Quakers oppose hydrofracking in New York State and beyond
Urge political representatives to prohibit the practice
[November 28, 2012; New York, NY] New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (commonly called Quakers) formally opposed the practice of High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (HVHF, hydrofracking, or fracking) at its Fall Sessions in Old Chatham, New York, on November 11, 2012. New York Yearly Meeting is the denominational organization of Quakers in New York State, northern New Jersey, and southwestern Connecticut.
The organization called upon political representatives to prohibit fracking in New York State, stating that the practice is “inconsistent with our faith and practices, which include a commitment to integrity, community, equality, and care of God’s creation.” It expressed its support for legislation and incentives that support renewable and sustainable energy, protect people and the environment, and foster a positive economy. The Yearly Meeting directed its clerk (presiding officer) and general secretary (staff executive) to communicate its stand to elected officials, other Quaker organizations and other faith communities, relevant environmental organizations, and the press. Finally, it asked its members to examine their own lives to find ways to reduce their need for fossil fuel energy and to consider joining in non-violent protest actions against fracking.
Full text of New York Yearly Meeting’s minute (formal statement of conscience) on fracking:
New York Yearly Meeting (NYYM) has considered the potential consequences of High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing (also known as HVHF, horizontal hydrofracking, or fracking) in New York State. We oppose hydrofracking in New York State and beyond. We urge our political representatives to prohibit the practice of HVHF in New York State. As Quakers, we experience the Divine through loving and truthful relationships with all people and all creation. After extensive efforts to inform ourselves about fracking we have concluded that it is inconsistent with our faith and practices, which include a commitment to integrity, community, equality, and care of God’s creation. We observe that the natural gas industry and government agencies have placed financial gain over the health of our communities and the environment. We see no legitimate reason to exempt hydrofracking from existing laws protecting water, air, land, and health, as is currently the case. In other states where horizontal hydrofracking has been performed, it has resulted in the loss of vast amounts of fresh water, the release of toxins into the environment, damage to communities, and cost to the taxpayers.
We support legislation and incentives that promote research, development, and use of renewable and sustainable energy; support local farms and farmers; protect the air and water; enforce accountability for industries that risk environmental harm; and create economic policies that promote work for New York State residents that they can do in good conscience. We urge all citizens to thoughtfully consider the long-term effects of hydrofracking on the water, land, local economy, infrastructure, services, and the community as a whole. We are encouraged by the many communities coming together to seek a way forward based on truth and respect. We are called to stand against fracking, and invite others to join us in opposition to this practice.
We, the task group of Witness Coordinating Committee charged with creating this minute, suggest the following actions:
We ask that the NYYM clerk and general secretary disseminate this minute widely through press releases, letters to our elected officials, to other yearly meetings and other Quaker organizations.
We charge our representatives to the New York and New Jersey Council of Churches to bring this concern to those bodies, and to advocate for those bodies getting under the weight of this concern.
We urge Friends to examine our own lives to discern the seeds that might inadvertently support the practice of fracking, and, to the degree possible, do what we can to limit or eliminate those seeds.
We ask Friends to prayerfully consider adding their names to the list of people, started in part by Friends, who have made a public commitment to join with others to engage in non-violent acts of protest, as their conscience leads them. The link to this list is as follows: http://www.dontfrackny.org/pledge/.
About New York Yearly Meeting
New York Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is the denominational organization comprised of the Quaker meetings (congregations) in New York State, northern New Jersey, and southwestern Connecticut. It was first established in 1695 and has met every year since 1696 to consider the work laid upon it by God’s Holy Spirit. For more information about the Yearly Meeting, visit the New York Yearly Meeting website, nyym.org.
New York Yearly Meeting
Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
15 Rutherford Place
New York, NY 10003
Tel: 212 673-5750
Email: office@nyym.org
www.nyym.org
CONTACT:
Steven Davison
Director of Communications
New York Yearly Meeting
212 673-5750 Tel
212 673-2285 Fax
steven@nyym.org
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
When Will You Wake?
When Will You Wake?
Angela Manno, Fifteenth Street Meeting
Written originally for Spark, New York Yearly Meeting News
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
Much has already been written about the danger, destructiveness and morally untenable practice of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Most Friends would agree it’s time to stop such practices that are violating the Earth and switch to sustainable sources of energy—wind, water, and solar. Yet after all we have learned about the ill effects of extreme extraction, from an outright assault on our democracy, freedom of speech, property rights, human and ecological health, and the beauty and integrity of the natural world, Friends for the most part are still sitting on the sidelines.
Therefore I have chosen to address a troubling question:
What is the source of Friends’ failure to take corporate action on behalf of the planet? Why are Friends still so reluctant to take a stand in the face of the literal evisceration and shattering of our larger body—the Earth—through hydraulic fracturing?
