Category Archives: Environment

Earth. global warming. climate change. care for tthe planet. sustainability. harmony with nature.

Scorched and Torched

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While global warming accelerates and the rest of the world takes responsible action, we in the USA have decided to fire up the coal to warm ourselves to death.

The Paris Agreement on climate change is toast. It was scorched November 8 by election of a climate change denier who declared global warming was a hoax. Green is about to be torched and scorched into orange.

scorched-earth

“Scorched Earth” – Margo Talbot, All That Glitters

Thanks to “The Daily Post” for the invitation to write a piece on the word ‘scorched‘. Lots of us are feeling scorched these days. it’s the first time in my life when orange made me feel blue.

Kyrie eleison.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Nov. 20, 2016.

Sierra Club: “#BlackLivesMatter!”

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Sierra Club, the nation’s highly respected environmental conservation and preservation non-profit, weighed in on the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile this week with this statement by Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune:

“It is impossible to not be outraged by the devastating images of black people being gunned down by police on a shockingly regular basis and it should be impossible to remain silent in the face of this sustained injustice any longer. Sadly, the tragedies that are unfolding before our eyes are just a fraction of the violence that has been happening off camera in our nation for far too long.

“The Sierra Club believes all people deserve a healthy planet with clean air and water, a stable climate and safe communities. That means all people deserve equal protection under the law and the right to a life free of discrimination, hatred and violence. Unfortunately, those aspirations and goals are not a reality in our country, and that is why that is why the Sierra Club stands in solidarity with all of those saying #‎BlackLivesMatter, demanding justice, accountability, and action to confront the racism and inequality that has allowed these tragedies to persist. We can do better and by standing together to work for the changes that are needed, we will.”

The violence on the street and the violence to the environment are cut from the same cloth.

Thanks to Sierra Club’s executive director for making the connection and taking the risks of fallout among purists donors who don’t want the Club to stray outside of its core environmental mission.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, writing from Georgetown, MT, July 8, 2016.

The Wisdom of Adalbert Stifter

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“Don’t the overwhelming majority believe that mankind is the crowning achievement of Creation, that man is better than everything, even things we haven’t yet investigated? And don’t those people who aren’t able to escape the bonds of their own ego think that the entire Universe, even the countless worlds of outer space, is just a backdrop for this ego? And yet it might be quite different.”
― Adalbert Stifter (1805 – 1868), Indian Summer

Click HERE for more about Adalbert Stifter.

 

 

Verse – Night Vision

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The rotating blades make the red lights
appear to blink atop the windfarm
electrical generators far in the distance, while In the back yard the lightening bugs flash their need for love.
All our chargers need charging, too.
Electronic lives have been drained
by machines powered by dinosaurs.
Coal miners and oil rig workers
die to supply the energy we covet.
Piles of nuclear wastes surround us
glowing unblinking in the dark.

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, June 6, 2016

Earth Day 2016 – farewell to evergreens

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white-spruce-apThe tall White Spruces that add beauty to Village Point Urban Townhomes in Chaska, MN require annual treatment for spider mites. Without early spring treatment the spider mites eventually will kill all the evergreens: the arborvitaes, junipers, and pine trees.

Last week the arborist who treats the association’s evergreens told us what we didn’t want to hear. Because of rising temperature, the Greater Twin Cities Area of Minnesota will no longer be suitable habitation for the evergreens. In five years they will be dead or on their way to becoming a memory of a cooler climate in Minnesota.

It’s one thing to believe that climate change is real. It’s another to learn of a real consequence that drives it home. You have to work really hard at denial!

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Earth Day, April 22, 2016

 

The Green Man

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Every generation tends to think of itself as superior to its predecessors. Ours is no different. Sometimes we’re right. Often, we’re wrong. We ignore or don’t know history.

Take, for example, the consciousness of green and climate change – the discovery, or is it the re-discovery, of nature as the context of human life. We tend to think it’s a new consciousness that sets aside the longer consciousness by which the human race justified ravaging the earth.

The Green Man in Clermont-Ferrant, Photo by Dennis Aubrey, Via Lucis Photography

The Green Man in Clermont-Ferrant, Photo by Dennis Aubrey, Via Lucis Photography

But, then, along comes the forgotten Green Man of Romanesque churches build in the Medieval Period, one version of which is featured in Dennis Aubrey’s post “A Green Man in Clermont-Ferrand” on Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture.

