I think that churches have a uniquely
important role to play in addressing this problem of problems. But whether or not climate change is
the problem, it is certainly a problem, and a big problem for churches, as it is for other institutions. It
therefore seems reasonable, if perhaps somewhat old-fashioned, to consider what light the Bible
might shed on this issue for religious institutions that in theory, if not always in deed, honor the
Bible as a foundational document. So, with that justification for my playing preacher, let me turn to
the Good Old Book, that book “so little read in so many places at so many times” ("omas Greene).
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I begin my remarks tonight with these beautiful and familiar words first spoken 2,500 years ago by a
man living somewhere in the Near East, perhaps in what we now call Iraq, perhaps in what we now
call Israel. He spoke a long time ago in a far away place and in a foreign tongue, and I recite his
words in his tongue to remind us that these words do come from another world. Yet they still have
meaning for us today:
Arise, shine, for thy light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.
For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.
And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising (Isa. 60:1-3).
"e speaker of these words called himself Yesha‘yahu. He was the second or third of Israel’s prophets
to call himself by that name. Yesha‘yahu, or Isaiah as we know him, wrote at the end of the biblical
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 2 of 90
period. As one of the last of the writers of the Bible, he could look back over hundreds of years of
thought and action inspired by Israel’s unique faith. As one of the last of the prophets, he saw himself
and his people at a turning point in time when at last the promise of God’s covenant with Israel
would be fulfilled, mutually fulfilled.
If the Bible has a red thread, an organizing principle, it is certainly the notion of the covenant. What
does this covenant mean? To understand, we must go back to the beginning of Israel’s history, as
Israel’s priests did when they were putting the Torah in its present form. For them, the story begins
with God’s creation of mankind in his image:
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Let us make mankind in our image, according to our
likeness (Gen. 1:26).
For Israel’s priests, the resemblance between God and man was both physical and spiritual. It was
this resemblance that made it possible for God at a later date to tell Israel, “You must be holy,
because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2). Without such a resemblance, such a
requirement would be impossible. But even at the beginning of history, before ever speaking a word
to this e!ect, God expected mankind to model its behavior on his.
It didn’t. God’s first attempt to create a holy following failed. "e generation of Adam and his family
created a world full of violence. Clearly, if people were going to become holy, God would have to do
something more than simply turning them loose on their own recognizance. And so, after wiping
out all life on earth except the beings saved in the ark, God gave mankind its first instructions in how
to behave. He told Noah that men may not kill each other, because they are the image of God. And
he told Noah that while people would now be allowed to eat animals as opposed to just plants for
food, the life of these animals, as embodied in the blood, belonged to God and to God alone.
"is was the first simple statement of ethics and the first dietary law of the Bible (Gen. 9:3-6). Once
more, however, humanity failed to live up to its promise and its obligation. Humanity again filled
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the earth with violence, and even proposed to take heaven by storm by building a gigantic siege
tower (cf. Isa. 14:13-14: Babel and Babylon, the same city at di!erent ends of history, define
arrogance). God responded by scattering humanity to the winds and making it di#cult for them to
work together. Students of foreign languages will be forever grateful for this di#culty.
And so, God made a third attempt. Again he singled out one good man, and he made a promise to
this man of a sort that he had not made with Noah or with Adam. God bound himself to this man
as a friend, with the promise that he would be a friend not only to the man but to his o!spring. In
time, God took the o!spring of his friend, Abraham, and set them down at the foot of Sinai for a
lecture like no other in history. In painstaking and unprecedented detail, God laid out for the
Israelites what it means to be holy. And no aspect of life was too trivial for consideration. Diet,
clothing, hygiene, behavior, governance — God spelled it all out for them so that there would be no
room for excuses. "is was Israel’s Torah, the Teaching, the basis for the agreement between God and
his people. If they would follow his Teaching and become a holy people, he would be their God, and
would dwell among them, literally. In Israelite thought, the giving of the Torah and the covenant at
Sinai is the epitome of God’s relations with mankind, for at Sinai God at last gives mankind the
knowledge of how to become like God.3
Such is the vision of the Torah. But the biblical story of God’s passionate involvement in the life of
Israel of course does not end there. It continues in the prophets, whose theme is the failure of Israel
to live up to this covenant responsibility. "e tone of the prophetic message down the ages is set by
Samuel, the first great prophet after Moses of whom we have any substantial record. Samuel rebukes
Israel for its desire to have a king like the other nations, for Yahweh was their proper king (1 Sam.
8:10-22). And Samuel rebukes Saul, Israel’s first king, for having saved some of the spoils of battle to
make a grand sacrificial o!ering, despite Yahweh’s command to destroy them. Samuel’s response to
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3 In this reading of Israel’s prehistory, I follow Martin Buber, “Abraham the Seer,” in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum Glatzer. New York: Schocken, 1968, 22-43. I discuss the relevance of the primeval history to the Holiness Code in my own article, “Genesis 1 and the Priestly Agenda.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 82 (1999), 97-114. An abbreviated audio version of this article, which I presented at the 1998 Sunstone Symposium, is available on my website: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Supporting_Documents/Scholarly_Works_files/Genesis%201%20and%20the%20Priestly%20Agenda.mp3. Obviously, this reading of the Torah is 180 degrees di!erent from the traditional Mormon view. But this is the plain, holistic reading of the text, which is to say, the intent of the text according to its final compositors.
Saul will echo through generations of prophecy, “Does Yahweh desire whole o!erings and sacrifices
as he desires that you hear him? To hear is better than sacrifice, and to listen better than the fat of
rams” (1 Sam. 15:22).4 If king and priest were the anointed executors of the divine will, the prophets
were the guardians of it, a role that from the beginning put them at odds with the political and
religious establishment. “So these men, the prophets, who mostly have no appointment but only a
mission... stand and summon to justice the representatives on the royal throne for their treachery
against YHVH and His commandments. One after another they repeat God’s words, ‘I have
anointed thee to be melekh,’ or ‘I have appointed nagid’: Samuel to Saul (1 Sam. 15:17), Nathan to
David (2 Sam. 12:7), Ahijah to Jeroboam (1 Kgs. 14:7). For four hundred years they come one after
the other and take their stand before the prince and reprove him because of the violated covenant,
and finally Jeremiah (22:6!.), sometime after the disaster [the fall of Jerusalem], announces
destruction for the king’s house which had not been just, and therefore was no more justified.”5 "e
conflict is tragic and deeply moving, as in the case of David, who is Yahweh’s champion in war and a
charismatic figure of enormous human depth and obvious faith. Even David, who, like Abraham,
was promised that his dynasty would enjoy God’s special favor forever (2 Sam. 7:16) and who
became the model for the Messiah, does not escape prophetic censure. In contemporary pagan
literature, kings were the subject of epic and hagiography. In Israel, they are the foils of the prophets,
cautionary tales of the failure of even the greatest to live up to their responsibility. It’s an
extraordinary tale, without parallel in world literature, which perhaps is why many people today still
read it, long after the royal propaganda has been relegated to the dustbin. I wonder, though, how
many readers understand its message. No book in history sits less comfortably with the status quo
than the Book that has so widely become the icon of the status quo.
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4 Trans. mine. Generations of Sunday School lessons to free-spirited children notwithstanding, Samuel’s rebuke is not a sermon on obedience per se. It’s a statement about the hierarchy of values. In e!ect, Samuel says that how you behave trumps how you worship. "at’s a message that today’s punctilious Sunday School and temple goers might actually #nd troubling. I’ve chosen to render kishmoa‘ beqôl YHWH literally, because the injunction to “hear” is so rich in biblical echoes, as in the Shema: “Hear, Israel, the laws and statutes that I proclaim to you today. Learn them and observe them” (Deut. 5:1). To hear is to internalize, not simply to follow your #le leader’s orders. Mechanical obedience is as meaningless as mechanical sacri#ce. Yahweh does not want automata any more than he wants zealous hypocrites. To suppose otherwise is to treat Yahweh himself as a machine, an idol.
5 Martin Buber, !e Prophetic Faith. Trans. Carlyle Witton-Davies. New York: Harper, 1960, 68. Originally published 1949.
In the end, what the prophets look for and universally fail to find is the transformation of a people. In the
view of the prophets, it is precisely the Lord’s chosen people who are the most blind and deaf to God
(Isa. 42:19-20; 43:8; Jer. 5:21; 6:10; Ezek. 12:2; cf. also Isa. 30: 9; Jer. 6:17; Hos. 4:6,16; 7:11), who
do not understand God (Hos. 4:1 || lack of covenant loyalty, v. 6 || forgetting the Torah; Isa. 5:13;
Jer. 22:16 = doing justice and righteousness), and who are unclean (Isa. 64:6). "e prophets therefore
seek a national purifying, a return to fundamental principles. In Hebrew to this day, the word for
repentance is simply “return,” teshuvah. "us, Jeremiah tells Jerusalem, “Wash your heart of evil
(kabbesî mera‘ah libbeka) that you may be saved” (Jer. 4:14). “Circumcise yourself to the Lord,
remove the foreskin of your hearts” (4:4) so that you become in fact as well as in belief a holy people
(Amos 5:14; Isa. 62:12; cf. Jer. 2:3; Isa. 6:13).
"e apparent resistance of the people to deep, wholesale, and permanent transformation provokes
the prophets to anger and sorrow, for they see, as the people do not, the disparity between what is
and what could be, and between what is and what must be. In reality, the Israel of the prophets was
probably not for the most part a society run amok, prophetic indictments notwithstanding, but an
everyday kind of society with its “normal measure of daily sin.”6 Hezekiah (715-687 B.C.E) and
Josiah (640-609 B.C.E.), for example, ruled for almost 60 years between them, during a century of
exceptional political turbulence and social change. Such longevity itself says something about the
likely quality of their leadership. And the Bible recognizes that they were in fact good kings, who
generally did right by God and by the people. Of Hezekiah, the author of 2 Kings says, “He put his
trust in the Lord..."ere was nobody like him among all the kings of Judah who succeeded him or
among those who had gone before him” (2 Kgs. 18:5). Josiah “did what was right in the eyes of the
Lord, following in the footsteps of his forefather David and deviating neither to the right nor to the
left” (2 Kgs. 22:2). Jeremiah himself says of Josiah that “he upheld the cause of the lowly and the
poor” (Jer. 22:15). And yet, it is during this same period that Isaiah and Jeremiah thunder against
Israel, because there were also less-than-exemplary kings, less-than-exemplary ruling classes, and even
less than exemplary poor. Jeremiah blankets them all with furious denunciation, “From the smallest
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6 Yehezkel Kaufmann, !e Religion of Israel. Trans. Moshe Greenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960, 421. Kaufmann’s is by far the best general history of Israelite religion ever written, and I cannot recommend it too highly to those who may wish to pursue the subject in greater depth.
to the greatest of them, all seek gain, from prophet to priest all deal falsely” (Jer. 6:13; 8:10). In an
ordinary society, Abraham Heschel notes, “Few are guilty, but all are responsible...In a community
not indi!erent to su!ering, uncompromisingly impatient with cruelty and falsehood, continually
concerned for God and every man, crime would be infrequent rather than common.”7 Israel had
crime, and corruption, and poverty even at the best of times, like all societies before and since. But
for a people under covenant to be holy, to be ordinary, to be like every other nation, was to fail God.
"e fact that crime and corruption and all of the ills of normal society had not disappeared
demonstrated to the prophets that Israel’s commitment to the covenant was insu#cient. In the end,
while the prophets produced a long litany of the people’s o!enses, what they really condemned Israel
for was being ordinary.
"e importance of this point cannot be overstated. Believing readers of the Bible today who suppose
that Israel was punished because it was in fact unusually wicked fundamentally miss the point, which
is that the Israelites were in fact probably just like most people in most ages, and the prophets
condemned them. "e prophets were not sociologists or moral statisticians. "eir indictment of
Israel was not compiled from an encyclopedic knowledge of the sins of the people, but rather from
their observation of the society as a whole and its self-evident failure to be something radically
di!erent. "e prophetic indictment was therefore not subject to mitigation by the righteousness of
some individuals. "e prophets were no more concerned with individual righteousness than with
individual wickedness. Of course individuals must be righteous. But if society as a whole cannot rise
to the challenge, individual righteousness does not matter: the righteous and the wicked perish
together. “To a person endowed with prophetic sight,” Heschel continues, everyone appears blind; to
a person whose ear perceives God’s voice, everyone else appears deaf. No one is just; no knowing is
strong enough, no trust complete enough. "e prophet hates the approximate, he shuns the middle
of the road..."e prophet disdains those for whom God’s presence is comfort and security; to him, it
is a challenge, an incessant demand..."e prophet’s word is a scream in the night. While the world is
at ease and asleep, the prophet feels the blast from heaven.”8
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7 !e Prophets. New York: Harper, 1975, I:16 (first published 1962).
8 Idem.
For the prophets, the transformation of the world — and their ultimate vision is of a transformed
world modeled on Israel’s holiness (Isa. 2:2-4; 42:6-7; 45:22; 49:6; 56:6-7; 66:18-22; Mic. 4:2; Jer.
3:17; 4:2; 12:16; 16:19; Zeph. 3:9-10; Zech. 2:15; 8:20-23; 14:16-21) — requires first that God’s
people take their divine mission to heart in a way that they have not yet done. Israel is the first fruits
of God’s harvest of the nations (Jer. 2:3). "us, after chastising Israel for its failure to do this, God
tells Jeremiah, “I will put my teaching (torah) inside them, I will write it on their heart, and I shall be
their God and they shall be my people” (Jer. 31:33). In this last chapter in the story of God’s
relations with men, “they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother,
saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of
them” (v. 34). Bringing the story full circle, Jeremiah reminds his people that the person telling them
this is “the Lord, which giveth the sun for a light by day...and the moon and the stars by
night” (v. 35). Only at this point can God say of mankind, “It is good.”
"e essence of biblical prophecy is not to see what will be but to see what is and what can be. "e
reality that the prophets saw is that while the physical universe is all that God intended it to be,
God’s masterpiece, man, “is still in the process of being created.”9 And what God hopes to achieve
with this part of his creation is an image of himself in the fullest sense of the word. While God
prohibits icons to Israel, he permits himself one: Israel is God’s icon. Israel is God’ mate, his love, his
passion. As I said at the beginning, it is God’s purpose, according to the Bible, to create a nation that
embodies his own holiness, his own righteousness. "us, Isaiah in a striking image says, “But the
Lord of hosts shall be exalted in justice, | "e Holy One of Israel sanctified in righteousness” (5:16).
It is not in his omnipotence or his omniscience that God says he is distinguished, but in his
righteousness. Omnipotence and omniscience are qualities that uniquely characterize God, and yet
in Isaiah’s vision these qualities are not what God chooses to dwell on. It is the quality that he shares
with man.10
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9 Heschel, op. cit., I:198.
10 So Heschel, op. cit., 213, in a particularly brilliant passage in a book that is notable for brilliance.
What God seeks in mankind is the same overflowing of righteousness that exists within himself, that
seeks to fill and to transform the world. “Let justice roll down like waters, | And righteousness like a
mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). "is righteousness is an irresistible force, not the static balancing of
interests or the maintenance of “law and order” that we associate with simple justice. In real world
justice and law and order, there are many ways, especially for the powerful, as the prophets knew
only too well, to sidestep responsibility. Even in the midst of social order, therefore, injustice and
inequity abound. Righteousness does not tolerate such a status quo. It seeks constantly to redeem the
imperfect. “Zion shall be redeemed by justice, | And those in her who repent, by righteousness” (Isa.
1:27). And the scope of the intended redemption is universal: government, religious life, and civil life
as well as individual behavior must all be transformed.
As Amos’s metaphor illustrates, justice and righteousness in prophetic thinking are not principles
that exist in the abstract. "ey are not morals or ethics but the force of goodness in action that
emanates from God to man. In fact, they are important ultimately because and only because they
bless the life of man, for God himself seeks fulfillment in man. Injustice too is a force, which flows in
the other direction. "us, “injustice is condemned not because the law is broken, but because a
person has been hurt,”11 and God too feels that hurt. “You shall not a$ict any widow or orphan. If
you do a$ict them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry...I will hear, for I am
compassionate” (Exod. 22:22-23, 27).12 Inasmuch as you do it to the least of these, you do it to me.
"ere is no more profound expression of the human aspiration for goodness. Nor is there a more
tragic appreciation of human reality, which expresses itself in the prophets as divine pathos. In
nothing are the prophets as moving as in their sense of the disjunction between God’s desire to touch
his people’s hearts and their unwillingness to be touched. What the prophets hold out to Israel is the
prospect of abundant life (cf. esp. Isa. 55). As Moses says at the beginning of Israelite history, “I have
set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” (Deut. 30:19; cf. Amos
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11 Heschel, op. cit., 261.
12 "ere are also positive formulations of such commandments (Isa. 1:17; Jer. 22:3; Deut. 14:28-29; 16:11, 14; 24:19; 26:12). Israel is to show kindness to the disenfranchised, because God himself does so (Deut. 10:18-19). Righteousness thus goes beyond not oppressing the widow and orphan to being their advocate and aid, even though in strict “justice” they don’t “deserve” it.
5:5-6). What Moses and his successors hold out is not simply a way of life that avoids imminent,
nasty death. It is not a stay of execution. It is rather a blessing, a life of unimaginable possibility and
radical freedom empowered by the presence of God himself. Yet Israel, in the prophetic view, refuses
this.
For the prophets, as Heschel observes, “"e opposite of freedom is not determinism, [an inability to
act freely,] but hardness of heart, [a refusal to act rightly]. Freedom presupposes openness of heart, of
mind, of eye and ear...Hardening of the heart is the suspension of freedom. Sin becomes compulsory
and self-destructive. Guilt and punishment become one.”13 Freedom is therefore more than the
simple possibility of self-determination. It is the active opposite of all those qualities that characterize
Israel in its refusal to be touched: stubbornness, hardness, and brazenness of heart (Deut. 29:18;
Lam.3:65; Ezek. 2:4), the willful refusal to see and hear reality (Isa. 42:19-20; 43:8; Jer. 5:21; 6:10;
Ezek. 12:2; cf. also Isa. 30: 9; Jer. 6:17; Hos. 4:6,16; 7:11). To be free is to become all that one can
become, not simply to make one’s way with God knows how many shackles holding you back (Isa.
5:18).
Despite their sorrow at Israel’s present rejection of freedom, the prophets to a man hold out the
possibility that at some point things will change and Israel will at last embrace its mission. If the
present scene is bleak, the ultimate outcome is a happy one. How could it be otherwise? If Israel’s
refusal to become the image of God were to be the last word, then God’s creative purpose would
come to nothing, and that by definition cannot happen. Confidence in man’s capacity to repent saves
the prophets from despair.
Such is the paradigmatic, biblical story of God and his people from the creation to the fulfillment of
creation in Zion. In the thinking of the Bible, the unity of God and his people at the end of time is
what will inspire the rest of the world, the nations and their kings, to come knocking on Israel’s door
in search of the same blessing. "is is the biblical paradigm of Zion, the kingdom of God, the
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13 Op. cit., 191.
exemplary city on the hill that brings about the final transformation of humanity into the true image
of God. "is is the essential, unifying message of the Bible throughout its long history.
"is is therefore the theme that Jesus too comes preaching, “Now after John the Baptist was put in
prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, "e time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:14-15).
Jesus’s gospel wasn’t new. He didn’t need to explain the kingdom to his fellow Jews, because they
already knew what it meant. "e gospel, the good news, of Jesus of Nazareth is the old priestly and
prophetic ideal of the holy nation, the Zion society, that is built upon the premise that mankind is
under divine injunction to be holy, to realize in themselves the divine likeness that is theirs in
potentia. In the gospels, this ideal is personified in Jesus. It is an inner, individual reality, as all
righteousness must be (Jesus’s whole moral teaching underscores this point). But it is also a collective
truth. For Jesus, or any other individual, to be the sole, essential, or isolated embodiment of the
ideal, renders the notion of a kingdom meaningless. "us, Jesus can say, “"e kingdom of God is
entos hymon” (Luke 17:21) and mean both “among” and “within you.”14 "is is the biblical value.
"ere is in all of this long story of the Bible an astonishing integrity, as of a man’s life that makes
sense as he looks back on it in old age. Although what we now call the Bible, the so-called Old and
New Testaments, was written by many hands over many centuries, it has meaning as a whole that
unites the many disparate and not always mutually consistent parts. And the same can be said of the
history of “God’s people” after the Bible. "e Zion idea reaches into the Christian tradition of
monasticism, which likewise sought to create a community of holiness that linked the mundane
aspects of life with the spiritual quest. "e Zion idea is in part the inspiration for the Puritan
tradition, and through it for not a little of the American religious experience, whose most
extraordinary manifestation is the religion of the Latter-day Saints.
