Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/environment-politics/page/24/)
About efforts to treat the environment as sacred, to save species and ecosystems. Biophilia.
Well, of course we do. Some new invention that gets us all the energy we want from renewable sources? Isn’t that the holy grail of environmentalists these days, the only way to stave off global warming? Or is it? Today’s headline news is about nuclear fusion again.
One of the main criticisms we at Tikkun have reluctantly had to make of the Obama administration from the start, has been his failure to even “pragmatically” include a genuine range of opinion in his cabinet. He took Geithner and co. from the corporate / financial world, but did not balance those “centrists” (in any European country they would be well to the right of center) with strong progressives. When he did take on a progressive leader — Van Jones — he dropped him like a hot potato as soon as criticisms came up from the Right. One of the disappointments was the choice of Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.” — Erik Otto
Just south of America’s littlest big city, across the highway from where the 49ers play, a raucous city of refuse rages 24 hours a day, fed by a never-ending river of San Francisco’s garbage. This is Recology, also known as the San Francisco dump. Recology is on the front line of an effort by the city of San Francisco to achieve a state of garbage transcendentalism known as “Waste Zero” (nothing wasted, nothing buried, nothing burned).
In response to one of the comments on my humorous post “Satan Responds to Pat Robertson on Haiti,” I found this article on the Voodoo view of the quake. Vodou is the earth-based religion of Haiti, so it makes sense that a Vodou priest would view his country as a manifestation of Mother Earth. From the Washington Post:
Voodoo’s view of the quake in Haiti
By Elizabeth McAlister
Associate Professor of Religion, Wesleyan University
Vodouists in the Haitian diaspora are praying on their knees today, just as Catholics and Protestants are. Why did this devastating earthquake have to happen in Haiti, a country already so vulnerable that people live on a dollar a day, where on a good day, the government cannot employ or educate or provide health care for the majority? In Port-au-Prince, they are coping by searching and rescuing, sharing resources, crying, and praying.
Yesterday I posted some ecofeminist reflections on Avatar. Today I want to take on the racism issue that several Goddess Scholars as well as bloggers here at Tikkun Daily have raised. Originally I thought this movie was carefully crafted to bring the (mostly) white audience into an understanding that indigenous people already have — the importance, even sacredness, of their world ecology. The hero is Jake Sully, a human who becomes a Na’vi, thereby moving from one world to the other. He begins by betraying the people who ultimately become his own, so it’s not like his first actions are laudable — he’s actually an anti-hero in the beginning, not meant to be liked.
I’ve really been enjoying the Avatar discussion, both here on Tikkun Daily and on the Goddess Scholars List I belong to. I waited until I’d seen the film to read any of the posts, because I didn’t want to prejudice my reaction to it. The GoddessScholars’ discussion reminded me a lot of a Women and Science Fiction class I taught in the 1980s. In my classes I always had a check-in before we began (despite the fact that they were university courses), because then we had deeper discussions. One of the odd things about the Women and Science Fiction class that semester was that there was a sizable minority (about 7 women out of 24) who were big football fans.
There is an interesting article in the NY Times Ideas section today about Environmentalism as a Religion. It points out that environmentalism has the concept of guilt and sins (leaving the water running and the lights on), the righteous pleasures of being more orthodox (green) than your neighbor, and new heresies include failure to compost or refusal to go organic (I would add questioning global climate change). It has Satan figures (evil corporate chief executives), prophets (Al Gore), and even a belief in an imminent apocalypse if we don’t change our ways. While the article points out that “environmentalism as a religion” is not a new idea, it does provide a nice short summary of the concept. To what extent is this idea true, and if so, is that a bad or good thing?It can certainly be argued that two of the main purposes of religion are to (1) teach us how to live better and more ethical lives in a community with others, and (2) provide us with a connection to something that is bigger than ourselves.
From Raj Patel: The Value of Nothing
My newspaper this morning gave me hope. And brothers and sisters, that doesn’t happen very often. On the front page, taking up about one third of the sheet, there was an article entitled “Trying to open the ‘inner eye.'” It was a piece that described the new Center for Conscious Living, an offshoot of the Church of Religious Science, which the pastor said is “reinventing the idea of church, with ‘stand you up music,’ meditation, singing, chanting and ‘an inclusive message of self-empowerment.'” Above this article, the top story was about our governor’s clean energy plan, in which 25 percent of the Wisconsin’s energy must come from wind, solar, biomass, or other renewable sources by 2025. My friend Jack Kisslinger, whose website is called Planet for Life, tells me that 25% might be a good number, but it has to be 25% of reduced overall energy consumption. So the governor’s goal is at least a step in the right direction.
Long ago–actually not that long ago, less than two centuries–the peoples of the North American Pacific coast knew how to maintain salmon stocks and share them so everyone had enough. They had the technology to wipe out the salmon as well as we do. They restrained themselves. More on that below. Today, those of us who eat fish wonder what salmon is safe to eat.