environment

Thunberg and Monbiot: "Nature must be used to repair broken climate"

Greta Thunberg and George Monbiot testify that "the protection and restoration of living ecosystems such as forests, mangroves and seagrass meadows can repair the planet’s broken climate but are being overlooked.

"Natural climate solutions could remove huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as plants grow. But these methods receive only 2% of the funding spent on cutting emissions, say the climate activists.

"Their call to protect, restore and fund natural climate solutions comes ahead of a global climate strike led by young people on Friday and a UN climate action summit of world leaders in New York on Monday.”

Spread the word. The climate emergency is real.

Leap for Christ’s Sake:  A Meditation on Physics, Cosmology, and Human Life

Unlike the other three Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Gospel of John begins more scientifically than it does historically.  The first line of the Gospel reads: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  That may not sound like science to us today, but it was a form of science two thousand years ago when it was written.  It was science and philosophy and theology all rolled into one.  Back then, a university would never have relegated these disciplines to separate departments, different faculty.  And, I believe, neither will we some day in the future.  

    “All things came into being through the Word,” the Gospel says, “and without the Word, not one thing came into being.  What has come into being in the Word was life and that life was the light of all people.” 

    It’s an ancient text that’s trying to make sense of reality—science and philosophy and theology overlapping.  The author’s glimpsed something as big, as revolutionary, as epic as what Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein saw, something that changes everything.

    Trouble is, as with other breakthroughs, the vision would be met with enormous skepticism, hostility, and rejection . . .

"There is a crack in everything": Hope for activists entering a new political era

Despair is an energy, a negative energy that is born of the stuff that can rattle around in our heads, unchecked.  Despair’s the sour fruit of the cranky stories we often tell ourselves, the bad-tempered tales we can inflict on others.

We live and die by the stories we tell—inside our heads and outside our bodies.

“The destiny of the world,” Shakespeare scholar, Harold Goddard tells us, “is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories [we] love and believe in.”

Today, we’ve gathered in this circles, not to wring our hands or shake our heads or pound our fists and inflict our despair on others.

No, we’ve gathered together to stir ourselves, to wake up, to find some traction.  Whether we realize it or not, we’ve gathered together to tell ourselves stories, ordinary stories that come from ordinary people—stories that can become the source of our hope . . . our creative, courageous action on behalf of the wellbeing of our world.

“Hope,” says Rebecca Solnit (who is for me a contemporary writer and dissident whose voice is on par with the voice of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, that feisty Russian dissent who challenged the Soviet behemoth in the second half of the last century)—