It was this ideal that brought my ancestors here to the desert of the Great Basin 150 years ago, in
what they believed was the end of time, the “latter days,” a turning point, like Yesha‘yahu’s, when all
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14 For a good, critical discussion of the range of meanings, see Joseph Fitzmyer, !e Gospel According to Luke X-XXIV. Anchor Bible 28A. New York: Doubleday, 1985, s.v.
of God’s purposes for mankind and the world would be fulfilled, those purposes that have inspired
people wanting to call themselves saints since Yesha‘yahu’s day and beyond.
For my ancestors, those would-be saints, as
for their biblical role models, there was
ultimately no distinction between sacred and
profane.15 All of life was encompassed by the
injunction to be holy. From how you make
your clothes to how you raise your food to
how you make your living, absolutely
everything was part of the gospel of the
kingdom. Mormons would easily have agreed with Josephus, “Moses did not make religion a
department of virtue, but the various virtues — I mean, justice, temperance, fortitude, and mutual
harmony... — departments of religion. Religion governs all our actions and occupations and speech;
none of these things did our lawgiver leave unexamined or indeterminate...” (Against Apion
2.170-173).16 "e Mormon symbol for this all-encompassing mandate of holiness was the all-seeing
eye above the beehive with its busy little bees and the inscription “Holiness to the Lord.” Today, you
see that inscription, though not that image, only on Mormon temples. But in earlier times, you
might also see it on a warehouse or a ward house or a storefront; it didn’t matter. All were equally the
province of God.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 12 of 90
15 With regard to the Hebrew Bible, in the strictest of priestly terms, there was of course a distinction between the holy objects of the sanctuary and the profane world outside, as there was between the borrowed holiness of the priests and the non-holy world of the people. But this technical distinction is obscured by the overarching notion of the mandate for the people to become holy and by the fact that their trespasses, their violations of the code of holiness, directly a!ected the purity of the sanctuary. In other words, like the priests, the people also had obligations of holiness, and would su!er real-world consequences for their failure to live up to these. "e most serious of these consequences was the total withdrawal of God from their midst. For God to dwell anywhere among men required a general setting of holiness. So, what makes biblical religion unique among its ancient peers is the degree to which it blankets the everyday “secular” life of the people at large. "is tendency continues into the post-biblical and rabbinic periods, as the Pharisees, and, following them, the rabbis extend the reach of the requirements of holiness ever farther and deeper into daily life. Orthodox Judaism is the outgrowth of this tendency. On the Pharisees, see G. F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era. Cambridge: Harvard, 1955, I: 60!. In general, see E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice & Belief 63 BCE - 66 CE. Philadelphia: SCM Press, 1992.
16 Quoted in Sanders, op. cit., 51.
Photo: Edwin Firmage
"e question I would now like to put to you is whether this biblical paradigm embraces us here
tonight. For myself, you may be surprised to hear, the answer is an emphatic Yes, despite the fact that
I haven’t worshipped in a Mormon or any other chapel for 25 years, and despite the fact that I don’t
even believe in God, at least in the sense that my ancestors or my fellow Mormons today do.
What draws me and I hope others to the biblical tradition of Zion is that it is a defining, and, in
some ways, definitive expression of the human search for goodness. It recommends itself, even
imposes itself on us, not because it comes from an omnipotent, graybearded, cosmic tyrant, but
because it is the summary of our own search for meaning and grounding in life. It is an expression of
the human need, if not the divine imperative, to be sanctified. And what is the sanctification that we
seek? It is a comprehensive goodness, a life lived in accordance with principles of fairness,
compassion, and community with others. It is a life based on the rejection of arrogance and
superpower. !e great biblical imperative is that “You shall have no other Gods before me.” In my
secular interpretation, this is our way of warning ourselves against the idolatry of the self and the
worship of our wants and desires.17 "e biblical paradigm of Zion is a way of life that knows
contentment. It’s a way of life that is at peace with the world, in both the human and the physical
senses of the word.
"is is not the American way today. We have been at war with the physical world, our own world no
less, since the day we set foot on Plymouth Rock. No nation in history has enjoyed such natural
bounty, or destroyed it so quickly. In just three centuries, we have consumed our way through a
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 13 of 90
17 "e history of Israel, as viewed by its prophetic chroniclers, is a drama about the e!ects of violating this wisdom. As Israel’s ancient tribal god, Yahweh was never in danger of being formally replaced by other gods, prophetic rhetoric notwithstanding. "e real danger was turning Yahweh into one of the other gods. It wasn’t Baal as rival, for example, but Baal as image of Yahweh that was dangerous. Israel’s God forbad icons of himself in order to insure that the people’s image of him never displaced him. When, despite this warning, Yahweh became assimilated into the religious mainstream represented by Baal, Asherah, fertility cults and the like, when, instead of being the aniconic challenge to the norm, Yahweh became its #gurehead, he ceased to be Yahweh. Yahweh protests, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways...as the heavens are high above the earth, so are my ways high above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8-9). In my secular midrash, this is the inherited wisdom of generations warning us against elevating our ideas of the sacred above the sacred, and in the end replacing the sacred with mere ideas about it. Map, as they say, is not territory. Religion is a map of the sacred, nothing more. "e moment we forget that, as we seem to do with regularity, we e!ectively begin worshipping ourselves. "e history of religions generally, Judaism and Christianity included, is largely the story of successive idolatries. What makes Judaeo-Christian idolatry particularly dangerous is that we elevate not a cross-section of life but one narrow view of it. Monotheism becomes monolatry, following the path toward monoculture that appears to be our universal destiny.
continent of resources, a continent of virgin hardwood forest that we simply burned, a continent of
prairie that was an American Serengeti, a continent of wildlife where salmon were once so common
they were called poor man’s hamburger. We brought the beaver to the edge of extinction. We
slaughtered 60 million bison and left their carcasses to rot. We dammed almost every river and
stream in America, destroying riparian ecosystems by the tens of thousands. We’ve scraped
mountains to the ground. We’ve and drained and developed wetlands. We’ve poisoned our air with
acid and soot and our water with mercury. It’s not an exaggeration, therefore, or a metaphor, to say
that we have waged war against our own world, just as we have waged war against the native human
inhabitants of this world, with equally deadly results. And always, this has been a war without terms,
without compromise. "e natural world will surrender to us unconditionally.18
Punctuating this perpetual natural war have been spasms of smaller-scale war instigated by us and
directed at other people beyond our borders: Mexicans, Spaniards, Cubans, Koreans, Vietnamese,
Cambodians, Laotians, Iranians, Grenadians, Panamanians, Iraqis, and Afghanis. We also fought a
large-scale and astronomically costly cold war with Russia, which sent probably hundreds of
thousands of innocent people to their death as “collateral damage” from proxy wars, political
subversion and revolution, environmental destruction, economic deprivation, and nuclear fallout.
Although Russia never dropped a bomb on us, we exploded over 900 nuclear weapons on our own
soil, 100 of them in the open air.19 "at’s fifty times as many as we dropped on our mortal enemy,
Japan. We even contemplated the possibility of waging nuclear war at an “acceptable cost” of tens of
millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of lives. In saying that the biblical way embraces me, I am
saying that I reject the American tradition of war. And I reject much of what we call the American
dream, which has been the American nightmare for uncountable billions of other living things that
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 14 of 90
18 Incidentally but not coincidentally, the same story plays out with the Mormons. In the battle over polygamy, the U.S. government waged all-out war on the Mormons. Gilded Age America tolerated no alternatives.
19 http://www.nv.doe.gov/library/publications/historical/DOENV_209_REV15.pdf. "e total breaks down as follows: 17 tests on American sites (CO, NM, AK, MI, NV) outside the Nevada Test Site (NTS), 904 at NTS, 3 in the South Atlantic, 106 in the Pacific, and 24 tests conducted in conjunction with the U.K., for a total of 1,054. Of the 904 at NTS, 100 were above ground. "e Baneberry underground test shown here was a ten kiloton bomb the size of President Bush’s proposed “bunker buster” weapons. It was buried 900 feet below ground but still resulted in a radioactive release that reached more than 10,000 feet into the atmosphere. In 2003, I wrote about the dangers of Bush’s “bunker busters” in a short piece that is available on my website: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Supporting_Documents/Writing_on_the_Environment_files/Oppose%20Nuclear%20Weapons.pdf.
we have destroyed. Our way today seems to me to embody precisely that worship of the self and of
the selfish that is the great sin in biblical thinking, and it seems to be tending toward the same sort of
result that biblical arrogance did. If there is a Jungian archetype for cataclysmic, self-induced
destruction, we are living it.
"e more I think about the problems we face
today, therefore, the more I find myself, kafir
though I am, gravitating towards the way of
life pioneered by my ancestors and their
biblical models. Does the biblical tradition of
Zion, or the Mormon tradition of Zion, have
anything to say to us arrogant Americans in
Utah today? At the heart of my emphatic Yes
is the notion that inspired Yesha‘yahu 2,500
years ago, the idea of a community that
embraces the principles of fairness,
compassion, and dedication to the common
cause against the worship of self and
superpower.
To be meaningful, the biblical ideal of righteousness, of goodness in action, must be embodied in
community and not just in individuals. As I’ve said, in the Hebrew Bible, the focus is almost entirely on
community. What concerns priests and prophets alike is Israel’s righteousness, not that of isolated
individuals. God’s promises and punishments therefore apply to the people as a whole. If they will be
righteous, he will dwell among them and be their protector. If not, they will perish en masse. "ere is
no promise to or concern with individuals as such.20 "is collective gospel continues in the post-
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 15 of 90
20 "e focus on the individual, and especially on the salvation of the individual, that is characteristic of modern manifestations of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is the child of the Greco-Roman period. For an excellent treatment of the subject, see A. D. Nock. Conversion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933, Reprinted 1972. Jesus is thus a transitional figure. He comes announcing the kingdom of God, but his teaching focuses on the individual.
Baneberry “underground” nuclear test, Dec. 1970
biblical ideology of the Messiah, the royal descendant of David, who will lead God’s people in their
ultimate resurgence.21 "e Messiah is not a personal but a national savior. In short, the Hebrew Bible
is a teaching less for individuals than for a people. It is a handbook for creating a holy nation.
"e early Mormons sensed this intuitively if not explicitly. Unlike most of the rest of religious
America and very much unlike other settlers of the American frontier, the Mormons thought from
the beginning in collective terms. "e heart and soul of early Mormonism was the sense of being
called to build a new society, Zion. "is objective of building Zion, or as Mormons called it the City
of Enoch, was what created the first Mormon communities in Kirtland, Ohio, Independence,
Missouri, and Nauvoo, Illinois. From the start, Mormons felt compelled to build new community.
"ey were not content with simply becoming converts to a new religion and living where and more
or less how they had lived before, with just a change of ideology. "ey were not content to be so
many independent selfs trying to live righteously on their own. "us, religion, as other Americans
tended to practice it, held no interest for the Mormons. "ey weren’t out simply to live a pious life
but to create a new world. "is mentality ultimately brought them West when it proved impossible
to build their ideal community among other Christians. And, the Zion mentality is in large measure
responsible for the success of the Mormon saints in an environment that few thought inhabitable.
Common faith gave the communistic Mormons what modern communists lacked, a basis of
voluntary but total commitment, of genuine and total passion.22 "eir common faith gave them
something that frontier expedience, however great, also could not: it made their experience
meaningful. It did this by putting their experience in a context that linked them in common cause to
each other and to generations past and future without end. It made their life a living sacrament.
Sacraments not only connect people to God but people to people. Sacraments are a treasured
inheritance passed down from generation to generation. And they are entered into with others in
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 16 of 90
21 "e post-biblical Messiah is of course modeled on the biblical king of Israel, who is God’s mashîah, or anointed representative (cf. 1 Sam. 9:16; Ps. 2:2, etc.). But it isn’t until Israel has lost her independence as a nation that her future king, or more correctly her divinely appointed regent, begins to take on the character of the Messiah.
22 For a brief resumé of the subject, see Appendix 1.
common worship. In a Mormon temple marriage, for example, bride and bridegroom kneel facing
one another across the altar. Behind each of them is a mirror, and the two mirrors, reflecting one
another, create a series of kneeling couples that stretches on in each direction into eternity. At the
center of this procession of life is the couple being married now. Eternity ends and begins in this
moment. It is in the nature of a sacrament to focus eternity in the present moment. To live
sacramentally, therefore, as the early Mormons tried to do, is to act in each moment with the
awareness of an eternity leading to and from this moment. It is to act with awareness and
appreciation of those who have preceded us and who will follow us in the procession of life.
"is sense of the sacramental in the everyday, the exaltation of the everyday, is what the religious
world view, and above all the Zion world view, even if it is secularized as in my case, o!ers that no
mere ideology can provide. My emphatic Yes is therefore a cry to bring a kind of Zion to life in our
time, a self-su#cient, morally driven, sacramental community that at least on essential points of first
principles is, as Mormon scripture puts it, of one heart and one mind. In such a community,
stewardship of the earth would be top of the list of first principles, because without a sustainable
relationship with earth life itself is not possible. In such a community, responsibility for insuring that
the procession of generations continues would be a first principle, and it would be a sacrament. In
such a community, day to day decisions, like how we build our homes, how we raise our food, how
we get about, are sacramental decisions, because they impinge on eternity. In 1857, Mormon apostle
Heber C. Kimball addressed the saints in Salt Lake. His theme was the sacrament of life.
We dedicate and consecrate the wine or water that we partake of in the sacrament, and we also dedicate the bread to the Lord; and it should be just so with everything; it should all be dedicated to the Lord; and upon all that we do and put our hands unto, we should ask his blessings. We should never meddle with anything on this earth that we cannot lay our hands upon and bless and dedicate and consecrate to the Lord...
Brethren, go out and dedicate your gardens, and when you get a tree that you want to set out, dedicate the ground, the root, and the elements that you are going to place around it, and ask God to fill it with warmth and with power to vegetate. Dedicate the seed that you are going to put into the earth, and then dedicate the earth, and nourish it when it springs forth...and do not say that it cannot be quickened, for I say it can...
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 17 of 90
"e Lord will now bless our labor; he will bless the fruits of the earth, he will bless our tanneries, he will bless our sheep, our flocks, and everything we undertake to handle and manage...and we will dedicate and consecrate them to God, and we will ask God to fill the earth with the resurrecting power; for life is the resurrecting power...and it is that power which brings forth vegetation; it is the same power which brings forth food and raiment; and by the same power we shall be brought forth in the morning of the resurrection...23
Is my hope for a Zion community in 21st-century Utah any more than the pipe dream of Yesha‘yahu
or Jesus or St. Benedict or Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball? Probably not. We don’t seem to be
able to stick with this vision long enough or with su#cient dedication to build the new society that
these followers of the biblical way had in mind. At the same time, I must also confess that I put even
less hope in civilization as it stands. And it seems to me to stand on the brink of self-induced
catastrophe. If there is any hope for our civilization, it is the hope that inspired the biblical tradition
of Zion.
As the boy in the Passover Seder asks, How is this time di!erent from all others? Why should there
be any more hope now for the establishment of Zion than in the days of Yesha‘yahu or Jesus or
Brigham Young? "e answer is that we, in ways that go beyond mere religious belief, really do live in
the last days. If these aren’t the last days of history or time, they are the last days of civilization as we
know it. "ere is an apocalypse on our doorstep. It’s called climate change.
Apocalypse is much more than an old-fashioned word for disaster. We do face disaster, and on a scale
beyond anything we have ever experienced. But we face apocalypse in the truer meaning of the word,
which is literally “uncovering.” "e apocalypse of climate change is the uncovering of the fact that
our present way of life is utterly — root and branch — unsustainable. Climate change is the coming
together, the perfect storm, of the many di!erent manifestations of our worship of self and
superpower. Climate change is the result of the reckless pursuit of narrowly defined self-interest at
others’ expense. It’s the result of the injustice of six percent of the world’s population consuming a
quarter of the world’s fossil fuels and producing 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the
result of the hypocrisy of this six percent wagging the finger at the "ird World about emissions and
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 18 of 90
23 “Increase in Saving Principles,” Journal of Discourses. Liverpool: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854-1886, 21: 187, 189-90.
doing nothing about their own. It’s the result of a health care system that spends billions treating
heart disease, obesity, and diabetes, the diseases of an indulgent lifestyle, while leaving the lifestyle in
place. It’s the result of the worship of consumption, in which no product is too inexpensive and no
true cost too invisible. It’s the result of an attitude that views living systems of all kinds, including
our own bodies and minds, as mere resources to exploit for profit. Climate change isn’t just another
in a series of problems. It’s the sum of all of the many problems that we have faced and failed to solve
or refused to solve in our idolatry of the bottom line.
Standing against this tendency of our civilization is the biblical notion of Zion, the good society that
embodies our deepest aspirations for individual and social transcendence. While these two aspects of
our humanity have always been in conflict, they come to blows now as never before in the problem
of climate change. "e next few decades will either be the moment when humans at last take
something like the path we imagined for ourselves 3,000 years ago in ancient Palestine, or they will
be our undoing. Climate change will be the catalyst for deep individual and societal transformation,
or it will be our Deluge, our Babel, and our Exile. "is is the moment when myth becomes history.
We will create Zion or we will create the Apocalypse. "e choice is ours.
In this endeavor, we will succeed together or fail together. Climate change is the result of systemic
problems in our society, and it will only be averted by a systemic response. "is means that if all we
can muster is random, individual transformation, we will fail. If, for example, it’s just
“environmentalists” putting up solar panels and getting rid of their cars, we will fail. If it’s just the
wealthy doing the environmentally responsible thing, we will fail. If it’s everyone acting on his own,
we will fail. "is is something that everyone must do, and something that we must do together, with
common purpose.
"e change we need is as radical as it is universal. As I discuss in Section III, one of the paradoxical
recent discoveries of climate science is that the piecemeal conservation that we have practiced thus far
is actually contributing to climate change. When just a few people do all of the right things or a few
more people do bits and pieces of the right things, all society as a whole gets is modestly improved
e#ciency. But a more e#cient version of the present system is precisely what we do not want. A more
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 19 of 90
e#cient system that is still essentially devoted to utilizing earth’s resources for profit is not progress.
We need a complete turnaround, societal repentance, a new collective mind. With 6.5 billion people
on earth, soon to be 9-12 billion, we must forever abandon the old way of doing things.
"e good news, and really the only good news, is that crisis is the catalyst of change, for individuals
and for society. And this is why I turn to you here tonight. In my opinion, it is in our communities
of faith that the transformation of individuals and society must begin. It is in communities that have
some understanding of and commitment to the biblical paradigm that this transformation can start,
if it can start anywhere. I don’t say that this is the only place where the transformation can happen.
Anywhere that you have a community deeply committed to the underlying principles of Zion there
is hope for transformation. But this is not what our present American political system is committed
to, nor is it what American business is committed to. Both of these are alike and interchangeably
committed to profit and self interest at all costs. Looking at American society at least, the only place
I see communities that could rally around the idea of Zion is our churches.
"e degree to which politics and business as usual have betrayed us became abundantly clear in
Copenhagen. What happened, or rather didn’t happen, in Copenhagen, even with Barack Obama in
the White House and Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, is the truest expression of the
degree to which American culture has been enthralled by the darkness, the cosmic evil, and I do not
speak in metaphor, that is today’s American capitalism. Copenhagen was an apocalypse, a sneak
preview of the Apocalypse that will surely come if people of faith do not stand up for the alternative.
By standing up, I don’t simply mean vocal protest, though that in itself would be a step forward, for
there is precious little protest going on in America right now. I mean first and foremost individual
and collective commitment on the part of people of faith to live the principles of Zion here and now,
and to live them radically. And to the age-old principles that Yesha‘yahu would have known we must
now add a new one: carbon neutrality. Until every church and every member of every church is
carbon-neutral, we Christians are not living the gospel that we profess.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 20 of 90
"e imperative for our time, as for Jesus’s, is to repent. "e Greek word that Mark uses for Jesus’s call
to repentance is metanoeite, literally to get a new mind. Jesus invites those who would be his
followers to realize that the world has changed, and that a new order now governs how they should
act. In Jesus’s teaching, the individual new mind and the new kingdom go hand in hand. Followers
of this way are in fact the very temple of God (1 Cor. 3:16), the source from which the kingdom
takes its strength. "e news of Jesus’s kingdom is an invitation for people to believe that a radically
di!erent way of life is possible, a way that values people as a manifestation of God and not simply as
human resources. Even I as an unbeliever can subscribe to this. I believe that we can become
whatever we imagine we can become.
