This is World Environment Day, because the United Nations tells us so, and the theme this year is"Ecosystem Restoration." On the UN website there is an invitation of sorts:
We cannot turn back time. But we can grow trees, green our cities, rewild our gardens, change our diets and clean up rivers and coasts. We are the generation that can make peace with nature.
Let’s get active, not anxious. Let’s be bold, not timid.
This is meant to be encouraging but the truth is that all the evidence suggests that we should be scared as hell by the state of our ecosystems. We have depleted the seemingly inexhaustible oceans and impoverished our terrestrial systems to the point that humans are far more vulnerable to diseases, including those which race around the Earth as viruses of what some like to describe as biblical proportions.
What is truly frightening is that we just don't get that we are not apart from ecosystems, we are part of them and we are interdependent. So our governments can't declare that we want to environmentally responsible, then buy pipelines (Canada) , or blah-blah about studies of old growth forest while allowing companies to cut down stands of some of the last giants in the country (British Columbia.) This doublespeak should outrage us all.
As a Christian I can't live in a perpetual state of anger but I figure we should all be throwing around some tables in the temple at the "all talk, no action" stances of those who are entrusted to act on our behalf. As a climate scientist offered recently, if we really lived in democracies our governments would find the courage to do what the people want them to do.
And as a Christian I am also called to hope and to love This isn't optional, as I read the gospels. So as we cycle along the Bay of Quinte, as we did this morning, or paddle on a nearby river, it is the imperative of my faith to give thanks for the dragonflies and the turtles and the blue herons whom the Creator is brought into being. They are subjects to be treated with reverence and respect -- two more R words -- not objects to be exploited.
I know that the ecological diversity of my childhood no longer exists and as I age I grieve this loss.. Yet I will concede that we are called to make peace with nature, and restore it, because this has always been God's intention.
Every single day is a gift from God in which I can give thanks for Creation and be an agent of healing.
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