Our planet, our home, our community, our church. We mark Earth Day by asking, “Do the shared things we call “ours” belong to us, or do we belong to them? Shared ownership sets up an exploitive principle known as “the tragedy of the commons.” But if we see ourselves as nodes on an interdependent web, parts of a shared whole, citizens of an ecological system, then we invite respect and care.

            We’re looking this spring season during worship, at two parallel topics.

            One has to do with the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism.  These seven statements were written in the 1980s as an effort to define the shared core of our Unitarian Universalist faith.  In a faith where you can follow your own path, follow your own conscience, express your own interests and ideas, what unites us?  The Seven Principles propose that we are united by an agreement of how we will conduct ourselves as we explore our lives and the world around us, build and sustain our church community, and make a positive difference in our neighborhood and the larger world around us.  The Seven Principles identify our faith by describing how we act, rather than what we believe or what we do.  Which is a pretty nifty way to describe our eclectic faith.

            Officially, the Seven Principles are included in the bylaws of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the organization of which our church is a member, and which exists to serve its member organizations with programs of support and consultation.

            Currently, the Article II of the UUA Bylaws which contains the Seven Principles is being considered for a radical rewrite.  The proposed revision will come up for a vote at this year’s General Assembly in June.  

            If you’d like to learn more about the proposed revision you can find it posted online.  We are also currently offering a study group online that will meet again this afternoon and next week.  Jacki Weber can connect you with that class.  You can also watch recordings of the class sessions.  And in two weeks, on May 5 after worship, we will host a forum to discuss the proposal and to consider how we would like our church’s delegates to vote for us at the General Assembly.

            So one of my purposes for this series of Spring sermons is to take a look at the Seven Principles and consider what they are and what we may lose if the Revised Article II language is approved.  Today, because tomorrow is Earth Day, I want to look at the last of the Seven Principles, the one with the most clear connection to environmentalism.

            “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part.”

            It is a guiding principle of our faith, as we explore ourselves and the reality we live in, and move through our lives and the world around us, that we conduct ourselves with “respect for the interdependent web of all existence, or which we are a part.”

            My second goal for this sermon series is to complete the fifth task of the five tasks of an interim ministry.  This is work that congregations are advised to undertake during the transition period between one settled ministry and the next, as we are in now.  We looked at the first four tasks earlier this year:  history, leadership, mission, and vision.  Now we look at the last:  connections.

This is the work of reminding ourselves that though every Unitarian Universalist church is an independent congregation, that we are not alone.  We are connected to supportive congregations around us:  sister UU congregations, interfaith partners; local organizations, like the NOHO Home Alliance; and the larger faith of Unitarian Universalism through our membership in the UUA.

            It’s through the UUA that we have access to a UU faith-based environmental movement called the UU Ministry for the Earth.

            The Ministry for the Earth started back in 1989 as “the Seventh Principle Project”.  Their first project was to publish, in 1991, a manual called, the Green Sanctuary handbook to assist congregations in learning about environmental issues and adopting environmentally conscious practices in their communities.  In 2022, the Green Sanctuary became an accreditation program of the UUA where congregations who complete environmentally-focused work, and meet a set of environmentally-healthy standards in their church can be certified as a Green Sanctuary.

            Currently the Green Sanctuary program is offering an initiative called The Green Sanctuary 2030, Mobilizing for Climate Justice, a process that includes four elements:  Congregational Transformation; Justice; Mitigation; and Adaptation and Resilience.

            The Seven Principles are arranged artfully, you may have noticed, in concentric spheres, from the individual worth and dignity of every person, in the first principle, through the interdependent web of all existence in the seventh principle.

            And by the way, if you’re not familiar with the seven principles, they are printed in the front of our grey hymnal and are also posted in our Narthex.

            But there’s an interesting aspect of these concentric spheres of concern.  To care about oneself as an individual is given.  Of course, I care about my own health and happiness.  But as the spheres expand outward to include more and more people, and eventually “all of existence” our concern may start to diminish, or vanish all together.  Do I really give the fate of some anonymous person on the opposite side of the world the same weight I give to my own fate, or a loved one close to me?  Few of us act that way.  We might retain a sense of concern for that largest sphere but only in an abstract way, not the concrete way that we care about ourselves.