"e central problem of climate change has nothing
to do with the environment. Ours is not an
environmental problem in the way that living in
the desert or in the jungle is an environmental
problem. Nothing we are experiencing as a result of
climate change is dictated by factors outside our
control, not yet anyway. Ours is a problem of impoverished imagination and will. We cannot think
outside of the desperately narrow little boxes that we mentally and physically inhabit. And the
manifestation of our loss of imagination is neurosis on a scale never before seen in history.24 Our
neurosis, indeed I would call it psychosis, is so profound that we cannot even see that we are in crisis,
despite the fact that evidence of the crisis is all around us in plain sight. In the next section of this
presentation, I’ll have occasion to say something about these obvious evidences of climate change
and their implications.25
Climate change is for us what the threatened destruction of Israel was for the biblical prophets, a
singular opportunity for people to look inward, to reexamine their life at the deepest level. At least
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 21 of 90
24 In linking neurosis with the loss of imagination, I follow psychologist "omas Moore, !e Care of the Soul. New York: Harper, 2006, 26-35.
25 Fig. 1 source: NOAA State of the Climate Global Analysis 2007, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/index.php?report=global&year=2007&month=ann, visited 12/20/09.
Fig. 1
from the prophetic point of view, Israel failed to seize that opportunity. But their failure has been our
gain, for it prompted the most extraordinary outpouring of radical ethics the world has ever seen.
“Prophecy,” writes Heschel, “is a moment of unshrouding, an opening of the eyes, a lifting of the
curtain. Such moments are rare in history.”26
It’s easy, especially those of us who cannot call ourselves true believers, to dismiss the relevance of the
prophets. But I can’t. In what Mormon scholar (!) Hugh Nibley called the long night of human
history, there are precious few shining lights. I think of Mahatma Gandhi, Jesus, and the Buddha of
Compassion. And, I think of the prophets. What these men represent for me is the refusal to accept
that the world we create for ourselves cannot be something dramatically better than what we have
seen so far. For me, the significance of these visionaries lies not only in their moral outrage but also
in their willingness to think and to do the unthinkable in the quest to transform their people. "e
prophets asserted, for example, that being God’s chosen people was no protection against folly and
self-induced catastrophe. "ey proclaimed that worship was meaningless, indeed o"ensive to God, if it
wasn’t accompanied by righteous living. "ey foretold the destruction of the temple, God’s own
dwelling. "ey pummeled government o#cials, ecclesiastical leaders, business elites, and ordinary
people. And they illustrated their message with outrageous acts guaranteed to shock. "ere was no
idea so sacred, no person or institution so powerful, that the prophets were unwilling to attack it in
their quest to shatter the people’s complacency. In the biblical view, to be a prophet is to be an
iconoclast. But then, to build Zion one has to be.
At some point, every society, if it is to thrive, must shatter its icons. "ese have their proper place.
But mistaken for God, they become demonic. Our icons — consumption, growth, profit, extreme
individualism, and superpower — now threaten life itself. To overcome these demons, we, like the
prophets, must think the unthinkable and we must do it. And, as in Isaiah’s time, our fate depends
on whether we act while there is still time to prevent catastrophe. What holds us back is our own
success. Politics, business, and religion — booming industries and vested interests all — are
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 22 of 90
26 Op. cit., I:193.
...isolated, self-subsisting, self-indulgent..."e answers o!ered [are] unrelated to the problems, indi!erent to...man’s suspended sensitivity in the face of stupendous challenge, indi!erent to a situation in which good and evil [have become] irrelevant, in which man [is] increasingly callous to catastrophe and ready to suspend the principle of truth...[T]he terms, motivations, and concerns which dominate our thinking may prove destructive of the roots of human responsibility and treasonable to the ultimate ground of human solidarity. "e challenge we are all exposed to, and the dreadful shame that shatters our capacity for inner peace, defy the ways and patterns of our thinking. One is forced to admit that some of the causes and motives of our thinking have led our existence astray, that speculative [or any other] prosperity is not an answer to spiritual bankruptcy...
"e prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency...
Prophecy ceased; the prophets endure and can only be ignored at the risk of our own despair. It is for us to decide whether freedom is self-assertion or response to a demand; whether the ultimate situation is conflict or concern.27
As a catalyst for change, climate change is a godsend. It will challenge us like nothing else in history.
It will be our doom or our finest hour. "e choice is ours.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 23 of 90
27 Op. cit., I:xiv-xv.
II“"e end of the world is nigh, and it’s already been published in Nature.”
— Mark Lynas28
“What ba$es the prophet is the disparity between the power and impact of God and the immense indi!erence, unyieldingness, sluggishness, and inertia of the heart. God’s thunderous voice is shaking heaven and earth, and man does not hear the faintest sound. "e Lord roars like a lion...his word is like fire, like a hammer which breaks the rock in pieces...and the people go about unmoved, undisturbed, unaware. What to the prophet is like the sun piercing the thickest cloud remains unnoticed by the people.”
— Abraham Heschel29
So, what is climate change?30 Simply put, it is increasing global temperatures and their related
climate and environmental e!ects. Climate change isn’t a theory about climate, and it isn’t
projections of things that could happen. Climate change is a present reality. It’s a measured, tested,
visually verifiable reality. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, global average annual
temperatures have risen by 1.3ºF. "is is a fact, and it’s not open to dispute. In Figs. 1 and 2, you can
see this measured fact for yourselves.31
"e climate change we’re witnessing today is caused by human-generated carbon dioxide or CO2.
CO2 makes up only four hundredths of a percent of earth’s atmosphere, and human-generated CO2
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 24 of 90
28 Author of Six Degrees. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2008. "e quotation is from Lynas’s website: http://www.marklynas.org/2007/3/15/to-the-end-of-the-earth-six-degrees-in-the-sunday-times, visited 1/3/10.
29 Heschel, op. cit., 188-189.
30 "e following section summarizes a much longer discussion of present and future climate change e!ects in a document entitled “A Call for Leadership,” which I prepared in early 2009 as a petition to the administration of the University of Utah. "e petition is available for download on my website: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Edwin_Firmage_Photography/Blog/Entries/2009/2/2_A_Declaration_of_Energy_Indepenence_files/A%20Call%20for%20Leadership.pdf. "e petition was met with glacial indi!erence, not least by faculty members who fear to anger Utah’s reactionary state legislature, which controls the university’s purse.
31 Fig. 2 source: Wikipedia Commons, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg, based on instrumental data compiled by the Hadley Centre and the University of East Anglia, visited 12/19/09.
makes up only 3.4% of all CO2 generated each year.
But human CO2 is nonetheless important. Natural
CO2 is balanced by natural sinks that recycle it,
keeping historical CO2 levels at 180 to 280 parts per
million (ppm). Human-generated CO2 has no
natural sinks, so extra CO2 accumulates in the
atmosphere. Today’s CO2 concentration is 385 ppm,
a level not seen in at least 800,000 years, and this
number is rising rapidly, and could reach over 900
ppm by 2100. "is rise is unprecedented and
unnatural. "ese historical and
present CO2 concentrations are
also facts and are not subject to
dispute. You can see this for
yourselves in Fig. 3.32
What makes rising CO2
concentrations dangerous is that
they give us too much of a good
thing. Earth is a warm and
hospitable place for life because
the atmosphere, like the earth’s
surface, is full of water. Water
vapor is the most important and
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 25 of 90
32 Fig. 3 source: United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), based on research by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/historical-trends-in-carbon-dioxide-concentrations-and-temperature-on-a-geological-and-recent-time-scale, visited 12/19/09. While this graph goes back only 400,000 years, ice core analysis from Antarctica can now take us back 800,000 years, over which time the generalization made here stands.
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
abundant greenhouse gas by far. It works by trapping
a portion of the energy coming from the sun. But a
lot of reflected solar energy still escapes back into
space — just enough to keep things here from
endlessly heating up. Life on earth as we know it
exists because of the balance that earth has struck
between too much and too little trapped energy.
What human CO2 does is to throw this balance o! kilter by plugging up holes in the absorption
spectrum of water vapor and preventing more of that reflected solar energy from escaping into space,
as you can see from Fig. 4.33 "is is the cause of climate change.
Who says so? Virtually every credible climate scientist on earth, and every national science
organization on earth without exception. For over two decades now, scientists around the world have
coordinated their e!orts to study climate change under the auspices of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which comprises scientists from 130 countries. "e IPCC’s
latest summary of climate data, which was issued in 2007, involved over 450 lead authors (all climate
experts), 800 contributing authors (also climate experts), and 2,500 peer reviewers, making this one
of the most thoroughly scrutinized subjects in the history of science.34
"e IPCC concludes that the evidence for climate change is “unequivocal,” and that the cause is
“very likely” us. “Very likely” is defined to mean that the odds are greater than 9 in 10. "is is the
considered judgment of 97% of the world’s climatologists.
Now, it may be that the scientists are wrong. But, if you consulted ten doctors about a health
problem, or ten investment consultants about a business deal, and nine of the ten gave you the same
advice, whose advice would you follow?
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33 Fig. 4 source: http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/253.html, based on Climate Website of the German Museum.
34 "is is the assessment of America’s Union of Concerned Scientists, whose review of IPPC methodology is very useful. "e review is available online at http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science_and_impacts/science/ipcc-backgrounder.html.
Fig. 4
In fact, the evidences of climate change are all around us, and you don’t necessarily have to be an
expert to see them. Let’s go through these quickly, starting with the temperature increases.
1. Increasing air and ocean temperatures. As I said, global annual average temperatures have increased
1.3ºF since the beginning of the industrial age. It’s important to note that this is both a global and
an average figure. Regionally, there’s
considerable variation from this number in
both directions. In some parts of the world,
such as the western United States and the
Arctic, temperatures have risen between 2.5º
and 3.5ºF.35 In general, the Northern
Hemisphere has experienced more warming
than the Southern, as you can see from
Fig. 5.36 It’s also important to note that
global warming doesn’t necessarily mean
that temperatures increase continuously. As you can see from Figs. 1-3, there is enormous fluctuation
in year-to-year temperature. Climate, in other words, is not the same thing as weather.
Climate is about larger, more permanent phenomena. When defining climate, you look not at
individual events or individual years, but at trends. Temperature trends indicative of climate change
include the fact that seven of the eight warmest years on record in the American West and five of the
ten warmest years nationally occurred between 1999 and 2007, with hottest-ever summers being
recorded in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in 2007.37 And this is not a purely regional
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 27 of 90
35 On western U.S. climate, see Hotter and Drier: !e West’s Changed Climate. Rocky Mountain Climate Organization and NRDC, 2008, available online at http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/west/west.pdf, visited 12/20/09.
36Fig. 5 source: “Global Warming,” Wikipedia, based on NASA GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Map.jpg, visited 12/19/09.
37 For national data through 2007, see NOAA’s State of the Climate National Overview, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=national&year=2007&month=13&submitted=Get+Report, visited 12/20/09.
Fig. 5
phenomenon. All ten of the ten warmest years on record globally have occurred since 1995.38 In
2003, Europe experienced a record heat wave that claimed the lives of 35,000-50,000 people,
making this the biggest natural disaster in modern European history. In the Arctic, temperatures are
higher now than they have been at any time in the last thousand years, and they’re rising two times
faster than the global average.
Oceans, because of their greater heat capacity are even better barometers of climate change than air.
Here the trends are nothing short of astonishing, and I want to stress, because climate change
skeptics always focus on the use of predictive models, that these too are measured phenomena, not
projections. Arctic ocean temperatures have risen as much as 9ºF in some areas since 2000.39 And,
again, this is not a regional blip. In the waters around the United Kingdom, seven of the ten warmest
years since 1870 have occurred in the last decade.40 It takes a great deal of heat to raise overall
temperatures in vast bodies of water like the oceans. So you can imagine the sort of sustained
warming of the planet that is represented even in a seasonal and regional nine degree (!) rise in Arctic
water temperature much less a permanent 1.3º F rise in global ocean temperatures.
2. !e length and intensity of the fire season. "e fire season in the Western U.S. today is two and half
months longer than it was from 1970 to 1986.41 Fires now are also more intense, destroying six and
half times as much forest as in the 70s and 80s. And fires are four times as frequent. "ese — I stress
the point again — are facts of measured data, not models or projections. "e fire years of 2004,
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 28 of 90
38 See the Global Temperatures summary in NOAA’s 2007,http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2009&month=13&submitted=Get+Report. "is trend continues into 2009, with projections that the 1998-2008 decade will be the warmest on record worldwide, http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global&year=2009&month=13&submitted=Get+Report.
39 A. Proshutinsky, et al., “NOAA Arctic Report Card: Update for 2009,” online at http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/ocean.html, visited 1/20/10.
40 Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, http://www.mccip.org.uk/arc/2007/Temperature.htm, visited 12/20/09. See also the European Environmental Agency’s “Rising Sea Surface Temperature: Towards Ice-free Arctic Summers and a Changing Marine Food Chain,” at http://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/coast_sea/sea-surface-temperature.
41 A. L. Westerling, et al., “Warming and Earlier Spring Increases Western U. S. Forest Wildfire Activity.” Science 18 (2006), 940-943, available online at http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5789/940, visited 12/20/09.
2005, 2006, and 2007 were each successive record breakers.42 In 2006 and 2007 alone, nearly 20
million acres of forest were destroyed. "at’s ten times the area of Yellowstone National Park.
3. !e spread of pests such as the pine bark beetle. Fires are not the only threat that climate change
poses to our forests today. With warmer winter temperatures, pine beetle populations, once
controlled by deep winter cold, are exploding all over the Northern Hemisphere. In British
Columbia, for example, 33,000,000 acres of lodge pole forest, 40% of the region’s total forest, have
been destroyed or severely damaged by pine beetle, with projections from the Canadian government
that British Columbia could lose nearly 80% of its forest cover by 2015!43 Tree mortality rates in the
U.S. have more than doubled over the last few decades.44
4. !e melting of arctic permafrost. Permafrost contains almost two trillion tons of carbon, an amount
equal to that of the world’s rainforests.45 As it melts, permafrost emits CO2 or CH4 (methane). "e
latter is 20-25X more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.46 In Siberia, 1,000,000 km2, an area the
size of France and Germany combined, has melted in the last four years.47 In places, methane is
bubbling out of solution so energetically that the water does not freeze even in winter. "is is not a
model or a projection, but present reality, and this one fact alone may spell the end of life as we
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 29 of 90
42 Yearly wildfire data available on the National Interagency Fire Center’s website: http://www.nifc.gov/fire_info/fires_acres.htm, visited 12/20/09.
43 “Pine Beetle Moves South in B.C.” Vancouver Sun, 9/18/07, available online at http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=08c2bac3-bcb3-4090-bb08-43f375d8caa7&k=31916, visted 12/20/09.
44 Phillip J. van Mantgem, et al., “Widespread Increase of Tree Mortality Rates in the Western United States.” Science 23 (2009), 521-524. Summary available on at: http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=08c2bac3-bcb3-4090-bb08-43f375d8caa7&k=31916, visted 12/20/09.
45 Edward A. G. Schurr, et al., “Vulnerability of Permafrost Carbon to Climate Change: Implications for the Global Carbon Cycle.” Bioscience 58 (2008), 701-714, online at http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1641/B580807?prevSearch=%5Ball:%2520schuur%5D%2520AND%2520%5Bpublisher:%2520bioone%5D&searchHistoryKey=&cookieSet=1; Amy Mayer, “Permafrost in Flux: Tracking Carbon in the Alaskan Tundra.” Bioscience 58 (2008), 96-100, online at http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1641/B580203?prevSearch=%5Ball:%2520schuur%5D%2520AND%2520%5Bpublisher:%2520bioone%5D&searchHistoryKey=, visted 12/20/09.
46 See the wonderful collection of useful documents in the Max Planck Institute’s Atmospheric Chemistry Department’s website at : http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/253.html, visted 12/20/09.
47 “Climate Warning as Siberia Melts.” New Scientist, August 11, 2005 at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725124.500, visted 12/20/09.
know it on earth. While Judge Dee Benson doesn’t think we’re in a crisis that merits civil
disobedience, we are and it does. It merits revolution.48
5. Loss of Arctic summer ice. In addition to being home to animals such as the polar bear, Arctic ice
helps to moderate global climate. It reflects 80% of incident energy back into space, while water
absorbs 90% of this energy. Loss of ice thus leads to increased air, water, and land temperatures
throughout the region. Not surprisingly, these have been accompanied by record breaking ice
shrinkage in 2005 and again in 2007. According to one of the world’s leading experts on the Arctic,
this area could be ice-free in summer as early as 2013, decades before the IPCC’s current projected
dates.49 Like the melting of permafrost, with which it’s inseparably connected, the melting of
summer ice is a tipping point that could trigger runaway temperature increases beyond anything yet
imagined by the IPCC.
6. !e loss of glaciers worldwide. Globally, since 1945, the mean mass balance of all glaciers has
declined by about 20%, and rate of shrinkage appears to be increasing. Regional decreases are often
significantly greater. In Europe and the Caucasus, glacial cover decreased by about 35% between
1850 and 1970 and by another 22% between 1970 and 2000. Of Glacier National Park’s original
150 glaciers, only 35 remain today, and these are expected to disappear by 2050. Over the course of
the 20th century, Central Asian glaciers have declined by 25-35%, the glaciers of Afghanistan by
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 30 of 90
48 “Bogus bidder’s global warming defense rejected.” Salt Lake Tribune, 11/17/2009. U.S. District Judge Dee Benson banned climate activist Tim DeChristopher from presenting any evidence on how the threat of climate change influenced his actions in protesting the BLM auction of oil and gas leases near national parks in Utah on the grounds that there was no imminent threat.
49 Al Gore quoted this number in his address to the Copenhagen climate conference in December 2009, citing the research of Wieslaw Maslowski, who later denied that he had made such a prediction to Gore. But in fact Maslowski had made such predictions not once but multiple times over a period of several years. I picked up the number from articles of Maslowski’s that I read in the preparation of my petition for the University of Utah in early 2009. "e change in Maslowski’s willingness to go out on a limb in public is perhaps the result of the “Climategate” controversy, which appears to be making scientists nervous about saying anything that might embroil them in the increasingly frenzied conservative backlash. "ere’s a useful, if brief, summary of the Maslowski flip-flop in Je! Goldstein, “Firestorm in the Arctic: Al Gore Vindicated on Comments in Copenhagen,” Hu#ngton Post, Dec. 16, 2009, online at http://www.hu#ngtonpost.com/je!-goldstein/firestorm-in-the-arctic-a_b_394084.html, visited 2/11/2010.
50%.50 "e glaciers of the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau are the water tanks of Asia, providing water
during the dry season to two billion people in China, India, and Southeast Asia. "e loss of glaciers
could cause glacier-fed rivers such as the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow
to seasonally run dry. "is prospect should keep you up at night, because it spells disaster for the
entire world.
As you can see, there are many di!erent indicators from all over the planet that global warming is a
present, and a very frightening reality. And all of this from a mere 1.3ºF rise in average temperature.
But we’re just getting started with global warming. "is past year, even in the midst of the worst
economic recession since the Depression, world pollution increased 2%, and it has been rising at an
annual rate of 3% or more for some time. At present, the world’s biggest polluters, the U.S. and
China, have yet to adopt any meaningful steps to eliminate carbon emissions. In fact, in China, a
new coal-fired power plant goes into operation every week or two. "e implications of the
combination of continued growth in carbon emissions and the political stalemate on meaningful
change are what I’d like to turn to now: the coming e!ects of climate change.
1. Increased ocean acidity. "e pH of the pre-industrial oceans was 8.179. Current ocean pH is 8.104.
At the present rate of increase, ocean pH is expected to be at least 7.824 by 2100, a change of
225%.51 Elevated ocean pH and temperature are suspects in the worldwide decline of coral reefs,
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 31 of 90
50 Global Glacier Changes: Facts and Figures. World Glacier Monitoring Service. United Nations Environment Programme, 2008, at http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/pdfs/glaciers.pdf, visited 12/20/09 and 1/31/10. While controversy now surrounds the prediction of the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, it is a fact that glaciers everywhere are rapidly shrinking, and that this shrinkage is the result of the still modest rise in average global temperatures of just 1.3ºF. "e U.N. study quoted here is a useful corrective to the over-concentration on individual glaciers of the Himalayas that has followed in the wake of the 2035 prediction controversy. Individual glacier behavior depends on many factors other than climate, including latitude, altitude, precipitation, local topography, surging, calving, and debris cover. As in the issue of climate change itself, one must look at general trends across a region and across multiple regions to see the big picture. "e U.N. study, which looks at 36,000 length change observations and 3,400 mass balance measurements from 1,800 and 230 glaciers respectively, clearly shows that the trend in Central Asia and across regions worldwide is toward significant and rapid retreat. "e U.N. concludes that this “may lead to the deglaciation of large parts of many mountain ranges by the end of the 21st century.” If, as seems likely based on the presently increasing rate of temperature rise, we find ourselves in a world that is 11ºF warmer (or more), this prognosis appears, if anything, to be conservative.
51 pH is logarithmic scale, so small numerical changes represent large natural e!ects.
25% of which have disappeared in the last 50 years.52 Another 32% are at risk by 2100. Twenty-five
percent of all ocean life is sustained by coral reefs. Where will ocean life gets its food in 2100 if 50%
or more of our reefs are gone? And where will we get our food if ocean life is threatened? I also
remind you that 50% of earth’s oxygen comes from the oceans. If we kill these, we kill everything.