I have pondered this state of affairs for many years, from my participation in the School of the Spirit Quaker Ministry program from 2006 to 2008, where I was one of two voices crying in the wilderness, to the current onslaught of extreme extraction sweeping this country and threatening our beautiful state of New York, to my very backyard in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where plans to install a 32-foot-high pressure pipeline to deliver radioactive fracked natural gas from the Marcellus Shale to our homes and businesses, have been progressing almost completely unnoticed and without resistance.
The answer is not in a lack of knowledge. Friends are quite cognizant of the problems. The list serve of Quaker Earthcare Witness is an endless stream of news on the coming ravages of climate change, overpopulation, genetic engineering, hydrofracking, tar sands strip mining, etc.
Albert Einstein said, “Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” Why, then, do so many Friends continue to shirk this grave responsibility?
To unblock the floodgates to action, we must first examine our unconscious fears and the errors in our thinking.
In my search for some answers, I have found that the most likely causes for inaction—both Quaker and non-Quaker—can be explained in the writings of Quaker activist George Lakey and eco-theologian Thomas Berry.
As a result of my investigation into these two seminal thinkers, and as I search my own heart, I have come to believe that the failure among the majority of Friends to take action beyond our personal realms (what George Lakey calls “earning Quaker merit badges by personal lifestyle choices rather than asking how much difference one is making in the movement’s struggle for macro-level change”) is due to our fundamental confusion about our true identity as Homo sapiens (a cosmological question) and in the unconscious limitations imposed by Friends’ respective social class (the domain of social science).
The primary error in our thinking, it seems to me, lies in the misconception that we are somehow separate from or “above” the Earth and all its life. As I wrote once to explain “why I care” to a group of Westchester Friends, “If you consider yourself separate from the Earth, from Gaia, the being in whom we live and move and have our being, then confusion sets in when you see the Earth in peril. But if you feel yourself to be part of the organism, of the larger being called Earth, it is a matter of self-care to want to preserve the beauty and well-being of the planet.”
An excerpt from a Buddhist Ceremony for Ecological Regeneration illustrates this inseparability in a highly evocative manner:
With heart and mind open, I see that there is no separation between my body and the body of the Earth. Every mineral in this flesh and bone has been stone and soil and it will be again. Looking into one calcium molecule in my bone, I can see that it used to be part of the body of a green leaf. Before that, it was part of the living soil in a garden. Long before that, it was a shell in the sea. I see the continuation of this calcium molecule in so many forms and now in my bone. I can see that the earth element in me will return to the soil and manifest as other forms of life in the future.
…With tenderness and love I bring my awareness to the suffering that is present in this collective body. I see the mineral element that is stone becoming soil becoming vegetation becoming flesh and bone becoming soil again. I also see the suffering that is present in the mineral element. I see the toxins we have made creating sickness and cancer in living beings, and the pesticides and fertilizers poisoning the soil. I know that the suffering of the mineral element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
My query deepened: What is the source of this sense of separation that pervades our religious society and society at large, that keeps Friends mostly silent and immobile in the face of the poisoning of our planet? I noted that Friends were able to step up to the plate when the immorality of slavery finally became clear. What, then, makes the destruction of the Earth—the living host of all we know, the very source of the next breath we take—somehow less offensive in the eyes of Friends?
A major cause is species-centered narcissism, also known as anthropocentrism. In his Schumacher lecture “Every Being Has Rights,” Thomas Berry proclaimed that our love had become too narrow. “It has been narrowed to the human instead of including the whole of the universe, as it once was in the Christian teaching.”
We not only have our radical discontinuity with the rest of Creation to contend with. We are also, I have begun to learn, unconsciously bound by our class distinctions. In his article for the January–February 2012 Quaker Eco-bulletin, George Lakey writes that “middle class culture supports fitting in, being restrained. It was hard for nurses and teachers historically, to form unions, because they didn’t want to appear ‘unprofessional’ in the eyes of the world, since ‘professional’ is performed by appearing smooth and not making waves.…Quakers who stay in their middle class bubble guarantee the ineffectiveness of which they complain.”
To read his words was an awakening to me. I reached out to George to find out more. He explained that “no amount of consciousness-raising or discussion can ever take the place for Quakers of getting their bodies out of the chair and in motion, outside their comfort zone, taking a stand. One reason why a vigil is a waste of time for Quakers these days is that it is a ritual—the kind of ritual that early Friends scorned when they saw Anglicans doing it. Friends need to act, in situations of uncertainty, where they are slightly out of control, where nicely phrased locution is not the currency.”
