News with Nuance: Sept. 29, 2023

Your Friday dose of News with Nuance: the week's biggest stories, unpacked + more ..

Hi Readers,

Maybe it’s the gradually changing leaves, or the massive temperature swings each day from breezy chill in the mornings to sweaty sun in the afternoons - or maybe it’s the fact that both of my kids have birthdays within three weeks of each other in this end of September/early October time period. Maybe it’s my own age, and my own ever-increasing sense of my own mortality and relative insignificance in a massive world.

(I know - we matter - immensely - to each other and to God. But hey, sometimes a little perspective isn’t a bad thing!)

All this to say, as I emerge from a cold turned sinus infection and a busy weekend spent supervising school-age boys at a rowdy and noisy waterpark - I write to you this week with a bit of a sense of whiplash, as well as a desire to slow down and take stock, before the ongoing change and transition of life reasserts itself.

I’ve always been a person who cares about government and politics - more from a policy perspective than a partisan one, and therefore I always try to watch televised debates, for any race, from local to national. Dutifully, then, I watched the GOP Presidential Debate this past Wednesday evening, even though frontrunner and former President Donald Trump was nowhere to be found (except on Truth Social?). Even as I watched, though, I found my mind wandering, likely as a coping mechanism from frustration and exhaustion rather than mere boredom. At a time in history when so much is changing, and so many are in need of a functioning government to help us navigate this change in our society and our climate - we are left instead with a refusal to answer substantive questions and a willful disregard of the “facts on the ground” like Trump’s perilous legal status, or the question of women’s reproductive rights under a Republican administration (for a party that staked its identity on ending Roe v. Wade for most of my life, Republicans now seem clueless about how to actually govern in a post-Roe world, and the candidates spent less than 2 minutes talking about it on Wednesday night, according to

Jessica Valenti

).

I find myself scouring news reports each and every day just to find the human stories: the faces and families amidst the too-often faceless crowds and lifeless charts and statistics. I do this to remind myself that individual human lives are sacred, just as my own is. And even as everything shifts, we still wake up each day to this “one wild and precious life,” and I don’t intend to let mine pass me by without living it, and sharing it with you.

Let’s get to the news … with nuance …

In Kongiganak, Alaska, residents had to stop burying their dead in the oldest part of the cemetery because it was sinking as permafrost melted into watery swamp. Digging new graves was making it worse, reporting KYUK, an NPR affiliate in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta

Photo by Teresa Cotsirilos/KYUK

The Headline: When the dead don't stay buried: The grave situation at cemeteries amid climate change

Why should we worry about the plights of long-dead bodies in a world where climate change is threatening the lives of children, infants, young adults, and senior citizens alike - each and every day - as floods crush homes in Libya and Moroccans dig out from a catastrophic earthquake earlier this month?

Well - as this oft-cited quote from Sir William Ewart Gladstone says: “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender mercies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.”

While many today are considering more environmentally friendly alternatives to traditional burials, the fact remains that the destruction of burial grounds and even the revealing of long-buried caskets due to climate change marks something devastating about the impact of humans on this world, and how hard those of us living today need to work to heal and repair.

As a pastor, I’ve long appreciated the importance of funeral rites in honoring not only the grief of death but also the sacredness of life itself. The same can be said for the feeling I get each Memorial Day, when I return to the military cemetery where my grandparents are buried near my home, and I gaze upon the undulating bone-white headstones, remembering intensely the cost and carnage of violent war.

In times of violence, tragedy, and disaster, the sight, smell, and magnitude of dead bodies is one of the longest-lasting trauma effects on survivors. Just think of the callousness of mass murderers like the Nazis and other architects of genocide, who showed no consideration for those who they killed, often forcing other prisoners to “dispose” of their bodies. Think too of long-unidentified burial grounds in America and Canada at “boarding schools” for Native American children, or at Catholic “homes for unwed mothers in Ireland.”

One of the ongoing tragedies of the migrant crisis in Europe today, where thousands risk their lives in unseaworthy vessels to travel across the Mediterranean and seek an escape from the violence and poverty of their homelands, is that many who die at sea are never officially identified, leaving their loved ones with an ongoing sense of loss, but no final resolution or closure. Read more about this story in the Jan. 13 edition of News with Nuance.

All this to say - the story of the destruction of graves, the rising of coffins out of permafrost in Alaska and jutting out of cliffs in Mississippi as erosion decimates the riverbank and sends bodies into the water below - this story reminds me how hard we have to fight to maintain and protect the value and meaning of individual human lives in a world increasingly bent toward destruction and despair and nihilism.

And how futile it is to pretend that somehow we might be immune from climate change: that we should continue to drill and burn and destroy, and that somehow it won’t change us or affect our ability to honor human life with the dignity it deserves.

The Quote: Rising temperatures are thawing the permafrost into watery swamp as the ice underneath melts and loses volume, said Louise Farqurharson, a research assistant professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. Sinking graves are just one of many concerns warming creates for the state's Indigenous communities.

At the opposite corner of the nation, 7.4 inches of rain in a few hours swamped parts of Bay County on Florida’s northern Gulf Coast in October 2021. As the skies cleared, Norman Forehand walked through the flooded Callaway Cemetery to check on his father. 

The family had already reburied him after an earlier flood and were hoping they weren’t going to have to do it again, Forehand said.

Story by Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA Today

Of course, human lives aren’t the only lives that are being stripped of their dignity by human-caused climate change. This story, about a black bear in Colorado whose intestines were clogged with garbage and discarded human food waste, broke my heart.

The Headline: 'They bombed everywhere': Survivors recount Karabakh attack

Content Warning: The link above contains disturbing content about the death of children

While the first story today demonstrates the violence done to the earth by climate change, and the ways that violence destroys the sacred nature of life - we read this second story about another visceral attack on the sacred nature of life, this time in the genocidal assault on the ethnic Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave long populated by Armenians but located entirely within the borders of Azerbaijan.

For months now, Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh have been suffering under