The Dream of the Earth.

"The logging of the Amazon rainforest, heavily publicized since the 1990's, has finally reached a tipping point. As of today, 39 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been wiped out or partially deforested. Scientists now predict that once the forest loss hits a critical threshold of 40 percent, the Amazon will slip into an irreversible, self-perpetuating cycle of deforestation and drought known as "die-back," whereupon the world's largest jungle will convert itself into the likeness of a desert. *** After a 70,000 year career as the "lungs of the earth," the Amazon river basin is ready to die. Like audience members of a Greek tragedy, we are already aware of what will happen once the Amazon disappears - a surge of CO2 emissions, rising temperatures and abnormal weather patterns across the globe - and yet we continue to watch, riveted by the catastrophe unfolding before our eyes."
--Jerry Toth, Adbusters #69.

"After dealing with suicide, homocide, and genocide, our Western Christian moral code collapses completely; it cannot deal with biocide or geocide. Nor have the church authorities made any sustained protest against the violence being done to the planet."
--Thomas Berry, "The Dream of the Earth, pg. 77.


***

I've been reading lately a collection of essays called "Deep Ecology and World Religions." Most world religions seem to share some philosophy with deep ecology - that is to say, the ideas are not too far apart. But there are few strands of Judeo-Christian thought that can stand as proponents for deep ecology.

And indeed, we are outraged at genocide and such; however, the health of our environment is a question that science and technology will find us a way out of.

The extinction that is currently at the hands of the human species is not like other extinctions. When the dinosaurs went extinct, this constituted a removal of the top-level species from the evolutionary chain. Less evolved species prevailed, holding the great genetic diversity necessary to provide the greatest possible number of adaptations for the success of future life. We stand to destroy 20 percent of species, and many of these species are low level organisms such as plants, insects, et cetera... the very information for the life process.

Why is this not equally outrageous?

How can our commodified culture that lives increasingly in the "great urban interior" radically reshape their view of the value of the wilderness?

In this great urban interior in which we have alienated ourselves from the experience of being in the universe, how do we begin to develop the spiritual language that will allow us to feel outrage at the destruction of the natural systems that these interior spaces depend on?

How can we have food if we poison all our soil?
How can we have water if there's no oil to ship it from Fiji?
Where do we begin when there is so much that needs to end?