I'd been getting ready to post something by Rex Weyler, o­ne of the founders of Greenpeace, when I got this from Rick Ingrasci. It makes a zesty preface to what will follow:

Greenpeace hopes the images will highlight the vulnerability of the earth to climate change. Nearly six hundred volunteers have stripped for the camera o­n a melting Swiss glacier high in the Alps for a publicity campaign to expose the impact of climate change.

Greenpeace commissioned the photo shoot by world-renowned photographer Spencer Tunick.

For the full story: http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL1858183620070818?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=22&sp=true

I just returned from a gathering that Rick Ingrasci hosted at Hollyhock, Canada's leading educational retreat centre — something else Rex Weyler helped to found — where I spent time with Rupert Sheldrake, who had this to say: “A paradigm shift can o­nly occur when there's an alternate model provided. A coming out movement is what we need.” Indeed. Until we get a glimpse of what's outside the box of our current worldview, we won't change it. In a sermon he delivered o­n Earth Day to the Unitarian Church of Vancouver, Rex gives us a beautiful vision of where to from here. And, although no harm will come to you if you don't send it back out to anyone, passing it along is a very good idea. (I've left out a few sections so as not to make too long a post. The whole piece is at http://www.thevancouverobserver.com/cgi-bin/show_sitemap_article.cgi?ID=171.)

For a tease to this wonderful talk: “I believe humanity has looked in all the wrong places for miracles. All we have to do is open our eyes…You don’t have to go around looking for a burning bush; the bush itself is miracle enough…This awaking to the miracle all around us is the spiritual renaissance that I believe might save us.” – Rex Weyler

Ordinary Courage

…We look out at our tortured world, heating up at unprecedented rate, rivers polluted, forests turned to desert, and we witness the hubris of humanity…Rachel Carson wrote a half century ago, “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology.”

We do not control nature. We are nature.

The Unitarians point out that the concept of Worship derives from the Old English “weorthschippen,” to ascribe worth to something. So, to what do we ascribe worth? To security, to money, to our career or nation? Do we ascribe worth to ancient scriptures or a life in heaven after we die?

We now see that we have failed, as a society – for millennia – to ascribe worth to the earth itself, the o­ne sustaining gift of the universe that we touch and feel every day. Perhaps it is time to not just respect the earth but to worship the earth, to ascribe worth to nature.

Nature is the first teacher of humanity. Nature provoked our ancestors’ first sense of awe, the first inspirations for human songs, stories, and for our sense of the divine.

Where do we go for a holiday? Into nature, to the beach, snorkeling in the sea, or skiing in the mountains. We find ourselves suddenly back home. Nature built us. Nature designed our eyes to see, our touch to feel, and our ears to hear the call of our kind, or the sound of danger.

Technological societies suffer from epidemics of neuroses, and I believe these mental conflicts reflect a lost connection to our natural state of being. But our mother, the earth, is patient. She abides. She suffers our neglect. She waits.

I think she waits for us to ascribe worth to her.

I am optimistic about our future because history shows that we can change, but, before I can be optimistic, I must be realistic. Otherwise I am not optimistic, I am delusional.

We cannot fear the truth, because that is what will save us.

In my high school biology class, I recall we put two fruit flies – a male and a female – into a jar with a tomato. The flies multiplied day after day: four, eight, a dozen, and soon hundreds of fruit flies feeding o­n the tomato. After about three weeks the jar was full of fruit flies and the tomato was half-eaten away. The very next day, when we came into class, the tomato was gone and all the fruit flies were dead.

This was an experiment about exponential growth in nature. There are no cases in nature in which exponential growth continues forever. None. The global economy cannot double every 24 years forever. The planet cannot absorb or feed 75 million more humans – 8 New York cities – every year. None of this is remotely sustainable.

I remain optimistic about our future because I believe we are smarter than fruit flies. But realistically, I know: we’re halfway through the tomato, and the time to wake up is now.

Forget quibbling about peak oil. We are way past peak everything. There is no natural resource available o­n the planet today that we are going to have more of in the future, except perhaps heat.

We are roughly halfway through the planet’s petroleum deposits, which represent 400 million years of accumulated sunlight deposited as organic material o­n the ocean floors of past ages. And because we took the cheap, easy oil first, future oil will cost more energy to retrieve. We are way past the peak of net energy from oil.

We are halfway through the world’s forests. Five thousand years ago, there were about 8 billion hectares of forest o­n the planet. Today, there are 4 billion hectares left. The forests are half gone. The Syrian-Lebanese desert was o­nce a cedar forest. We are losing about 12 million hectares per year. I’ve seen panzer divisions of bulldozers, dawn to dusk in Argentina, ripping up the forest in clouds of dust to create industrial farmland. They don’t even use the wood. They burn the forest like rubbish. The smoke and soil blow over the horizon.

More than half the world’s fresh water resources are gone or polluted. We’re more than halfway through the ocean’s fish, 90% through many commercial species.

On top of this, the richest 15% of the people o­n the planet – those of us with hot showers, cars, and three meals per day -consume 85% of the wealth.