2. Loss of the Amazon rainforest. "e Amazon is home to 20% of all species on earth, and produces
20% of the earth’s oxygen. Loss of the Amazon would be a catastrophic blow to the biosphere, and as
things are going now, the Amazon will disappear before the end of this century. In 2005, the
Amazon experienced record drought due to elevated Atlantic Ocean temperatures that prevented
trade winds from bringing in moisture. Two to three years of such drought could be catastrophic.
"e Hadley Centre projects that the probability of 2005-level drought in the Amazon will rise to
50% (that is, once every other year) by 2030 and 90% (every year) by 2100. Besides species
extinction and decreased planetary oxygen levels, loss of the Amazon will have other e!ects that are
in themselves climate-changing factors. If the Amazon dries up as predicted, it will be the world’s
largest tinder box, a two million square mile megafire waiting to happen.
3. Mass extinction. According to a study by the University of Leeds in England, one in three plant
and animal species could become extinct by 2050 on the basis of mid-range climate models.53 Fifty
percent could disappear in worst-case scenarios. Right now, we’re on a worse than worst-case
trajectory. According to the IPCC, if temperature rises exceed 6ºF, the extinction rate could climb to
70%. You have to ask yourself at what point does a system so damaged collapse entirely? People who
look at climate change as a matter for future generations to solve obviously do not understand that it
won’t be their great great great grandchildren but their kids who will face a dying biosphere. I may
even live to see it.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 32 of 90
52 John Weier, “Mapping the Decline of Coral Reefs.” NASA Earth Observatory, March 12, 2001, at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Coral/, visited 12/20/09.
53 Chris D. "omas, et al., “Extinction Risk from Climate Change.” Nature 427 (2004), 145-148. Summary at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v427/n6970/full/nature02121.html, visited 12/20/09.
4. More severe and more frequent extreme weather events. One of the best, if necessarily oversimplified,
summaries of climate change that I’ve seen is by Stephen Schneider, the editor of the journal Climate
Change. “Global warming intensifies the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to
have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long dry periods. Where the atmosphere
is configured to be wet, you will get more rain...Global warming will intensify droughts and it will
intensify floods.”54 Many scientists suggest that global warming will bring more frequent and more
severe extreme weather. While one cannot say that the occurrence or severity of any one storm such
as Hurricane Katrina, the sixth-strongest hurricane ever recorded, or Hurricane Rita, the fourth-
strongest, we can expect an increase in the intensity of such storms. Hurricane Katrina was the
biggest natural disaster in American history, causing $150 billion in damage. How many such
storms, especially if they become frequent, can our system handle before it collapses?
5. Rising ocean levels. As agents of destruction, future Katrinas will have an advantage over today’s
because they’ll start at one to seven feet higher due to sea level rise. Over the last hundred years,
oceans have risen at the average annual rate of 1.8 mm/year. Since 1993, that rate has increased to
3.1 mm/year, or a foot a century. Since the pre-industrial era began, oceans have risen about
seventeen inches. According to the IPCC, oceans are projected to rise by as much as another two feet
by 2100. But this number is almost certainly far too conservative. "e rise in ocean levels to date is
entirely due to the thermal expansion of water, and does not include increases from melting ice sheets
in Greenland and Antarctica. New data from these suggests an additional rise of three to five feet by
2100. Many of the world’s most populous cities such as Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tianjinn, are
located on coastlines or in flood plains. Millions of people in Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan,
and China live in flood plains. And how about New York, Washington, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles,
and San Diego? Do we imagine that we can dike every city on every coast?
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 33 of 90
54 “Warming Will Exacerbate Global Water Conflicts.” Washington Post, 8/20/2007, online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967.html, visited 12/20/09.
6. Health e"ects. Warming climate enables insect-borne diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and
dengue fever to spread into temperate regions.55 River and coastal flooding compromises drinking
water with sewage, heavy metals, and pesticides, and spreads water-borne diseases such as cholera,
typhoid, and hepatitis. Air pollution from smoke and ozone increases the incidence of asthma and
pneumonia. "ere’s a precedent in America’s own recent past for the kind of health e!ects that global
warming portends. In the Dust Bowl, people experienced what was popularly called “Dust
Pneumonia,” a sometimes fatal irritation of the lungs induced by breathing the fine dust that was
ubiquitous during the area’s frequent dust storms. When climate models suggest permanent Dust
Bowl level drought in the Southwest, you have to ask yourself whether Dust Pneumonia will become
part of our everyday vocabulary, and whether our health system will be able to cope, not just with
ten years of health consequences, as in the Dust Bowl, but with permanently elevated levels of lung
and heart disease and heat-related illnesses. Will our health system generally be able to cope with
possibly epidemic levels of infectious diseases, some of them new?
7. Loss of food production. A few lucky humans can escape the heat in air-conditioned homes. But
farms can’t be air conditioned. And the projected temperature increases bode ill for a planet that
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 34 of 90
55 See, for example, Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological and Economic Dimensions. Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment and Swiss Re, 2005, at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6809/full/408184a0.html, visited 12/20/09.
must have more food, not less. Over the next century, ignoring climate change, earth’s population is
projected to grow from 6.5 to 12 billion. "at means we need to double our food supply. But a
growing food supply is not what the climate models hold in store. "ey suggest a greater than 50%
decline in India’s wheat-growing capacity by 2050 and a loss of more than 30% of Africa’s maize
crop, its most important agricultural product, by 2030 (IPCC). Overall food production in Africa
could be cut in half by 2080. And don’t imagine that this is a "ird-World problem. As Fig. 6 shows,
temperature increases in our own Breadbasket will be pushing plants to the level of breaking point.56
In the coming century, the climate of Illinois will become like that of Texas, and Texas will become
an oven. Increased temperatures are a direct threat to the stability of agriculture, and they bring with
them other e!ects. Summer heat combined with pollution creates ozone, and ozone is extremely
detrimental to crops. Increased danger from weeds, pests, and disease is also a likely correlate with
higher temperature, as are extreme weather events that will locally devastate crops.
8. Water shortages. One in six people worldwide depend on water from glaciers and snowpack, and
glaciers especially are in steep decline. In areas a!ected by drought, including the western U.S., water
resources could drop by 30%. And even in areas where presently enough water is available, we could
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 35 of 90
56 Fig. 6 source: United States Global Change Research Program, http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/climate-change-impacts-by-sector/agriculture, visited 12/19/09.
Fig. 6
face shortages. According to the IPCC, hundreds of millions in Africa and tens of millions in Latin
America who now have enough water will be short of it in 20 years. By 2100, according to the
IPCC, as many as three billion people may be threatened by water shortages.
Let me bring this particular threat home. From 1999 to 2005, the Colorado Plateau experienced its
worst drought in 500 years, reducing Colorado River flow from 15 million acre feet/year to 3.8, and
dropping Lake Powell to one third of capacity. "at was five years of severe drought starting from a
full reservoir. Two to three more years of such drought would have brought Lake Powell to “dead
pool,” the point at which no water can leave the dam, the point at which the Grand Canyon has no
water. We know from tree ring studies that severe droughts lasting longer than five years have
occurred, and that is without climate change.57
Today, Lake Powell is about two-thirds full, and drought conditions continue. A return to severe
drought could drain Lake Powell, and quickly. "e most thorough study of the Colorado basin to
date, inclusive of climate change, suggests that the combination of drought and continued growth
could lead to water shortages severe enough to depopulate the West’s megacities. By 2022, according
to a conservative climate model, Phoenix, which gets 60% of its water from the Colorado, could
become a ghost town. Nor will Phoenix be the only casualty. Las Vegas gets 90% of its water from
the Colorado, and Los Angeles over 50%. All southern California agriculture depends on the
Colorado.
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57 For this and the following material on the Colorado Plateau, I’m heavily indebted to James Powell, Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West. Berkeley: University of California, 2009. I called attention to Powell’s book and its implications for Utah and the LDS Church in an op-ed published in the Salt Lake Tribune, January 9, 2009, available online at: http://web.me.com/efirmage/Supporting_Documents/Writing_on_the_Environment_files/West%20Hurtling%20toward%20Water%20Crisis.html.
Not only are we doing nothing
to prevent this climate-induced
water crisis, we are building as if
there is no tomorrow. Phoenix,
Las Vegas, and our own St.
George are among the most
rapidly growing cities in the U.S.
"rough our growth-for-growth’s
sake and growth-at-all-costs
policies, we are setting ourselves
up for a compounded disaster
that will make the experience of
the Okies look like a cakewalk. During the Dust Bowl of the 30s, 2.5 million Americans were
displaced. Many of the displaced, as readers of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath will recall, ended up in
California. But today’s West is full. "ere’s no place and there are no resources to accommodate
environmental refugees. What will happen, then, when not 2.5 but 10-20 million residents of the
Southwest are forced from their homes because there simply isn’t enough water?
To close out the water issue, I’d just like to show you graphically what our future in Utah under
climate change looks like (Fig. 7).58 It is as bleak as the color scheme of this writing on the wall.59
9. Social unrest and instability. Environmental changes on the scale evident in the foregoing will put
unprecedented pressure on the world’s poorest countries, which are entirely unequal to the task of
responding either to the environmental changes or the consequent social upheaval. For the "ird
World, future climate change will be cataclysmic.
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58 Fig. 7 source: United States Global Change Research Program, http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/regional-climate-change-impacts/southwest, visited 12/19/09.
59 Since completing this essay, I have written more extensively on the water crisis that faces the West. My #ndings are available in a slide presentation available on my website: http://web.me.com/e#rmage/Edwin_Firmage_Photography/Blog/Entries/2010/3/27_Water-"e_Coming_Crisis_#les/Water-"e%20Coming%20Crisis.html.
Fig. 7
But the impacts, direct and indirect, will not be limited to the "ird World. "e U.S. has just spent
$3 trillion protecting its oil interests in the Gulf. What will be the cost of keeping a hungry and
destitute "ird World from destroying itself and the U.S. in the process? How, for example, will the
U.S. react to and be a!ected by a war between nuclear powers India and Pakistan over dwindling
water in the Indus or between China and Russia over the water and food resources of Siberia? And
how will even we, the richest nation on earth, cope with the many demands on diminishing dollars
for agriculture, health systems, coastal cities, desert cities, power systems, and a military all under
unprecedented stress?
10. !e one-two punch. Tough as any one of these challenges would be, we will not face them one by
one but simultaneously, and with increasing intensity and frequency. "ings don’t just get worse
under climate change, they get exponentially worse. And I haven’t even mentioned one other gigantic
factor that we’ll have to deal with while all this other stu! is going on: the end of oil or “peak oil.”
While there is considerable debate about the real extent of oil reserves, a growing number of oil
experts believe that world production is now in or shortly will be in irreversible decline. A U.S.
Energy Information Administration study found that non-OPEC and non-Russian production
worldwide peaked around the year 2006, production in some countries such as the U.S. having
peaked long before that (1970 in the U.S.). How long will reserves last? At present o#cial but
unaudited and highly suspect numbers and at the present rate of production, the reserves of Saudi
Arabia, the world’s largest producer, are su#cient to last for another 70 years.60 But the true size of
Saudia Arabia’s estimated reserves and those of other OPEC producers are questionable. In the
1980s, OPEC introduced a country quota system that sets each nation’s output based on its reserves.
Immediately, estimated reserves rose sharply, raising questions about whether the new numbers have
any basis in fact under the ground. In 2007, Sadad al Husseini, a former VP of Exploration for
Aramco, asserted that 300 billion of the world’s estimated 1200 billion barrels of oil reserves should
be considered speculative and not available for production. In a best case, at least with today’s
extraction technology and at o#cially stated reserve levels and current rates of production, reserves
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60 For a useful summary, see Wikipedia, “Oil Reserves,” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves, visited 12/20/09.
will last another 50 years or so. If actual, usable reserves are as low as Al Husseini states, they may not
last through mid-century.
"ere is uncertainty here at many levels. Not all oil in a field can be economically harvested. Rising
prices and improved technology may make previously uneconomical extraction worthwhile. And,
there is always a possibility, though it is unlikely, that major new sources will be found. All of this is
true. But history is a caution. U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, and in spite of then record-high
prices in the wake of the oil crisis of 70s and great improvements in oil exploration technology, U.S.
oil production has continued to decline. Another problem with the notion of the previously
uneconomic becoming attractive is that other factors such as the e!ects of global warming may take
options o! the table that could otherwise be considered. We may simply not have the means,
however willing we are to pay the higher price.
In 2005, the U.S. Department of Energy published a report entitled Peaking of World Oil Production:
Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, also known as the Hirsch Report.61 "e report concluded
that with emergency-level action, “the fastest humanly possible,” and extraordinary government
intervention the world could transition to an alternative, oil-less economy in 20 years without
substantial negative impacts. With less than 20 years, the impacts rise. But 20 years is a best case in a
world that is rapidly becoming less than the best of all possible worlds. Hirsch did not include in his
time estimate the possible impact of other factors such as climate change that might compete for the
attention and dollars that will be required to meet even a 20-year figure. What will happen, for
example, if, under severe climate stress in the year 2025, America experiences two Katrina-level
hurricanes, one that destroys half of the city of Houston and another that levels Miami Beach, while,
simultaneously, wildfires escalate out of control in the Oakland Hills, destroying 30% of the cities of
Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville, and Glenn Canyon Dam reaches “dead pool,” which necessitates
the immediate creation of new and extremely expensive diversion tunnels around the dam? What if
such catastrophes are regular occurrences during the time that the Peak Oil transition is in process?
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61 Available online at http://www.acus.org/docs/051007-Hirsch_World_Oil_Production.pdf.
"e point is that our ability to respond to Peak Oil without societal upheaval will be constrained by
factors that we cannot now anticipate that may make 20 years seem wildly optimistic.
Given the time, e!ort, and contingencies involved in making a successful transition to an oil-less
economy, and since we do not and probably never will know precisely what the true state of world
reserves is, and therefore what our likely deadline is, it would be highly imprudent to suppose that
the need for action now is anything but acute. One of the most sobering findings of the Hirsch
Report, based on several case studies, is that it will likely not be evident even as little as a year before
production peaks that peak is imminent. In other words, “the world will have less than a year’s
warning.” According to Hirsch, the relative risks of premature action and failure to act in a timely
manner are asymmetric. “Mitigation initiated prematurely would result in a relatively modest
misallocation of resources. Failure to initiate timely mitigation with an appropriate lead-time is
certain to result in very severe economic consequences.” "is is global warming all over again.
So, we come to this: Humans are creating a new world order, and it’s not an order under which most
humans, or indeed most life forms, will be able to survive. "ese are not changes that we will be able
to fix after the fact with technological wizardry. "e CO2 that we put into the air today will remain
there for hundreds of years, and the e!ects of this gas on our climate will therefore persist for
hundreds of years. "e only cure for climate change is prevention. What’s more, half measures are as
good as no measures. If only half of Antarctica melts, we’re still facing global catastrophe. If only the
Colorado dries up and not the Ganges, we’re still facing catastrophe.
Of all of the dangers facing us, none is more insidious than that form of self-delusion that says that
we can and should move deliberately, cautiously, and incrementally toward sustainability. "is is our
business-as-usual approach to things, and for many things it’s the right kind of approach. For climate
change, it spells disaster. "is is the kind of change that our churches, and universities, and, yes,
environmental organizations have so far adopted. And it is a moral outrage. What we face today is
not primarily an environmental problem; it is a moral problem. It is in fact the moral problem. How
we respond to this moral problem will be the measure of our species. So far, we rate an F.
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IIIWhile this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence, and home to the mother.
— Robinson Je!ers62
So, how do prevent climate change? According to the IPCC, we need to implement IMMEDIATE
and DRAMATIC reductions in greenhouse gases: 50-85% GLOBAL reductions over 2000 levels by
2050. What do these numbers mean? At 50%, the probability of holding temperature increases to a
hopefully livable 3.6 to 4.3ºF increase above pre-industrial levels, is 50%. At 85% reductions, the
probability of staying in that 3-4º range is 85%. Clearly, given the stakes involved, mandatory global
85% reductions over 2000 levels by 2050 should be considered an absolute minimum. "is is a far
cry from Utah’s voluntary 25% by 2025 over 2005 levels or the Obama administration’s pitiful plan
for 17% by 2020.
Now, the implications of these global reductions by 2050 are even more radical for the U.S. For the
world to reach 50% by 2050, the U.S. must reduce its emissions by 88%, and for the world to reach
85%, the U.S. must reduce by 96%! E!ectively, we Americans must set ourselves the minimum goal
of zero carbon emissions by 2050. So, within just 40 years, at most, Americans must replace every
gas-powered engine, every natural gas powered heater and power plant, and every coal-fired power
plant with a clean, non-emitting alternative. We must reinvent agriculture to work without cheap
fossil fuels. We must reengineer our transportation system to work without trucks and airplanes. And
we must do all of this in less than 50 years. If this imperative, this minimal imperative, doesn’t scare
the hell out of you, you aren’t listening, because this means reinventing America in just 40 years.
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62 From “Shine, Perishing Republic” in Richard Ellmann, ed., !e New Oxford Book of American Verse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976, 540.
But many believe that the 2007 IPCC goals are not aggressive enough. "e 2014 report is almost
certain to up the ante, and others have already done so. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute
and longtime researcher on climate change believes that the world target should be 80% by 2020.
For what it’s worth, I happen to agree with Lester, because every indication from the science is that
reality is outstripping the projections. What we thought was “worst-case” is in fact far from worst.
An example is the melting of both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Far from giving us an unnecessary
scare, as climate change skeptics claim, science is falling behind reality.
"e need for urgent and extreme action emerges from tipping points such as the melting of the
permafrost. Once permafrost begins melting on a large scale, it has the potential to set in motion
feedback loops that will create runaway climate change that we will be unable to stop
REGARDLESS OF WHAT WE DO. "e feedback loop works like this. Increasing global
temperatures cause permafrost to melt, releasing additional natural (not man-made) carbon dioxide
and methane into the atmosphere. "ese in turn cause temperatures to rise even faster, causing more
permafrost to melt, and so on. "e biosphere as a whole could become a gigantic feedback loop.
Most general climate models to date assume a static biosphere. But, the biosphere’s ability to absorb
CO2 is in fact climate-dependent. At present, about half of anthropogenic CO2 is absorbed by the
biosphere (land and oceans). "e land component of this form of carbon sequestration, however,
may become a casualty of climate change. A study by the Hadley Center suggests that the land could
become a net source of CO2 by 2050, and that as a result, atmospheric CO2 concentrations may be
250 ppm higher than predicted by static biosphere models.63 An additional temperature rise of 2.7°F
over and above that predicted by static models (an increase of 75%) would accompany these higher
CO2 concentrations, and this additional rise kicks in further climatic changes. "e caution of the
tipping points is that this is one time when we either do things right the first time, or we die. We will
not get a second chance.
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63 Peter M. Cox, et al., “Acceleration of Global Warming Due to Carbon-Cycle Feedbacks in a Coupled Climate Model.” Nature 408 (2000), 184-187. Summary at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6809/full/408184a0.html, visited 12/20/09.
So, as we contemplate what our agenda will be, let’s agree on two basic points. We need dramatic
change, and we need it now. Is anyone doing this? Are there groups that we can point to as models?
Yes, to a degree, in isolated pockets. In May 2007, for example, an F5 tornado tore through
Greensburg, Kansas, wiping the town o! the face of the earth. Instead of returning to business as
usual, the town voted to use the opportunity of rebuilding to make Greensburg a model of
sustainable living. And, as American towns go, it is indeed a model. I urge readers to look at
Greensburg’s website to see what a town with vision can do. HEAL Utah, on whose board I sit,
recently hosted Greensburg’s mayor, Bob Dixson, and we have put videos of that event on our
YouTube website.64"ey’re inspiring.
For the most part, though, America is trapped in denial. Recent polls have found that about half of
the populace does not believe that climate change is real, and only about a third believe that it is
caused by human activity. Fewer still understand that this is in fact the biggest challenge humans
have ever faced, and that it is the moral imperative of all time. Now more than ever in human history,
we need unity in common purpose. We need the sort of unity that brought Americans and
Americans and their allies together during World War II.
Our political system today, however, is not about unity. It is more partisan than ever. It’s driven not
by notions of public service but by special interest, corporate bribery, and demagoguery. It’s heroes
are figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck. Americans wanting change, if not
necessarily action on climate change, hoped to see a radical about face with Barack Obama. But so
far, even with a Democratic Congress, he has failed to deliver on the issue of climate change, and
appears to be hopelessly bogged down in a stalemate of parties that he seems unable to break. In the
fullness of time, when the American people finally wake up to their plight as agents and victims of
climate change, the politicians will presumably snap out of their ideological funk. But their
awakening will be too late for our planet.
