The Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi: A Celebration of our Brother Sun and Sister Moon

Welcome, Opening Comments

Rev. Bob Donnell

Welcome to our celebration of the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi. Today is also the last day of the Season of Creation, which started September 1st and which we celebrated a few weeks ago on September 21st. That was also Sun Day, on which we celebrated our star the Sun, and its promise to help heal our home Earth by providing us with clean energy. As you will see this evening, these three themes—St. Francis, the Season of Creation, and Sun Day—are closely interrelated. You will hear about each. All Saints and Gulf Coast Creation Care are co-hosts for our celebration, and you will hear from both Lella Lowe and Rhoda Vanderhart. Thanks also to Josh for our music. I am sure you have noticed our fire. Perhaps a little warm for a fire, but it reminds us of the never-ending light and energy of creation, and especially of our star the Sun. I hope you enjoy the evening.

Brother Sun: Our Hope for Healing

Lella Lowe

Humanity has honored the sun for millennia, through poetry and song, art and dance. St. Francis’ 13th century poetry referred to the Sun as “brother”, who bears the likeness of God and brings the day and the light. As early as 1500BC, ancient Vedic hymns celebrated the sun as the source of light and life, with practitioners physically and spiritually worshipping the sun. Indigenous tribes have continued traditions such as the Sun Dance every spring.

We do well to recognize the sun as a symbol of God’s ongoing care for all of creation, as it reliably provides light, warmth and food through photosynthesis. Today, we are increasingly aware that the sun can also supply all the energy humanity needs.  In fact, the sun constantly bathes the earth with about 10,000 times more energy than humans currently use. With modern technology, we can harness just a tiny portion of that energy and move beyond our reliance on fossil fuels.

In his new book Here Comes the Sun, environmentalist Bill McKibben notes that, in a world where everything seems to be going wrong, this is the one big thing suddenly going right. Economic forces are finally on the side of renewable energy, and there will be no going back to fossil fuel dominance. He points out that:

1.     In the early 2020’s we reached a point where the cost of generating solar energy dropped below the cost of producing energy from burning fossil fuels, and

2.     Globally, we are in a period of exponential growth in the production and installation of solar panels, due to countries’ desire for energy independence.

We have reached a tipping point with solar energy. There. Will. Be. No. Going. Back.

However, as they say, “we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way”. In the United States, we appear to be choosing the hard way, while the rest of the world moves on without us. That is especially the case in sunny Alabama, where currently only 1% of our electricity comes from solar energy. Last year, in the United States, 80% of new electric generating capacity was from solar panels and batteries, while in Alabama the Public Service Commission is still permitting new natural gas power plants and denying permits for utility scale solar projects.

You are probably aware, because you can see with your own eyes, that there is precious little rooftop solar installed in this area The main barrier is a fee imposed by Alabama Power, with the blessing of the Public Service Commission. This fee acts as a “tax on the sun,” significantly reducing the financial return for homeowners who install solar panels and remain connected to the grid. As a result, solar energy adoption remains minimal in the state.

In response, Gulf Coast Creation Care decided to participate in a national movement called Sun Day that, for other groups, involved everything from electric vehicle parades…to field trips to solar installations…to presentations by solar installers and advocates. But given Alabama’s unique challenges, GCCC chose to focus on a postcard writing campaign directed at the Public Service Commission. The goal is to urge our elected officials to create policies that support, rather than hinder, solar energy development in the state.

While the official Sun Day was September 21, the postcards can be sent any time, because the PSC needs constant reminders that the public cares about solar energy—for the savings it provides, the jobs it can create, and the promise of a healthier planet for us and for future generations. Postcards are available tonight for anyone willing to participate in this important advocacy effort

The sun shines impartially on all life, reminding us of our interconnectedness and the divine power that cares for and sustains us. It is a universal gift that binds all of creation together. For this, we join in offering our praise to God, grateful for the blessings bestowed by our Brother Sun.

A Sun Reflection: Sacred Imagination

Rhoda Vanderhart

Most High, all-powerful, good Lord,
Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor, and all blessings.

To You alone, Most High, do they belong,
and no man is worthy to mention Your name.

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures;
especially Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom You give us light.

And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
and bears a likeness to You, Most High One.

This is a part of The Canticle of the Sun, a song of praise composed by Saint Francis in 1225. It is considered the first poem in vernacular Italian. 

