Today on Earth Day 2017 it’s hard to believe it was just one year ago today (April 22, 2016) that the world celebrated 195 nations signing of the Paris Accord on climate change.
Exactly one year later to the day, it is both Earth Day and Election Day in Paris, where the French go to the polls following another chilling terrorist attack that boosts the candidacy of far right nationalist candidate Marine Le Pen who would “Make France great again!”
Here on the other side of the Atlantic and across the world, scientists and supporters of science are casting their votes with their feet, signs, and speeches in the wake of the 2016 American election of a climate change-denying President and Congress unravelling the Paris Accord while concentrating of erection of a border wall.
The March for Science stands with Albert Einstein. “We cannot,” said Einstein, “solve our problems with the same thinking by which we created them.”
The thinking that has led to our problems includes bad religion, fake science, bad politics, and bad economics that ignore reality, shrink reality to the size of the human will to power, and sacrifice creative imagination beyond the boundaries of worn out thinking.
Today it will take prayerful people on both sides of the Atlantic to vote for the Earth in whatever way we can. Good science, good religion, good politics, and good economics go hand-in-hand.
On Earth Day 2017 pray for the Earth. Pray for yourself, for others, and for all creatures great and small. The Planet has no borders. It’s all the same house.
- Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Earth Day 2017.
Views from the Edge 
Hi, Gordon. It’s the editor in me coming out. The Rabbi’s letter is full of wisdom, not short, but made longer by a few paragraphs in it that were repeated. I will try to copy/paste from my email, but that might close this comment. I so, I will send it in a new one. Ok, here ’tis, minus the bullet points before each of the last two sentences:
“It’s true that Control — in Buber’s language, I-It as distinct from I-Thou — is a necessary part of life. But when Control becomes so overwhelming that community, compassion, are erased –- disaster follows.
Triumphalism, like the “triumphs” of Pharaoh in enslaving people and the very earth his country lived in, becomes self-destructive.
Mentioning Pharaoh reminds us of an historical as well as moral truth:When Control becomes overwhelming, it self-destructs and a new form of society is born.
When the ancient Egyptian and Babylonian Empires over-reached, shattering the societies of early Western Semitic tribes, the new social form we know as Torah was born.
When the Roman Empire over-reached, it shattered Biblical Judaism – so that Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism and (a little later) Islam were born.”
Oddly enough, if memory serves, there is a third bullet point in the sequence. Anyway, if you wanted to, it could go back in. I didn’t think it too long as I read it in my email, just a bit confusing until I decided that the repetition was not for emphasis.
As always, you have given us needed observations, my friend.
Kyrie eleison.
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This is so very pertinent to our times and our very survival….
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Thank you, Karin. I just deleted a large section – Arthur Waskow’s letter – which made it too long for most readers.
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Reblogged this on From Sandy Knob and commented:
Long but well worth reading and contemplating!
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Yes, TOO long! But thanks for the re-blog.
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