The Treasure of the Outdoor Community

Linville Gorge from the summit of Hawksbill Mountain. Photo Credit: Brett Haas

By Brett Haas

Brett is a UN Climate Observer at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai and a participant in the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP2023).  The views expressed in this article are the writer’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of CCOP2023 or any of our partners and partner organizations.

Trudging into the woods of Western North Carolina, an old man with a heart for the Lord spent his days praying while surrounded by trees. Everywhere around him, the world seemed to be falling apart. COVID-19 upended everyday life, sending almost everyone into lockdowns and a “new normal”. This man, Fred Lunsford, was moved by God to toward a day of “Praying on the Mountain”- which was May 5, 2020. Thousands of people joined in virtually to pray; and on that day, I decided to attend Appalachian State’s grad program- thus beginning the journey towards climate action and COP28. Both on that day and the next day, I journeyed into the peacefulness and solitude of Pisgah National Forest. Perched atop a lookout of South Harper Creek Falls at the end of a long gravel road, God’s presence met the stillness that was broken by the sound of blowing trees.

            The outdoors. A place of refuge. A place of wonder. A place of adventure- and freedom. A place that declares the praise of the Lord (Psalm 148)- and a place to be with Him. His creation spreads out in vast expanse- from the rocky crags of Linville Gorge to the massive underground formations of Worley’s Cave. It touches the seldom travelled logging tracks of the Black Mountains and the ladders of Grandfather Mountain. I would hear of stories from the Gorge Rats hiking group in my area who loved to explore the massive Linville Gorge. Stories of wildfires that burned entire trails and scarred the landscape. Stories of the flood that changed Linville Falls forever. Yet I also heard stories of generations who settled in the nearby valleys and called this place home.

            Yet could the climate crisis turn the outdoors into something totally different- a torrent of destruction? Could our great refuge no longer be the refuge that it was? More frequent and severe wildfires have dotted the landscape, closing large sections of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and levelling towns like Paradise, CA. Costal areas in Alaska, Canada, and other areas are being eaten away by the ocean accompanied by more powerful and severe storms. More of our wild spaces are being sold or deforested to make way for developments, agriculture, and profit. As COP28 begins, I and many other delegates will find ourselves in some of the finest architectural achievements that mankind has ever produced in Dubai. Yet as this conference begins, I ask myself a different question: “How can we reconnect with nature?” And more importantly: “Can our natural environment be a way to share about our Creator?”

            A celebration echoed through the wooded holler in western North Carolina. Scores of volunteers clapped as golden shovels hit the ground. After nearly a year of trail building and hard work, the wheelchair accessible Meadows Trail was finally open in Old Fort, NC! The G5 Trail Collective community created a trail for even the most vulnerable to have access to the outdoors. During that weekend, I ran into mountain bikers, ultra-runners, and forest rangers. We were united by one thing in common: a love for the outdoors. This is the outdoor community, and they are everywhere. They form bonds of fellowship while hiking the rugged peaks in Kosovo. They relax in the hostels of Leadville, CO, waiting for a conversation as I walked up to them after thirteen days on the Colorado Trail. They are bold and willing to push the limits of adventure in the underground caves. They also care about our Earth and our climate. A lot of them are young.

            But many of them are searching! And many of them are wondering about the big things in life. Is God out there? What does nature ultimately tell us? Yes, we are at a crossroads! How can the Church walk with them in this journey? Brothers and sisters, we must reach out to them! But how? How can we orient ourselves to see God change lives forever? One key lies in the crisis that is affecting all of us: climate change. The science tells us that reducing greenhouse gas emissions gives us a fighting chance to slow global warming and prevent significant adverse climate related phenomena. But could it be that taking action is not just about the earth and the science? It’s ALSO ABOUT PEOPLE- SOULS. It’s about building the bridge to where someone wants to open up about their life because YOU CARE. It’s about reaching more people with the Gospel because WE WANT TO PROTECT THE OUTDOORS THAT BOTH OF US CHERISH! At Appalachian State, a lady who loved the outdoors prayed and started a ministry that brought international students together. Over this semester, our group ate dinner, hiked in Virginia, and spent time getting to know each other as friends. Yet I walk into COP28 knowing that many, many outdoor loving people like her with a heart for service and people are out there. Some of them- I personally know. And they might just be who the Lord uses to build His kingdom. And so the question remains- what will we do to show His witness from above?