In light of this new awareness, never having been a student of social science and belonging to the middle- to-owning class myself, it was interesting to consider my own resistance to nonviolent direct action. More burdensome, as a victim of child abuse, I had no desire to ever again be a victim of “the Man” by getting myself arrested and perhaps being helpless and abused with no way out. Yet I understood how facing my worst fears might redeem a lifetime of conflict avoidance. The answer, he told me, is to keep remembering, contradicting the message from my class background, “I am not alone. Others will help me.”
In contrast to the middle-class tendency to shy away from conflict, early Friends embraced and cultivated it. They used conflict to create a stir, to bring injustice into the light. Friends can easily trace Quaker history to find myriad examples of conflict cultivation, from women’s suffrage, to civil rights, to the abolition of slavery.
This conflict aversion affects not only many Friends but middle class environmentalists as well, including the class of big name environmental organizations that veteran organizer Bill Moyer, author of Doing Democracy (a handbook of essential reading that maps the structure of successful social movements), calls “Professional Opposition Organizations.” George Lakey explains, “Even with the cliff edge of climate change staring middle class environmentalists in the face, most are reluctant to return to the strategy used in their biggest US victory, which they won against all odds, the 1970s nonviolent direct action campaign against nuclear power.”
In recent times we’ve learned how a number of the most established environmental advocacy groups have compromised their standing, quite possibly to avoid the inevitable conflict that must emerge if we are to safeguard the Earth’s living systems from the ravages of tar sands strip mining, nuclear energy, hydraulic fracturing, deepwater drilling, mountaintop removal, and genetic engineering. The most recent example to come to public awareness is Sierra Club’s acceptance of $25 million from Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest gas drillers in the world. A further investigation of this capitulating trend can be found in the article published in The Nation last year, “The Wrong Kind of Green.” We must all examine where we are unwilling to make waves, when our consciences dictate it’s time to move our bodies “out of the chair and in motion, outside [our] comfort zone, taking a stand.”
However, George offers us not only his critique but also uplifting solutions: “Brought up owning class? Great—bring the gifts (vision, big picture, aesthetics) often cultivated in the owning class, and let go of the isolation and need to control. Brought up middle class? Great—bring the gifts (optimism about making an individual difference, process skills, articulateness) and let go of both the obsession to fit in and conflict aversion. Brought up working class? Great—bring the gifts (directness, passion and willingness to fight) and let go of the deference to ‘superiors’ and the old label of ‘ignorant.’” He assures us that though the cultural differences between middle class and working class people often keep us apart, there are already guidebooks helping us to learn to work together. He cites Betsy Leondar-Wright’s book Class Matters as abundant with quotes and anecdotes. He also tells us that Linda Stout, who comes from many generations of Quakers, now leads the organization Spirit in Action and that her book Bridging the Class Divide is a great source of inspiration. (For more about the gifts and limitations of class conditioning, you can view the 2011 William Penn Lecture by George Lakey at http://bit.ly/JzgPL9.)
There are many more resources for Friends. For more about the Quaker tradition of cultivating conflict, listen to George’s FGC 2011 plenary address “Conflict as a Gift of the Spirit,” where he discusses the specific power of conflict to transform and bring about positive change in our society. Another is “New Theory, Old Practice: Nonviolence and Quakers,” George Lakey’s Southeastern Yearly Meeting 2004 paper, which also discusses the most powerful (though slightly rusty) tool in the Quaker toolbox for social change. Then there’s the organization Training for Change and the online blog/journal Waging Nonviolence. Finally, there’s the amazing Global Nonviolent Database at Swarthmore College: http://bit.ly/J3jeLx.
In the struggle for ecological justice, which is integral to human justice, we have now seen the victims’ faces. We see victims from 34 states across the US and around the world, animal stillbirths, destroyed land values, air pollution in Wyoming, the industrialization of the beloved landscape. Friends are needed in this struggle.
In closing, I leave you with the words and final query of Christopher Frye in his poem
“A Sleep of Prisoners”:
The human heart can go the lengths of God
Cold and dark we may be......
But this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries cracks, begins to thaw.
The thunder is the thunder of the flows, the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now.
When wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us.
The longest stride of soul folk ever took.
Affairs are now soul sized, the enterprise is exploration into God.
But what are you waiting for?
It takes so many thousand years to wake.
But will you wake? For pity's sake.
— Christopher Frye, A Sleep of Prisoners
Angela Manno, Fifteenth Street Meeting
Written originally for Spark, New York Yearly Meeting News
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)
Much has already been written about the danger, destructiveness and morally untenable practice of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. Most Friends would agree it’s time to stop such practices that are violating the Earth and switch to sustainable sources of energy—wind, water, and solar. Yet after all we have learned about the ill effects of extreme extraction, from an outright assault on our democracy, freedom of speech, property rights, human and ecological health, and the beauty and integrity of the natural world, Friends for the most part are still sitting on the sidelines.
