June 5 is World Environment Day. A majority of the population cares about the environment, both here and internationally, but those with power do not, and keep us all in thrall to technologies and methods that make matters progressively worse. There is not much we can do as individuals or members of smaller communities compared to the size of BP’s careless assault on the earth, but that little can add up when done by enough of us. Perhaps in time it will spark real efforts at reform of our worst institutions. But until such opportunity arises, there are things we can all do on a regular basis, and feel good about doing so.
We can buy locally wherever possible. Sometimes the price will be higher, but that higher price buys the amenities a WallMart never provides: safe streets, decent employment to members of our towns, a vital down town even in smaller communities, and the chance to be self-employed rather than a cog in a corporate machine.
We can patronize farmers’ markets, locally owned organic food providers, and if those are not available, Whole Foods. Doing so helps make it possible for farmers to survive in a good way, as stewards of their land, rather than becoming sharecroppers for industrial agriculture. The food usually tastes better as well, but that’s secondary in my mind.
We can urge our communities to shift away from privileging cars over everything else. This spring I traveled to Vancouver, BC, to help a man there write a chapter on Vancouver as a creative community. He had been a vital part of the reform movement that took over Vancouver in the late 60s, and instituted the changes that made it the city it is today. Central to those reforms was eliminating freeways and making the city more pleasant to those who already lived there. That meant privileging pedestrian and public transit over the auto, and those changes have persisted to this day.
And we can encourage interfaith work to help raise awareness that there are moral and spiritual responsibilities we have towards the earth, responsibilities more important than money. I was delighted at the number of progressive Christians and Jews who are interested in such projects. Often what keeps them from happening is a lack of organizing energy.
These are all things we can do, feel good about doing, and in the process help contribute to shifting our culture away from its suicidal obsession with More and Bigger. They can help inject a critical Pagan insight into daily life, an insight not absent in other faith traditions, but not as central as it is in ours. Everything we do with respect to the earth, as everything we do with respect to others, has its ethical dimension, and our lives are enriched and deepened when we are aware of it.
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