New Clear Vision

Can We Grow Up and Fall in Love with the Earth Again?

by Robert C. Koehler

The AP story on military maneuvers in the Arctic reads like the gleeful report of a mugging:

“To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.”

Wow, what fun — a new playground, with maybe 90 billion barrels waiting for corporate exploitation beneath the melting ice cap, 30 percent of the world’s untapped natural gas, and all sorts of minerals, diamonds, gold, copper, zinc and so much more. And the world’s armed forces get to play war games. Boys will be boys!

The first insanity here is that this is how major news is reported, as the sophomoric reduction of a terrifying global wound to a spectacle of pop culture, with military leaders portrayed as independent actors, taking it on themselves to prepare for inevitable war in or over the Arctic Circle, which is, thanks to global warming, now open for business. (more…)

An Ethic of the Earth

by The Blue River Quorum

A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth. A civilization that ignores the deep constraints of its world will find itself in exactly the situation we face now, on the threshold of making the planet inhospitable to humankind and other species.  The questions of our time are thus: What is our best current understanding of the nature of the world?  What does that understanding tell us about how we might create a concordance between ecological and moral principles, and thus imagine an ethic that is of, rather than against, the Earth? (more…)

‘Heartstorming’ as an Antidote to Denial

by Priscilla Stuckey

We know it’s getting worse; we’re not climate deniers. We’re well informed and aware of the facts. And yet we go about our lives as if nothing has changed. We live the same way we lived five years ago, before the wealth of new climate science confirming that the situation is worse than first thought. Maybe we travel even more than before or live in a bigger house than we did then. (Guilty on both counts.) What’s wrong with us?

We’re obeying the hush-hush rule on climate change. When the President can’t even utter the word climate in his State of the Union speech, at a time when climate change presents emergency levels of economic, health, and national security risks — and that’s just in this country, never mind the millions of people in other parts of the world whose homes and lives are already lost and endangered — you know something is seriously wrong. Even Stewart and Colbert seldom devote time to it. (more…)

A Time to Keep Silence … and a Time to Speak

by Debbie Ouellet

The older I get, the more in tune I become with the finite measure of time — not just for me, but for the place and planet I call home. This earth calls to me — from the most basic joy of placing my hands in dirt to bring life into my garden — to considering the enormity of the threats against this planet’s future. My poet’s mind tries to reconcile the awe of nature and all she has to offer with the fear that this all could one day end. Generations to come may never know the abundance of nature as I have over my lifetime.

This April marks two events close to my heart and soul: National Poetry Month and, on April 22nd, the 41st anniversary of Earth Day. How are these two events connected?

The great bard himself, William Shakespeare, said, “And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” If poetry isn’t about life, this earth, and our connection with it, then what is it about? (more…)

Can Ecological Democracy Trump Partisan Politics and Neoliberalism?

by Devon G. Peña

Over the past two and a half decades, environmental justice activists have tried to address the limits and contradictions of liberal democratic approaches to the protection of our most vulnerable communities. We have danced with the state but have also come to recognize how the existing framework for proactive transformational action is limited by the regulatory apparatus established by former President Bill Clinton through Executive Order 12898.

While E.O. 12898 proved useful to imaginative movement organizations and communities seeking to address the legacies and continued challenges of environmental racism, the status of the framework as an Executive Order also limited prospects for genuinely transformational change. It now seems clear that this is not the best framework to sustain our movement’s political influence, scientific efficacy, and mobilizing capacity. This essay charts the limits and contradictions of Executive Order 12898, summarizes prior efforts at legislating environmental justice, and closes with an analysis of the prospects and possible orientations of a new federal law for environmental justice. (more…)

Thinking Whole, and Not Just Apart

by Winslow Myers

I still recall the shock of reading the philosopher Krishnamurti’s bald assertion, in his little book “Freedom from the Known,” that I was personally responsible for everything. The book was recommended to me by a remarkable man named Albert Bigelow. In 1958, Bert sailed his small ketch, the Golden Rule, into an American nuclear testing area in the Marshall Islands in an act of protest. Bert took seriously the obligation of being a global citizen long before the phrase “global citizen” was coined.

In 2010, the burden of trying to act responsibly for the planet as a whole has become overwhelming, almost paralyzing. There are so many huge challenges, all interrelated, and the cause-and-effect relationship between what I do personally in my daily life and those planet-wide challenges has become infinitely clearer than it was to all but a few in 1958. (more…)