Therefore I have chosen to address a troubling question:
What is the source of Friends’ failure to take corporate action on behalf of the planet? Why are Friends still so reluctant to take a stand in the face of the literal evisceration and shattering of our larger body—the Earth—through hydraulic fracturing?
I have pondered this state of affairs for many years, from my participation in the School of the Spirit Quaker Ministry program from 2006 to 2008, where I was one of two voices crying in the wilderness, to the current onslaught of extreme extraction sweeping this country and threatening our beautiful state of New York, to my very backyard in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where plans to install a 32-foot-high pressure pipeline to deliver radioactive fracked natural gas from the Marcellus Shale to our homes and businesses, have been progressing almost completely unnoticed and without resistance.
The answer is not in a lack of knowledge. Friends are quite cognizant of the problems. The list serve of Quaker Earthcare Witness is an endless stream of news on the coming ravages of climate change, overpopulation, genetic engineering, hydrofracking, tar sands strip mining, etc.
Albert Einstein said, “Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.” Why, then, do so many Friends continue to shirk this grave responsibility?
To unblock the floodgates to action, we must first examine our unconscious fears and the errors in our thinking.
In my search for some answers, I have found that the most likely causes for inaction—both Quaker and non-Quaker—can be explained in the writings of Quaker activist George Lakey and eco-theologian Thomas Berry.
As a result of my investigation into these two seminal thinkers, and as I search my own heart, I have come to believe that the failure among the majority of Friends to take action beyond our personal realms (what George Lakey calls “earning Quaker merit badges by personal lifestyle choices rather than asking how much difference one is making in the movement’s struggle for macro-level change”) is due to our fundamental confusion about our true identity as Homo sapiens (a cosmological question) and in the unconscious limitations imposed by Friends’ respective social class (the domain of social science).
The primary error in our thinking, it seems to me, lies in the misconception that we are somehow separate from or “above” the Earth and all its life. As I wrote once to explain “why I care” to a group of Westchester Friends, “If you consider yourself separate from the Earth, from Gaia, the being in whom we live and move and have our being, then confusion sets in when you see the Earth in peril. But if you feel yourself to be part of the organism, of the larger being called Earth, it is a matter of self-care to want to preserve the beauty and well-being of the planet.”
An excerpt from a Buddhist Ceremony for Ecological Regeneration illustrates this inseparability in a highly evocative manner:
With heart and mind open, I see that there is no separation between my body and the body of the Earth. Every mineral in this flesh and bone has been stone and soil and it will be again. Looking into one calcium molecule in my bone, I can see that it used to be part of the body of a green leaf. Before that, it was part of the living soil in a garden. Long before that, it was a shell in the sea. I see the continuation of this calcium molecule in so many forms and now in my bone. I can see that the earth element in me will return to the soil and manifest as other forms of life in the future.
…With tenderness and love I bring my awareness to the suffering that is present in this collective body. I see the mineral element that is stone becoming soil becoming vegetation becoming flesh and bone becoming soil again. I also see the suffering that is present in the mineral element. I see the toxins we have made creating sickness and cancer in living beings, and the pesticides and fertilizers poisoning the soil. I know that the suffering of the mineral element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
My query deepened: What is the source of this sense of separation that pervades our religious society and society at large, that keeps Friends mostly silent and immobile in the face of the poisoning of our planet? I noted that Friends were able to step up to the plate when the immorality of slavery finally became clear. What, then, makes the destruction of the Earth—the living host of all we know, the very source of the next breath we take—somehow less offensive in the eyes of Friends?
A major cause is species-centered narcissism, also known as anthropocentrism. In his Schumacher lecture “Every Being Has Rights,” Thomas Berry proclaimed that our love had become too narrow. “It has been narrowed to the human instead of including the whole of the universe, as it once was in the Christian teaching.”
We not only have our radical discontinuity with the rest of Creation to contend with. We are also, I have begun to learn, unconsciously bound by our class distinctions. In his article for the January–February 2012 Quaker Eco-bulletin, George Lakey writes that “middle class culture supports fitting in, being restrained. It was hard for nurses and teachers historically, to form unions, because they didn’t want to appear ‘unprofessional’ in the eyes of the world, since ‘professional’ is performed by appearing smooth and not making waves.…Quakers who stay in their middle class bubble guarantee the ineffectiveness of which they complain.”
To read his words was an awakening to me. I reached out to George to find out more. He explained that “no amount of consciousness-raising or discussion can ever take the place for Quakers of getting their bodies out of the chair and in motion, outside their comfort zone, taking a stand. One reason why a vigil is a waste of time for Quakers these days is that it is a ritual—the kind of ritual that early Friends scorned when they saw Anglicans doing it. Friends need to act, in situations of uncertainty, where they are slightly out of control, where nicely phrased locution is not the currency.”