Can you think of anything more worthy of praise for Earth dwellers in God’s creation than our sun? Is there anything more beautiful and useful to us than humanity’s personal star? What a blessing it is to wake up every morning, knowing that no matter how difficult yesterday was, the sun will rise in the eastern sky to bring light to our world. Even if the sky is covered with clouds and it rains all day, our sun is powerful enough to bring light through the clouds, enough light to see and go about our business of the day.  Is there any miracle more astounding than the process of photosynthesis? Sunlight, collaborating with plants to use water and carbon dioxide to create sugar and turn it into food that sustains all life? As I sat in San Juan del Sur bay a few weeks ago on vacation and watched the gorgeous sunsets every evening, it occurred to me that the sun gives us the most stunning artwork in the world. Can you think of anything more awe inspiring than the sun coming up or going down to a vast array of pink and blue and orange and coral and purple and red clouds spread across an endless sky? 

And yet, with the large-scale burning of fossil fuels that began in the mid-eighteenth century, we have made the sun into our enemy. We have created a blanket of smog that traps sunlight and prevents its rays from leaving our atmosphere, thereby setting in motion a steady rise of heat that will one day make life on earth impossible for humans. By living outside of right relationship with this beautiful God-given gift, we have turned the burning power of the sun into something that will eventually be our demise if we don’t repent—that is, change our minds, which will lead to a change in our behavior. 

Bob has asked me to paint a picture of what creation might look like today if we truly followed the way of Francis. So come with me as we imagine life on Earth powered by renewable energy resources. A world where our power plants do not release harmful gases into the environment, where climate change slows, where habitats that have been lost begin to renew, where air and water pollution from extractive processes plummet. 

Air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels is estimated to currently be responsible for 1 in 5 deaths worldwide. Imagine……deaths from asthma, cancer, heart disease beginning to fall.

Imagine…..oil spills being a thing of the past…..some scary occurrence our grandparents lived through.

Imagine…..our groundwater and drinking water no longer contaminated by arsenic, lead, chlorine, and mercury from fracking operations.

Imagine….the health disparities of black and brown communities living near oil refineries and industrial zones begin to dissolve.

Imagine…sheep grazing on millions of acres of solar farms that power our world. 

Imagine…throwing away your car’s windshield sun blocker as every parking lot is covered by millions of solar panels that provide shade for us to park under.

Imagine….college students powering their laptops with solar panels hung off their balconies.

Imagine…your energy bill cut by a third or a half.

Imagine…never going to the gas station again to fill up your car, and never having to remember to change your oil.

Imagine…coral reefs teeming with life as ocean waters cool.

Imagine….no city in the world ever having to clean soot off of historic buildings again.

Imagine…our financial and political systems not controlled by billion dollar industries and rich, powerful men that can cut off supplies of energy and perpetuate war.

Imagine…instead of a Department of the Interior, a Department of Earth Stewardship, responsible not for licensing extraction but for healing the land, restoring watersheds. Instead of pipelines, soil trusts and community reforestation programs.

Imagine…instead of the EPA, a Department of the Common Good, to protect and co-govern what we all share—forests, seeds, water—not as commodities, but as sacred trusts to be passed down to future generations.

This world doesn’t have to be in a far off future. We have the knowledge and materials and technology to fully create this world right now. Many communities around the globe are already leading the way. In 2024, approximately 57% of California's in-state electricity generation was from renewable resources. Renewable energy sources collectively produced 81% of Denmark's electricity generation in 2022, and are expected to provide 100% of national electric power production from 2030 on.

This week, Richard Rohr’s daily devotional reminded us that up to the point of St. Francis’ ministry, “most of Christian spirituality was based in monastic discipline, theories of prayer, or academic theology, but not in a kind of practical Christianity that could be lived in the streets of the world. Francis emphasized an imitation and love of the humanity of Jesus, and not just the worshiping of his divinity.” Let us quit theorizing about caring for God’s creation, and begin the work of restoring relationships, building community, welcoming and harvesting the energy of the sun, leaving the world of exploitation and greed behind, and being a blessing, not a curse to our  incredibly precious natural world.

O God, grant us a whole new mind that we may help usher in a new world already on its way. Amen

Homily

Rev. Bob Donnell

Allow me to tell a few stories that shed some light on the life of St. Francis.

