We don't have to go to outer space and look back at the Earth to realize what it really is; we don't have to go on safari in Africa, or sail down the Amazon, to see wildlife, not subject to human intervention; it's here, right in our own backyard. The experience of watching the earthworms can be had for the asking, wherever you can find a few feet of bare ground after a rainfall. And then you'll I had come to realize that you are, if not a visitor, at least only one of a zillion inhabitants of our earthly home.

This is a place with its own secret agenda. Humanity is only a part of the huge interdependent web of existence. And, indebted though I am to Bennet's writing, I like even better the way poet Dylan Thomas said it: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/ Is my destroyer.”

I had a comparable kind of experience on Thursday evening. On my calendar there was a meeting, a forum about health care that I had thought I might go to; a very worthwhile activity and one I could learn from as well as perhaps contribute to. But I'd been out for six nights of the week before that, and I'd barely started writing this talk, so I decided to stay home and do some work on it. First, though, because I was at home at 7.30 p.m., I had to watch Jeopardy. And then, at 8:00 p.m., when it was dusk at the end of a sunny, warm and beautiful Spring day, I had to go out into my yard just once more.

As I opened the door to go outside, I could hardly believe the overwhelming noise that greeted me! Unless you've had this experience yourself, you'll think I'm exaggerating, but it was almost deafening. Was it police or ambulance sirens, or my teenage neighbour's stereo, as it sometimes is, or a specially noisy crowd of kids at the community centre just steps away? No, it was none of those things; it was the Spring Peepers in my little garden pond! I peered through the twilight to watch a couple of them sitting on the rocks which edge the pond, opening their mouths wide and emitting their amazing sound. When some more of them in my next-door neighbour's pond joined in I was very glad to remember that the noise usually stops when itís completely dark, and that I could more or less shut off the din by closing my doors and windows tightly.

Spring Peepers are smallish frogs with truly enormous voices which, as you might have guessed, the males use to their utmost capacity to attract females to their part of the pond. While they're going through the ritual of screaming for a mate to come to them, it doesn't seem to matter what else is going on around them - they're utterly single-minded. Jennifer Bennet referred to her little patch of ground as a place with its own secret agenda, but there's nothing secret about the Spring Peepers' agenda; they advertise it as loudly as they possibly can. I think that only adds to the realization of the listener that humans are often visitors to territory belonging largely to other creatures entirely. On this Earth Sunday we try to remember that this planet, our home, is shared with beings who vastly outnumber us and whose existence is utterly necessary to our own life - far more than we are necessary to them! I can't think of anything useful I do for frogs and toads - even without the pond, there's plenty of other water around for them - but they do something very useful for me in consuming mosquitoes and other insects and helping to keep the garden in beautiful balance.

Tomorrow, April 22, will mark the 32nd observance of Earth Day. The founder of this annual celebration was U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, who says that the idea occurred to him while on a conservation speaking tour out West in the summer of 1969. At the time, some of you will remember, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, called "teach-ins," had spread to college campuses all across America. Suddenly, the idea occurred to Nelson - why not organize a huge grassroots protest over what was happening to our environment? He thought that if a few enthusiastic people could tap into the environmental concerns of the general public and infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, they could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda. It was a big gamble, but worth a try, he thought. So he announced that in the spring of 1970 there would be a nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment.

Months before the first Earth Day was observed in April 1970, it was already obvious that the idea would be a spectacular success. It was also obvious that grassroots activities had ballooned beyond the capacity of Nelson's U.S. Senate office staff to keep up with the telephone calls, paper work, media interest and inquiries. In mid-January, John Gardner, Founder of the project known as “Common Cause,” provided temporary space for a Washington, D.C. headquarters, an office was staffed with college students.

The rest, as they say, is history. Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 and every April since.

Nelson believes that Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. No-one had the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators - that's 20 million demonstrators -- and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day, he says. It organized itself.