            This step-by-step enlargement of our sphere of concern matches the line of human development.  As babies we are concerned only with ourselves.  We regard even mother and father as extensions of ourselves, whose purpose is to attend to our needs.  As we grow, we begin to recognize the reality of the world beyond us, and we find our continued healthy development depends on making reciprocal relationships with others persons.

            This human development matches the arc of spiritual development as well.  From a spiritually unhealthy ego centered only on the narrow self, we grow to identify with a reality beyond ourselves.  We see other people not as objects in our world, but as subjects like ourselves with their own interior lives and needs and hopes, equal in worth to our own.

            Our first principle addresses this spiritual point when it speaks of worth and dignity not for the self alone, but for every person.  Thus, reaching from the individual to the communal.  And our seventh principle speaking of the widest circle of concern circles back to the individual with the concluding phrase, “of which we are a part.”

            Environmental issues are complexified this way because they simultaneously address both the individual and the global:  the self, and the planet.  Work like the UUA’s Green Sanctuary program must speak to both levels:  what should I do, in my life to support the communal need?  What should my church do, in our shared space?  And also, what should all humanity do to care for the shared home of all living creatures?

            And here there is a tension, because what is best for me is almost always at odds with what’s best for the planet.  If we remain focused at the smallest circle of concern, I’ll make one kind of choice.  I’ll take the car!  I’ll throw away the plastic!  If I focus on the largest circle of concern, I’ll make a different choice.

But a choice I make to benefit the communal level will almost always be measurably less good for my own self while honestly having a negligible impact on the health of the planet as a whole.  So, it’s hard to not feel like a sucker for making personal sacrifices that hurt me without really helping anyone else.  My taking the train to work is not going to reduce sea levels in the Pacific islands, nor will my being uncomfortable in my own apartment appreciably lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, so crank up the AC!

            This tension arrives whenever individual actors occupy a shared space.  It’s a principle called the Tragedy of the Commons.

            The principle was first described in 1833 by an amateur mathematician named William Forster Lloyd.  He was thinking about the situation of a village that holds an amount of pasture land in common for all of the villagers to use to graze their flocks.  All the villagers have access to a single public space, a “common” that they share.  Every farmer brings their herd to the common, and the sheep wander throughout the shared space grazing from wherever they find good forage.

            For a long time, the arrangement works well.  Every farmer, and every sheep, receives what they need from the common.  And the sheep don’t outgrow the space because their numbers are held in check by outside factors like a war with a neighboring community, or wolves, or poachers, or disease.

            But eventually, the happy day comes when social stability is achieved.  Conflicts are resolved, security is assured, disease is conquered.  And this is where the situation turns tragic.

            The common supports a finite number of sheep.  More sheep than the maximum number overgrazes the common and the green turns to barren land and all the sheep and farmers suffer.

            But while the common is healthy, a different dynamic comes to the front.  If a farmer has 20 sheep, it would be to his advantage to have 21 sheep.  He gains the entire benefit of an additional animal, and the effect on the common of a single sheep is minimal.  The positive is all to the one farmer, while the negative is spread over all of the community.

            And, of course, the same is true for every additional sheep and for every farmer.  Every one of them would be better off, personally, with a bigger herd, whereas they won’t suffer a negative consequence until the situation becomes everyone’s problem.  If I were managing my private field it would be foolish to introduce more sheep than my field can support.  But in a common field it’s foolish not to introduce more sheep.  There’s the tragedy.  Self-interest and rational action lead inevitably to a situation where everyone loses.

            This happens in any case where there’s a shared space and individuals are free to act for themselves.

            John and I were talking about the Tragedy of the Commons in the case of the storage closet.  It’s a shared space.  Anyone is more or less free to bring whatever they want to the church and store it in the closet.  It’s to the advantage of any one person to take up as much room as they can claim for themselves.  Why should they be the sucker who takes up less room than they can?  But everyone else makes the same decision too until eventually the closet has become a disorganized mess with no room to move, and no room for the church to store what we actually need.

            Environmentalism brings up the same dilemma.  The earth is a shared space.  For much of human history the vastness of the land and air and oceans made it seem infinite.  There were enough resources for everyone to use as much as they wanted.  And outside factors like war and disease kept human needs in check.