In light of this new awareness, never having been a student of social science and belonging to the middle- to-owning class myself, it was interesting to consider my own resistance to nonviolent direct action. More burdensome, as a victim of child abuse, I had no desire to ever again be a victim of “the Man” by getting myself arrested and perhaps being helpless and abused with no way out. Yet I understood how facing my worst fears might redeem a lifetime of conflict avoidance. The answer, he told me, is to keep remembering, contradicting the message from my class background, “I am not alone. Others will help me.”
In contrast to the middle-class tendency to shy away from conflict, early Friends embraced and cultivated it. They used conflict to create a stir, to bring injustice into the light. Friends can easily trace Quaker history to find myriad examples of conflict cultivation, from women’s suffrage, to civil rights, to the abolition of slavery.
This conflict aversion affects not only many Friends but middle class environmentalists as well, including the class of big name environmental organizations that veteran organizer Bill Moyer, author of Doing Democracy (a handbook of essential reading that maps the structure of successful social movements), calls “Professional Opposition Organizations.” George Lakey explains, “Even with the cliff edge of climate change staring middle class environmentalists in the face, most are reluctant to return to the strategy used in their biggest US victory, which they won against all odds, the 1970s nonviolent direct action campaign against nuclear power.”
In recent times we’ve learned how a number of the most established environmental advocacy groups have compromised their standing, quite possibly to avoid the inevitable conflict that must emerge if we are to safeguard the Earth’s living systems from the ravages of tar sands strip mining, nuclear energy, hydraulic fracturing, deepwater drilling, mountaintop removal, and genetic engineering. The most recent example to come to public awareness is Sierra Club’s acceptance of $25 million from Chesapeake Energy, one of the largest gas drillers in the world. A further investigation of this capitulating trend can be found in the article published in The Nation last year, “The Wrong Kind of Green.” We must all examine where we are unwilling to make waves, when our consciences dictate it’s time to move our bodies “out of the chair and in motion, outside [our] comfort zone, taking a stand.”
However, George offers us not only his critique but also uplifting solutions: “Brought up owning class? Great—bring the gifts (vision, big picture, aesthetics) often cultivated in the owning class, and let go of the isolation and need to control. Brought up middle class? Great—bring the gifts (optimism about making an individual difference, process skills, articulateness) and let go of both the obsession to fit in and conflict aversion. Brought up working class? Great—bring the gifts (directness, passion and willingness to fight) and let go of the deference to ‘superiors’ and the old label of ‘ignorant.’” He assures us that though the cultural differences between middle class and working class people often keep us apart, there are already guidebooks helping us to learn to work together. He cites Betsy Leondar-Wright’s book Class Matters as abundant with quotes and anecdotes. He also tells us that Linda Stout, who comes from many generations of Quakers, now leads the organization Spirit in Action and that her book Bridging the Class Divide is a great source of inspiration. (For more about the gifts and limitations of class conditioning, you can view the 2011 William Penn Lecture by George Lakey at http://bit.ly/JzgPL9.)
There are many more resources for Friends. For more about the Quaker tradition of cultivating conflict, listen to George’s FGC 2011 plenary address “Conflict as a Gift of the Spirit,” where he discusses the specific power of conflict to transform and bring about positive change in our society. Another is “New Theory, Old Practice: Nonviolence and Quakers,” George Lakey’s Southeastern Yearly Meeting 2004 paper, which also discusses the most powerful (though slightly rusty) tool in the Quaker toolbox for social change. Then there’s the organization Training for Change and the online blog/journal Waging Nonviolence. Finally, there’s the amazing Global Nonviolent Database at Swarthmore College: http://bit.ly/J3jeLx.
In the struggle for ecological justice, which is integral to human justice, we have now seen the victims’ faces. We see victims from 34 states across the US and around the world, animal stillbirths, destroyed land values, air pollution in Wyoming, the industrialization of the beloved landscape. Friends are needed in this struggle.
In closing, I leave you with the words and final query of Christopher Frye in his poem
“A Sleep of Prisoners”:
The human heart can go the lengths of God
Cold and dark we may be......
But this is no winter now.
The frozen misery of centuries cracks, begins to thaw.
The thunder is the thunder of the flows, the thaw, the flood, the upstart spring.
Thank God our time is now.
When wrong comes up to face us everywhere, never to leave us.
The longest stride of soul folk ever took.
Affairs are now soul sized, the enterprise is exploration into God.
But what are you waiting for?
It takes so many thousand years to wake.
But will you wake? For pity's sake.