But how much of a success has it been really? Global warming becomes an ever-more alarming prospect. The ecological footprints of developed societies - that is, the measures of how much impact our human consumption of resources is having on the planet - these do not give us much cause for rejoicing. Not only does the gap between rich and poor societies widen in this respect, but the overall picture often seems to be getting bleaker. How much credit can Earth Day, and other attempts to raise ecological consciousness, really claim?

I think in fact there have been wonderful achievements, although they're very hard to quantify because they're mostly along the lines of “What would it have been like otherwise?” There's hardly any question that we're all more aware of our environment now, thanks to people like Senator Nelson, and in our own community Theo Raynham, and Linda Curry who set up the amazingly comprehensive resource table in the foyer, and all the members of the Green Sanctuary group and the many people who were plugging away at environmental issues for years before Green Sanctuary was thought of. If it had not been for them, there's no doubt in my mind that we'd be in a worse state. I read an item in Friday nightís Record which reminded me how important persistence is. This wasn't related to the environment but to another important cause, road safety. Here's the item:

“Quebec reported its best year in road safety in more than a half-century last year when 615 people died and 5,062 others suffered serious injuries. The number of deaths in 2001 fell 20 per cent from the previous year, while the number of serious injuries dropped six per cent. Transport Minister Serge Menard attributed last year's numbers to various factors, including a $224-million roadworks improvement program. An increased police presence on the roads and awareness campaigns about the dangers of speeding and drunk driving also paid off, Menard said yesterday. In 1948, 566 people died on Quebec roads. The worst year on record is 1973, when 2,209 people died.”

Isn't that amazing? The death toll, while it's still totally unacceptable, is down by almost 75 per cent, almost down to the level of 1948 - and imagine the difference in number of cars on the road then!

Just as the struggle for human rights and justice in the fields of feminism, racial equality, disarmament and so many other vital causes is never finished, but is full of small battles won, so the struggle for a healthy and happy home planet is about determination and plugging away, I believe. Every time we learn of a waterway or lake recovering its balance, being cleaned up - every time we hear of a Bill passed to help prevent pollution or a company or project being called to account for its impact on the earth, we can congratulate those who work so hard to keep us conscious of the state of the world. Without them, it wouldn't have happened! Of course the efforts need to be magnified in their intensity and scope, but the efforts are effective.

The introduction to today's theme, in April's Window, already noted that many members and friends of this congregation are environmental activists and practise ecological citizenship as individuals. I observed that as a community, too - as a collective - in the past few months we have welcomed the “Green Sanctuary” project as part of our ongoing activity. Then I suggested a question: how can our congregation best challenge, nurture and sustain us as we learn to live more responsibly in the interdependent web of all existence? How can we carry the spirit of Earth Day into our week-by-week congregational activities and life together? It's this that I'd like to focus on now.

The first way the congregation can both challenge and nurture us, and probably the most important way, I think, is by raising our consciousness. The display table in the foyer is an excellent example of this. Even if you just take a cursory glance at it on your way out, you're likely to think to yourself, “What an amazing amount of material; those Green Sanctuary people sure have a lot of information and they must care deeply.” If you look more closely, and pick up some of the literature to read at leisure, you'll inevitably be more educated and aware of environmental issues and concerns affecting the Earth. Consciousness-raising can be somewhat of a thankless task, as people persist in telling you things you really aren't eager to hear; they may even seem a bit obsessed in their focus on whatís wrong with the way we live, but the witness of those who care most is probably our best hope for saving the earth. Linda Curry lent me some books to help me prepare for these reflections, and in one of them, called State of the World, from the Worldwatch Institute, I found this quotation from Robert Semple, editorial writer of the New York Times:

“[Rachel] Carson's dismal scenario of a ‘silent spring,’ where robins and other birds would not appear, did not in fact come to pass. But one powerful reason that her predictions were wrong was that her diagnosis was right.”

