Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/environment-politics/page/7/)
About efforts to treat the environment as sacred, to save species and ecosystems. Biophilia.
Our corporate money worshippers often attend services at churches and synagogues. But they worship during the workweek at the altar of money, and we, the 99 percent, have become their sacrificial lambs. Their chase after ever greater wealth is disrupting the very fabric of life on Earth.
The rooms in the Eco Center are named for their floors. The Rubber Room’s floor is made from salvaged conveyor belts from the Arkansas Kraft paper mill and Granite Mountain Quarry. The Beer Bottle Bottom room is named for the several thousand beer bottles in the floor. And the Rock Around the Clock room gave new life to the thick rocks that maintained the terrace around Ferncliff’s old pool. These whimsical rooms prove that waste is never necessary.
Content from our print issue is usually only available to subscribers, but right now we’re offering free access (for a limited time only!) to one article from our current issue on The Place of Hope in An Age of Climate Disaster. Click here to read the article, “Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry.” If you are already a subscriber, please share this article with your friends! And if you have not yet subscribed, we invite you to check out this critical and engaging article to see what you are missing. Though hope is critical to any political or social activism, big energy, along with Republican climate change-deniers have created an illusory hope industry founded on American Exceptionalism. We cannot throw our hands up and leave the health of the planet (and humanity) to be secured by technology, capitalism, or future generations, writes Charles Derber.
The biggest challenge is turning awareness into real action. It doesn’t just come up when people know about an issue — there has to be a real plan for what happens next.
“Scripture tells us that all of the world is God’s precious creation, and our place within it is to care for and respect the health of the whole,” says Union Theological Seminary President Serene Jones. “Climate change poses a catastrophic threat, and as stewards of God’s creation we simply must act.” Across the country, people are bringing the wisdom of their faith traditions to their work on climate change because they know they’re better together.
As long as corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the investments of their stockholders, they have no choice but to make profits their “bottom line.” But we are promoting a New Bottom Line, so that every corporation, government policy, our legal system, health care system, educational system, and every other major system is judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize love and caring, environmental sustainability and responsibility, ethical behavior and generosity, and our capacities to respond to the Earth with radical amazement, of which we are an important part.
When we celebrate Earth Day, we are giving thanks for the wondrous gift of life on Earth and are recognizing the paramount importance of protecting the Earth’s fragile life support system. This is a responsibility we can all share and when we embrace this humbling and unifying perspective our lives take on new meaning.
Today most of the population gets its living from land value. What I mean is that most of the population lives in cities where land values soak up a big part of earned income. That’s why a modern day version of the Jubilee land law must address land value justice rather than simply endorse redistribution.
Placing wholeheartedness at the center could build much more virtuous cycles between personal change and political action. Placing wholeheartedness at the center of our relationship to work could build much more virtuous cycles between personal change and political action. Author and researcher Elena Blackmore examines the role of empathy in economic transformation.
Why should a “corporate” business card trump one that reads “non-profit?” Once those monies from products are made, the dividends received and the stocks sold — where next and how best can these resources be put to work?