Earth Church

'Earthalujah!': A Rebel Pastor Preaches for the Planet

As part of its crusade against consumerism, an unorthodox New York church urges action to preserve the Earth.

...Mr. Talen went on to sermonize about things not generally heard from pulpits. About mounting warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific body created by the United Nations. About record high temperatures, melting ice sheets and skyrocketing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About torrential downpours intensified by heat that seemed less like rain, and more like midair waterfalls.

Outside, New York City was baking. The temperature was 91 degrees Fahrenheit but felt like 106. A block away, down East Third Street, kids were dancing in the spray of an opened fire hydrant. Inside the storefront space, which used to house a bank, a sclerotic air-conditioning system was losing its battle with the heat. The air felt as hot as breath.

"This proto apocalypse that we're living through, it's moving so fast and changing so fast that a lot of what's happening doesn't have names," Mr. Talen continued. "We're living through it but not talking about it."

Then, sensing the need for levity, he cried out, "Someone give me an Earthalujah!"

"Earthalujah!" the choir and congregants hollered back...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/climate/rev-billy-talen-earth-church.html?smid=em-share

Into the Heart of Life: Richard Powers on Living with Bewilderment at the Otherworldly Wonder of Our World – The Marginalian

Maria Popova again has me thinking this (like its predecessor "Overstory") would be a good text for Environmental Ethics. Bioethics too.

"…Set sometime in the near future, when our search for life beyond the Solar System has come to its inevitable fruition, [Bewilderment] tells the story of a thirty-nine-year-old astrobiologist and his neurodivergent, frightened, boundlessly courageous nine-year-old son, searching together for other worlds and instead discovering how to reworld ours with meaning. 

Radiating from their quest is a luminous invitation to live up to our nature not as creatures consumed by "the black hole of the self," as Powers so perfectly puts it in his talk, but as living empathy machines and portable cosmoses of possibility, whose planetary story is yet unwritten…

As the father searches for other worlds, he is savaged by despair at humanity's catastrophic mismanagement of this one, haunted by the growing sense that we couldn't possibly be good interplanetary emissaries until we have become good stewards of our own home planet. But each time he hits rock bottom, he bounces back up — as we all do, as we all must in order to go on living — with rekindled faith in what we are capable of…"

https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/06/26/richard-powers-bewilderment/

How to Save a World: Rachel Carson’s Advice to Posterity – The Marginalian

"Today our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars. 

[…] 

The stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself. 

Therein lies our hope and our destiny."

—Rachel Carson

 https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/04/12/rachel-carson-scripps-college-commencement/

Twisted

How 'Twisters' Failed Us and Our Burning Planet

"… I'm not arguing that Mr. Chung should have turned his 122 minutes of beautifully rendered cinematic escapism into an Anthropocene screed. But artifacts of popular culture have always had immense power to articulate changing attitudes, engage empathy and open firmly resistant minds. Think about how swiftly Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" changed attitudes toward the fragile natural world and led to new regulations of synthetic pesticides, or how Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and John Prine's "Paradise" expanded awareness of the environmental movement. A decade ago, the CBS drama "Madam Secretary" proved that even a single episode with a climate-based story line could significantly affect viewers' understanding of the human costs of climate change.

This is why Percy Bysshe Shelley called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." When art changes opinions or opens hearts, it changes the world as profoundly as any legislation does.

With MAGA politicians at every level denying that climate change even exists, real climate legislation is now nearly impossible to pass. And with the Supreme Court determined to quash all executive-branch efforts to address the changing climate, too, we seem to be at the mercy of artists to save us.

If only they would. In a missed opportunity the size of an F5 tornado's debris field, we got no help from the makers of 'Twisters.'"

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/opinion/twisters-failed-climate-change.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Germans Combat Climate Change From Their Balconies

Plug-and-play solar panels are popping up in yards and on balcony railings across Germany, driven by bargain prices and looser regulations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/business/germany-solar-panels-climate-change.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

hottest day ever measured

The world just experienced its hottest day ever measured by humans – and then, it happened again. After climate change service Copernicus measured July 21 as the hottest day ever recorded, the temperature was smashed a day later on Monday.

"We all (will) scorch and fry" if the world doesn't immediately change course, the former head of U.N. climate negotiations said.

https://cbsn.ws/3WkCdNm

“What this landscape is meant to look like”

Is It Too Late to Save the Southern Grasslands?

"…I recently went looking for the grasslands restoration projects newly established at Radnor Lake State Natural Area and Warner Parks, both in Nashville. With the spring wildflowers already bloomed out and the fall wildflowers still setting buds, July is not the ideal time to visit a grassland restoration site, but I was thinking about the buffalo — that magnificent creature we nearly drove into extinction but saved at the last minute — and I wanted to see some of the many restoration projects that are springing up here as awareness of what this landscape is meant to look like continues to grow..."

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opinion/saving-southern-grasslands.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare