DON'T TAKE SHORTER SHOWERS

Pretty much every hospital rooms looks the same, especially when you find yourself going in and out of dozens of them a day. But it is the lives you discover inside of them that supplies their unique characteristics. Some of those rooms, and the people within them whom I sat and listened to during my six months of Chaplaincy training at Mass General Hospital, have burned such vivid memories in my mind, I will never forget a detail of them.

One such person I met on the cardiac step-down unit. He had just survived a pretty serious heart attack, and was under-going rehab to get him ready to rejoin his life and hopefully take better care of his ticker this time around.

I found that the people I met on this particular unit were often the most reflective. After all, they had survived, at least so far, and were trying to figure out why, and what it meant going forward. They were often diving deeply into their stories, working to transform their lifestyle going forward. This particular gentlemen I found to be an especially stimulating conversation partner. He had been born and raised in India, educated in England and traveled extensively around the globe. His official profession was as a history professor, currently at a very well known and prestigious Boston-area University, but he was one of those people who knew something about everything, and always had a fresh take or unique perspective to share, so our conversations spiraled all over the place and were quite enjoyable.

For this reason, during his several week stay at MGH I often made his room my final stop of my shift, so we had time to drift wherever his extensive mind felt like wandering that day. One evening, after regaling me with some incredible stories of his youth in India, as I got up to head home, he said intriguingly: "Tomorrow, if you have time to come by, I will tell you why Mohatma Ghandhi is responsible for World War II." I tell you, this man should have written teasers for TV shows, as he was full of these closing-line cliff hangers, which he expertly targeted right to where he knew my interests lie, ensuring I would indeed be back. This claim, that Ghandi, as he knew already, one of my heroes of non-violent resistance, could have possibly been responsible for World War II, hit the exact target he aimed for.

The next day as I made my rounds it was all I could think of. How could he possibly make such an audacious claim? What did he know that I didn't that allowed him to say this so cavalierly? Finally, as the fall sun began to sink low over the Boston skyline, I entered his room, to find him clearly waiting for me, with a big expectant grin.

"So, Jeremy" he slowly began, "have you thought much about what I said last night?" Had I thought much about it, it was all I had thought about! I was totally stirred up, and he knew it, and would spend another few minutes playing with me before I finally demanded that he return to his outrageous claim.

"Well, Jeremy" he began, once again at his slower pace, "As you know, Ghandiji brought the mighty British Empire to its knees. Without a shot fired from his side, he chased the greatest empire in the world out of his country. The space of time between the Indian independence and the beginning of World War two was very short, just a few years really. So when Hitler began annexing land around Germany, England, the other European power then, was expected to lead the response, not the U.S. who was trying to do everything it could at that time not to get involved. So what does England do, they act like they are fighting the Ghandiji again, they attempt to take the lessons they think they learned from their last conflict and apply it to the next one, in this case, appeasing Hitler non-violently by handing him the Sudetenlands. Which on the one hand is very smart, to learn from past mistakes, correct? But on the other hand, when you match a problem with the wrong solution, very bad things can happen. So you see, it is our beloved Ghandiji who is responsible for World War Two."

Now, I knew this man well enough to know what he was doing. He didn't really believe that Gandhi was responsible for World War Two, but rather was making a much deeper point, in his uniquely provocative and fascinating manner, that it is really important to match the right strategy to the particulars of the problem you are working to resolve. This, I would come to learn over our time together was really his great lesson from history.

Which brings me to the true focus of our time together this morning on Earth day, as we celebrate our beautiful, fragile planet. It is no longer in doubt that our planet is sick and that our human actions are at the very least a significant contributing factor to the illness. But what we are going to do about it is far less clear. In fact it can get paralyzing pretty quickly to think about the enormity of it all. But I really agree with my friend the history professor and believe that what we need to do is get serious about naming the true problem, so we can find the right solutions.

Of course there are multiple fronts in our highly effective war on the environment, but I am going to just focus on water today. I have chosen water for two reasons. The first is the obvious fact that all life depends on it. It is literally essential to the survival of all living organisms, so it holds a pretty special place in our hearts. The second reason is that water is especially on our minds as California slips further into drought and we prepare for what promises to be a long, hot and very dry summer.

So we all know that we need to conserve our water, right? Every drop is so precious, so we need to stop watering our lawns, be more thoughtful about letting the faucet run when washing dishes or brushing teeth, and of course, as I have now heard many times, we need to take shorter showers.

Now, I will be honest, my motivation for learning more about how to truly conserve water went up about one-hundred fold when the pressure to take shorter showers began to emerge, because a nice long shower in the morning is my portal to becoming human once again after sleep. I love my long hot showers, they are truly a joy of my life. And the thought of giving them up has plagued me for years. But thankfully, I don't need to. Because it turns out that shower usage is a mismatched strategy for our problem. It just got started as an idea because it sounded good, there is absolutely no scientific data suggesting this is a good way to save water, in fact, quite the opposite, it turns out that showering is such an infinitesimally small percentage of total water usage it would barely change a thing if every single Californian stopped taking showers altogether. Well, at least it would barely change our drought situation. It certainly would make things a lot stinkier.

When I learned this blessed information it of course led me to wonder, then, where the places were that I COULD really make a difference with my water usage? And it turns out there are at least three very good answers to that question that I hadn't heard before:

The first is meat: According to a study by the University of California, it takes more than 5,200 gallons of water to produce one single solitary pound of beef, which is almost the exact same amount of water as you use in an entire year of daily showers. So it turns out that reducing how much meat we consume by even a small amount saves a lot of water. This is because raising livestock is an incredibly water-intensive process. It takes thousands of gallons of water to produce one hamburger, from raising the cattle, to slaughtering, preparing and delivering it to you. So if taking just one pound of meat out of your yearly diet does that much, just imagine if you pledged to substitute one meat meal a week with a veggie one? That would save a tremendous amount of water. Beyond that, polluted run-off into lakes and streams from the large-scale industrial livestock farms that most of our meat comes from is also one of the most significant sources of water pollution in the world. So, you'd be doing double duty. Using a lot less water and helping to lessen the amount of our water that becomes too polluted for use.

So eating less meat is the first and - as far as I could find - most significant thing you can do to help conserve water. The second thing is even less obvious, it is redoubling your efforts on recycling, especially when it comes to paper and aluminum. Yes, recycling paper helps save trees, but it actually is even more important as a water saver, because the process for turning pulp into paper uses hundreds of times more water per sheet than it does to return the recycled paper fiber back into the market. It is the same with aluminum.

But the third thing I discovered, which is actually really a big one and I had never heard it before, was cotton. Yes, we love cotton. There are few things that feels as good as pulling on our favorite, soft, fuzzy cotton shirt. But cotton is an insatiable plant, requiring far more water than most. How thirsty could this loveable plant really be I thought? And then I read this mind-blowing fact: the irrigation of cotton crops accounts for just short of 3% of all human water use. Period. Three percent just for cotton! Put another way, it takes about 20,000 liters of water to grow enough cotton for a shirt and pair of jeans. That really surprised me. One little change, taking better care of the cotton garments I have to get more life out of them, and buying a whole lot less, would make an enormous difference to the earth.

The truth is, it is easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the environmental crisis we are creating, but I take great hope from our past. As much as we humans can be reckless and selfish, we also truly do care. In the end, when we have put our minds to a situation, with the real problems on the table, we have accomplished some incredible things, things that seemed just as impossible as righting our ship does now.

Remember the hole in the ozone that was going to burn us all to a crisp? Every single member country of the United Nations signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987, banning the use of chlorofluorocarbons, otherwise known as CFCs, the chemical responsible for the thinning of this essential protective layer of our atmosphere, and quickly the process began to reverse itself.

Similarly, for many decades gasoline contained lead in order to help it run more smoothly through our engines. This was very helpful in terms of our engine's efficiency, but it turned out to also be extremely bad for all living organisms. Despite the horribly corrosive effect on the air and water, car manufacturers actually fought for decades to keep the lead in. One of the early important victories of the EPA was winning the right to regulate the components of gasoline. They quickly moved to phase out lead, and the air and water immediately improved.

Now, just a quick and bizarre historical footnote on these two environmental success stories. This may sound hard to believe but it was the exact same chemist at GM who both discovered Chlorofluorocarbons and the trick of adding lead to gasoline, single handedly delivering a potentially lethal one-two punch to our earth's gut, which reportedly led to one historian to argue that this chemist, a man by the name of Thomas Midgley, Jr. "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth history."

One of the core values of system theory is that every system contains all the information it needs to solve its problems. As our history shows, we can overcome anything. We simply need to stop kidding ourselves about the problem, and find the collective will to move towards the real solution.

So, don't take shorter showers. Unless of course you want to. But do invest in the things that will really start turning this problem around. Consider reducing the meat you consume. Think about how you might be able to get some more use out of the cotton garments you already own, and what other fabrics you might check out in the future. And see if you can up your commitment to recycling at least the paper and aluminum you use. But whatever you do, don't lose hope, because we have done this befor. Together, we will do it again.

May it be so, ashe.