Climate Change is a Fairy Tale

by Heather Phelps

Heather is a UN Climate Observer at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai and a participant in the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP2023).  The views expressed in this article are the writer’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of CCOP2023 or any of our partners and partner organizations.

We love fairy tales. There’s a version of Cinderella dating back around two thousand years and we've been telling them ever since. 

There are those Disney popularized, of course: Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. There are those nearly as famous even if they've never quite made the line-up of the Disney Princesses: Hansel & Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Jack & the Beanstalk. Then there are the hundreds (or perhaps thousands) of far more obscure ones: The White Cat, The Six Swans, Finist the Bright Falcon. There are arguments about why so many fairy tales contain so much violence, and whether they're truly suitable for children - or, on the other hand, complaints that Disney did a terrible disservice by bowdlerizing the true, original, bloody versions of the tales (though if we’re being pedantic, the French version of Cinderella which Disney based their movie on actually predates the toe-chopping Brothers Grimm version by over a hundred years).

So why do these stories keep sticking with us?

There's a great quote by G.K. Chesterton: "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."

And that brings us back to climate change.

The science of climate change is not a fairy tale - it's very real. And to anyone paying attention, who thinks through the future implications, it's very scary.

Fairy tales are filled with terrifying villains - evil witches and wizards, kings and queens, trolls and monsters and, yes, dragons.

And right now we have a dragon ravaging our Kingdom. It's burning our forests, ruining our crops, and consuming our people with its voracious appetite. And it will only grow bigger and stronger and deadlier as time goes on. People are huddled in their homes, terrified, but not sure what to do.

And that's why we need stories. It's so easy to lose hope and fall into despair. It's so easy to think it's someone else's problem - someone who's older, stronger, and wiser. It's easy to get discouraged by the vast forces arrayed against us, both those who have actively worked to ruin the world for their own profit for decades, and those who simply stand on the sidelines and heckle any possible plan of action.

But this is what fairy tales teach us: dragons can be fought - and defeated. And it's not the expected heroes who save the day, either. It's the third son, youngest and least important, whose kindness and humility prevail when his older brothers fall prey to their own pride. It's the sister who works in silence for years to sew nettle shirts to break the curse on her siblings, persevering in the face of scorn and disbelief. It's the ones who offer food and a kind word to strangers, and have the wisdom to accept advice in return.

And against all odds, they prevail, where everyone else had assumed all hope was lost.

This is what we need, in the climate fight: the courage and hope to be part of a story. To use that story to bolster our courage when it starts to weaken, because despair is the one thing the hero of a fairy tale cannot, at any cost, allow to consume them. The only sure way to fail the quest is turning around and going home - even sitting down and having a good cry will sometimes succeed in summoning the most unexpected people to our side to help.  And then, we pick ourselves up and keep going.

Unlike fairy-tale dragons, climate change cannot be slain in a single mighty blow. Even reaching net zero new emissions will leave enough CO2 in the atmosphere to prevent our climate from simply going back to normal. But isn't that the way of stories - we can't go home again? And the climate dragon does have a useful feature fairy tale dragons don't: any improvement is a good improvement.

We may not keep warming below 1.5°C, but even so, 1.6°C warming is better than 1.7, which is still an improvement over 1.8.  

Maybe the better analogy isn't that of a dragon, but a curse  –  one the fossil fuel companies have cast on the whole world. It won't break all at once, but if our efforts prevent a single flooded village here or a single plague-stricken town there, it'll be worth it.

Whether you're the youngest son or oldest daughter, Puss in Boots or a mischievous fairy, you have a spot in this story we're all writing together. And fifty years from now, as we're telling this story to the generations coming after us, what part do you want to have played?

Fighting dragons and breaking curses are hard. Scary. Adventures always are. But they need to be done and someone has to step up and do them. And boy, do they make good stories afterwards.

Our Climate Purpose Must Be Clear

by Lowell Bliss

Lowell is the co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program (CCOP) that will be bringing emerging leaders from under-mobilized constituencies to COP28 in Dubai, UAE, Nov 29- Dec 12, 2023. This blog post first appeared at creationcaremissions.org on January 27, 2020. It is posted here as an example of: 1) how we can make our the purpose clear in our climate messaging; and 2) how CCOPers can use this space at COP28 for their own blogging.