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64 Fall Party Mayor Dixson IV.m4v, Fall Party Mayor Dixson II.m4v, Fall Party 2009 Mayor Dixson III.m4v, Fall Party 2009 Dixson I.m4v.
"e private sector too will eventually adapt, but not fast enough to avoid passing the tipping points.
Right now, the market cannot even begin to adapt because the true cost of the way we live is invisible
to the market. At the moment, our economic system externalizes, that is hides, true costs, and so
there isn’t an economic imperative powerful enough to cause deep, structural change of the sort we
need. We have, for example, no carbon tax that reflects the cost of the CO2 we emit, the cost that we
will pay either in reengineering our society to prevent climate change or in dealing with the
consequences of our failure to reengineer society. Without a significant carbon tax, there is no hope
of large-scale shifts in the American economy. For example, when gas prices reached an
unprecedented $5 a gallon, Americans began to change their driving habits, but only modestly. "e
reason is that gas was not nearly expensive enough, and it didn’t remain expensive.
Even with a carbon tax, however, change will probably not come swiftly enough to prevent us from
passing the tipping points from which there is no return to life as we know it. If, for example, an
improbable carbon tax were passed today that doubled the price of electricity in America, it seems
likely that we would only modify our behavior to the degree that we did when gas prices doubled,
which is to say, not nearly enough. Conservation, at least as we know it now, is simply not enough.
In fact, conservation as we know it is actually counterproductive. In the fall of 2009, Utah climate
scientist Tim Garrett published an article in the journal Climatic Change showing that conserving
energy promotes economic growth, which leads to the consumption of more energy and therefore the
production of more greenhouse gases.65 Garrett’s paradoxical conclusion is that conserving energy
promotes climate change. Talk about cognitive dissonance!
Cognitive dissonance is good, though, if it forces us to think more clearly. Garrett’s article has
certainly given me food for thought. My reaction to Garrett, after due reflection, is threefold. First,
Garrett puts a scientific face on a fact that conservationists have known for a long time: we can’t
conserve our way out of climate change. We need far more radical transformation.
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65 “Are "ere Basic Physical Constraints on Future Anthropogenic Emissions of Carbon Dioxide?” Climatic Change 21 November 2009, available online at www.springerlink.com/content/9476j57g1t07vhn2/fulltext.pdf.
Second, the deeper question is whether energy conservation, though clearly not enough, is
nonetheless worthwhile, even essential. Before examining that issue however, I first of all want to
address those on the political Right who deny that climate change is real or human-caused and who
see in Tim Garrett’s work a scientific justification for their refusal to embrace energy conservation
and alternative energy. Far from providing ammunition for this attitude, Garrett’s message is that
conservation is good for the economy. It’s the energy equivalent of increased worker productivity. If
you can produce more with less or even the same with less, you increase the e#ciency of your
business, creating a greater margin for profit. So, as billionaire George Soros has been saying for
years, truly clean forms of energy such as wind, solar, and geothermal could be the motor of the
world’s economy. Republicans, therefore, of all people, should embrace clean energy and energy
e#ciency as tools to promote growth, which is after all their highest good.
What Garrett has given us is a gift like the gifts the Greek gods were accused of giving, a gift such as
Pandora, that comes with a strong consumer warning. Tim’s gift is a Zen slap in the face, a wake up
call to reality. And, reality has a way of being uncomfortable. For far too long, environmental
organizations like the Sierra Club have been behaving like good corporate citizens and urging
eminently reasonable, responsible, and, as it turns out, remunerative actions like “conservation” in
the form of replacing lightbulbs, caulking windows, and buying e#cient appliances. But that
approach, as Garrett observes, while it salves our conscience and makes us more e#cient has done
nothing to stop our progression toward climate catastrophe.
At some level, we knew all of this before Tim Garrett had the temerity to point it out. For the last
decade at least, environmentalists have seen that the incremental, evolutionary, no- or low-impact
measures deemed to be “reasonable” aren’t working. We’ve seen this, but denied the implications.
We’ve also been living in denial about the fact that as long as economies and populations continue to
grow, anything other than the total and immediate replacement of fossil-fuel-based power with truly
clean alternatives is as good as nothing. "e evidence of our denial is greenwash, or should I say
hogwash, such as Barack Obama’s voluntary 17% reductions over 2005 levels by 2020. "e evidence
of our denial is climate stalemate of the sort that made the Copenhagen climate talks an utter failure.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 45 of 90
Finally, then, and here I part company with Garrett: we need a new vocabulary and a new ethic.
What we’ve been engaged in isn’t so much conserving as economizing — half measures concerned
first and foremost with the bottom line. For example, the EPA, with the full blessing of
environmental groups, has encouraged the creation of the “Energy Star” brand of appliances and
even homes that are more energy e#cient. "e pitch of the EPA is to the budget-conscious consumer
in all of us. We should caulk windows and add insulation so as to reduce heat loss and save money.
We should turn down the temperature on our thermostats and water heaters so as to reduce oil and
natural gas consumption and save money. We should install Energy Star appliances to reduce power
use and save money, and so on. "ese are all reasonable, cost-wise things to do. And they do save
energy, and therefore reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But for all that, this isn’t real conservation.
"ese e!orts reduce the harm the we cause by our lifestyle but they do not eliminate it. Real
conservation is about eliminating the harm. If your lifestyle is unsustainable because it consumes
more resources than the environment can handle, slowing the rate of consumption will not prevent
you from ultimately crashing and burning. You’ll just do so a little later than you might have
otherwise. True conservation is about preventing the crash and burn altogether.
Here is the reality of our lifestyle in America. We consume four to five earths’ worth of resources. As
a model for the world, this clearly is not a lifestyle the world can live with, yet at the moment this is
the lifestyle the world is emulating. China wants the American dream, and so do India, Africa, and
Latin America. Long before they get there, the biosphere is going to collapse. Clearly, even if
Americans conserved 25 to 50% across the board relative to present levels, and we’re nowhere near
that kind of number despite the EPA and the Sierra Club, it would not be enough. Our “reasonable,”
piecewise, economizing approach will not work in the long run, and it cannot therefore be regarded
as true conservation, which presupposes that you’re doing things in such a way that you at a minimum
maintain the present biological status quo.
So, what would a truly conservative approach to energy use look like? Well, instead of looking for
ways to reduce the electricity required for air conditioning, we would eliminate the need for it
altogether. And this is absolutely possible today. "rough intelligent design that incorporates “passive
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 46 of 90
solar” ideas and good engineering, it is possible to build homes that do not require any air
conditioning even in hot climates. In fact, this has been possible for a long time. I have been in old
pioneer adobe homes here in Utah that are comfortable in midsummer without the use of any high-
tech engineering. "e same kind of radical, but often technologically simple solution is available for
heating. "ere are towns in Germany today where people live in homes that require no heating or air
conditioning at all.66 In winter, they retain latent heat that is generated by household appliances,
computers, TVs, showers, baths, and the bodies of the occupants. In really frigid areas where latent
heating cannot deliver enough warmth, geothermal heat pumps could be used. "ese can both heat
and air condition homes and provide hot water using a tiny fraction of the electricity required for
conventional systems, and the small amount of electricity needed could be provided by a limited
solar panel array that would not add prohibitive costs to home construction. "ese are radical and
yet eminently doable changes that would be part of a truly conservative lifestyle. Such changes would
bring about dramatic greenhouse gas reductions that mere economizing has not.
"ere is, in other words, a way out of Tim Garrett’s paradox of “conservation.” "e solution to the
paradox is to realize that what Garrett regards as conservation isn’t conservation at all but false
economy, and that there is a form of conservation capable of achieving radical results. "is true
conservation also won’t single-handedly get us out of climate catastrophe, but it could get us well on
the way, and it could do so quickly. If, for example, the federal government or state and city
governments were to pass zero-energy requirements for heating and air conditioning on all new
homes, we would see instantaneous and significant reductions in energy use. If governments
mandated zero-energy retrofits whenever existing homes are sold, we would get an even bigger bump.
Nonetheless, Americans especially have turned their back on such alternatives, sometimes out of
ignorance, sometimes out of greed and short-sighted “economy,” sometimes out of sheer bloody
mindedness. I recall a recent letter to the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune, written by a man who was
outraged by the world’s “Lights Out” initiative, in which people were asked voluntarily to turn o!
their lights for one evening. Even the LDS Church complied. But the writer of the letter, who thinks
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66 “No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses.’” New York Times, 12/26/2008, available online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?_r=1.
that climate change is a hoax, turned on every light in his home in protest. "e great tragedy of our
time is that self-serving Republicans have politicized the issue of climate change and whipped up
public frenzy to a point that people, like the writer of that letter, simply cannot see what is staring
them in the face. Real change on the climate front, like real change on so many other fronts, is
stalled by a morally bankrupt political system whose leaders cannot rise above their own self-interest
and who are bound by their own self-imposed ideological straightjackets. So, how do Americans
break this impasse and start moving forward? How do we turn away from disaster?
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 48 of 90
IVVHU(/09 'W@*(S ).,: ;.,' ;.,' Q.,4'5S09(9 'AO0$#4F,
Day by day my ears invent the steps of a messenger of good tidings.
— Yehuda Amichai67
As I see things, one group, and perhaps the only group, capable of breaking this impasse and forcing
radical change is our churches. America’s churches are a solution in several ways. First, action by
churches to meet their own climate D-day would in itself be a real step forward. "e LDS Church,
for example, is one of the largest builders and furnishers of buildings in the United States outside the
federal government. It could single-handedly change the economics of solar power and geothermal
heating and air-conditioning systems in the U.S. "e LDS Church is also one of the country’s largest
food producers. It is the country’s largest producer of nuts, and it is one of the largest ranching
operations, with 500,000 acres of ranch land in Florida alone. "is is a church with the potential to
make and to change markets. "is is a church with the potential to bring new, clean energy
businesses to life. And there are other churches with this kind of scale, who acting singly, but
hopefully together, could transform the political and business response to climate change.
Our churches can be catalysts of change, agents that cause other agents to undergo radical
transformation. For a conservative organization like the LDS Church to make a commitment to
energy independence within ten years, which is something I proposed to then counselor "omas S.
Monson back in early 2007 (I’ve since cut the suggested time period to five years in a long proposal
that I sent President Monson in Jan. 2010), would send a shock wave through the Republican Party,
which has chosen, rather strangely given the potential that clean energy has to revitalize the U.S
economy, to align itself with dirty and dead-end industries such as coal and oil. Today’s Republicans
have turned their back on their own tradition of conservation and environmental responsibility, as
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 49 of 90
67 From his “Jerusalem 1967.” Hebrew original and English translation in Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1992, 46. Trans. mine.
represented by figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, who created the National Forest Service as we know
it, and Richard Nixon, who created the EPA and who approved an important extension to the Clean
Air Act (1970) and the Federal Water Pollution Control Amendments (1972). As a catalyst, the
Church could help to bring the Republican Party to a realization of its public responsibility.
And, last but not least, speaking of Teddy Roosevelt, churches can be the bully pulpit that convinces
the mass of ordinary Americans to change their personal lives. I don’t think that I exaggerate when I
say that if the LDS Church, for example, were to go green tonight, we would see a di!erent set of
Utah leaders in Washington tomorrow. And, we would find a radically di!erent approach to climate
change here in the West. "ere is indeed much that a church like this could do to change the world,
and to be that Zion on the hill, that city of light that a world in darkness needs.
What we need today from our churches is the message of a radically di!erent way of living, a new
“kingdom” based on notions of true sustainability. Practically speaking, the message we need to hear
from our churches is that standing between us and everything we want for ourselves and our children
is the mortal sin of climate change, from which we will either turn away now or perish. And what we
need to see from our churches is action to back up their words.
"e good news about climate change is that it is, at the moment at least, a solvable problem. We
have the knowledge and the technology and the money to fix this problem now. All we need is will
and imagination. In view of the moral bankruptcy of our political process and of corporate America,
I can think of no more critical mobilizer of public will and no better seed communities for
imaginative role modeling than our churches.
But, while I hope to see every church engaged in an all-hands-on-deck e!ort, there is one in
particular that I speak to here. Of the many religious communities that I could point to with some
hope, none is more pre-adapted, in theory anyway, to the present crisis than the Mormons, a people
who espouse the ideal of becoming one in heart and mind and who have already bound themselves
under sacred covenant to create a place in the here and now fit for God to inhabit. If there is any
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 50 of 90
church whose active involvement is needed now to change the world, it is ours. "e world needs to
see the gospel of Zion in action.
And so does the Church, for while the Church cherishes the Zion ideal in theory it does not do so in
practice. One has only to look at the Salt Lake Valley during a winter inversion, or drive down State
Street any day of the year, or look through the barriers of gated communities of millionaire Saints to
see this. Now, you may say that winter inversions are a force of nature beyond our control. But it is
not the inversions that create air pollution. We do, and therefore we can solve this problem if we
choose to. Doing so will not be easy. It will mean, for example, dramatically reducing our
dependence on automobiles in the Salt Lake valley. "at is a big but not insuperable challenge. It
could be done by greatly expanding our present public transportation system. It could be done
through negative economic incentives such as significantly increasing the gasoline tax and using the
proceeds to fund clean transportation initiatives. It could be done by making public transportation
free. All of this can be done, but, as with climate change, which is Salt Lake’s air pollution problem
on a global scale, there is little political will to do it. "e bottom line is that Mormons in Salt Lake
breathe terribly polluted air because they choose to do so, in part through action and in part through
inaction. And the Church is as guilty as anyone in allowing this state of a!airs to continue. Indeed,
because the Church is in a unique position to influence public opinion and legislative action, it is
more guilty than most. Where much is given, much is expected.
"e Church would perhaps answer that this is a “political” problem, and as such not a proper
domain on which to speak or act. But this excuse does not convince. It’s true that living sustainably
has become a politicized issue. But that is not the same thing as a political issue. "ere is no partisan
necessity for Republicans and Democrats to disagree about cleaning up our air. Everyone needs this,
as they need food and shelter. As necessities of ordinary life, indeed as the foundation of life itself,
clean air, clean water, and healthy food are not political issues. None of our environmental problems
are in fact political, although they are politicized. In any event, however, the mandate of the Church
is to create a place in the here and now that is fit for God to inhabit, regardless of political
complications. And Salt Lake City today is far from Zion. Are we not ashamed of our dirty air when
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we bring visitors here? And if we’re ashamed of this filth before mere tourists, should we not be a
hundred times more stricken as we present this valley to God for his approval?
By choosing not to get involved, the Church abnegates its moral responsibility to be a good shepherd
not only for a spiritual flock but for flesh and blood mortals who will breathe and be killed by the
dirty air the Church chooses not to speak about and act upon. According to the Utah Physicians for
a Healthy Environment, a thousand people along the Wasatch Front die prematurely each year as a
result of the dirty air we breathe.68 "eir deaths will of course not be attributed to air pollution. "e
cause of death will be pneumonia, asthma, or heart attack. And in this way, even our death is treated
as an externalized cost, the ultimate expression of the degree to which our society turns life into
money. “You can have anything in this world for money,” including a free conscience.
Sadly, the list of ways in which the Church is failing in its pastoral responsibility is long. I’ll give just
one more example. In December 2009, my father, Ed Firmge, Sr., sent a letter to the First Presidency
requesting that they take a strong stance against the storage of depleted uranium in Utah. "ere are
many reasons why the Church should do this.
First, there is the fact that without such action Utah will in all likelihood become the dumping
ground of choice for all of America’s depleted uranium, 700,000 tons of which are waiting a for a
disposal site as I write this. "anks to Energy Solutions and inaction across the board in Utah, Utah
is now the dump for 99% of America’s low-level nuclear waste. Energy Solutions has recently begun
importing depleted uranium in quantity, and few in Utah at present, beyond a few activists such as
my friends at HEAL, are protesting. "ere is the fact that depleted uranium, unlike low-level waste,
becomes more radioactive over time.
"en there’s the fact that, again unlike low-level waste, depleted uranium will remain radioactive for
millions of years. "ere’s the fact that the place where depleted uranium will be stored, Energy
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68 UPHE has compiled a sobering list of studies that demonstrate the many, often deadly, e!ects associated with dirty air: http://uphe.org/library.php. Perhaps the most sobering revelation of these studies is that some of the e!ects are genetic. We are raising a generation of children who will pass on the consequences of our neglect of their health to every subsequent generation. "e fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth stand on edge.
Solutions’ Clive facility in Utah’s West Desert, lies at the bottom of a lakebed that has been filled
with water many times in the last hundred thousand years and that is likely to be filled again, climate
change notwithstanding, at some point in the next few tens of thousands of years. As a result, what is
misleadingly billed as an isolated, arid, and geologically “safe” site, will be destroyed by wave action,
inundated, and dispersed through the length and breadth of the next Lake Bonneville and beyond.
Lake Bonneville came to an end 14,500 years ago when over three hundred feet of it broke through
Red Rock Pass near the Utah-Idaho border sending the largest flood in North American history
tearing through the Snake River plain to the Pacific Ocean. Red Rock Pass remains a possible outlet
for future Lake Bonnevilles. "e deadly legacy of Energy Solutions and of popular LDS greed
(Energy Solutions has bought favor from about three quarters of the Utah legislature) and o#cial
LDS inaction could therefore find itself spread over not just the entirety of western Utah but also
southern Idaho, and the Columbia River basin. "e greatest e!ect, however, will certainly be the
blighting of the eastern half of the Great Basin, Brigham Young’s kingdom. And we are not talking
about destroying a marginal salt water ecosystem. Lake Bonneville was a fresh water lake, and its
successor will also likely be a fresh water lake, which could be the basis for a thriving desert society in
the Great Basin, but not if it is filled with radioactive waste.
Ed Sr. had good reason to hope that the Church would be willing to act on this threat to the well-
being of our region’s future inhabitants. It was he, after all, who convinced the Church years ago to
speak up against the MX missile system proposed for this same area.69 And it was this statement
against the MX missile system that provided the precedent and the conceptual framework for the
Church’s 2006 statement against the storage of high-level nuclear waste in the West Desert.
"e First Presidency’s response to dad’s request this time — how much things have changed in 30
years — was that the Church cannot act on every such issue and that its principle mission is to teach
the gospel of Jesus Christ. "is is certainly among the oddest statements I’ve ever heard from the
Church, because it juxtaposes preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to stewardship of the earth and
care for the physical as well as spiritual well-being of its inhabitants. To my way of thinking, these
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69 Edwin B. Firmage, “MX: Democracy, Religion, and the Rule of Law — My Journey.” Utah Law Review 2004: 1, 13-56.
things are inseparable. How can the gospel of Jesus Christ be separated from anything that is good,
much less anything that is essential to the well-being of God’s children? Is not our physical health an
essential part of the life God intends for us? Is not insuring our physical health what the Word of
Wisdom is all about, this revelation which more than any other Mormons point to as evidence of
Joseph Smith’s inspiration? And as for the notion that the Church has other priorities, I would
assume that if the Church can find time for its crusade to protect Utahns from booze, it might also
find some time to speak about the dangers of nuclear waste, air pollution, and mercury in our water
and food. While preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Church somehow finds time and means to
rebuild downtown Salt Lake City to the tune of five years of concentrated work and a price tag of $1
billion or more. So, you’d think that the Church could take a few minutes to write a statement about
cherishing the earth rather than treating it as a waste dump. "e $1 billion that the Church will
spend on downtown Salt Lake City will be long forgotten and unimportant a thousand years from
now. But the depleted uranium (and mercury and CO2) that the Church, by its deliberate inaction,
allows to pollute our earth, will still be here. "roughout their millennial presence, they will threaten
the life of our descendants.
By refusing to tackle these temporal problems head on, the Church e!ectively tells God that it’s up
to him to solve the problems that we have created. "is is the height of arrogance. It is also fraught
with danger, for when has God ever been willing to let us o! the hook because the problems we have
created are big and hairy? Hasn’t it rather been his modus operandi to let us perish when things reach
such a point? Is that not the lesson of Genesis and of the Prophets? "e lesson of Scripture is that
being God’s chosen people means that you have a heavier burden of responsibility. Yours must always
be the high road, the hard road. And if you are not cut out for such hard work, God will find
someone else who is. I would therefore say to Church leadership, look around you and identify the
seemingly intractable problems that politicians shy away from and that our political process seems
unable to handle. !ose are your problems. If our economic system, for example, can’t eliminate
poverty, then that is your problem. If the political process can’t deal with climate change, then that is
your problem, and you need to solve it. In God’s scheme of things, there is no such thing as a
political problem. "ere are only problems, and they are all moral.