I turn to Via Lucis whenever I feel the need to get out of my skin, to shed the ignorant arrogance of the 21st Century presumption of progress and superiority.

The whole human story is captured in the various Medieval renderings of The Green Man, the human race fatally mis-perceived as “man over nature” and properly conceived as “man within nature”. 

Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, January 13, 2016

Four Big Questions – I don’t “get” it

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I don’t get it. Or maybe I do, but don’t want to.

Some things jade a person’s spirit.  Like the poisonous, partisan punditry that made a lot of noise responding to last night’s State of the Union Address. Blah, blah, blah; blah, blah, blah!

“I don’t get” why, or how, a thoughtful listener could disparage the FOUR BIG QUESTIONS that framed the President’s speech. 

► “How do we give everyone a fair shot at opportunity and security in this new economy?”

► “How do we make technology work for us, and not against us – especially when it comes to solving urgent challenges like climate change?”

► “How do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?”

► “How can we make our politics reflect what’s best in us, and not what’s worst?”

In the run up to the 2016 Presidential Election, President Obama’s last State of the Union Address spelled out the philosophical-ethical questions that every candidate should be asking and answering. Will we, the citizens – the voters – take the cue? Will we test every candidate for President, the Senate, and House of Representatives to assure ourselves that they “get it”: governing in the United States of America requires thoughtful reflection on complex matters that do not lend themselves to simple solutions or demonizing an opponent.

If we, the people,  don’t “get that”, it won’t be because we can’t. It will be because we prefer the poison of partisan blah, blah, blah.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Jan. 13, 2016.

 

 

Verse – The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter

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Scroll all the way down to the link View the Original Post to read and hear Ruth Pitter’s poem The Bird in the Tree.

malcolmguite's avatarMalcolm Guite

https://lanciaesmith.com/image-for-the-day-advent/ https://lanciaesmith.com/image-for-the-day-advent/

For January 2nd in my  Anthology from Canterbury Press, Waiting on the Word, I have chosen to read The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter. On New Year’s Eve we considered Hardy’s almost reluctant glimpse of transfiguration ‘when Frost was spectre-grey, and ‘shrunken hard and dry’, and Hardy’s heart, bleak as the world through which he moves, nevertheless hears for a moment the ‘ecstatic sound’ of his darkling thrush. And even though he wanted to end his poem with the word ‘unaware’, something of the transcended has ‘trembled through’ his poem. Today’s poem, also about hearing a bird in a tree, also addresses the question of how the transcendent might for ‘a moment of time’ ‘tremble through’ into the immanent.

You can hear me read this poem by clicking on the title or the play button. the image above was created by Lancia Smith, and carries a quotation…

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Eve of the Climate Summit

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Son of Man, René Magritte (1898-1967)

Son of Man, René Magritte (1898-1967)

Son of Man, René Magritte’s self-portrait with the green apple in front of his face, seems equally appropriate for the First Sunday of Advent and the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in Paris.

What Magritte meant by hiding his face (except for one eye) with the apple is left to the imagination.

To this viewer the apple’s presence in front of a man of civilized sophistication – bolo hat, buttoned-up dark suit, fitted white shirt, and perfectly knotted red tie – moves imagination in two directions.

The first is often discussed by art critics: the Genesis story of the Fall and the forbidden fruit – the serpent’s whisper that the creatures in the garden could “be like God” by stepping over the one limit imposed on their behavior by a paradisiacal ecosystem.

On this eve of the World Climate Summit, a second interpretation comes to mind – the primacy of nature – the green apple. For all our sophistication, we are nothing without the green planet whose green-ness climate change places at risk.

Magritte’s Son of Man opened me to hear today’s assigned Hebrew Scripture from the Revised Common Lectionary with different ears.

The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David; and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the earth. [Jeremiah 33:12-14]

A righteous branch yet may spring up in Paris. If it does, it will be green. One can pray that the Climate Summit representatives arrive in Paris without their bolo hats, starched white shirts, buttoned-up suits, and power ties, ready to concede finally that, despite all appearances to the contrary, all is nothing without green.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Nov. 29, 2015

Pope Francis, Climate Change, and Literacy

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Long-time friend Dan Wagner attended the Vatican consultation on climate change at Pope Francis’s invitation in recognition of Dan’s work in global adult literacy education.

Click A Papal Education to learn more about the   link between, poverty, literacy, and action on climate change.

Daniel A. Wagner is UNESCO Chair in Learning and Literacy, Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and Director of the International Literacy Institute.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, IL, 2015.