There is a little book called “Into the Green Future” with daily meditations written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In it is a quote by the Native American leader  Si’ahl, chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish peoples in what is now the state of Washington. The Anglican pronunciation of his Si’ahl is Seattle. The city Seattle, Washington is named after him. He and his people lived on the islands of the Peugeot Sound in what is now the state of Washington in the mid-1800s. He is famous for among other things a letter he wrote to President Franklin Pierce in 1855, some 700 years after the life of St. Francis. This speech and letter was a response to the treaty of the American government for buying the land of native Americans. It throws light on the carelessness of the White people towards the environment. Here are a few lines from that letter: “The President…wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sand shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy…we are part of the earth and the earth is part of us…the perfumed flowers are our sisters…the bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers…the rivers are our brothers…the earth is our mother. This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected…Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.”

That sounds a lot like St. Francis to me.

Let’s move now from the American west across the ocean to Russia.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist. His literary works explore the human condition in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. The following is from his book The Brothers Karamazov:

“Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.”

That too sounds like St. Francis.

Dostoevsky wrote this in the 1800s, during “the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres” of Russia. Are we not in the midst of just such troubled times here in America today? The temptation for many of us is to dive into this bottomless pit of hatred and lies and fear, to join the cacophony of angry voices screaming at one another. Yet Dostoevsky’s message and the message of St. Francis is a message of love.

This is the path we too are called to follow. Could the ultimate solution to our troubled times possibly be as Dostoevsky suggested? “Love all God’s creation…and you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” Imagine! It sounds naive doesn’t it? Yet it is the very message Jesus taught over and over again. And it is the message that the life of St. Francis of Assisi teaches us as well. Don’t succumb to the fear and the hatred we see around us. There has to be another way, and the way Francis chose was the way of simplicity, of unity with creation, and of love. St. Francis was more than just a gentle animal-loving and earth-loving man. He was a political activist in his opposition to the crusades. He took vows of poverty and lived a life of solidarity with and care for the poor. He was later named the patron saint of ecology. He is credited as the author of “The Canticle of the Sun,” also called “The Canticle of the Creatures.” I will close with his words:

“Be praised Lord through all your creatures…through my Brother Sun…he is beautiful and radiant…Sister Moon and the stars…precious and beautiful…Brothers Wind and Air and clouds and storms and all the weather…through which you give your creatures sustenance…Sister Water…she is precious and pure…Brother Fire…beautiful and cheerful and powerful and strong…Mother Earth who feeds us…and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs…for those who forgive for love of you, through those who endure sickness and trial…through our Sister Bodily Death from whose embrace no living person can escape…”

St. Francis came, in the words of Dostoevsky, “to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.” This is who we celebrate tonight.

Restoring Peace With Creation: A Sermon for Sun Day

All Saints Episcopal Church, Mobile, Alabama

Proper 20 Year C 2025 (Sun Day and Season of Creation)

Luke 16:1-13

In the name of God the Creator, the Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

Today’s Gospel from Luke is called the “parable of the dishonest manager.” If you can understand it and interpret its meaning, then congratulations. If not, then join the myriad people including scripture gurus and theologians who throughout the centuries have had a hard time understanding exactly what Jesus was getting at in his parable of the crooked manager! The parable’s meaning has stumped even the best and most creative interpreters of Scripture. Hold that thought. We will return to it a little later.

But first, welcome to our annual Season of Creation celebration at All Saints, which today is even more special because it is September 21st, which has been designated as Sun Day. Today is a worldwide day of action and celebration of the power of clean energy, a celebration of our life-giving star the Sun, which offers us the power to clean up the environment. It provides for us a way to reverse the devastating effect of the burning of fossil fuel and the climate change it is causing.

Today is a day for honoring and protecting this God-given created world out of which we are born, in which we find our home, and of which we are a part, just like every other created thing. Barbara Brown Taylor calls this creation a “luminous web” within which we live and breathe and have our being. All things are connected, all part of one whole. In her book An Altar in the World she beautifully makes the point that the entire world is sacred, that we can find God in all of creation, probably more so in the great outdoors than within the walls of any church.

We must protect this sacred space. We are called to help heal it. The sun itself is available for such healing. It is the stimulus for a clean energy revolution: we have the technology to harness its energy; all we need is to build the political will to make clean energy accessible to everyone.

Why was September 21st chosen as the first Sun Day? First, because it is the solar equinox—one of two days of the year when the axis of the Earth is no longer tilted toward or away from the Sun, so that the northern and southern hemispheres get an equal amount of sunlight. Incidentally, although most of the world won’t be able to see it, there is also a partial solar eclipse today, as the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun.

And second, because today is right before the UN General Assembly’s annual meeting, giving us an opportunity to send a message to the US and other world leaders about the urgent need to accelerate and scale up the transition to clean energy.

