Another Earth Day. Hard to believe somehow that since last April 22nd we've all taken another trip around the sun.
All the local papers will have the usual friendly and unthreatening articles about recycling and the addresses of places where you can take your tin cans and glass bottles.
No one seems to notice the other news articles, usually buried in the back of the paper or deep in the network news websites, about how we are literally destroying the very home we live in...our precious Earth.
Instead, we talk about the latest war casualites, the most recent child abductions and murders, the anniversaries of the Columbine killings and the tragedy of the Oklahoma bombing or the latest outbreak of a killer disease in Angola.
Hello...is anyone home?
Yes, the war...the murders... the bombings...the disease outbreaks are tragically awful.
But has anyone considered that the destruction of the Earth and all of the horrible things that are going on in the human realm could be related?
With our alienation from the Earth, the source and sustenance of our very lives, comes the breakdown of our humanity. Ecological philosopher Paul Shepard (1925-1996) writes eloquently of our human predicament:
"The infantile atmosphere of modern society---its gluttony, instant gratification, and simplistic values, its unwillingness to risk or endure, its lack of a cosmology that recognizes limits and otherness---continues to demand that living things be cartoons, warm and lively in their imagry preferably projected by or seen as electronic and mechanical devices...Most people seem to agree that we cannot and do not want to go back to the past, but the reason given is often wrong. The truth is that we cannot go back to what we never left. Our home is the earth, our time the Pleistocene Ice Ages. The past is the formula for our being. . . . The attempt to revive our humanity and recover values and behavior does not mean giving up science, art, medicine, law, machines, music, or anything else."
As important as recycling may be, the solutions to our problems demand far more...nothing less than a return home, to the true Eden...and an end to our separation from the Earth.
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