{"id":2292,"date":"2014-04-22T17:18:27","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T23:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/?p=2292"},"modified":"2014-04-22T17:18:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-22T23:18:27","slug":"earth-day-is-worth-celebrating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2014\/04\/earth-day-is-worth-celebrating.html","title":{"rendered":"Earth Day Is Worth Celebrating"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I wasn\u2019t going to write on Earth Day this year.\u00a0 I was going to point people to this excellent essay by Jason Pitzl-Waters<\/a> on The Wild Hunt (which you should read anyway) and post here on the obligations of CUUPS leadership.<\/p>\n

And then a Facebook friend said something that boils down to \u201cwe pollute too much, we consume too much, and so we\u2019re hypocrites if we talk about how much we love the Earth.\u201d\u00a0 The post on CUUPS leadership will have to wait till Thursday, because Earth Day is worth celebrating.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s worth celebrating how far we\u2019ve come<\/strong>.\u00a0 I\u2019m old enough to remember life before Earth Day, before the EPA, before the Clean Water Act, and before the Clean Air Act had time to have an effect.\u00a0 I remember when the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire in 1969.\u00a0 For all my love of the natural beauty of Tennessee, the air in Chattanooga was really bad.\u00a0 As late as the early 1980s, I\u2019d come home from college for the weekend, get across Signal Mountain and smell the air pollution.\u00a0 No more.<\/p>\n

Are things perfect?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 And it\u2019s gotten harder to generate support for improvements \u2013 when the damage is readily apparent, ordinary people get concerned.\u00a0 When you can\u2019t see or smell the pollution, it\u2019s easy to ignore it.\u00a0 But the Earth is much cleaner now than it was before the first Earth Day and that\u2019s worth celebrating.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth acknowledging our dependence on the Earth<\/strong>.\u00a0 In a world where food comes from restaurants, water comes from bottles, and energy comes from the wall, it\u2019s worthwhile to take a moment to remember that all of these things come from the Earth \u2013 and their supply is not unlimited.\u00a0 Modern agriculture can feed millions with a tiny fraction of the labor it took our ancestors, but if we wear out the soil, poison the bees, use every last gallon of water and exacerbate climate change, we could see famine in the \u201cfirst world\u201d again.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s worth strengthening our spiritual connections to the Earth<\/strong>.\u00a0 Few of us in North America live a lifestyle that is sustainable over several centuries.\u00a0 The evil sorcerers of Madison Avenue are telling us we must consume even more, and they are quite skilled at their deceptions.\u00a0 Making changes in our lives requires constant mindfulness and a spiritual commitment.\u00a0 Reason alone will never generate the level of commitment of religious devotion.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t make changes in our lives so we can love the Earth, we love the Earth so we\u2019ll make the changes we need to make.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth accepting how much is left to do<\/strong>.\u00a0 The US Energy Department\u2019s website<\/a> asks the question \u201cDo we have enough oil worldwide to meet our future needs?\u201d\u00a0 It answers simply \u201cyes\u201d \u2013 then it admits there\u2019s enough to last 25 years, with \u201cproved reserves\u201d about 50 years. \u00a0I\u2019m 52 \u2013 that\u2019s probably enough for me.\u00a0 What about my friends who are in college?\u00a0 What about the children who are being born today, or their children, or their grandchildren?<\/p>\n

How long will the oil last?\u00a0 Honestly, nobody knows.\u00a0 What we do know is that the easy-to-get oil is gone and what\u2019s left is increasingly more expensive in terms of both financial cost and environmental damage.\u00a0 The less we use now the longer what we have will last and the less damage we cause by increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n

Raising awareness is useless if that awareness doesn\u2019t lead to action, but your options aren\u2019t limited to driving a Hummer or living in a cave.\u00a0 Do what you can to use less and live more sustainably, today.\u00a0 If you can do more tomorrow, great.\u00a0 Purity is overrated<\/a> \u2013 doing something is better than doing nothing.<\/p>\n

Not every celebration is a feel-good party<\/strong>.\u00a0 Memorial Day has become the official start of Summer in the United States, but its primary purpose is to honor those who died in combat.\u00a0 Labor Day has become the end of Summer, but its primary purpose is to honor working men and women and to remember the sacrifices made by early labor activists.\u00a0 The Christian Good Friday and the Pagan Samhain are both somber holidays, but they are well worth celebrating.<\/p>\n

So let us celebrate Earth Day by remembering the places of great beauty we visit on rare occasion and the places of ordinary beauty we experience every day.\u00a0 Let us remember that we cannot eat without killing<\/a>, and we cannot live without impacting other people, other species, and the Earth herself.\u00a0 And let us remember that just as the previous generation made things better for the Earth and all her creatures, so can we.<\/p>\n

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We don\u2019t make changes in our lives so we can love the Earth, we love the Earth so we\u2019ll make the changes we need to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1129,"featured_media":2293,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[383,384,380,382,64,4,5,381],"class_list":["post-2292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nature","tag-clean-air-act","tag-clean-water-act","tag-earth-day","tag-epa","tag-nature-2","tag-pagan","tag-paganism","tag-peak-oil"],"yoast_head":"\nEarth Day Is Worth Celebrating<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We don\u2019t make changes in our lives so we can love the Earth, we love the Earth so we\u2019ll make the changes we need to make.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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