Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/environment-politics/page/14/)
About efforts to treat the environment as sacred, to save species and ecosystems. Biophilia.
Christian community has an urgent role in this history. On the one hand, no church can magically separate itself from the spiritual disease of the wider society. If we could, we would be a cult; we would not be God’s love for a whole world, but against it. Jesus saw this. Stay here in the city, he told his disciples. Here in the church we already have the laboratory set up to help with civilization’s great test.
Like Sandra, I know first-hand how the polluting of this planet causes unnecessary and horrific suffering for present and future beings. And, like Sandra, I am frustrated about how little has changed for the better over the years, despite copious evidence she and other scientists have compiled that points to the links between toxic pollution and cancer, neurological disorders, asthma, and other disease. A myriad of health problems such as these and others abound from the lack of environmental regulations in the U.S. Also, like Sandra, as a mother, I worry about what the future holds in these environmentally degraded times for all children present and future. These days, protecting our children takes on a whole new meaning. So much is out of our control, and the stakes are crazy.
I’m sad that our children have to face such a massive problem. But it’s not healthy for them or for us to be in denial about the harms being done to our planet by what we accept as our “normal” way of life. I’m sure that taking action to address these harms is a healthier response than apathy, no matter what the outcome. This we can teach, as well as model, to our children.
We make war for oil. The only security our wars buy this homeland is the security to keeping pumping oil and gas into our cars, factories, and homes. We are willing to frack the foundations of the earth and pour millions of gallons of toxic chemicals into vaults of the earth in order to get our fix of fossil fuels. For the sake of oil in the Middle East, our leaders will not challenge Israel to treat Palestinians justly. Food supplies and prices are threatened the world over as we turn food into gas for our cars and drive farm soils to ruin in a deluge of petrochemicals. Racism, the bastard of American slavery and many other evil fathers, is finally one more means by which the privileged keep economic benefits for themselves. Hoarding power is the motor inside the chariots of empire—and empire craves oil, coal, and gas to fuel the engines of wealth. Mass incarceration, wage stagnation over the last 40 years, the gutting of clean air and clean water regulations; an unjust, unaffordable health care system, rotting infrastructure, crumbling public education and the destruction of democracy—all these evils are driven by the unregulated desire of power to get more power by whatever means necessary. Climate change is nature’s blunt instrument to respond to systems which are fundamentally irresponsible. Capitalism, if unregulated, is simply sin. And the wages of sin is death.
Francisco shared that his passion to create the Peace Summit was inspired by a vision 30 years earlier during his honeymoon in the U.S., when he felt he was given a “holy assignment” to help develop a new consciousness about man’s relationship with Mother Earth. The recurring mantra he heard for 30 years was “Day One,” but at the time, he confessed, he did not understand the meaning of the phrase. Only in the last few years did his mission become clear, and suddenly Day One came to mean the first day after the Mayan calendar would end and a new era would begin.
At home in the U.S., the fair trade labels on products in health food stores often conjures up images in my head of happy farmers smiling as they tend their organic crops together. But an afternoon at Santez’s house shatters this optimistic stereotype; ironically, working with the bees is what pushed Santez and his son to leave Coyutla once more in search of work, this time as undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
In Torah, holiness/sustainability is a living system of systems just as we humans are living systems of systems. Each component of the system—humans, the Earth, nature, time intervals, and the Godfield—are all in recursive relationship with every other part of the system. We humans are energy movers, drawing down from and sending up to the Divine source, and sending out to and receiving from other people, other life forms and the living Earth. The holiness system is in constant flux, needing to be balanced and corrected by human action.
I don’t see the Pope as a Messiah. He is a man who has suddenly assumed a position of huge political, spiritual, and moral power. Looking at his political views, there are real reasons to hope that he will be an ally on some of the most important issues, and we need allies. I am not sweeping over whether he may or may not have done as much as he could have in fighting the death-squads in Argentina, nor that he remains on the wrong side of the fight for equality in matters of gender and sexual preference. But in the fight to save the planet, and the fight against huge economic inequalities, the odds have shifted slightly towards our side. And I’m grateful enough to say a prayer of thanks for that.
We see the liberation of animals as another social justice movement for which the Jewish community should naturally feel sympathetic. Jews and vegans share common values such as justice, fairness, equality and compassion.
While my friends and I celebrate the Jewish people’s freedom from slavery at our veder in the traditional way, we also honor the work that we are doing to move towards a day when animals are considered moral beings.
The environmental crisis is the no. 1 spiritual challenge facing the human race in the 21st century.
Spiritual Progressives should provide leadership in this struggle. We understand the dimensions of the issue, understand that we cannot save the planet without defeating the globalization of materialism and selfishness which provides the engine for unlimited exploitation of the earth without regard to the future consequences, and understand that a serious environmental movement would not only be involved in the day-to-day challenging of the worst offenses (as will happen at the demonstrations this weekend) but would ALSO be seeking to change the fundamental underlying assumptions about what is rational, productive and efficient in our economy, politics, and daily life. That is what we do with our “New Bottom Line” which is at the center of our Spiritual Covenant with America, and with our proposed ESRA–the Environmental and Social Responsiblity Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.