Earth Day 2014

Life marches ever onward
Thousands of years come and go
Constant motion of the tides
Beings that ebb and flow

Yet, there's a change this Earth Day

Parents and all grandparents
Children arrive one-by-one
This blue-green fragile planet
The jewel of many suns

Light begins a new Earth Day

Made from nothing but stardust
She shares the genes of many
One among all on this earth
Her grace is more than any

She's our little Earth Baby

Small and trivial from space
She stands out among all others
I will give her this earth
We will care for her Mother,

For this precious Earth Girl


Welcome Jordyn Katherine Haeckel (born April 22, 2014)!

Valdy MM-MM-MM-MM

Paul Valdemar Horsdal, known professionally as Valdy, is a Canadian folk musician who has been writing songs and performing for more than forty years. I remember discovering his "Country Man" album in the seventies and the couple of times I saw him in concert I was amazed with how this one man and his guitar could keep an audience engaged for hours. He is also one of the original artists who spoke out against the damage humans were causing to our environment.

His song entitled "MM-MM-MM-MM" is all but forgotten now (perhaps partly owing to the strange title) but has a great message of warning. The song envisions a future in which air pollution has reached such extremes that the people of earth have never seen the sun in the sky. In 1972 this was a vision that was easy to imagine. Due to the work of environmentalists and folk singers, air quality in such cities as Los Angeles has vastly improved since the seventies but air pollution is still a major health concern in rapidly developing cities such as Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Valdy's words are still an important warning to the people of our planet. I looked for these lyrics online and could not find them so I offer them here in this blog.

MM-MM-MM-MM
(Listen to the song here.)
Valdy (from the album "Country Man," 1972; also released as the B side of the single: "A Good Song.")

And I'll say mm-mm-mm-mm
That's not the way things oughta be
And I'll say mm-mm-mm-mm excuse me
I'm on the outside being free

Run to your houses and dally no more
Close up your windows and lock your doors
The sunlight is comin' the sunlight is comin'
Close all your curtains and lie on the floor

They had never seen the sunlight before they were sore afraid
They had never seen the sunlight before so they all obeyed

And I'll say mm-mm-mm-mm
That's not the way things oughta be
And I'll say mm-mm-mm-mm excuse me
I'm on the outside being free

Why, the last time the sun came out in full
Four men were trapped out on the moors
Now they've all four gone stir crazy
Cause they won't come back indoors

They say the sky is gonna break and turn some colour of blue
They're all nuts they said the trees looked green
Do you want that to happen to you?

And I'll say mm-mm-mm-mm
That's not the way things oughta be
And I'll say mm-mm-mm-mm excuse me
I'm on the outside being free

Homeless

As I watch new stories of the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico, it is sad to realize that my own hunger for things made from oil is part of the problem. Brian Walsh and Steven Bouma-Prediger (in their book Beyond Homelessness) speak of ecological homelessness and its causes. They describe ten such causes.

The tenth (and last) reason for ecological homelessness is anthropocentrism. The belief that we humans are at the center of the universe contributes both to the degradation of our home planet and to our own sense of homelessness on earth. Many now recognize that the so-called developed world’s worldview is overly human centered. Norman Wirzba puts it this way:

The eclipse of divine transcendence, once understood to be the source and goal of the world, created a hole that would be filled by human beings who now position themselves as the center or source of meaning and value. No longer microcosms of the creation, people are the autonomous beings who, in an expression of rational freedom, chart and direct the fate of themselves and the world. Again, the history of this development toward autonomy is complex. But what emerges is a self cut off from the world of which it is a part and a world shorn of all remnants of final causality. Nature, a self-regulating mechanism, stands as the arena on which reason and technique can be exercised.

Having banished or pacified God, we enthroned ourselves at the center of things. Following Protagoras, we believe that we humans are the measure of all things. With ourselves at the center and the world a machine, nature gets reduced to the status of an object – merely a resource to be used and, if necessary, abused. It is not difficult to see how such a perspective on the world and one’s place in it sanctions the despoliation of the earth. Viewing ourselves as autonomous creatures, fundamentally unrelated to either God or the rest of creation, we have shaped a culture, an economy, and a built environment subject to no principles beyond our own self-aggrandizing aspirations and with no sense of kinship with other creatures or their habitats.*

Your appetite and my appetite for oil leads drilling companies to dig it out of the ground many meters below the ocean surface without regard for the danger this process poses for a multitude of God's creatures who rely upon a clean ocean for their food and well-being. We rationalize that we need this oil and we gamble with the lives of the other species who have no need of oil but also share this fragile planet.

*Bouma-Prediger, Steven and Walsh, Brian J. Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), p. 182, 183.