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"e Church may reply, “Well, Brother Firmage, by that logic the Church should be involved in
almost everything.” My reply is, “Absolutely.” "at is what building a Zion society is all about. As in
biblical times and Brigham’s day, there can be no ultimate distinction between sacred or religious
space and secular space. It’s all sacred. It’s all important. I say this knowing that there will be
occasions when a publicly engaged Church will do or say things that o!end me. So be it. Unlike my
liberal friends who would just as soon see the Church shrink into self-imposed exile in its own land,
I would welcome a vigorous, vocal, and bold o#cial Mormon presence in Utah’s day to day life, as
was the case in Brigham Young’s day. "e retreat of the Church into its own self-imposed
insignificance on most temporal issues is a cause for sorrow, not rejoicing. All I would ask of a
socially reengaged Church is that it act prophetically. Brethren, let your tradition and your Scripture
dictate your course of action. If you do that, I have confidence that you will be more right than
wrong in what you do.
In speaking and acting prophetically on issues of the day, the Church will in fact be ceasing to play
political games. At present, the Church is perceived — accurately, I believe — as an extension of
Right Wing American politics. "e Church o#cially denies the connection, and encourages
members to vote their conscience. "en it turns around and installs the former head of the
Republican party in Utah as editor of the Church-owned Deseret News. One could cite a hundred
other examples of actions that belie the Church’s professed political neutrality. "e Church is also big
business. As my mission president once remarked to me about some issue we had been discussing,
“It’s just business, Elder Firmage, and the Church is big business.” To be a big business in America
today is by definition to be political. "e Church’s statement, therefore, that it doesn’t get involved in
political issues is patent nonsense.
If Church leadership truly wants to avoid being “political,” then it needs to start being prophetic.
"e biblical prophet, as defined by the example of Hosea, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Jesus, is not a
fortune teller but a speaker of the truth, the truth of the responsibility of leaders to principle, of
people to principle, and of leaders to people. "e biblical prophets spoke truth to power and truth to
the people, without consideration of the consequences, without worrying whether they were being
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 55 of 90
political or politic. Not surprisingly, because they told the truth, the prophets to a man were always
in conflict with the political and economic establishment.70 Abraham Heschel writes of them that
“they are some of the most disturbing people who have ever lived.”71
A full discussion of ways in which the prophets were disturbing would be beyond the scope of this
article. But take as an example the divine injunction to Hosea first to marry a prostitute and have
children with her (Hos. 1:2) and then to marry an adulteress (3:1), to symbolize Israel’s infidelity to
her covenant with God. Or take the injunction to Ezekiel to lie on his side in the street for 390 days
and make a meager meal of water and bread baked with human feces to illustrate the fate that awaits
the people (Ezek. 4:9-15). Ezekiel himself protests at the o!ensiveness of this, so God relents and lets
him use cow dung instead. "ese men spoke uncomfortable truths and illustrated them in ways that
people then as now would have found deeply o!ensive. "ese men, who define what it means to be a
prophet, would have laughed at the notion that “political” issues were o! the table. Samuel, for
example, attacked the notion of kingship, which was the basis of government in most of the ancient
world (1 Sam. 8:11-18). "at may not sound radical to us descendants of George Washington and
"omas Je!erson, but it was to many in the ancient world. In most places, such talk would have
ended your life on the spot. It would be the equivalent of President Monson attacking the notion of
laissez-faire economics at a Republican convention in Utah, something, by the way, that I’d love to
see him do.
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70 "is is a challenging concept for Latter-day Saints because in the LDS tradition the prophet is the establishment. “Prophet” is just another way of saying corporate president, head of the church. In biblical Israel, however, the prophet was not the head of the “church” but the political outsider. "e ecclesiastical establishment was led by priests, and priesthood was passed down exclusively within the families of the priests and the Levites. Accordingly, prophets did not speak by virtue of any priesthood or ecclesiastical authority, for they had none (except in the accidental and exceptional case, such as Ezekiel, in which the prophet also happened to be a priest). Speaking for God and speaking for the corporate “church” were therefore two di!erent things. "e prophet’s only authority was moral. Now, ideally, of course, the priestly establishment would have taught and embodied the principles of the Torah. Ideally, there would have been no need for prophets (cf. Num. 11:29, “would that all of the Lord’s people were prophets”), for God has already told his people what they need to hear. In the view of the prophets, however, Israel’s leadership, religious and civil, did not live up to its scriptural calling. "ereon hangs the tale of conflict between the establishment and the independent idealists whose only authority was their claim to have been appointed personal messengers of God. "eir message was a call for national repentance, a call for leaders and people to live their principles. "e prophets of the LDS Church are thus in the impossible position of having to be their own worst critics. To be a prophet, you have to stop thinking like an ecclesiastic and a CEO.
71 Op. cit., I:xi.
But Samuel’s political radicalism does not end with his attack on kingship. If we substitute the word
“president” or “executive” or “real estate developer” for “king,” we begin to see just how radical he
was, for the abuses he cites were not and are not unique to kings. Samuel could just as well be
speaking of any powerful, centralized government or organization or successful millionaire General
Authority. His condemnation of economic exploitation would certainly apply to today’s high-handed
American corporations that treat their employees like serfs. Employees at Walmart, for example, had
to sue the company for the right to go to the bathroom!72 "ey had to fight to get even modest
health insurance. And, like generations of American workers before them, they have had to overcome
corporate bullying to form unions. I have no doubt about what Samuel or Hosea or Jeremiah would
say to the CEO and shareholders of Walmart. In 1965, American CEOs earned 24 times the salary
of the average employee. In 2005, that ratio was 262. At its peak, before 9/11 and the bursting of the
mortgage bubble, the ratio was as high as 300.73 I have no doubt what Amos would say to the heads
of the Fortune 50. But when was the last time you heard a General Conference sermon about the
evils of Walmart or Enron or AIG or Bank of America or GM? When did you last hear a modern
LDS prophet attack the Republican Party for its opposition to an increase in the minimum wage?
I could go on at great length, but my basic point is clear: to live in today’s society and refuse to
become involved in the messy issues of daily life is in and of itself a political decision of the worst
kind. And it is not the sort of decision that the biblical prophets would have approved of. In
disclaiming the world of “political issues,” most of which in fact have nothing to do with politics, the
Church winks at abuses of power that have always been the primary focus of prophetic action. How
dare we, then, preach the “value” of justice while we ignore the injustice that will be visited upon the
world’s poor by climate change. How dare we talk about love while our way of life guarantees that
hundreds of millions will perish. "e God who spoke through Hosea said, “I have hewn them in
pieces by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth” (Hos. 6:5). "e words of our
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72 See the scathing exposé of Walmart and other American companies that use minimum wage labor in Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
73 “CEO-to-Worker Pay Imbalance Grows,” Economic Policy Institute, at http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20060621, visited 12/31/09.
present prophets wouldn’t cut through butter much less bone or sinew. "e disturbing thing about
today’s LDS prophets is that they’re not disturbing.
To preach a prophetic gospel much less a gospel of Jesus Christ, the champion of the poor, without
social and economic, and, yes, political consequences is a contradiction in terms. And, if the
prophets of the Bible are to be believed, it is an o!ense against God. Isn’t this the plain meaning of
the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37)? Who are the real villains of this story? "e
priest and the Levite, the General Authorities of their day. Who is the hero? "e outcast Samaritan,
the man without a temple recommend. And what is the fault of the priest and the Levite? It isn’t
something that they did. It isn’t even something that they thought. It is something they didn’t do, and
didn’t even think to do. "e priest and the Levite are models of orthodox belief and conventional
rectitude, models, in other words, of what the Church today would call “values.” "ey think the
right thoughts and believe the right beliefs. "ey also do the right things, at least as prescribed in
Scripture and tradition. "ey observe the Sabbath, and do their temple work. "ey pay their tithing.
In short, these are not bad men pretending to be good. By ordinary standards, they are good. "ese
men would have had no problem getting a temple recommend. Indeed, they are the ones who in
today’s church would be giving out the recommends. But in Jesus’s story, they’re the bad boys
nonetheless. Of course, none of this is said in so many words. But what sense would the story have if
in fact the priest and the Levite were bad men or obvious hypocrites? So what if a jerk walks past an
injured man? You’d expect that of a jerk. You wouldn’t expect it of a General Authority. "at is Jesus’s
point. In Jesus’s kingdom, goodness that ends at the boundary of the conventional is not what’s
wanted. If all you can muster is conventional goodness, you’re not part of this kingdom.
In Jesus’s day, as in ours, righteousness was measured in terms of orthodoxy and religious observance.
But in Jesus’s teaching, righteousness has little to do with either. While Jesus does not reject
orthodoxy or customary observance, his message is that these are not enough. Never once does Jesus
tell a parable about the importance of proper belief. He seems similarly uninterested in customary
forms of ritual and worship. He does show interest in basic morality. But this is typically just a
starting point for uncovering a deeper kind of morality that his hearers are ignoring, something that
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 58 of 90
goes beyond the conventional. “And, behold, one came and said unto him, Good Master, what good
thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life? And he said unto him...if thou wilt enter into life, keep
the commandments..."e young man saith unto him, All these things have I kept from my youth
up: what lack I yet? Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young
man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions” (Matt. 19: 16-22). If
Jesus were speaking to us today, I suspect he would want to know what the Church is not doing. Or,
to put it positively, what the Church is doing that goes beyond the ordinary. If other good Christians
are doing X, what more than X is the LDS Church doing? And God forbid that the Church should
have to confess that it isn’t even managing X.
Like the Jewish church of Jesus’s day, ours is zealous in belief and zealous in conventional observance.
It spends millions, for example, sending its young men and young women and old men and old
women into the world to preach the gospel. "e Church spends vast amounts of time and money
trying to get people to believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that he restored the
gospel of Jesus Christ in these latter days. It works hard to get people to believe that the Book of
Mormon is Scripture. It cares a great deal that people recognize today’s successors of Joseph Smith as
prophets, seers, and revelators. "is preaching and believing is what todays LDS prophets apparently
regard as the purpose of the Church. "at is all fine and good. But to what end is all of this earnest
believing and preaching? If it doesn’t result in a dramatically di!erent way of living, who cares what
people believe? In the kingdom of brick and mortar that the prophets preached and that was our
ancestors’ version of Mormonism, what mattered was less what you believed than what you did and
what you and others who shared your faith did together. What mattered was what happened after the
missionizing was done and people gathered to Zion. "e point was ultimately not to tell other
people about the gospel, but to show it to them by living it. "e point was to build Zion.
And how do today’s ordinary Mormons, the world’s most industrious evangelizers, live? Are we as a
people significantly better or indeed any better than the rest of America? Do we — I have to chuckle
as I write this — break the bounds of the conventional? Does Salt Lake City, Utah, distinguish itself
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 59 of 90
when compared with Portland, Oregon, or Madison, Wisconsin, or Boulder, Colorado, or any other
pleasant, well-run city in America? If 50% of Salt Lake City and 60% of Utah is LDS, and if Latter-
day Saints have, as we say, a saving truth, where is the living manifestation of this in Salt Lake City
today? Are we a living example of Zion? To this observer, at least, members of the Church today,
from top to bottom, talk like saints but live like Americans — like typical thoughtless, careless, self-
absorbed Americans, who have done more than any other people to bring the world to the brink of
catastrophe. We profess a belief in the kingdom of God, but, apart from missionizing, have done
nothing since the passing of the generation of first converts to make this kingdom a reality. For those
Saints, there was no dichotomy between preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ and living it politically,
economically, and socially. For Brigham Young and his generation, there was no such thing as a
“political” issue that the Church could not and should not tackle. Economics was not o!-limits as a
province of Church action. Social reform was not taboo. Indeed, radical economics and social change
were an essential part of Brigham’s gospel. For Brigham, everything had spiritual meaning, whether
you were talking about getting your endowments, darning your socks, or buying supplies from the
Church-owned co-op. Nor would Brigham have thought it an untouchable “political” issue to attack
government and local business for wanting to turn his Great Basin kingdom or the earth into a
dumping ground. Everything that happened in the community of the Saints was subject matter fit for
the Church to speak and act upon. Brigham too believed that he lived in the last days, and this belief
was cause for urgency, not just to preach the gospel, as the Church does today, but to build a brick
and mortar kingdom that would last a thousand years. Is there anything in contemporary Mormon
society, except the temples that Brigham built, that is likely to last a thousand years? At the rate we’re
destroying things, we won’t last a century.
Today’s Mormon reality is that as a people we’re just average, unforgivably average, if you believe that
of those to whom much is given, much is expected. "is is the inconvenient truth of contemporary
Mormonism. As a commercial institution, the Church has unquestionably succeeded. It belongs, for
example, by many estimates, to the Fortune 250. Not bad for an organization that was on the brink
of collapse in 1890. But the Church is not called to be a commercial success; it is called to be a
model of societal transformation. As a force for such transformation, even on the scale of Salt Lake
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City much less the world, the Church has unquestionably failed. And, it has failed in spite of massive
missionary work. Why? Because when the missionizing is over, people are still untransformed. "eir
conversion is a kind of head game only. Once I was a Democrat, now I’m a Republican. Once I was
Catholic, now I’m a Mormon. What passes for conversion today is an ideological shell game, because
it is principally about changing one’s beliefs. Until the conversion of the head becomes something
deeper, something that gets people out of their heads and out into the world, the Church is kicking
against the pricks.
"e tragedy of contemporary Mormonism, and the reason I think that it will ultimately fail unless
there is a course correction, is that the Church has chosen to withdraw into disembodied belief,
belief without social consequences, except in the bedroom. To say that the Church’s role ends at the
preaching of “values” is the end of Mormon uniqueness. As I noted at the beginning, what made
early Mormons distinctive was our social gospel, the belief that we are called not only to live pious
lives but to build a new world order. For our ancestors, this was not just ideology, but a battle plan
for constant, concrete, world-shattering action. It was that vision and that kind of action that
brought early Mormons into conflict with their neighbors in Kirtland, in Independence, in Nauvoo,
and in Salt Lake City. "at vision and that willingness to be di!erent has all but disappeared as
Mormons have assimilated into mainstream American society and bought into the devilish notion
that a Church’s proper role is limited to advice on “morality.”
Of all of Mormonism’s so-called “political” issues, the ones today’s ideologically obsessed and
sociologically inert Church seeks to avoid, none cries out for action like climate change. In its
reluctance to become engaged and in its silence on this issue, the Church shows how far it has come,
or, more accurately, regressed, from the brick and mortar gospel of its first generation. "e Church’s
inertia in responding to climate change is a tragedy, not only because of the unimaginable human
su!ering that will result but also because a bold, vigorous response to climate change could be such a
force for positive, spiritual transformation within the Church. For Americans, who generally live
wildly beyond their means, the social revolution that will be required to prevent climate change and
other ecological disasters that are in the o#ng will be the greatest shock we have ever experienced.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 61 of 90
But Mormons have at least the cultural memory of a radically di!erent way of life, the sort of life
that preventing climate change must entail. If any group of people in America can adapt to this way
of life, it is the Mormons. If we will embrace this opportunity, we will find that the exigency of
climate change is the greatest blessing in our history, for in our return to first principles lies the key
to the future success of the Church.
"e key to success as a transformed and transformative organization is precisely that old-fashioned
Zion ideal that our ancestors lived and died for and that Saints in the interim have forgotten about
in their pursuit of comfortable American mediocrity. "e LDS Church, as another moralistic,
conservative, evangelical religion, much less as a successful business, has nothing to o!er the world.
As crass as this sounds in the context of speaking about Zion, let’s look at the issue from the point of
view of a marketing plan. "e Church’s success will be limited by the degree to which it looks and
feels like the other religious “products” on the market. "e more it does so, the lower, ironically, its
appeal. For the Church to succeed in a religious marketplace where people have many options to
choose from, the Church must define for itself a niche. "ere is a superabundance of groups that
preach family values. "ere are plenty of groups that are only too happy to persecute gays and
lesbians. "ere are groups that teach sexual abstinence before marriage. "ere are groups that have
better and more comprehensive dietary restrictions. Now, the Church can preach and practice all of
this, if it wants to, but wherein will it di"erentiate itself from the competition? "e answer is obvious:
in its unique theology of Zion. If the Church will live that, it will become what people wanting the
truly good life will seek out. It will in fact and not just in word be the ensign on the hill, the beacon
in the darkness. And it will succeed.
Here, then, is the great paradox for Latter-day Saints. We can continue with our headlong
assimilation into the American religious mainstream and fail, or we can buck the system and succeed.
We can continue to eliminate every vestige of the church of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, from
polygamy to communitarianism to bold ideas about the nature of man and God, or we can embrace
the past that we’ve been fleeing since 1890 in our desperate attempt to convince Americans that we’re
just like they are. It so happens, however, that those long-discarded and now denigrated ideas like
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communitarianism are in fact exactly what the world needs. Our poster boys, Mitt Romney and
Glenn Beck, can’t say enough bad things about the “redistribution of wealth,” but that is exactly
what Brigham Young preached as an essential foundation of a Zion society. Until and unless we are
willing to embrace that inconvenient truth and the other radical social inconveniences of our
particular gospel, we have nothing to o!er the world.
So, to summarize thus far, in climate change, the Church faces a seemingly intractable problem that
the political and business world cannot or will not tackle. It’s a problem with both temporal and
spiritual dimensions. It’s a problem that has Apocalypse written all over it. "is looks like a job
tailor-made for prophets to handle.
"us, I come to this conclusion: it is in how the Church responds to climate change that the future of the
Church will be determined. I don’t mean simply that the Church, like every other institution, is
threatened by climate change. I mean that the present crisis is the ultimate turning point for the
Church, the moment in which it will at last start to live up to its theology or shrink into irrelevancy.
As the reality of climate change begins to dawn on an unprepared and sleepy America, the Right,
which has invested its entire energy in opposing e!orts to prevent climate change, will lose its final
vestige of relevance. Churches, which by their action or inaction have allowed the agenda of the
Right to prevent needed social change, will be caught with their pants down, a particularly
unflattering pose for those who claim to be seers. "e choice before the Church now could not be
clearer. It can continue on its present course as the kingdom of devout inertia or it can return to its
roots as the kingdom of faith in radical action.
According to LDS theology, we live in the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times, when all of God’s
purposes for earth and her inhabitants come to fruition. Chief among these, as far as Latter-day
Saints are concerned, is the divine injunction to build God’s kingdom here and now. "is is not a
kingdom of words and ideas and moral concepts alone but a flesh-and-blood kingdom of
transformed people living their principles. And until such a society exists, until we build it, the
heavenly kingdom of God cannot return to earth.
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"And righteousness will I send down out of heaven...and righteousness...will I cause to sweep the earth...to gather out mine elect...unto a...Holy City...and it shall be called Zion...
"And the Lord said unto Enoch: "en shalt thou and all thy city meet them there...and we will fall upon their necks, and they shall fall upon our necks, and we will kiss each other;
"And there shall be mine abode..." (Moses 7:62-64)
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You seduced me, Yahweh! I’m seduced.You ravished me, and had your way.All day long, they laugh at me, all of them mock me,for when I speak, I cry “Violence,” and “Ruin” when I call out.So I said, “I won’t mention Him, I won’t speak in His name again.”But there was an inferno inside me.I grew weary and couldn’t hold it in.
— Jeremiah 20:7-974
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for youAs yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;"at I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bendYour force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,But am betroth’d unto your enemy;Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,Take me to you, imprison me, for I,Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
— John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV
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74 Trans. mine. In this interpretation of v. 7, I follow Heschel, op. cit., I:113. Pittîtanî can mean simply “you deceived me,” but the verb also frequently has the connotation of “seduce,” and regularly means this in modern Hebrew. For this use of the word, see Ex. 22:16 [Hebr. 22:15]; Job 31:9; Hos. 2:14 [Hebr. 2:16]. For me, the necessity of this reading comes first of all from the sequence of actions, seduction followed by forcible violation. Simply being deceived does not naturally lead to being overpowered. But being seduced does, particularly in Israelite thinking. "e verse from Hosea is especially instructive: “I’ll beguile her (mephatteyha), lead her into the countryside, and win her heart” (and presumably more than her heart). In Israelite law, a betrothed girl who is violated by someone other than her fiancé inside city limits was presumed to be guilty of adultery and was stoned, on the assumption that she could have called for (and presumably gotten) help. If, however, she claims to have been raped in the countryside, the burden of guilt falls on her attacker alone, because she would have been unable to get help (Deut. 22:23-27). Hosea’s Yahweh, in typically provocative language, proposes to take Israel into the countryside to woo her, where the outcome of the wooing is beyond doubt. "e finer points of philology aside, this is the only reading that makes sense. Jeremiah’s point here is not that he has come to doubt the truth of Yahweh’s message. He is in no ordinary sense deceived. Jeremiah’s complaint is rather that he has become an object of ridicule and hostility, as a floozy is ridiculed and subject to popular outrage. Yahweh’s message is as true as ever, but the people don’t believe it and regard the messenger as an a!ront to public decorum. Jeremiah is exposed as God’s floozy until such time (v. 11) as Yahweh emerges as Prince Charming to save the day and rout Jeremiah’s persecutors, who, unlike Yahweh (tûkhal, v. 7), will not have their way (lo’ yukhálu).