            But in the last century or so, we’ve become aware of the finitude of our common earth.  Our population growth and appetite for consumption of natural resources is no longer held in check by outside forces.  Individually as persons, or as a single nation, rational self-interest says we should take as much as we can.  Take the car!  Use the single-use plastic! Consume more of everything!  But with all of us following that strategy to, the common is becoming unhealthy for us all and leading to an unhappy common future.

            What’s the solution to the Tragedy of the Commons?

            Well, you remember that at the beginning of the scenario the self-interest of each farmer, and the available resource of the pasture land, is held in balance by outside forces:  war, wolves, poaching, disease.  It’s only once those outside forces are neutralized that the simple dynamic of self-interest and shared resource grows to a tragedy.

            So the solution is to reintroduce outside forces.

            In the case of the church storage closet, the outside force might be church policy.  The Board, or the Building and Grounds Committee, or a Church Storage Closet Committee, could create rules about who gets to store what stuff, and how much, and where.  They could divvy up the space and enforce rules.  Or they could create a system of regular review, sorting, and culling.

            In the environmental context of our shared earth, Federal legislation limits the overuse of our shared resources:  only this number of oil wells, only this number of trees cut down, only this amount of fish pulled from the oceans. Environmental rules protect the common air and water resources.  In exactly the scenario of the original Tragedy of the Commons, western ranchers are only permitted to graze a certain size herd of cattle on our common BLM land.

            But as hard as legislation is to create and enforce with a nation, legislation gets even harder to do when it reaches beyond a nation to the entire planet where nations see themselves in competition with each other.  Why should I be the sucker, says one country, taking less than I can, when the benefit is all to me and the negative is shared by everyone?

            So another kind of outside force is also necessary.  An outside force that is actually an inside force, inside each of us:  a moral force.

            It has to do with the sense of spiritual development moving from the selfish ego to identifying the self with a larger sphere of concern.  It’s moving from me to we, from I to us, from mine to ours.  It’s moving from me as a person of worth and dignity to every person being a life of equal value.  It’s in that circling back of the seventh principle from “all existence” to, “of which we are a part.”

            And it has to do with that fifth of the five interim ministry tasks:  connections.  If we see other persons, or other countries, as separate from us, unconnected from us, then we will see them as competitors for our shared resources.  It’s every farmer for himself.

            But if we feel connected to others, and if we see others as an extension of ourselves, then there can be no competition.  Their gain is mine.  Their suffering is mine.  If we learn the spiritual truth that we are not isolated individuals on a infinite earth but are part of an “interdependent web of all existence” then we will treat the earth as though it were our private field, carefully managing the finite resource for the good of all, and for all time.

            Perhaps it is naïve to imagine a moral solution to a global crisis.  Indeed, in the article that first introduced the phrase, “the tragedy of the common” which is actually from a 1968 edition of Science magazine, building on the idea from 1833 by William Forster Lloyd, the magazine article author, Garret Hardin, speaking about the problem of population growth, argued that appeals to conscience would be insufficient.  No one, rationally, selfishly, would disadvantage themselves, in order to solve a global problem.

            But we do disadvantage ourselves, voluntarily, constantly.  I do it all the time, and I’m sure you do, too.  I return the shopping cart.  I take my trash with me when the movie finishes.  When there’s a mistake on the restaurant bill I have the waiter correct it and I pay what I owe.  I reuse the plastic bag.  I step aside.  I wait my turn.  I vote, though one vote hardly matters.  I stay late.  I lend a hand.  Every time I put up with the inconveniences of the subway and bus instead of driving my private car, I do my part to support an interdependent whole.

            Human beings are not only selfish creatures, we are also selfless creatures, and every individual has the capacity to grow more selfless as they mature spiritually.  Rational action doesn’t only mean selfish action.  Our rationality can also lead us to selfless choices.

            Self-interest, as William Forster Lloyd and Garret Hardin point out, is hard to overcome.  But growing in spiritual maturity doesn’t mean eliminating self-interest.  Spiritual maturity means identifying with a larger sense of what the self is, from just my narrow ego to wider and wider circles of concern.  The spiritually mature still act with self-interest but now from a “self” understood as an interdependent web of connections, where there are no “others” only “all of us” and there is no “mine” only “ours.”

“This we know,” warns Chief Seattle, “All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.  All things are connected.”  For negative, but also for positive, “Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”

Thus, the tragedy of the common can turn to celebration when we see that our common home makes common life, and common good, for us all.