— Christopher Frye, A Sleep of Prisoners
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
Regeneration of the Earth Ceremony
This Regeneration of the Earth Ceremony was written by Tim Ambrose Desmond and is reproduced here with permission. Might this be used in some way in your Meetings to sensitize Friends to our integral relationship with the Earth?
Touching the Earth for Ecological Regeneration
I
Touching the Earth, I open myself to this beautiful planet and all of the life that is here.
[BELL]
[ALL TOUCH THE EARTH]
With heart and mind open, I see that there is no separation between my body and the body of the Earth. Every mineral in this flesh and bone has been stone and soil and it will be again. Looking into one calcium molecule in my bone, I can see that it used to be part of the body of a green leaf. Before that, it was part of the living soil in a garden. Long before that, it was a shell in the sea. I see the continuation of this calcium molecule in so many forms and now in my bone. I can see that the earth element in me will return to the soil and manifest as other forms of life in the future.
I know that every drop of my blood has been the rain, rivers and ocean, and it will be again. I can see that the life of a water molecule in my blood extending back to before the non-beginning. I can see the water I drank becoming part of my body. Looking back farther, I can see that water has been part of every river and every ocean since the beginning of the earth. I can see that the hydrogen and oxygen that make up this water have been in existence long before the earth formed. Although my blood feels so much like a part of “me,” I know it will continue in many forms forever.
The air that gives life to every cell in my body has lived in trees and other animals and in the vast sky, and it will again. I see air element in me – the air that I can feel going in and out of my lungs and the air that is carried throughout my body keeping me alive. I know that this air is part of the vast ocean of the atmosphere moving in and out of all people, animals and plants and microorganisms. I see we are all breathing together.
The warmth of my body is the warmth of the Sun. I see the Sun’s warmth radiating through space to the Earth and connecting with a green leaf. That leaf miraculously transforms the energy into sugar. As I take that leaf into my body, I transform the sugar back into warmth. I can see the Sun is alive in me.
I can see clearly that the Earth is not my environment. It is my body and there is no separation.
[THREE BREATHS]
[BELL]
[ALL STAND UP]
II
Touching the Earth, I open myself to all of the suffering is present in the Earth.
[BELL]
[ALL TOUCH THE EARTH]
With heart and mind open, I see clearly that the Earth and I are one body. With tenderness and love I bring my awareness to the suffering that is present in this collective body. I see the mineral element that is stone becoming soil becoming vegetation becoming flesh and bone becoming soil again. I also see the suffering that is present in the mineral element. I see the toxins we have made creating sickness and cancer in living beings, and the pesticides and fertilizers poisoning the soil. I know that the suffering of the mineral element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
I see the water element. I see the ocean becoming cloud becoming rain becoming drinking water becoming blood and returning. I also see the suffering in the water element. I see thousands of children without clean water to drink, and the toxins that we have allowed to be released in streams, aquifers and oceans, and all of the suffering they cause. I know the suffering of the water element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
I see the air element. I see the one ocean of air circulating through all life and through the vast sky. I also see the suffering in the air element. I see pollution in the air and the sickness it causes. I know the suffering of the air element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
I see the fire element. I see the energy of the sun warming the Earth, turning into sugars when it touches green leaves, and those leaves becoming my body. I see the heat in my body is the heat of the sun. I also see the suffering in the fire element. I see the ocean levels rising, the polar caps melting and all of the destruction caused by global climate change. I know the suffering of the air element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
[THREE BREATHS]
[BELL]
[ALL STAND UP]
III
Touching the Earth, I open myself to the enormous capacity for healing that is present in the ancestors and in the Earth.
[BELL]
[ALL TOUCH THE EARTH]
With heart and mind open, I see the Earth herself as a living body. I see her capacity to adapt and heal herself. I know that she is strong and that she has a miraculous capacity to transform a toxin into a resource in the same way I can transform suffering into compassion.
I can see the Earth billions of years ago when she was covered with single celled organisms that only could breathe carbon dioxide. These single celled organisms produced oxygen as a waste and the increasing amount of oxygen in the atmosphere threatened to end life on Earth. I see that in that moment, the Earth began to manifest new single celled organisms that breathe oxygen and restored the balance in the atmosphere.
I see that this creativity is still alive in the Earth and in human beings. I know that all of the solutions to our environmental problems already exist. I know that my ancestors have discovered ways of harnessing the power of the wind and sun and water to provide for all of our needs. I see intentional community, Permaculture food forests, electric trains, and compassionate conflict resolution. I also see my own capacity to embrace suffering with mindfulness and love, transforming it into compassion.
Looking deeply, I see that all that is needed for global healing is present within me and all around me. I feel immense gratitude for this miraculous power of transformation.