There are several clean alternatives to the burning of fossil fuel for our energy needs: solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, nuclear, and bioenergy sources such as hydrogen and ocean energy. These are referred to as “clean” or “low-carbon” because they don’t directly emit green-house gases like carbon dioxide. These sources therefore help to improve air quality and mitigate climate change.

Today we focus on the solar energy provided by our star, the Sun. Why solar energy? Here are a few quotes.

From environmentalist Bill McKibben: “We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to produce energy is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. This isn’t ‘alternative energy’ anymore—it’s the common-sense obvious path.”

From former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, “It’s time for all of us who know that windmills don’t cause cancer and that not all energy comes from deep underground, to stand together with our kids and grandkids on Sun Day to stop the mind-numbing rhetoric and jumpstart our clean energy transition.”

From the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., “No one hoards energy from the sun and wind; billionaires and fossil fuel executives can’t hold it in ‘reserves.’ It’s energy for everywhere and everyone.”

And from marine biologist and author Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book What If We Get It Right?, “We really could get it right—we have the clean energy technology we need, and what we need now is the human energy to make it happen despite the obstruction of Big Oil. That’s what Sun Day is about, harnessing photons to power our lives.”

The transition to clean energy is happening across the world. California is showing how a big state can power itself without fossil fuels (with 45% of their total energy consumption coming from clean sources in 2024). Texas broke its solar, wind, and battery records in one week this spring. Ranchers in the state of Washington have turned to a new crop: solar power. Reaching “net zero” carbon emission is getting easier and cheaper in the UK. Pakistan has had a “solar boom” by using cheaper Chinese solar panels, creating a bottom-up energy revolution that could become a blueprint for energy transition worldwide.

As Bill McKibben wrote in the New Yorker a few years ago: “In a world on fire, stop burning things.” People are acting across the country and across the globe, but sadly the powers that be in our state of Alabama are making the transition to clean energy difficult. In a few minutes you will hear about Gulf Coast Creation Care’s campaign to take our case to the Alabama Public Service Commission and how you can participate.

The Season of Creation is an annual celebration running from September 1st through October 4th, which is the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology. The season was first celebrated in 1989 and is now a worldwide ecumenical celebration calling on all people to come together to care for our common home, Earth. It is a time for repairing and restoring our relationship with God and with all of creation—the worldwide church family invited to pray, protect, and advocate for God’s creation.

Each year has a new theme, and the theme for this year is “Peace with Creation,” inspired by these words from Isaiah 32:14-18: “For the palace will be forsaken, the populous city deserted...until a spirit from on high is poured out on us, and the wilderness becomes a fruitful field...then justice will dwell in the wilderness... the effect of righteousness will be peace...quietness and trust forever. My people will abide in a peaceful habitation, in secure dwellings, and in quiet resting places.”

What a beautiful vision—justice, secure dwellings and peaceful habitation: peace with creation. This passage challenges us to reflect on our role in healing a world harmed by the environmental destruction and conflict and injustice we are now seeing.

We hear a lot from this pulpit about social justice. What we are addressing during the Season of Creation is the dominant social justice issue of our time. It is the mother lode of social justice, the issue that affects all of the other social justice issues we face. That issue is climate change. We are seeing it all around us now: the heat, the fires, storms, melting ice caps and sea level rise, instability of our weather patterns, displacement and migration of millions of people.

Much of what we are seeing started with the Industrial Revolution which began back in the 1760s, the age of industrial manufacturing. That’s only 265 years ago, a millisecond in terms of how long Earth has been here, over 4 1/2 billion years. Climate change is happening quickly. Can the Earth sustain life as we know it with this pace of change? What can we do to reverse this change?

One thing we can do is to stop burning fossil fuel, and begin using clean energy, which brings us to our focus today—Sun Day—to our star the Sun, to its potential to reverse this unsustainable change. Theologian and environmentalist Gus Speth said this, “The main threats to the environment are selfishness and greed and pride. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation.” Yes, caring for God’s creation is a spiritual and moral imperative. In choosing to live our lives with respect and care for all of life we are choosing the way of love, of justice, and of righteousness, those same things Isaiah said nearly three thousand years ago.

Let’s go full circle now and return to our parable of the dishonest manager that we heard today. This past Tuesday I was sitting at the dinner table with my wife and daughter, trying to decipher what Jesus was trying to say with this parable. Not only that, but how could this parable about a crooked manager have anything to do with caring for creation? With celebrating our star the Sun and the energy it can provide? My wife said “Why not just go to the last line? I think it may be saying something you could preach about." Here is the last line again: “You cannot serve God and wealth,” or as Eugene Peterson translates it in The Message, “No worker can serve two bosses: He’ll either hate the first and love the second or adore the first and despise the second. You can’t serve both God and the Bank.”

