Tag Archives: Earth

Stamping out Affluenza

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Verse – “Dump and Run”

Lisa Heller lost a ring.

Dumpsters came to be her thing!

She taught students at her school

Making trash just wasn’t cool.

…

Donate stuff that still has use;

Reduce trash, avoid abuse

To the earth.  Take your measure:

Turn the trash into treasure!

…

Lisa started Dump and Run.

College students have great fun

Giving, sharing–have a sale!

Find a bargain, make a deal!

…

Help a group that helps the world,

Buy recycled things you need.

Like you avoid  INfluenza,

You can stamp out AFFluenza!

- Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, pays tribute to “Dump and Run”.

Dumping and running at the landfill

  At the end of the academic year, University of Illinois students drop off the “stuff” that might end up in the landfill to the University YMCA to be recycled by other students.

Former Executive Director of the University YMCA and Pastor of McKinley Presbyterian Church at the University of Illinois, Steve continues to host “Keepin’ the Faith” on Illinois Public Radio  every Sunday evening at 5:00 CST.

The Web of Sanity and Fullness

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Pond with morning mist evaporating

Pond with morning mist evaporating

A newspaper reporter asked me some questions. We were preparing for a First Tuesday Dialogues series on sustainability called “The Good Green Earth.” The series would bring five speakers, including  spokespeople from the Gulf of Mexico deeply engaged in hazard assessment, technology, and recovery in the wake of Deepwater Horizon.

What’s your sense of the possibilities and trends for sustainability in your work now and what does it look like in the future?

One of my inspirations is Paul Tillich, according to whom:

Being religious means asking passionately the question of the meaning of our existence and being willing to receive answers, even if the answers hurt.

Faith consists in being vitally concerned with that ultimate reality to which I give the symbolical name ’God’. Whoever reflects earnestly on the meaning of life is on the verge of an act of faith.

The Spider’s Web with Morning Dew

My calling as a pastor is to help us here at Shepherd of the Hill and here in Chaska literally “go out of our mind.”  Because the collective mind that has gotten us to this place is killing us and destroying the balance of nature.  So it’s to shake us loose from the mental and spiritual chains of species superiority, the mistaken notion that we – humankind – are the exception to nature.  It’s a call to help re-shape our understanding of ourselves as participants rather than owners, participants rather than conquerors or manipulators, members of a diverse natural order of interdependent life. The spiritual resources are there in Hebrew scripture, in the NT epistles to the Ephesians and to Colossians, and in the ancient respectful spirituality of some of America’s indigenous people. By “going out of our mind” we will come back into a the web of sanity and fullness.What factors do you see pushing towards or against sustainability?

Historian of science and technology Lynn White said flat-out the root problem of the sustainability crisis is religious or spiritual, and so is the solution.

So, number one, we have to address the old and emerging questions about what Tillich called “Ultimate Reality” and the meaning of our existence.  We have to go into labor to push the new theological and anthropological  paradigm free from the womb of the old destructive thinking.  What we are beginning to find as we go into this spiritual labor is that this more respectful, more holistic way of thinking is not new at all – it’s the older paradigm that got side-tracked by greed and pride.

Building of the Tower of Babel – Master of the Duke of Bedford

God has “come down,” as it were, to frustrate our attempts at building the secure city called Babel; God is making us nomads again who recognize that we and the Earth are already full, not empty. Every settlement comes to nothing. Every tower built as a monument to pride falls.And number two, and I’m afraid there is no other way to say this – we will never make it without leaving behind the economic system of greed. Capitalism is killing us.

The consolidation of wealth and corporate power have a stranglehold on national, state, and even local public policy. The members of the Boards of the oil companies sit on the Boards of General Motors and Ford.  So it’s no wonder that U.S. federal policies on transportation are car-friendly and suspicious of mass-transit, regardless of a car’s gas mileage. And obsolescence is built in because you can’t sell something five years from now if the old model is still like new. Our health care and the FDA are in the palm of the drug company’s hands so that it’s illegal to go across the border to fill your prescription in Canada.

Finally, the sustainability of the human species itself is, I believe, imperiled by chemical alterations that are meant to do good but that, in the long run, make us biologically less resistant and resilient. Our natural immune systems are being weakened by pesticides in the food we eat and by the pharmaceuticals we ingest from the drug store.