[THREE BREATHS]
[TWO BELLS]
[ALL STAND UP]
--
"From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things" - Walt Whitman
Touching the Earth for Ecological Regeneration
I
Touching the Earth, I open myself to this beautiful planet and all of the life that is here.
[BELL]
[ALL TOUCH THE EARTH]
With heart and mind open, I see that there is no separation between my body and the body of the Earth. Every mineral in this flesh and bone has been stone and soil and it will be again. Looking into one calcium molecule in my bone, I can see that it used to be part of the body of a green leaf. Before that, it was part of the living soil in a garden. Long before that, it was a shell in the sea. I see the continuation of this calcium molecule in so many forms and now in my bone. I can see that the earth element in me will return to the soil and manifest as other forms of life in the future.
I know that every drop of my blood has been the rain, rivers and ocean, and it will be again. I can see that the life of a water molecule in my blood extending back to before the non-beginning. I can see the water I drank becoming part of my body. Looking back farther, I can see that water has been part of every river and every ocean since the beginning of the earth. I can see that the hydrogen and oxygen that make up this water have been in existence long before the earth formed. Although my blood feels so much like a part of “me,” I know it will continue in many forms forever.
The air that gives life to every cell in my body has lived in trees and other animals and in the vast sky, and it will again. I see air element in me – the air that I can feel going in and out of my lungs and the air that is carried throughout my body keeping me alive. I know that this air is part of the vast ocean of the atmosphere moving in and out of all people, animals and plants and microorganisms. I see we are all breathing together.
The warmth of my body is the warmth of the Sun. I see the Sun’s warmth radiating through space to the Earth and connecting with a green leaf. That leaf miraculously transforms the energy into sugar. As I take that leaf into my body, I transform the sugar back into warmth. I can see the Sun is alive in me.
I can see clearly that the Earth is not my environment. It is my body and there is no separation.
[THREE BREATHS]
[BELL]
[ALL STAND UP]
II
Touching the Earth, I open myself to all of the suffering is present in the Earth.
[BELL]
[ALL TOUCH THE EARTH]
With heart and mind open, I see clearly that the Earth and I are one body. With tenderness and love I bring my awareness to the suffering that is present in this collective body. I see the mineral element that is stone becoming soil becoming vegetation becoming flesh and bone becoming soil again. I also see the suffering that is present in the mineral element. I see the toxins we have made creating sickness and cancer in living beings, and the pesticides and fertilizers poisoning the soil. I know that the suffering of the mineral element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
I see the water element. I see the ocean becoming cloud becoming rain becoming drinking water becoming blood and returning. I also see the suffering in the water element. I see thousands of children without clean water to drink, and the toxins that we have allowed to be released in streams, aquifers and oceans, and all of the suffering they cause. I know the suffering of the water element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
I see the air element. I see the one ocean of air circulating through all life and through the vast sky. I also see the suffering in the air element. I see pollution in the air and the sickness it causes. I know the suffering of the air element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
I see the fire element. I see the energy of the sun warming the Earth, turning into sugars when it touches green leaves, and those leaves becoming my body. I see the heat in my body is the heat of the sun. I also see the suffering in the fire element. I see the ocean levels rising, the polar caps melting and all of the destruction caused by global climate change. I know the suffering of the air element is my suffering. I embrace this suffering with tenderness and love.
[THREE BREATHS]
[BELL]
[ALL STAND UP]
III
Touching the Earth, I open myself to the enormous capacity for healing that is present in the ancestors and in the Earth.
[BELL]
[ALL TOUCH THE EARTH]
With heart and mind open, I see the Earth herself as a living body. I see her capacity to adapt and heal herself. I know that she is strong and that she has a miraculous capacity to transform a toxin into a resource in the same way I can transform suffering into compassion.
I can see the Earth billions of years ago when she was covered with single celled organisms that only could breathe carbon dioxide. These single celled organisms produced oxygen as a waste and the increasing amount of oxygen in the atmosphere threatened to end life on Earth. I see that in that moment, the Earth began to manifest new single celled organisms that breathe oxygen and restored the balance in the atmosphere.
I see that this creativity is still alive in the Earth and in human beings. I know that all of the solutions to our environmental problems already exist. I know that my ancestors have discovered ways of harnessing the power of the wind and sun and water to provide for all of our needs. I see intentional community, Permaculture food forests, electric trains, and compassionate conflict resolution. I also see my own capacity to embrace suffering with mindfulness and love, transforming it into compassion.
Looking deeply, I see that all that is needed for global healing is present within me and all around me. I feel immense gratitude for this miraculous power of transformation.
