Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/environment-politics/page/23/)
About efforts to treat the environment as sacred, to save species and ecosystems. Biophilia.
I simply love this article. Key quote:
Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience. It’s not that he doesn’t get it.
Here in Brazil, some friends decided to put a new spin on April Fool’s Day. The prank was this: instead of tricking people with an “untruth,” why not encourage people by announcing something that we wish were true. “We decided to come up with some ‘fictitious’ headlines that we would like to announce. But the good news is that all this is really possible. It could be true.”
A San Francisco lot that once held a Lutheran church, which burned down in 1995, and has been a wasteland since then, is now being turned into an urban farm by volunteers. The group leader is a man named Tree. “Doing things for free encourages people to share,” Tree said. “It encourages people to be community, to be family. It provides people the chance to be generous with each other.”
Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions. These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say.
We had an email from a reader, Nancy Oden:
I’m an organic farmer up here on the North Coast of Maine, also political & environmental activist for over 40 years (yikes!) now. We have to come up with solutions as to how people can survive these manipulated economic crises – my response is on my website http://www.cleanearth.net. I checked it out. Some quotes from Survival: Here’s What We Can Do:
When working families lose their jobs, and then lose their homes, how can they stay afloat as a family, given that living in one’s vehicle is not acceptable? Maine has plenty of land and water, making us ideal for farming…
As many of my readers know, I feel incredibly lucky to live in Madison, where wild birds and animals are plentiful. In fact, my first post on this blogsite last summer concerned a mink I saw in my backyard. Lately I’ve been enjoying a gaggle of turkeys in our neighborhood (or a covey or flock — whatever it’s called).They sleep in the trees close to our house and feed on the nearby golf course during the day. I’ve never had any trouble with them, but some folks have recently found them aggressive. Four people out walking were chased by several, and a child walking to and from school was harassed as well.
The year before I left small town New York for this job at Tikkun, a few of us in our Network of Spiritual Progressives chapter got together to reduce our carbon footprint. We used a workbook by David Gershon called Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5000 Pounds. It was interesting to me how different the small group experience was from just reading about the need to do various things. I already knew much of what the book said, but in our regular group meetings we discussed the details of how difficult or easy it was for each of us to implement the necessary changes. We became better friends and we developed a sense of upbeat possibility: “I’m really going to do this” turned into “I’m doing it!”
You may have heard that The Obama administration has approved a $8 billion loan guarantee to support the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If the project goes forward, the plants would be the first built in the United States since the 1970s. Conrad Miller, who wrote “Energy Generation in the Obama Years (No, Nuclear Power Is Not “Safe and Clean”)” for Tikkun last summer, has drawn our attention to what sounds very much like a promise by Obama on campaign that he would not promote nuclear energy until safety issues had been dealt with. Wednesday’s New York Times article on environmentalists’ disappointment with Obama stated that
Mr. Obama has long supported nuclear power, as a senator and as a candidate for president. Employees of the Exelon Corporation, the Chicago-based utility that is the largest operator of nuclear plants in the United States, have been among Mr. Obama’s biggest campaign donors, giving more than $330,000 over his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Ultimately I would love to be able to produce art which helps people respect and connect with the natural world in a more realistic way. To make them aware of their dependence on it and the way their choices and actions affect it. It’s not something to fear, or to control, or to endure while we wait for some Great Hereafter – it’s the only home we’ll ever know, and we’re doing our best to wreck it for our kids.–David Bygott
Did you realize the giraffe antelope has the ability to stand upright on its hind legs? Did you know there was any such thing as a giraffe antelope? Chances are you didn’t.
You might think, on this site, that I would be talking up a sacred biologist, someone who combines a spiritual worldview with strong scientific credibility, but I don’t know too many of those (Francis Collins is one). I look forward to seeing more come out of the woodwork as this century progresses. This purely scientific story, though, does have spiritual implications for us. It tells us that the whole biosphere is much more interconnected at the DNA level than biologists including Darwin previously thought. I’m throwing in a related story about our human DNA, which it turns out isn’t so simply human after.