Black tar heroin - U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

Black tar heroin – U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

We have become a nation of addicts.  Addicted to illusionary dreams of abundance.  Addicted to prescription drugs.  Addicted to fast food and faster short-term solutions. Even instant gratification is too slow. Controlled by advertizing that sells us prescription drugs that’ll give you an immediate erection but may send you to the emergency room if it last more than four hours,or drugs that may ruin your liver or land you in a casket, and the real pushers are not the petty drug peddlers on Minneapolis’s North Side – they’re legal, they’re given license, while those who would shut them down are looked on as crackpots and throw-backs who are opposed to progress.So…what’s stopping real progress , a more Earth-friendly way of organizing human affairs that embraces reality itfself, “Being-Itself”?  The intransigent, legal, institutionalized arrangements of power and money, on the one hand, and our willingness to comply with the de-democratization of America that salutes the system of greed. We have to learn again, and we are – very slowly, pushing and screaming, that “the Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”. We have turned it over to the forces of greed and destruction.

The Good, Good Earth: Our Island Home

The Good, Good Earth: Our Island Home

We need to recover the gratitude and spiritual paradigm of a natural abundance in order to push against the false promises of those who have us believe that our lives and the world would be empty without all the stuff that’s in the landfills and washing ashore in the estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico.

So……Chime in, friends. How would you answer the reporter’s questions?

The World in an Oyster – an Earth Day reflection

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Oysters

A COMMENTARY FOR EARTH DAY - Rev. Gordon C. Stewart | Friday, June 4, 2010 – published by MinnPost.comThe “spill” in the Gulf of Mexico raises the most basic questions about how we humans think of ourselves.

We’re at a turning point. The crisis we can’t seem to kill in the Gulf of Mexico puts before us the results of a more foundational crisis than the black goo that is choking the life out of the Gulf. The uncontrolled “blow-out” raises basic questions about how we think of ourselves and the order of nature.

Fifteen years ago I was with a group of pastors who spent four days with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, whose mission is to protect and clean up the Chesapeake Bay. Our time there began with a day on the bay on a Skipjack, one of the last remaining motorless sailing vessels that used to harvest oysters by the tens and hundreds of bushels from oyster beds. The director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and an old waterman named Earl, who had worked the bay for 54 years, took us to school.

Back then the oyster population had shrunk to a fraction of 1 percent of what it used to be. Fifteen years before our visit the oyster population would filter all the water in the bay in three days’ time. A single oyster pumps five gallons of water through its filtration system every day.

The oysters were close to extinction; the bay’s natural filtering system was in danger. “It’s humans who’ve done this,” said the old waterman. “They’ll come back; I have to believe they’ll come back.”

Others were less hopeful. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources discussed the damage to the wetlands and the estuaries, the seedbeds of life. It had sounded the alarm for public action to protect the birthplaces of all the seafood we eat, the places on which the whole chain of life depends.

Deepwater Horizon fire
Deepwater Horizon fire

This week we heard from the Gulf of Mexico that the attempted “top kill” has failed and that the “spill” is spreading in every direction — not only on the surface, but below the surface — a glob the size of the state of Texas. I think of Earl and his Skipjack as I see the poisoned oysters in the hands of Louisiana oystermen whose livelihood depends on clean Gulf waters. “It’s humans who have done this.”

But it’s not every human who has done this violence to the Gulf. It was not the indigenous people of North America, nor was it the Moken people (“the sea gypsies”) who, because they see themselves as part of nature, anticipated the 2004 Asian tsunami while the rest of the world was caught by surprise. It was a specific form of humanity known as Western culture that sees humankind as the conqueror of nature.

Our language is not the language of cooperation with nature. “And God said, ‘… fill the earth and subdue; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth’ ” — (Genesis 1:28), a conquering view based in the idea of species superiority expressed in the phrase “top kill” for the attempt to plug the hole that is killing the oysters and fish of the sea.

Insofar as interpreters of the Book of Genesis have shaped this Western hubris, my Judeo-Christian tradition bears responsibility for this crisis. The idea of human exceptionalism springs from the Bible itself.

But no sooner do I sink into confession and despair than I remember a prayer that Earl called to my attention on the Skipjack 15 years ago, the prayer of St. Basil from the third century that offers a more hopeful understanding of ourselves, a view like Moken people’s that knows that the whole world’s in an oyster:

“The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. O God, enlarge within us the sense of kinship with all living things, our brothers and sisters the animals to whom You have given the Earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty, so that the voice of the Earth, which should have gone up to You in song, has been a groan of travail. May we realize that they live not for us alone, but for themselves and for You, and that they have the sweetness of life.”

 

Muskrat Heaven

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A story in preparation for Earth Day, April 22, 2012

Muskrat

I stand looking through the picture window at the pond behind the house.  The small nature raft in the middle of the small pond is peopled with Canadian geese preening in the mid-morning sun.   To their left, three or four ducks paddle across the pond – but something is different.

They’re moving much faster than usual. They don’t seem frightened; they’re just moving faster.

