Can You Feel It? (Page 1 of 2)

America’s suddenly red, white and GREEN

The Great Miss Tipping Point waltzes onstage, two steps forward, one back, two forward…

Resplendent in shimmering green, now she pirouettes — spinning en pointe — then takes a bow. It’s an insouciant gesture, as if she’s appeared on cue rather than 30 years behind schedule. Still, she creates a stir.

Businessmen grow tumescent. They smell the sexy scent of money. Environmentalists stand to shout, “Bravo!” They’ve worried she’d never find an audience worthy of such flair, economy of motion, resourcefulness and pedigree.

Yet Miss Tipping Point, self-assured and smiling, appears at last on history’s stage to overwhelming reviews, just in time to propel humankind’s latest, greatest drama forward.

Suddenly everyone of good sense or good will applauds all things green, and even her critics observe tactful silence. Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Tipping Point has arrived in America, fresh from her world tour.

A chorus line of recent voices has me feeling her arrival in my heart and bones:

* First, a Newsweek interview gave the lie to those who say we must go nuclear or die. That we must drill and light toxic candles in game preserves and coastal waters or else curse the darkness and die.

The interview was with Craig Venter. Known as “the outlaw of science,” he’s a man of impressive credentials. He decoded the human genome in 2000 faster than a government program and at far less expense, writes Fareed Zakaria, who interviewed Venter in the June 16 edition of Newsweek, where Venter made this jaw-dropping statement: “Multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels…” (italics added).

Typical families one day will own bacteria-processing “fermenters,” to use a word Venter employs, with no toxic wastes, no transport costs: “That’s how wine and beer are made… We consider ethanol the first-generation fuel. We have second- and third-generation fuels that … come from plant sugars … a fourth-generation fuel, where the starting material is not sugar, but carbon dioxide. People want to bury that CO2 in the ground or pump it into oil wells or coal beds. We want to use that CO2 and the carbon in it to make new fuels …  We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We’re definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.” (Again, my italics). Read all about it at http://www.newsweek.com/id/140066.

* On the longest day of the year, June 21, I watched a vermillion sun drop beyond blue ridgelines surrounding Sewanee, Tenn., as some 100 souls opened a new era in the history of the National Episcopal Peace Fellowship. Since then, I’ve noticed that activists, priests, scholars, artists, musicians, writers, teachers and environmentalists from nearly every spiritual tradition are issuing calls for a sustainable planet.

Watching Christians turn green can be exhilarating. Read all about it at http://www.knoxvoice.com/blog/truthserum/2008/06/23/sewanee-conference-on-sustainable-living-opens-a-new-era-in-epf-activism/.

* Two weeks ago, a friend of my first-born son dropped by and told me about plans to build greenhouses and windmills. Not because he’s gone green, he allowed, but because there’s money to be made. He’d studied up on it. A 4x4-foot greenhouse can produce all the vegetables required by one person in a year, he said. And he knows a man who built a windmill and is now selling power back to the electric company. So my young friend is driven by profit-motive rather than pure altruism? More power to him. Better yet, more power from him.