Gratitude for Holiday Gifts to Our Environment
Here’s a beautiful piece on environmentalism – climate change in particular – written within the context of holiday gifts. The author, Rebecca Solnit, celebrates the gifts we received, like the Sierra Club’s success with its Beyond Coal campaign, which, she notes, “helped prevent 168 coal-powered plants from opening and retired 125 dirty coal plants.” She also points out that some of the greenest gifts look like….
“…Nothing. The mountaintops that weren’t blasted by mining corporations, the children who didn’t get asthma or mercury poisoning from coal emissions, the carbon that stayed in the Earth and never made it into the atmosphere.”
Fabulous writing, Rebecca.
I respect and compliment you, Craig, for your continuing courage you demonstrate here on behalf of all our parents’ children (us) and our children’s children. Rebecca’s article is a truly excellent summation of hope so appropriate to welcoming the new year.
Like the rest of her fine piece, her closing is particularly poignant, “This is, among other things, a war of the imagination: the carbon profiteers and their politicians are hoping you don’t connect the dots, or imagine the various futures we could make or they could destroy, or grasp the remarkably beautiful and complex ways the natural world has worked to our benefit and is now being sabotaged, or discover your conscience and voice, or ever picture how different it could all be, how different it will need to be.
“They are already at war against the wellbeing of our Earth. Their greed has no limits, their imagination nothing but limits. Fight back. You have the power. It’s one of your gifts.”
This is, in fact, a war. Even though it’s not a war of open murder with weaponry, if the wrong people win, the casualties will quickly mount into the billions – if you count the littler lives upon which we all depend – and still in the hundreds of millions if you count only people.
Shooting wars nowadays almost always have resources and money at their root, and this global war on greed cannot be allowed to degenerate into a shooting war.
JFK realized that if peaceful change is made impossible, then violent change is inevitable – yet Abe, a kindred soul in the same office a hundred years prior, also recognized that while violence may be all conquering, its victories are always short-lived. His wisdom is borne out in the reality that the slaves weren’t really all free for another hundred years or more, and it took non-violent action.
Gandhi and MLK are among our best teachers here – and particularly Gandhi. He achieved direct, sweeping and lasting change without resorting to the cruel tactics of his enemy.
Truth, Non-Violence, Cooperation, Direct Action, Perseverance!
Thanks so much for the kind words. And you make so many great points here. If you Google “Rebecca Solnit” you’ll find tons of her writings, and let me warn you in advance, they’re pretty powerful. “She’s not just anyone,” as one of my piano teachers used to say about the real stand-outs.