VWith this long prologue, I’d like now to o!er a few elementary ideas about how the Church could
respond appropriately to climate change in ways that are consistent with the its theology and history,
and which could be the first baby steps toward building a Zion society in the 21st century.
1. Establish a five-year plan to make the Church energy-independent through the use of solar panels and
geothermal heating and air-conditioning systems. "is plan would also include steps to make all new
church buildings maximally energy-e#cient, thus reducing and even eliminating the requirements
for heating and air-conditioning. Among the changes to future church buildings would be extensive
use of “passive solar” design principles such as orienting buildings to minimize exposure to summer
sun and to maximize winter sun, designing interior spaces to create convection currents (thus
minimizing the need for fans), use of solar lighting, landscaping that focuses on providing shade in
summer and sun exposure in winter, etc. Behavioral changes would include greater use of buildings
during the day to take advantage of sunlight and minimize electricity requirements for lighting. "e
plan would also outline stringent energy (and water) conservation measures to begin immediately.
Energy independence is not only a matter of protecting society from catastrophic climate change,
but a principle of self-su#ciency that is appropriate at any time. And, it is a principle of prudence,
when our electrical grid is vulnerable to volatile energy prices, natural disasters, and terrorism.
2. Make this energy-independence plan public. Never has there been a greater need for visible
leadership. "e Church as a conservative organization can do this better than any other. "e Israelis
have a saying that, “Only Menachem Begin could go to Cairo.” It is certainly an irony that it was not
the progressive Labor Party that finally brought an end to Israel’s decades-long war with Egypt but
the party led by a man whom many considered little better than a Jewish terrorist. With progress on
climate change being blocked by almost monolithic opposition from Republicans at both the local
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 66 of 90
and the national level, I believe that only a powerful conservative organization can break the
deadlock.
Quite apart from the need to alter the political landscape, however, public action by the Church is
vital for the sake of its membership. If this and the other changes proposed here are to help kindle a
recommitment among members to build a Zion society, then the Church’s acts of leadership must be
bold and they must be public. "e men in the pulpit need to speak with the energy and the
pointedness that Brigham Young did. "at kind of energy has been missing from our pulpits for a
very long time.
3. Create an o#ce of sustainability. "e goal of this o#ce should be to insure that the Church operates
on a 100% carbon-neutral and true-cost basis by 2020, thus more than meeting Lester Brown’s 80%
by 2020 goal. As I’ve already explained, this is not the way the Church or any other institution does
business today. As a non-profit, the Church of course has no reason to externalize costs. But to the
extent that it buys products and services from for-profit companies, the Church necessarily becomes
a party to the dishonesty that is inherent in today’s business world. In a real sense, our way of
externalizing costs is a form of living beyond our means. It is the most insidious form of “bubble”
economics, to which our society appears to be increasingly liable. True-cost accounting insures that
the Church is as honest in its dealings with the living planet as it encourages its members to be in
their day to day lives.
4. Make the existence and purpose of this o#ce public. Only when members see that the Church itself is
committed to sustainable and honest living, will they feel compelled to make the same commitment.
In fact, as part of its publicity around this o#ce, the Church should encourage its members to
institute similar programs in their own businesses.
5. Adopt a “Go-Organic” program for all Church agricultural and ranching operations worldwide, and
make this public. Agriculture contributes substantially to greenhouse gas emissions (about 18% of the
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 67 of 90
total).75 "e imperative for going organic derives not only from the need to prevent catastrophic
climate change (and with it the destruction of agriculture) but also from the fact that we will in any
event run out of oil in the coming century. "is will force a revolution in farming whether we like it
or not, as Cuba experienced in 1990 with the sudden loss of Soviet oil. How Cuba reinvented
agriculture is a model and an inspiration.76 In Havana today, half of the food consumed in the city is
raised within city limits, and 80% of it is organic. "is is a degree of true self-su#ciency that
American cities, the Mormon capital included, can only dream of. And yet, it was the norm in Utah
in the memory of people living today. As in so many respects, our sustainable future will resemble
our sustainable past more than it does the present.77
6. Reinstitute aggressive stake, ward, and home gardening programs. It isn’t only large-scale farming that
is unsustainable. It’s our very diet.78 "e wisdom of the Word of Wisdom, with its counsel to eat meat
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 68 of 90
75 "e percentage attributed to agriculture varies depending on what is included as “agriculture” and what is categorized under some other heading, such as transportation or land use. At the low end of the scale, is the EPA’s 6%, which uses a very restrictive filter for what goes in the agriculture bucket (http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads09/GHG2007entire_report-508.pdf ). "e Pew Center, using similar methodology, pegs the number slightly higher at 8%: http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-basics/facts_and_figures/us_emissions/usghgemsector.cfm (U.S.) "e 18% number is that of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000448/index.html. "e di!erence between the high and low numbers lies in the fact that the FAO includes emissions from all sources connected with agriculture, including transportation and land use and land change practices (esp. deforestation), which the EPA treats under separate headings. While not applicable in all respects to the U.S., where deforestation, for example, is not an issue, the FAO’s method is generally the more honest and accurate. Transporting cattle, for example, is an inherent cost of today’s livestock industry. It would appear, for example, on the balance sheet of any farm, and it should therefore be treated as an agricultural contribution separate from that of the larger transportation sector, and so on down the line. Not to do so, again, externalizes the true environmental cost of, say, eating a hamburger or a steak, which turns out to be quite high. "ere’s a useful discussion of the issue at the University of Missouri’s Agricultural Extension, http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G310.
76 See the documentary, !e Power of Community (http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php). I cannot recommend this extraordinary, life-changing film too highly.
77 For a fascinating look at the sustainable past that lives on in America’s Amish and Mennonite communities, see Eric Brende, Better O": Flipping the Switch on Technology. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Of particular interest is Brende’s observation that in the 15 years that his particular community had been in existence, not one farm had failed, while oil-dependent, technology-heavy American farms were going out of business left and right (162). Indeed, the farmers of this community were debt-free. Farm equipment powered by oil represents a modern farmer’s largest capital investment, and correspondingly one of his greatest liabilities. Also of interest here is the life work of Joel Salatin, a pioneer in sustainable, small-scale farming (http://www.polyfacefarms.com/default.aspx).
78 Among the many books on this subject, I recommend the following: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food. New York: Penguin, 2008; Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: !e Dark Side of the All-American Meal. New York: Houghton Mi$in, 2001; Richard Robbins, Diet for a New America. Tiburon, CA: H. J. Kramer, 1998. Originally published 1987; Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. 4th Edition. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2007.
sparingly, becomes more evident every day. And yet, this, arguably the most important element of
the Word of Wisdom as regards both individual health and the environment, is not the aspect of the
Word of Wisdom that we focus on today. If we want to be healthy and to live sustainably, the core of
our diet should be what we raise ourselves, and this, for us, as for most people throughout history, is
grains, fruits, and vegetables, not meat. And Americans can do this as well as Cubans. During World
War II, for example, urban Americans planted “Victory Gardens,” where, it is estimated, we grew
40% of the food consumed nationally.79 "e Church should encourage members to rip out their
lawns and create productive permaculture.
7. Establish a low-cost food co-op program that parallels Deseret Industries. "is co-op program would
provide mostly whole foods from the Church’s own farms where feasible (as in part of Utah,
California, and the Northwest) and from local organic farms where the distance to Church supplies
is prohibitive. "e co-op program would also be a venue in which members could exchange their
own produce from home and community gardens. Healthy, basic foods should be accessible to
everyone in the community without having to spend a fortune. Sadly, today, “junk food” from
chains such as McDonalds is often cheaper than truly nourishing, unprocessed foods. Healthy food
is an even more fundamental necessity than clothing and the other goods that are provided by
Deseret Industries. What a wonderful thing it would be, therefore, for the Church to become known
as the place where people can get back to this fundamental human value. Co-op outlets could be
anything from a Deseret Industries store to a local stake center. "is is also a way for the Church to
positively engage local communities and local skill sets everywhere. As Cubans discovered, not least
of the benefits of their urban gardening revolution was the way that it helped to foster the sense of
neighborhood community. "e Church thus gets the additional benefit of strengthening and being
seen to be strengthening community. "is is practical bridge building, as opposed to trying to
convince people through media alone that the Church is not divisive.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 69 of 90
79 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden, visited 1/19/10. In fact, Victory Gardens by other names (Potato Patches, Liberty Gardens, Depression Relief Gardens) have been a feature of the American urban landscape for over a hundred years. "e story is beautifully told at Sidewalksprouts, http://sidewalksprouts.wordpress.com/history/vg/.
8. Reinvest in Utah agriculture. It’s vital that the Church, as the wealthiest and most powerful
organization in Utah and the one with the most at stake, help to preserve what’s left of Utah’s arable
land as a hedge against hard times and as a surety of self-su#ciency. "e Church’s advocacy of
“provident living,” if it is to be meaningful, must go beyond mere penny pinching in the home. A
community that depends entirely or largely on distant farms and oil-based food distribution systems,
as ours in Utah does, is scarcely provident or self-reliant.
And even if we didn’t have environmental, health, and economic reasons to return to locally grown
food, there is a spiritual imperative. People need to be involved in raising their own food as a
principle of stewardship. We need to reconnect with the earth as the ground of being. Writing in
1947, apostle John Widtsoe, Mormonism’s great exponent of desert agriculture, expressed the
opinion that, “"e people who have descended from the pioneers still cherish the thought that the
majority of the members of the Church are farmers and hope that it may ever be so..."e earnest
belief in farming as the cementing element in all social and economic progress is one of the major
contributions to the world of the people who settled the Western American deserts.”80
As an example, let’s consider Utah fruit. At the peak of production in the 1920s, Utah boasted nearly
2,000,000 fruit trees, most of them located in the stretch of land from Santaquin to Brigham City.
Of all places in the Intermountain West, it turns out, our ancestors picked the only ones where large-
scale, sustainable fruit growing could be practiced.81 In the words of Sam Edgecomb, former head of
Utah State University’s horticulture department, “No place in Canada or the U.S. o!ered the
opportunities for fruit production that were o!ered here in Utah.”82 "is unique resource is being
paved over for shopping malls that will not feed us when times get hard. And even as we plow under
the orchards, we now import apples from China and Japan. What a disgrace! What remains of this
precious land along the Wasatch Front (from Brigham City to Santaquin) should be preserved now.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 70 of 90
80 How the Desert Was Tamed. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1947, 18, 20.
81 "e story, and the reasons for Utah’s uniquely fertile fruit industry, are found in Carrol Firmage, A Land of Milk and Honey: Family, Food, and Faith in Utah (Master’s project, University of Utah, 2009). Carrol and I are presently working on a joint history of Utah agriculture, of which her thesis is a part.
82 Quoted in Clarence Ashton, “Recent Developments in Utah County’s Fruit Industry and Its Future Possibilities” in Eleanor Bishop, ed., Utah Fruit Tree Survey 1965. Salt Lake City: Utah State Dept. of Agriculture, 1965, 28.
And valleys once too cold for agriculture that will become prime agricultural land as climate warms
also need to be preserved. "ese areas include Cache Valley, the Heber-Kamas-Coalville area, and the
corridors along I-15 and Utah Highways 24, 28 and 89, areas that even the federal government now
recognizes as the Mormon legacy.83
9. Lobby for no-growth policies in communities throughout Utah. “Growth for the sake of growth is the
ideology of the cancer cell,” as dear old Ed Abbey used to say. It makes no sense to implement energy
conservation and renewable energy e!orts in part of a community only to have saved energy
swallowed up by continued growth. And the problem of growth extends far beyond energy, though
that is what drives climate change. Here in Utah, we are going to face an enormous challenge in
meeting our water needs and our need for locally grown food, which may well end up (and which
should end up) being the majority of the food we have to eat. Utah must have a population level that
can be sustained using local water and food resources, both of which will be under environmental
stress. If Utah is to be self-sustaining, and in my mind that is what true sustainability in Utah means,
it must preserve remaining arable land for food production. Indeed, some developed land may need
to be returned to agriculture. No-growth is a step in this direction. And it will have other immediate
benefits. "e Wasatch Front already has some of the unhealthiest air in the U.S. "e prospect of
adding another 500,000 people to the Salt Lake valley, as anticipated by some, staggers the
imagination.
An example of the desperate, if politically unlikely, need for no-growth policies is Washington
County, which until the recent recession was often first or second on the list of fastest-growing
metropolitan areas in the United States. At present, unlike other fast-growing desert areas such as
Phoenix and Las Vegas, Washington County is able to meet its water needs without the use of
Colorado River water. Given the likelihood (discussed above) that the Colorado will not be able to
support the present much less the future population of the Southwest, this is a state of a!airs that
must continue. But this is not what Washington County leaders want. "ey foresee as much as a
three-fold increase in the area’s population by mid-century. To power that growth after they have
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 71 of 90
83 As indicated in the recent historic highway designation of the same name.
exhausted local water resources, they propose to build a pipeline to carry Colorado water to St.
George. If they are successful, southern Utah is set for compounded disaster, because it is destroying
whatever native resiliency, whatever natural reserve, it would otherwise have to respond to climate
change. What’s more, if the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline is built, and if, as seems almost certain,
the promised water proves to be temporary, Washington County will be saddled with a $1 billion
debt that the local water utility will have to bear. In a word, the moment Washington County gets its
first drop of Colorado River water, it signs its own death warrant.
10. Establish a Perpetual Energy Fund to enable members to make their own homes energy-independent.
Apart from ignorance and inertia, the biggest impediment to the popular adoption of solar energy
and geothermal heat pumps is their high up-front cost, which for most existing home owners is still
prohibitive, though it is declining. My term Perpetual Energy Fund — the pun is deliberate —
derives from the Mormon institutions of the Perpetual Immigration Fund and the Perpetual
Education Fund that respectively helped Mormon immigrants get to Utah and to get an education.
What I have in mind is a Church-sponsored financial system that fronts money for clean energy
investments and that are paid back from what would otherwise go to the utility. "is kind of thing
seems to me to be an incomparably better way to spend Church money and Church-raised
investment than building a new chapel. "is is a real investment in the flock.
In parallel with the Perpetual Energy Fund for existing homes, the Church should encourage the
passage of city and state ordinances requiring all new homes in Utah to have both solar and
geothermal systems, the cost of which, when amortized over the lifetime of the home, make them
not only a!ordable but a sound economic investment. Builders presently have no incentive to install
such systems, because, as I noted above, there is no market-based mechanism for recognizing the true
cost of the alternative. As long as that remains true, the only way to get us moving is through
regulation. And here in Utah, that will require action by the Church, because our political leaders are
among the least environmentally savvy and progressive in the world.
11. Encourage members to dramatically reduce their environmental impact. "is needs to be done not as
one instruction among many, but as part of a call for all hands on deck. It needs to be preached with
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 72 of 90
the intensity that drove Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball in their sermons of the retrenchment
movement in the late 1850s. "e challenge we face today is in fact far more serious than any faced by
the early saints after their initial settlement here. But we are not presenting the situation as a crisis.
Indeed, Church leadership does not yet perceive that there is a crisis.
In fact, what we need is a new Word of Wisdom that defines us today and for the future as essentially
as its predecessor has for the last century and a half. What purpose is there in encouraging saints to
keep the present Word of Wisdom if they ignore the even bigger threat to their health that looms in
climate change? "e message that members need to hear from the pulpit is that climate change is
real, that it is the problem of our time, that changing our way of life is not only a practical but also a
moral necessity, and that such change is part and parcel of building Zion here and now.
In the 2007 letter that I wrote to counselor "omas S. Monson, I included a sample First Presidency
message that might launch a shift in the way the Church deals with the issues presented here.
“When Joseph Smith revealed the Word of Wisdom in 1833, he could scarcely have imagined how
this list of basic dos and don’ts for healthy living, given, as the Doctrine & Covenants puts it, “not by
commandment” but as words of counsel ‘adapted to the capacity of…the weakest of all saints,’
would subsequently define Latter-day Saints as a people. A century since the early Church’s most
distinctive practices such as the United Order and polygamy disappeared, what defines LDS people
today in the eyes of the world is the fact that we abstain from co!ee, alcohol, and tobacco. In
addition to defining us as a people, as any peculiar practices might, observance of the Word of
Wisdom also in fact makes us healthy. No one imagines the Word of Wisdom to be the last word on
healthy living. But it commits us as Saints to being concerned about health. "at commitment has
had unexpected, far-reaching, and defining consequences for us as a people.
“"e story of the Word of Wisdom is a lesson for life. "e simple things we do each day are often the
most important things of all. Taking care of our bodies, raising happy families, performing daily acts
of kindness — these are real Christian living. What these things have in common, and what defines
them as essentially Christian, is the attitude of love. As the apostle James said, pure religion is not a
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 73 of 90
matter of belief but of love in action (James 1:27). "e prophet Isaiah, hundreds of years earlier, had
said much the same thing, ‘To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices’ — we might say
church meetings, fast o!erings, or temple endowments — ‘…who hath required this at your hand?
…Learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the
widow’ (Isa. 1:11,12,17).84 Jesus’s final charge to the Twelve was simply ‘feed my sheep.’ "e message
of these and countless, similar passages from biblical and modern prophets is that God is concerned
less with what we believe than with how we live. Are we in deed as well as in word good stewards of
the life He has given us?
“In that spirit, we encourage the Saints to take thought for their responsibility to the earth and to the
generations of beings of all kinds who have yet to inhabit the earth. We live in a time when our own
success as a species has put unprecedented stress on the earth, upon which we all depend for our very
life. From the beginning, God has taught us that the earth is not ours but His, and that our use of
the earth is conditioned upon exercising the restraint and love that God Himself shows to us and to
all of His other living creations. God’s gift of the world to us — our ‘dominion’ — is our chance to
prove that we can govern ourselves with forbearance and wisdom and treat the earth with love. Our
failure to do so carries its own punishment, as well as the anger of God.
“We o!er the following suggestions as a word of wisdom for our time, as counsel for those who call
themselves saints. We encourage you to take these suggestions not as the limit of our responsibility
towards the earth but as the beginning of a life rededicated to wise and sustainable use of the
miraculous home that God has given us. "e earth is here not for our profit but as a source of
happiness and well-being for us and for other living things, who, like us, are under commandment
from God to fill the measure of their creation. Let us become a people as noted for their prudent and
loving care of the earth as for their good health, for these two qualities of saintly living cannot
ultimately be separated.”
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 74 of 90
84 "e overwhelming weight of the prophetic message is precisely on these simple manifestations of caring that have absolutely nothing to do with belief, dogma, or ideology. Cf., among many examples, Amos 2:6-7; 5:11-12; 8:11; Isa. 42:1-4; 56:1; Jer. 22:15-16.
"is message was the introduction to what I proposed could be a Church-published pamphlet listing
what I called “ten steps for good stewards,” ten simple, low- and no-cost actions that ordinary
members could take to begin reducing their carbon footprint. I won’t try readers’ patience by listing
or discussing them here, but the document is available online for anyone who is interested.85
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 75 of 90
85 [URL to be supplied.]
VINo bitterness: our ancestors did it."ey were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth too."eir children will learn to hope for a Caesar.Or rather — for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists —Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who’ll keepPoverty and Carthage o! until the Romans arrive.We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
— Robinson Je!ers86
Before wrapping up, let me anticipate and try to answer some objections to the agenda that I’ve
proposed here. "e biggest likely objection, that this is a “political” issue and therefore outside the
proper bounds of Church action, has already been addressed at length. Let me take some of the lesser
objections one by one.
1. We’re in the last days. All of this, however, painful, is part of God’s plan. It has been foreseen by prophets
and can’t be stopped. "ere are, of course, those such as myself who doubt that this has been foreseen,
who in fact would say that it is not foreseeable. But approaching the question from the vantage point
of LDS belief, I reply that we’ve been living in the last days since the Church was founded in 1830,
and that living in the last days has never been a legitimate reason for not doing the best we can. On
the contrary, living now, as one sees in the verse from the Book of Moses quoted above, is a mandate
to build a radically better society. And until that society exists, the end of this phase of earth’s
existence cannot come. We may be living at the end of time, but the final curtain won’t fall until we
finish the work that we’ve been assigned, which is to build Zion.
On a more practical level, consider the exemplary life of our pioneer ancestors, who were chased
from three cities before they came to Salt Lake, and who, even after arriving here, were often called
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 76 of 90
86 “Ave Caesar,” in Ellmann, ed., op. cit., 547.
to leave yet again and settle some remote corner of the Mormon hinterland. Wherever they went, for
however short a time, they built to stay. "ey built sustainable, beautiful communities. "e women
of Nauvoo, for instance, ground up their china to make the temple walls sparkle, and they did this
knowing that they would soon have to leave the temple forever.