Then I see why.  A muskrat is chasing them – ten yards or so behind.  I’ve seen this before – mallards and muskrats playing a game of catch us if you can.  Speed up, slow down, speed up.  Nobody ever catches anybody and nobody ever gets caught.  They just chase and get chased.  It’s play.

As the mallards paddle past the raft with the muskrat in hot pursuit, the muskrat makes a sudden 90 degree turn, races at full speed and leaps up for the raft, the geese flapping their wings, scattering in flight just as the muskrat lands and springs into the air. A flying-muskrat in hot pursuit, an air-Jordan muskrat suspended in mid-air, a flying goose wanna-be, leaping and laughing for joy. Muskrat heaven!  Sheer unadulterated play.

I envy the muscrat, the ducks and the geese today. I know I’m making the story up, but the story I tell speaks aloud a yearning for more playfulness.  An enjoyment of each other with natural games that keep away the boredom and challenge our pretensions.

Nature raft with mallards

Nature raft with Mallards

I watch the pond a lot these days to learn about myself and us.  Oh, I know!  There’s also terror and danger in that pond – the snapping turtle lurks beneath the surface, the fox roams the edges, and my neighbor sometimes stands on his deck with his shotgun aimed at the little muskrat who dares to burrow his home under his manicured lawn.  But today all of that is beside the point – upstaged by ducks and geese and a muskrat in self-forgetful play. I stand looking through the window and give thanks for quacking mallards, honking geese and a funny little creature whose muskrat heaven restores my natural sense of play and joy.

Earth Day Poem

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Sunday, April 22, is Earth Day. My friend Steve sent this poem this morning.

Hope it lifts your spirits and causes you to do something crazy for the Earth.

“Earth Day” - Steve Shoemaker, April 20, 2012

Kites - Morro Bay Kite Festival

Earth Day is best observed with string and kite.

A little bit of wind is nice, but not

Required:  just hold the spool and run–take flight!

To make a kite, buy line and glue, get

Help by recycling– all the rest is free:

Day-old newspapers can be cut just right,

And sticks from fallen branches, two or three.

Your spirits will fly up just like the kite!

The House We Live In

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Gordon C. Stewart, April 3, 2012

The economy is broken. While most of us have been holding our breath, some of us have been out buying the most expensive jewelry at Tiffany’s. Investor’s Business Daily reported that Tiffany’s profits rose by 56 percent during the 2nd Quarter of 2011.

‘Economics’ is about the house we all live in. We get the word from the Greek word oikos (household).   Economics (Oikonomia) is how we arrange things in the one household. They don’t teach that in MBA programs.

This is not an economy. It’s something else. It’s an anti-economy, the antithesis of one household in which all residents are housed, fed, secure, and peaceful.

Profit vs. loss is not a way to manage a household. It divides the members of the household into winners and losers, owners and renters, charitable givers and those who receive, or do not receive, the winners’ charity.

What we call the American economy is spiritually and morally bankrupt. It’s not just broken financially.  Warren Buffett’s proposal to increase taxes on those who can afford to shop at Tiffany’s only scratches the surface of the household problem.  One could argue that the system – free market capitalism – is working the way it’s set up to work. Or one could argue that it isn’t.

It all depends on what floor of the house one lives in.

Two percent of the rooms are in the penthouse. They’re very large, decorated by the best interior designers and decorators. The furnishings are custom-made.  Those who live in the penthouse have a private elevator to leave the for lunch at the country club or the yacht club.  Over lunch they discuss how to maximize their profits with more blue chip stocks or bonds and whether to leave the penthouse for a week, a month, a season in exotic places. They discuss their charitable giving, encouraging each other to give to their favorite causes. Sometimes, in the best of clubs and social circles, they argue vociferously, just like the rest of us, about the economy in the Greek sense, the oikos. They are not all of one mind.  Some belong to the  Buffett Fraternity, others to the Trump Circle, even if they wish “the Donald”  would be more subtle.

The other 98 percent of the rooms in the house are rentals of various sizes. Some very large, some modest, and some small.  Only a few of the tenants have long-term leases or the protections of rent control.  The most vulnerable of us live downstairs on the smallest rooms on the lower levels. A growing number of us have been forced into the cellar.

And the rest?  We watch “the Donald” to catch a glimpse of life in the penthouse. We watch our neighbors and family members move to smaller rooms or to the basement, fearing that we, too, will end up in the cellar, but hoping that someday we’ll win the lottery and move upstairs to the penthouse.

Meanwhile, the folks who own Tiffany’s are laughing all the way to the bank, confident that the 98% are too preoccupied to get what’s happening…right there under our noses in the one house where we live.

Economics 101: “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and all who live in it” (Psalm 24:1). How, then, shall we re-arrange the one house? How will we Occupy it?