I accepted it as a given when the Kansas Leadership Center listed as one of its five underlying principles about leadership: Your purpose must be clear. “People have to care,” they say. “You have to care enough to do something different. Without a clear sense of purpose, nothing is going to change" (KLC Handbook, 9). Shortly thereafter, when I encountered Simon Sinek’s TedTalk, I immediately understood what he meant when he said that such people or organizations like Apple, Martin Luther King or the Wright Brothers all “start with Why.” Sinek said, “By ‘why,’ I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? . . . The inspired leaders and the inspired organizations—regardless of their size, regardless of their industry—all think, act and communicate from the inside out.”

That’s one of the reasons why I have found our climate targets to be so problematic. When I have stood before an audience with a copy of The Paris Climate Agreement in my hand, and declared “Our purpose is “to prevent an average global temperature warming of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels,” I feel even my own consciousness scrunching up to say, “Huh?” UN Secretary-General António Guterres took a giant leap forward in clarifying our climate purpose when in September of 2019 he wrote every single head-of-state and challenged them to pursue “Climate Neutrality by 2050.” Wow, just four words. That’s even shorter than John F. Kennedy’s challenge before Congress in 1961: the US “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

Nonetheless, anyone in Kennedy’s audience could go outside and look at the moon. They might know of its distance there and back (477,710 miles.) The nature of the challenge is crystal clear. In September of 1961, at a packed football stadium at Rice University, Kennedy was additionally able to drill down into the inspirational “Why?”:

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

“Carbon Neutrality by 2050” might be a clearer purpose than temperature preventions, but that doesn’t make it clear. Do you know for certain what “climate neutrality” means? And why is the year 2050 significant? And, equally important, what in the statement, as a rallying cry, should make you care? I appreciate Secretary-General Guterres’s challenge, and I do adopt it as my own, but I also recognize that it may take more than just its four words to make our purpose clear. And so, I undertook an exercise:

Our Climate Purpose Must Be Clear:
“Carbon Neutrality by 2050”
But what does that mean?

Before I took up this explanatory challenge, I gave myself another one. I borrowed from a popular urban legend from the 1980s that goes like this: the CEO of Sony one day walked into a meeting of his engineers. He pulled out a small block of wood and placed it dramatically on the table among them. “Design for me,” he told them, “a tape player of superior sound quality that is no larger than this block of wood.” The result was the first Sony Walkman. For me, I was determined to fit everything I wanted to say on a single half sheet of paper, the size of what we used to use for church bulletin inserts. If you read it out loud, it clocks in at a two-and-a-half minute “elevator speech,” which should be okay so long as you and your listener are both travelling up to the top floor. After choosing a suitably evocative photo, here’s what I came up with for my half-pager:

Simply, that the nations of the world would live
in balance with how God has created
our common home.

When God created his oceans, vegetation, and rocks, he gave them capacity to absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at an astounding rate of 9.5-11Gt of CO2 per year. That’s drawing out of the sky the equivalent weight of one billion African elephants every year. We call these carbon sinks.

We want to live in balance with how God created the world. We want to honor what our Creator God had in mind when he designed natural processes like his carbon sinks. What carbon neutrality simply means is that the total amount of CO2 that our human activities (like the burning of fossil fuels) puts up into the atmosphere would not exceed at least 9.5Gt in any given year, the amount that God designed his carbon sinks to handle. “Net zero” is another term for carbon neutrality:

9.5Gt emitted (minus) 9.5Gt sunk = 0
neutrality, balance, honoring God’s mechanisms

In 2019, the nations of the world emitted, not 9.5Gt of CO2, but rather 36.81Gt. It was another “carbon positive” year and that meant a further thickening of our atmosphere with these gas molecules which re-radiate heat back to Earth instead of letting it escape into space. We were once again out of balance, and the accumulated effect of extra heat energy resulted in many devastating disasters in 2019, such as bush fires, floods, and droughts.

But what’s so special about the year 2050? If we can decrease CO2 emissions by 7.6 percent each year until a carbon neutral year of 2050, then the atmosphere will not be as thick with greenhouse gases as it could be. It will still be different than what our lifetimes, indeed our civilization, has ever known, and indeed many good people will suffer, but at least not as badly as what we would if average global temperatures were to rise over “1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels.”

So you see, “carbon neutrality by 2050” is the same thing as talking about the old 1.5ºC target, but in a way that is easier to understand and more directly under our control (“7.6% decrease a year, folks!”). Plus, with a bit more reflection, “carbon neutrality by 2050” ties us to some of our greatest values: we want to honor God by living in balance with how he created our common home.