One of the most inspiring little stories along this line is that of Lorenzo Young, Brigham’s brother. In
the spring of 1848, a year after his arrival in the Salt Lake valley, Lorenzo planted seed for 40,000
apple trees. Shortly after the trees sprouted, the Mormons experienced the first of several infestations
of crickets, which ate all but 17 of Lorenzo’s 40,000 apple tree sprouts. Undaunted, in 1849 Lorenzo
decided to try a di!erent approach. He returned to St. Louis and purchased 200 sapling trees, which
he planted in a special wagon filled with dirt. He then set o! for Salt Lake. By the time he arrived, all
but three of his saplings were dead. Such was the heartbreaking, backbreaking beginning of Utah’s
thriving fruit industry. Lorenzo had every reason to give up, and could well have said, as I have heard
many Latter-day Saints say to me, that it doesn’t really matter what we do now because we live at the
end of things. God will take care of the present mess. "is attitude is a denial of everything our
pioneer ancestors stood for. In short, my answer to this objection is to hold up the life of Brigham
Young and his fellow saints, for whom living at the end of things simply meant that they had to get
busy.
2. !e Church is now a global institution and cannot think narrowly in terms of action focused on Utah.
"e Church does indeed have a global responsibility, and what is proposed here is for the Church to
act globally. But, the Church is uniquely positioned to make a di!erence in Utah, where over 60% of
the residents are LDS. Nowhere else does the Church have such popular and political leverage. "e
Church should do most where it can have the most impact, and that is here in Utah. More
importantly, by creating a model community in Utah, the Church achieves the most important
possible goal: to show the world how a community can become sustainable. A small number of
individuals can live sustainably in isolation. But that is not an answer for the world. "e world needs
to see a way for everybody to live.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 77 of 90
3. We can’t a"ord it. "e Church is in the process of spending at least $1 billion on Salt Lake City’s
Downtown Rising project, which benefits mostly those living in Salt Lake. It’s a worthy project for
reinvigorating Salt Lake’s economy. But, it’s hardly a mission to save the world. If the Church is
willing to spend this much money on a business venture that benefits few, how can it possibly reject
a proposal that benefits an entire nation, and that could well, as a catalytic example, save the world?
"is objection is a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
"e bottom line in any event is that we can’t a!ord not to. "e consequence of failure will be the
devastation of Utah and of the world and the loss of everything we think we’ve saved by refusing to
do anything now. At some point, as the e!ects of climate change and peak oil start to squeeze the
world, the Church, like all institutions, may find that it no longer has the means to act. "e Church
must act now while it has the means. It must act now while it can still make a di!erence.
4. We’re already doing many of the things you talk about. Not by long shot. "e Church, for example,
recently formed what it calls the Global Energy Management Committee, which is apparently
charged with creating an energy plan that includes renewables. And the Church has begun work on
three pilot solar chapels here in Utah. "is is a good beginning. But the Church is moving far too
slowly and deliberately, and it is moving in secret. I doubt that any of the readers of this journal, for
example, will have heard of either of these energy initiatives of the Church. As I’ve said, it is
imperative that the Church act publicly if it intends to bring the LDS populace along with it on the
journey to community resilience. From my perspective, until the Church has a plan to become
carbon-neutral across the whole spectrum of its operations by 2020, it is not doing enough. Until the
Church is 100% carbon-neutral, it is not doing enough. And until all active Church members can
say that they too are carbon-neutral, the Church is not doing enough. If from this moment, the
Church erects a single new building that isn’t carbon-neutral, the Church is not doing enough. And,
if the Church isn’t shouting this message from the rooftops, it is not doing enough.
"e Church has extensive and admirable welfare and preparedness programs. But these should not be
confused with the kind of community resilience that I’m talking about. "e Church’s existing
programs will not begin to meet the long-term needs of members should systems begin collapsing as
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 78 of 90
scientists project. "e only way to respond appropriately to climate change is to prevent it. To the
extent that members feel “prepared” for climate change as they’re prepared for a two-week power
outage, their preparedness is an impediment to the kind of change that must now occur. In this
respect, the Church’s existing programs may give a false sense of security. If they prevent the
sweeping changes I’ve talked about, they will have done the Church the greatest possible harm.
5. In spite of what you say, we don’t believe that climate change is the earth-shattering problem you say it
is, so we’re not going to put our money into preventing it. It may be that I and 97% of the world’s
climate scientists are wrong. But what if we’re not? By the time we accept beyond a shadow of doubt
that the scientists were right, we will have passed the tipping points. If that happens, we’re
committed to catastrophic change no matter what we do. "e risks are therefore totally asymmetric.
If we act now, and climate change isn’t what we think it is, we’ve spent a lot of money to buy energy
self-su#ciency and community resilience. "at’s by no means a bad deal. If, however, we don’t act
and climate change is catastrophic, we will live to see our civilization and all of the money we “saved”
disappear. "e prudent decision seems utterly obvious.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 79 of 90
My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain!Oh, the walls of my heart!My heart beats wildly;I cannot keep silent;For I hear the sound of the trumpet,"e alarm of war,Disaster follows hard on disaster,"e whole land is laid waste...
My grief is beyond healingMy heart is sick within me....For the wound of my beloved people is my heart wounded,I mourn, and dismay has taken hold on me.Is there no balm in Gilead?Is there no physician there?Why then has the health of my beloved peopleNot been restored?O that my head were waters,And my eyes a fountain of tears,that I might weep day and nightFor the slain of my beloved people!...Who will have pity on you, O Jerusalem,Or who will bemoan you?Who will turn asideTo ask about your welfare?
— Jeremiah 4:19-20; 8:18-9:1 [Hebr. 8:18-23]87
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 80 of 90
87 Trans. Heschel, op. cit., I:120-121.
Conclusion“"is is what the prophets discovered. History is a nightmare...What saved the prophets from despair was their messianic vision and the idea of man’s capacity for repentance.”88
Zion, by definition, turns its back on business as usual. It is the quintessential expression of the
challenge that biblical prophecy and early Christianity were in their time to the always inadequate
status quo. Amplifying on Kierkegaard’s ironic observation that “Christianity has completely
conquered — that is, it is abolished,” Harold Bloom observes that you “become a Christian only in
opposition to the established order.”89 "e same could be said of becoming a son of Israel according
to the prophets, who decried the “the coalition of callousness and authority.”90
For the LDS Church today to realize its full potential, it too must o!er a clear alternative to our
present way of life, not only in “morals” but in every dimension of life. It too must o!er a vision not
only of individual goodness but also of societal redemption. Plenty of other churches preach morals
and goodness as the LDS do. What will make us di!erent is the comprehensive, unifying idea of an
alternative society. One sixth of Americans today live below the poverty line in the richest and most
professedly Christian nation on earth. Millions more, including many Mormons, are without access
to a!ordable health care. As a nation, we are increasingly subject to the diseases of excess and self-
indulgence. Our air and our water are polluted due to unprincipled devotion to the profit motive at
all costs. And now, towering over all of these evils is the specter of climate change, which is the
profoundest expression of the human capacity for destruction (and self-destruction) ever. For the
Church not to speak out on these problems and especially on the problem of problems is an
abnegation of its prophetic responsibility. For Church leaders to call themselves prophets and not to
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 81 of 90
88 Heschel, op. cit., I:185.
89 Jesus and Yahweh. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005, 27.
90 Heschel, op. cit., I:16.
be the outraged and vocal opponents of the status quo that the biblical prophets were is to make
mice of the lions of the Lord. One expects more. “"e prophet is a person who, living in dismay, has
the power to transcend his dismay. Over all the darkness of experience hovers the vision of a di!erent
day.”91 Today’s LDS prophets must have and communicate such a vision. A prophetic church, if it
takes its biblical mandate seriously, must likewise be something vocally, visibly, and radically
di!erent.
Not least of the characteristics of the alternative lifestyle that the Church must represent is joy.
Latter-day Saints are unusual in regarding joy as one of the purposes of being. But, for joy to have
meaning, the Church must fight to insure that the ground of being is not destroyed. We need the joy
that can come only from clean air and water, healthy food, and a beautiful environment. We need
the joy that can only come from living at peace with the earth. Our dependence on fossil fuels
threatens all of these. Climate change threatens life itself.
"e world must change, and the Church, as the institution that claims to represent God, must lead
the change. In this crisis or any other, slow, incremental change is not only inappropriate, it is
morally indefensible. Incremental change is the political and commercial norm, but it is not the
proper response to crisis and it is not the way of repentance. “Others may be satisfied with
improvement, the prophets insist upon redemption.”92 "e Lord asks us not to gradually abandon
sin, but to forsake it all at once. “And another of his disciples said...Lord, su!er me first to go and
bury my father. But Jesus said...Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead” (Matt. 18:21). In other
words, “Come follow me NOW.”
"e imperative of building the kingdom of God brooks no delay. God will not tolerate our
continued refusal to build his kingdom. Earth also has a non-negotiable deadline for us. We either
meet it, or perish. God and his creation call upon us to forsake our ignorance, selfishness, greed, and
arrogance, which are the root causes of the present crisis.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 82 of 90
91 Heschel, op. cit. I:185.
92 Heschel, op. cit., I:181.
If we will do this, we can change our society in undreamed-of ways for the better. "is is the silver
lining of climate change. Real transformation, whether of individuals or of society, always occurs in
times of crisis. We face the greatest crisis of all time. We therefore have an opportunity like no other
in history to create the new kingdom and the new man that Jesus and the prophets preached so
many lifetimes ago.
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Each evening God takes his shining waresfrom the shop window —mystical chariots, covenant tablets, pearls of great price,luminous crosses and bells —and returns them to dark boxesinside and closes the shutters. “Again,not one prophet came to buy.”
— Yehuda Amichai93
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 83 of 90
93 From “Poems of the Land of Zion and Jerusalem,” Amichai, op. cit., 85. "e translation here is mine. I’ve taken a small liberty with pnînîm yaphôt that I hope LDS readers will appreciate. It seemed particularly apt under the circumstances.
Appendix 1:
A Profile of Early Mormon Community94
Perhaps no other factor was more important in the ultimate survival of the Mormon people than
their collective identity, a sense of belonging to a peculiar community that borders on the ethnic. In
his study of the Mormon village, based on settlement records of towns such as Escalante, Ephraim,
American Fork, and Cardston, Lowry Nelson, son of Mormon homesteaders in Ferron, Utah, and
later professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, identified a number of attributes of the
typical early Mormon community, of which the following eight are perhaps the most crucial.95
1) At settlement, land was distributed equally by lot, with no preference being given on the basis of
ecclesiastical or social rank.
2) Holdings were small (< 25 acres) so that all members of the community could own land.
3) "e Mormon pattern of settlement was unique in the West and especially unusual among farming
communities in dividing land into three di!erent types. Each settler received a small holding,
typically 1% acres, inside the town for a residence, vegetable garden, and orchard. In addition, each
resident received another plot of about five acres outside the town for raising animals and grain. In
Salt Lake City, this outlying agricultural area was known as the “Big Field.” Finally, everyone in the
community had rights in common land still farther outside the town where livestock could graze.
"is pattern of land use encouraged the development of tightly knit communities in which people
associated with one another on a daily basis in town. "is form of town life stands in stark contrast
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 84 of 90
94 For this material, I am indebted to my wife’s master’s thesis, A Land of Milk and Honey: Family, Food, and Faith in Utah, cited above.
95 !e Mormon Village. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1952.
to that of much of the frontier West where homes were located miles from one another and where
town life took a backseat to farm life.
"e notion of fundamental equality among the residents of a town was taken at times to strange
lengths. For example, to insure equal access to common land, residents of some towns mandated that
no one could use the commons before a certain date. On that date, the town would hold a dance to
which everyone was invited. Only when the dance was done, were people allowed to go out and
stake their temporary “claim” to a portion of the commons. In this way, everyone literally started
from the same point with equal odds of access to any part of the commons. After a certain point in
the fall, the commons was thrown open so that anyone could graze their animals anywhere.
4) All town residents shared responsibility for building forts, roads, irrigation ditches, and other
public works and public buildings.
5) In larger towns, the Church established cooperative wholesale stores to provide a market for
exchange. "ese were not commercial stores in the usual sense. "eir intent, as illustrated by the
reaction of Charles Smith to the introduction of the coop program, was in fact to prepare the saints
for the fullness of the communitarian Gospel, the “United Order of Enoch,” that was shortly to
come.
“I went to Ward meeting Bro A M Musser and G Q Cannon occupied the time. !ey spoke upon this
matter of our trading with those who are not of us. He shewed the advantages from our cooperating
putting our means together...!is movement was intended to make us more united to bring us closer
together, according to the pattern of the Gospel. Bro Cannon Said it was very evident that men were
Seecking to get rich and build themselves up, and to form that distinction of class in society, which
thing was an abomination in the sight of God. He referred to the Nephites shewing that when they
began to get rich they Drew o" in Classes and despised the poor. !is matter to which our attention
was now being called would bring about good results, and would prepare the minds of the people, to
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 85 of 90
receive further those principles that pertained to the order of Enoch...At the close of the meeting
subscriptions were handed in to carry forward the movement of a cooperative Wholesale Store.”96
6) Agriculture, which formed the basis for all Mormon communities, though it became in time a
business, was first and foremost a matter of subsistence and self-su#ciency. "is modality continued
well into the 20th century. Writing in 1947 for the state’s centennial history, Arvil Stark, former
secretary of the Utah State Horticultural Society, observed, “In general, the commercial orchards are
small, averaging less than 5 acres in size and the fruit crop is usually associated with other kinds of
agriculture to make a diversified agriculture. In other words, farming in Utah is usually a way of life
rather than the highly specialized business characteristic of some other areas.”97
7) In most cases, towns were not created helter-skelter by individuals seeking their own place to settle
down. Instead, the Church would “call” people, that is, request them, to settle an area in order to
promote Mormon control of essential territory. Members of each “mission” were chosen for their
particular skills so as to provide an e!ective basis for self-sustaining communities all around the
Mormon pale. "us, personal empire building was subordinated to that of the kingdom of God. It
was not unheard-of for people to be called to settle one area only to be asked in subsequent years to
move to another.
8) "e culmination of the Mormon communitarian experiment was the heroic, if short-lived,
attempt at true religious communism known as the United Order of Enoch, or United Order for
short. In this system, individuals voluntarily gave all of their property to the Church and received
back what they needed to live on. All surplus was distributed within the community. "is form of
communism was never universally practiced, nor was it mandatory even in places where it was
attempted. Nonetheless, the attempt itself indicates the tendency within the early LDS Church
toward community.98
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 86 of 90
96 Diary of Charles Smith, 1819-1905, Typescript BYU, quoted in Leonard Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 298. Punctuation is original.
97 “History of Growing Fruit in Utah.” Utah: A Centennial History. New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1949, 1:114.
98 See the chapter on Orderville in Wallace Stegner’s Mormon Country. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 1942, the most beautiful evocation of Mormon life prior to WWII ever written.
No detail was too mundane for consideration in Brigham Young’s United Order, because the Order,
as the truest manifestation of the Gospel, encompassed all aspects of life, even the trivial, and
ennobled them by putting them in the context of the bigger objective toward which the saints were
striving.
Instead of having every woman getting up in the morning and fussing around a cookstove...for two or
three or half a dozen persons, [Young] said, he would have a village dining hall a hundred feet long
with a cooking room and bakery attached. !is would mean that most of the women could spend their
time profitably making bonnets, hats, and clothing, or working in factories. Confusion in the dining
hall could be avoided by installing a system by which each person could telegraph his order to the
kitchen, and this order would be conveyed to him by a little railway under the table. “And when they
have all eaten, the dishes are piled together, slipped under the table, and run back to the ones who
wash them”...In order to remove the laborious burden of big family washings, he suggested they have
cooperative laundries. !ese would not only relieve the women from drudgery, but would also “save the
husbands from steamy walls, soap suds, and ill-temper.
!e community would eat together, pray together, and work together...
“Half the labor necessary to make the people moderately comfortable” under their present
arrangements, he said, would make them “independently rich under this system. A society like this,” he
concluded, “would never have to buy anything; they would always make and raise all they would eat,
drink and wear...”99
Part beer hall, part chapel, Brigham’s dining room and its toy railroad illustrate the degree to which
he was willing to rethink every aspect of conventional life, especially when it came to the family. "is
vision of a Mormon communal utopia, though conceived with an entirely di!erent purpose in mind,
and the attempts that were made to bring the vision into life anticipate the longer-lived, but also
only partly successful experiment of the Israeli kibbutz (literally, “collective”).
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 87 of 90
99 Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 326, paraphrasing and quoting Brigham Young’s sermon of Oct. 9, 1872.
To these attributes of the Mormon village, I would add one more. Not unlike the kibbutzniks, but
modeling themselves on a much older Palestinian paradigm, the Mormons were also bound to their
land in a way that was in theory at least and often in reality quite di!erent from that of other
Americans. To begin with, Mormons viewed themselves as players in a sacred drama, in which the
land and their relationship to it are defined by Scriptural precedent. "ey thought of themselves
quite literally as the children of Israel, descendants of the Twelve Tribes being gathered in at the end
of time. To this day, Mormons receive “patriarchal blessings” in which they are told the tribe of Israel
from which they descend. "us, their persecution in Illinois was necessary to separate these children
of Israel from “the world” (the flesh pots of Egypt, etc.). "eir journey westward was the analogue of
Israel’s exodus, the Great Basin was their promised land, and Brigham Young their Moses. And here
in the Great Basin, they would not only settle and at last enjoy freedom from persecution but would
also build the Kingdom of God. "is was no mundane search for a home but a mission imposed on
them by God. "e city of the saints or rather the cities of the saints were therefore no ordinary
settlements but rather outposts of Zion, harbors, like Yehuda Amichai’s Jerusalem, on the shore of
eternity. Like the Israelites, the early Mormons believed that their occupation of this land was by
divine concession, and therefore subject at all times to God’s pleasure. Failure to live up to their part
of the covenant with God would jeopardize their entitlement to the land.
But the sense that God had called them to settle here also had a more immediate justification, for, as
I’ve noted, many were in fact called by their church leaders to settle specific areas. And those who
were not called to settle an area may have had reason nonetheless to regard their presence there as a
sort of divine test. As a result, many original settlers and their descendants remained even when
conditions deteriorated to the point of disaster. Describing the extraordinarily challenging years of
the Dust Bowl in Utah’s marginal areas, Brian Cannon writes:
...decades following his removal from the town of Widtsoe, one farmer recalled a promise made by
Mormon apostle Melvin J. Ballard to the community’s residents. !e valley would be a Garden of
Eden if its inhabitants kept God’s commandments and stayed out of debt, Ballard had prophesied. If
they did not do so, it would be taken from them. Ballard’s words had infused the land with sacred
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 88 of 90
meaning, rendering the valley a symbolic link between the area’s residents and God. Remembering that
promise, the people clung to their land as long as they physically could. To move away was to admit
spiritual as well as temporal failure. Although all but two families eventually moved away, some
former residents of the area still remember that promise, speak of their valley reverently, make annual
pilgrimages to it, and speculate that it may one day blossom.100
In these ways and in the equally radical attempt to redefine marriage, early Mormonism was the
antithesis of the American dream. No sharper contrast can be imagined than that which existed
between the Mormonism of the United Order period and its contemporaneous American
counterpart, the Gilded Age. At the very point in time when capitalism and not-so-enlightened self-
interest were transforming America into an industrial and commercial paradise (if that isn’t a
contradiction in terms), Brigham Young was preaching sermons such as the following:
Let the calicoes be on the shelves and rot, I would rather build buildings every day and burn them
down at night, than have traders here communing with our enemies outside and keeping up a hell all
the time and raising devils to keep it going… We can have enough [hell] of our own, without their
help… We sincerely hope that the time is not far distant when the people will supply their own wants
and manufacture their own supplies; then and not until then will we become independent of our
enemies.101
Brigham’s chief enemy was capitalism, and his kingdom would be its ultimate victim.
In no other place in the West did Europeans create such a legacy of sustainable community. As a
result, it is quite nearly true that there are no Mormon ghost towns. "e Mormons came to stay.
"ey are the West’s ultimate “stickers,” as Stegner felicitously called them. In the years before WWII,
even with the encroachments of capitalist America, Utah had achieved a high degree of the self-
su#ciency that Brigham Young so earnestly sought. "e state produced, for example, enough food of
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 89 of 90
100 “Struggle against Great Odds: Challenges in Utah’s Marginal Agricultural Areas, 1925-1939. Utah Historical Quarterly 54 (1986), 320.
101 Brigham Young to H. S. Eldredge, November 20, 1858. Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, March 28, 1858, as cited in Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom, 196.
all types to meet its needs and more.102 And, despite being the second-driest state in the nation, it
had developed water resources more than su#cient for its needs, without the help of the Bureau of
Reclamation. Indeed, the Bureau’s e!orts by comparison are a colossal failure. "e Mormons actually
accomplished what the Bureau never did, despite its mandate to do so: a reclamation of desert land
for the small-scale farmer.
Firmage, Light in Darkness, 90 of 90
102 H. H. Bancroft, History of Utah. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1964, 720.