China and the rest of the third world want the lifestyle enjoyed in the wealthy nations. They want automobiles, computers, nightclubs, and movies. China already uses half the cement in the world. There isn’t enough copper in the world to make electric motors for computers and washing machines for 6 billion people, let alone for 10 or 12 billion.

Already, some 25,000 people die of starvation every day. This is comparable to 50 jumbo jets dropping from the sky killing everyone o­n board, every single day. Eight 9/11s every day, and most of the victims are children.

So we should not quibble over peak oil production or wring our hands about whether or not we are causing global warming. We’re halfway through the tomato. The question is, will we wake up and will we be able to adjust? Are we smarter than the fruit flies?

I believe we are smart enough. I am optimistic because I have seen with my own eyes that dedicated people can change the world.

In my lifetime I have witnessed the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the rise of the environmental movement.

Private citizens initiated all of these changes, individuals willing to take a stand – people like Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Nelson Mandela. We, private citizens who see what is before our eyes, can ring the wake up bell for our governments, corporations, and institutions.

As some of you know, 30 years ago some of the first Greenpeace meetings were held here in Vancouver. Bill Darnell coined the name “Greenpeace” at o­ne of those meetings at the Unitarian church to plan the first Greenpeace voyage to stop nuclear bomb testing in Alaska.

That ship’s crew was arrested before they reached the test zone, but the sheer moral courage of the campaign created an international incident and led to the end of bomb tests in Alaska. We learned at Greenpeace that ideas and actions can change society.

We also learned at that time that radioactive elements from the bomb tests began to appear in children’s teeth and in mothers’ milk. Global war preparation had become a global environmental issue.

I remember seeing a picture of the polluted Cuyahoga River burning in Ohio. The rivers are burning? If that doesn’t wake us up to ecology, we’re hopeless. In the 1960s and 1970s, we witnessed oil spills and acid rain, and we felt that the next big shift humanity had to make was to recognize our interconnectedness with all of nature.

We set out to save the whales in 1975, because the whales were being hunted to extinction, and we believed that they had every right to live, just as we did. But there was another reason: for us the whales represented nature itself. They were magnificent, intelligent, and mysterious. They sang songs, protected their young, and lived in extended families.

By standing in little rubber boats between fleeing whales and exploding harpoons, we created enough of an international ruckus that by 1983, we won a moratorium o­n the deep-sea killing of whales. We still struggle with the whaling nations – Japan and Norway – to preserve this international law.

Greenpeace went o­n to help stop the dumping of toxic wastes in the oceans, won a moratorium o­n destructive drift nets, and has saved millions of acres of forests from Brazil to Canada.

However, as we can see, this is still not nearly enough. Humanity needs something more, and I believe what we need is a spiritual reawakening.

At its roots, Greenpeace was a spiritual movement. We believed that nature was sacred. If we fail to ascribe worth to nature – to worships nature – I don’t think we can make the changes fast enough.

We live inside the miracle every day. We see the miracle bursting from the ground every spring. I believe humanity has looked in all the wrong places for miracles. All we have to do is open our eyes.

My late friend and Greenpeace colleague Bob Hunter used to say, “You don’t have to go around looking for a burning bush; the bush itself is miracle enough.”

This awaking to the miracle all around us is the spiritual renaissance that I believe might save us…

What this comes down to is that by our actions, by the fruits of our action, we display social and spiritual maturity. Not by pronouncements and slogans.

To heal the human relationship with the earth, we do not need Hollywood heroes or melodramatic revolutionaries. We need ordinary heroes who practice common decency.

The writer May Sarton says, “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” This is the ordinary courage to stand up for integrity.

When Rosa Parks passed away last year, the whole world celebrated this humble black woman who toppled the institution of segregation in the United States.

If Rosa Parks, a poor seamstress, can change the world by sitting in a bus seat in Alabama, then so can you and I.

Who is going to stand up for the homeless, for the fetal alcohol kids, or the native people suffering from mercury poisoning?

Frederick Douglass, a US slave who became a renowned author, o­nce wrote, “Find out just what people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong that will be imposed upon them.”

Forty years ago, in Vancouver, a group of people got together and stood in front of the bulldozers to stop a highway project that would have pushed a four-lane highway into English Bay, out to UBC and around the Point Grey to the Oak Street Bridge. People stopped it. Moms and dads. So today we have Kitsilano Park, Jericho, and Spanish Banks. Because a few people left the comfort of their homes o­n a Saturday afternoon and stood in front of a bulldozer…

You’ve heard the expression, “Whatever will be will be.” No. Whatever we do will be. Whatever we create will be. History is not o­n autopilot. History is the result of what people choose to do.

When you stand up against injustice or ecological insanity you give courage to others. A simple act of courage can start a movement and change the world.

You cannot expect to change the status quo and not face resistance and ridicule. Ridicule is the weapon that the powerful use to bully the weak. Do not be intimidated by the consequences of having a conscience.

This is the example set by Jesus, by Gandhi, or by Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.

But here today, Earth Day 2007, each o­ne of us possesses this same power: the power of common decency, the power of compassion, and the power of an ordinary citizen to make the world right.

If we exercise this power, we may yet be able to preserve a place o­n this planet for future generations of human beings.

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