Mother Earth

Tuesday was Earth Day, a "holiday" of sorts where we think about all things ecological.  In another lifetime, I studied Environmental Resource Management at the Pennsylvania State University, and even though life and God's call have taken me far away from that field of study, I'm still paying attention.  In the nearly 20 years since I graduated some things have radically changed, other things have not.  We have "greened" up in a lot of ways, solar farms and wind turbines are now common sites around the nation, and growing numbers of people are moving from the "environmentalism is all about hippie communists" camp to the, "hmmm, clean drinking water and breathable air are pretty cool things" camp. But we're still a long way from breaking our dependence on fossil fuels, and so the noose around our neck grows ever tighter.
Ecology is a complicated thing, and like many complicated things, it frightens and intimidates people, inducing a range of reactions from flat out denial to apocalyptic panic.  As per usual, extreme reactions are usually a result of drastically over-simplifying the problem.  The deniers confuse current local weather patterns with long term climate data, the chicken littles believe that Waterworld is right around the corner.  As per usual, extreme perspectives are usually wrong, with only a grain of truth to make them seem plausible.
We do certainly need to get a handle on our stewardship of this planet, because science is telling us that in the vastness of the universe, planets similar to our own are a little hard to come by.  They may be out there, but as of now we have not found them, let alone developed the ability to get to them.  It's rather startling really, how tenuous our hold on life actually is.  Life is resilient, but things do go extinct, and we would do well to remember that.
Mind boggling creatures have walked, swum and flown around this planet over the course of geologic history, and many of them are now nothing but fossils.  We may be someday too, before the sun burns out.  But here's the funny thing, we are also the first species, (at least as far as we know) to be aware of its capacity to cause its own destruction.  Which gives us a fighting chance, maybe not much of one given human nature, but at least a chance.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about humanity is that, collectively, we have not come to the realization that we can really change things for the better.  We are still unfortunate slaves to the way things always have been.  Individually we can be altruistic and understand the need for sacrifice, but collectively, we are still blind, selfish and prone to panic.  This is born out by the reality that there is still poverty and famine in the world, and by the fact that we still don't recognize, despite an increasing global awareness, that we're all in this together.
I'm not exactly an optimist, and I am fully aware of the nature of sin, but it still gives me major agitation to think that children starve while we let millions of tons of grain rot in storage.  It torques me to think that some people are paid millions of dollars a year to play games or play games with numbers, while people who work in desperate and inhumane conditions get next to nothing.  What bothers me most of all is that I am absolutely powerless to change any of it.  I might as well tell the wind not to blow for all the good my rage will do.
So I do little things, like pay a little more for the coffee I drink in the morning, so that more coffee farmers in Rwanda can make a bit a of better living.  I recycle, I compost, I support various charities that work for environmental and social justice, but I'm just shouting at the ocean.
I hope, for my children's sake, that something in our collective human consciousness gets over its adolescent self-absorption soon.  We need the earth a lot more than she needs us, and so as is the case with Easter, we need to remember that every day is Earth Day, every day we need to breath air and drink water is a day that we should remember to be good and faithful stewards of our place on this "salubrious blue-green orb," as Kurt Vonnegut so loquaciously called it.
I look around my backyard, in the middle of the Megalopolis, just 20 miles from Washington DC, I see life going on, trees growing tall, animals thriving in the spaces between human habitations.  I realize that even now, as "civilized" as we are, we are still capable of living in balance with nature, but we do need to understand that balance is not served by simply taking whatever and as much as we think we need.
We need to take responsibility for what we have done, and make a better plan for what we're going to do, or else the Earth will celebrate her day without us.