[THREE BREATHS]
[TWO BELLS]
[ALL STAND UP]
--
"From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things" - Walt Whitman
Saturday, January 7, 2012
The Ecological Virtues, Non-violent Direct Action and Prayer to Mother Earth
The Ecological Virtues
In this New Year, as environmental activism becomes as necessary as activism was for the Civil Rights movement, it becomes equally necessary to touch the spiritual foundation of this work.
While Quakers have been interpreting the Testimonies in ecological terms and Buddhists are doing the same in terms of the Five Mindfulness Trainings, here's one Catholic nun who's articulating this new sensibility in terms of the Christian Virtues:
As Christians, looking for spiritual grounding in the face of so much quickening collapse, how might we reclaim the legacy of the four primary Christian virtues as ‘spiritual tools’ for an ecologically sensitive Christian orientation? Here’s a beginning at new definitions within an ecological framework:
Ecological Prudence: growing in a biocentric philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium; the ability to judge between ecologically virtuous and vicious actions, not only in a general sense, but with regard to appropriate actions at a given time and place; 'joining together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace' (4)
Interspecies Justice* (Earth Jurisprudence): 'advocating for healthy ecosystems and exploring the role of humans as integral members of a comprehensive Earth community; creating legal norms and dispute resolutions that foster mutual human-Earth relationships, and encouraging a fundamental rethinking of the basis of law' (5); 'strengthening local communities, enabling them to care for their environments' (6)
Greening our Fortitude: mental and emotional strength while facing ecological threats, loss and collapse (i.e. resolving to move through our fear, anger, apathy, despair, grief to a new place of strength and action on behalf of life); humility and courage to face conflicting worldviews as related to relationship with the Earth; alertness, courage, presence and service in the face of danger; honestly facing one’s own temptations and addictions to over consume so as to disarm their power
Eco-Temperance – moderation in our use of energy and water; limiting and reducing waste; limiting food choices that use large amounts of water and energy to produce and transport; abstaining from ecologically destructive and unethical behaviour; 'preventing harm as the best method of environmental protection and, when knowledge is limited, applying a precautionary approach' (7)
— Maureen Wild, http://paxgaia.ca/maureen_reflection.htm
* For a further discussion of this ecological virtue, see Thomas Berry's Schumacher Lecture:
Every Being Has Rights
Rosalie Bertell expresses her thoughts on Ecological Fortitude in her essay, In What Do I Place My Trust.
Friends and Non-Violent Direct Action
The recent training at Brooklyn Meetinghouse in non-violent direct action campaigning to end hydraulic fracturing (co-sponsored by Friends in Unity with Nature and the 15th St Peace Committee) will be the subject of the lead article in the forthcoming issue of Befriending Creation. The program was an outgrowth of this developing virtue among modern Friends, specifically in response to hydraulic fracturing, the newest form of extreme fossil fuel extraction, taking its place alongside deep-water oil drilling, mountaintop removal coal mining, and tar sands extraction.
There is no doubt this capacity and understanding needs to be developed and understood in greater depth among contemporary Friends. Quaker activist George Lakey goes to the root of Quaker action and inaction in his current article in Quaker Eco-Bulletin, "Quaker Eco-Justice Strategy: Equality and the Experiment of the Earth Quaker Action Team." For more about the Earth Quaker Action Team, please to to their website:http://eqat.wordpress.com/
An incredible resource for building momentum and non-violent campaigns is the Global Non-violent Database. After years of researching, the team at Swarthmore College has unearthed nonviolent campaigns in nearly every country. Browse the hundreds of cases to learn more about the power of nonviolent action. For targeted environmental campaigns, enter “environment” into the search box or just click here.
Another major resource is Doing Democracy by Bill Moyer, a Quaker who served on Dr. Martin Luther King's national staff, was the leading strategic brains behind the 1970s victory of environmentalists over the nuclear power industry, plus many other achievements in grassroots movements.
Thanks to George Lakey for the rest of the description on this incredibly valuable resource:
“[Moyer] summed up lessons learned in this short, impactful book not long before he died. He created a model for strategizing based on the stages that successful social movements have gone through. In his book he gives specific guidance on how the canny organizer can negotiate the early stages (which the anti-fracking people are in) in such a way as to lay the groundwork for the later stages in which the movement actually has a chance to win.”
Published in 2001, this book is highly recommended -- mandatory reading -- for Friends who have a leading to pursue non-violent direct action on behalf of the Earth.
Prayer to Mother Earth
Lastly, here are two simple and powerful lines from the Prayer to Mother Earth, offered by the community at Blue Cliff Monastery in Pine Bush, NY on the eve of the New Year, that close the disparity between humans and the Earth:
“We have seen that to protect you is to protect ourselves, and that your care for us is your care for yourself. There is no boundary between our lives, between our-well-being, and between our pain and sorrow.”
May this perception grow among Friends and all homo sapiens in this New Year.
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