In fact, the book's author's point out, society heeded Carson's warning, enacting necessary reforms such as pesticide restrictions, thus avoiding - at least so far - the silence she predicted. May we listen to the warnings of the people in this congregation - John McRuer and Keith McLeod and the others who keep on trying, despite our resistance, to raise our consciousness and save us from our foolish abuse of the Earth.

The second way in which we can be ecologically sustained through belonging to this congregation is, I suggest, by seeing a good model here at Unitarian House. We're just starting on that: we're getting an environmental assessment of this building to find out how we can be less wasteful in our use of energy; we've started being more systematic in our recycling efforts - you may have noticed the new blue boxes down in the kitchen and in the office up here; and we have a composter all set to go when we find the right place to put it. We're noticing that people like Sherry Ottman have for a long time been quietly and modestly taking our garbage away and helping keep Unitarian House clean. I think we have a long way to go in being more thrifty and sparing with our use of paper, but most of us are at least using both sides of a sheet for handouts and communications.

We have a long way to go, as well, in cutting down on our use of cars, but more and more we're encouraging people to car pool to get here, and applauding those who walk and cycle, and thinking about how when we move to our next building it will need to be easily accessible by public transportation. We're applauding our members who get politically involved in the environmental movement, such as Jack MacAulay, running for the Green Party. Little by little we are beginning to model for each other a responsible way of living on the Earth.

One of the prime purposes of a Unitarian congregation is to give each other hope, and we can find grounds for hope as we see and learn from each other's individual and collective attempts at ecological balance. A classic book, Gaia: an Atlas of Planet Management, reminds us:

“This is not the first time that the Earth's community has encountered crisis. Gaia [the name used for Earth seen as a living organism] has even benefited from periodic upheavals. Out of crisis can come advance, provided the impetus of change does not ‘overshoot’ into catastrophe. If we can match up to the crisis, Gaia may well move forward into an unprecedented period of development - development in its proper broad sense, embracing development of Earth's resources and of humanity's capacity for caring.”

We can model for each other a faith, based not on doctrine, but on our experience and observation, that catastrophe can be avoided if we give our best efforts to the cause. This can be a community of hope for an interdependent web that's beautifully intricate and tenderly valued, rather than hopelessly tangled and treated with disdain.

And the third way of furthering our sense of connection with the Earth, and therefore of our determination to care for the Earth, is by getting close to it. Now, you know I have a bias here because I'm crazy about gardening and like nothing better than grubbing about in the ground whenever I can, helping plants to grow. I don't feel apologetic about that bias, though I realize there are many different ways of connecting to the Earth. For you, it might be long walks in the country, or belonging to a Naturalists Club - or even a Naturist Club, which is quite different! It might be raising your own vegetables in a Community Garden sponsored by The Working Centre, or caring for a window box on your balcony. It might be visiting a local park and looking closely and appreciatively at the abundance of life around the lake, in the trees, on and under the soil. I suspect itís no accident that Earth Day takes place in April, just at the best time for starting or renewing a relationship with nature. Take advantage! Exploit the time of year! Neglect less necessary tasks in order to pay attention to the Earth!

A very small contribution I'd like to make to those of you who don't have gardens, or any of you who like to visit other gardens, is to invite you into my backyard at any time. The garden gate is never locked, and you're welcome to drop in and enjoy - you don't need to call in advance. If you find John or me at home, by all means knock on the door and say hello, but if we're not, don't let it stop you. All I ask is that you notice something and tell me about it when you next see me - I'll really enjoy that!

I began with words from Dylan Thomas, and I'll end with words from another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Please try to be tolerant of his being a Jesuit priest as far as religious language is concerned, and a creature of his time as far as gender-exclusive language is concerned, and let the spirit of his words reach you if they can, with a message of hope for the Earth and for ourselves.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

May this be a time in the life of this congregation when we grow green together. Happy Earth Day, everyone! So may it be.