Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/ecological-transformation/environment/page/7/)
Climate change and extinction are both too narrow. We need to move beyond ecological concerns to reach out to the ever-larger proportion of society focused on eradicating injustice and poverty. We need to reach out to those who now live in fear of losing their livelihoods and homes.
Although we live two continents and nearly 11,000 miles apart, as community organizers, Desmond D’sa and I look at climate change from similar perspectives — with our eyes on the ground in the places where we work. From these places, we see the results of the market-based global economic system as it transforms our communities and ecosystems into sacrifice zones for corporate profit.
Why Extinction Matters at Least as Much as Climate Change
by Allen Kanner
We Are All Facing Extinction
by Susan Griffin
Transforming the Economy: Linking Hands Across the Social and Environmental Divide
by Helena Norberg-Hodge
Earth Democracy and the Rights of Mother Earth
by Vandana Shiva
A Community Perspective on the Rights of Nature
by Shannon Biggs
The Loss and Recovery of Relatives
by Winona LaDuke
The center of the ecological crisis is not the weather but the ongoing and wholesale destruction of life. We are in the midst of Earth’s sixth mass extinction spasm, accompanied by unfathomable figures such as three to ten species, many of them millions of years old, being extinguished daily.
The Earth is precious, we have no other home. The people of the Earth are one people. The differences between us are small
Compared to our common nature
And our common future, as humanity. Every person deserves
To share in the Earth’s bounty:
Enough to eat,
Clean air to breathe,
Clean water,
And a chance to contribute
To the well-being of the Earth
And all its creatures. We cannot ensure a healthy future
For our planet
Without protecting and caring
For all of its people.
“Why don’t researchers ever ask us about wisdom?” Almost a year after I began talking with Jaypeetee Arnakak about Inuit ways of thinking about northern warming, he asked me this question. From his position as an Inuit policy worker and philosopher, Arnakak stressed to me that wisdom, or “silatuniq” in Inuktitut, should be of central importance to anyone concerned with climate change.
Noam Chomsky offered some interesting reflections on the environment during a speech at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, last September.
In the absence of a progressive voice resonating from the White House, the radical Right continues to dominate the political noise, forcing its policy narratives into the media and policy decisions.
There is no justice in the fact that one group — the Japanese people — has so disproportionately suffered the consequences of the sinful arrogance of those who have recklessly taken the atom and misused it for war and for profit. On the face of it, there was nothing inherently wrong with the human race considering atomic energy as one possible source of energy among others. But that consideration should have taken place in the context of a deep religious and spiritual recognition that these forces are so enormous and their use such a powerful transformation of nature that they have to be approached with reverence, awe, and a sense that we are dealing with the sacred powers of the universe. We should have been willing to consider the possibility that splitting atoms may have potential consequences so beyond our capacity to rationally predict that atomic energy shouldn’t be tapped at all. And the choice should have been made by people filled with humility and a desire to benefit everyone on the planet not just in this generation but in millennia to come.
Environment Highlights from the Tikkun Archive
The Tikkun print archive goes back twenty-five years. We are hugely grateful to a team of volunteers and interns who have been putting the archive online over the last two years, a task now near to completion. You can explore it here. In the next phase the team will create more pages like this selecting archived articles on particular themes. This one was created by one of our interns and doesn’t necessarily reflect official editorial choices: there will be time for that later, we hope!
Long before science, every tribe shared a “cosmology,” that is, a big picture. If we construct a shared cosmology today, based on our best scientific understanding combined with a deep appreciation that in human brains the sense of reality is created by metaphor, it could transform our minds and thus our world.
As a result of our current practices of industrialized agriculture, food chains and ecosystems are collapsing and extinction rates are soaring; human food systems — involving food production, processing, transport, and distribution — are strained, fragile, or broken; and hunger is again on the rise.
What are some of the other attributes of a superpower? Once again, they might very well mirror those of a person. These would include a demonstrable commitment to truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and the upholding of other moral values.
Consider the latest toxic spill in Hungary. To put it in terms that anyone can grasp, it is as though we filled up the entire Empire State Building with some of the worst stuff imaginable, tipped the building completely on its side, and then spilled the full contents on the ground. The resulting mess would have filled an area of approximately seventeen square blocks, or slightly over a half-mile in any direction.