In our care for creation we are serving God. In our search for clean energy sources such as solar we are serving God. We are acting out of our moral imperative to do what is best for creation including our Earth home. It is in resisting the transition from fossil fuel to solar and other sustainable energy sources that we are serving the Bank. That is where the big money is made. That is where the deep pockets, the “reserves” are stored, the cost of which is determined by those in power deciding how the most money can be made. It is greed. The powers that would prevent us from moving to clean energy sources are serving wealth, not God, or as Peterson puts it, they are serving “the Bank.”

I will conclude today with this translation of the words of the psalmist: “O Lord, send us forth with your Spirit to renew the face of the earth, that the world may once again be filled with your good things: the trees watered abundantly, springs rushing between the hills in verdant valleys, all the earth made fruitful, your manifold creatures—birds, beasts, and humans—all quenching their thirst and receiving their nourishment from you once again in due season.”

And we give thanks for the Sun, as Saint Francis puts it in his Canticle of Brother Sun, “Praise for the sun, the bringer of day, he carries the light of the Lord in his rays; the moon and the stars who light up the way unto your throne.”

Amen.

~Rev. Bob Donnell

Climate Change, Risk Denial and Collective Hope..."Or we are not Christians?"

A meditation after reading the Washington Post’s 2-part series about climate-related flooding on the Northern Gulf, particularly in coastal Mobile County (4/29/24). 

---------- 

For over a half century in the USA, we've known that--statistically--1 in 4 persons will get cancer. We're smart. We look around at our family of 4 and can do the 'maths.' Yet, we deny our own risk because we feel impotent or unable to grasp just how we'd cope when our world is turned upside down and inside out. Or, hey, maybe soon there'll be a cure. (BTW, technology is not our friend but rather that forked-tongued bad boy your mom told you to steer clear of, but that's another reflection.) 

Grasping climate change presents a similar predicament. We know the risk, we can do the math. We devote thoughts and prayers to a "cure." "Let this cup pass from my hands." But, don't ask me to give up my riches, comfort, convenience, security, complacency. I'm pampering myself now in case the tragedy comes tomorrow at 8am. The parable of the rich, young ruler does indeed jump to mind!

And tragedy is coming for all of us. The "new normal," it is named. 

Since we feel impotent in the face of the enormity of the challenge, never having lived through tragedy beyond our control, we cannot imagine it happening to us. Maybe the next hurricane will take out my neighbor's house rather than mine? Certainly, I'll take them a green bean casserole and express my sympathies. Maybe that rising water inching up my dock is an aberration that will bring the crabs nearer to catch but then soon recede. "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

(Psst...we're there.) 

With waning empathy in modernity due to diminished community, we "let the good times roll," denying both our impotence and our failure of imagination. God forbid we should sacrifice the good life for the common good. Not while we're rolling snake eyes with loaded dice. 

Maybe it’s true that pilgrims go to Lourdes seeking the Virgin Mary, not so much believing they'll be healed but seeking the strength to endure when no miracle comes? 

Even in an egregiously individualistic society where everyone in a rich country inhabits their own climate-controlled, security-enabled bubble, what if that is what resilience means? Shared strength. Perhaps "misery loves company" because that is where hope lives? 

If hope is collective, perhaps there's a reactive role for faith communities in climate destabilization. If so, it will be the greatest test of faith Christianity has ever faced. 

If you've lived and worked on the frontlines in poor countries that have faced unrelenting, sequential concurrent tragedies, you can imagine both the gory and the glory, the incapacity and the resilience. The former are humbling, the latter ennobling. Scarcity brings out the worst and best in us--sometimes at the same moment. Like when we are called to nurse an enemy with the resources intended for a loved one. The test of hospitality is when there simply is not enough to go around. Amidst abundance, hospitality may be lacking or not, but it is never tested. Abundance evaporates in the blazing direct light of unrelenting, sequentially concurrent existential crises. 

Collective hope is sharing. Both the sustenance and the suffering. A distinguishing hallmark of the Primate Order (monkeys, apes and humans)--unique among social mammals, is that it is hard-wired in our nature to share in times of abundance and scarcity. 

The eisegesis of Christian theologians seeking scriptural relevance for creation care waxes poetic on the transcendent significance of the incarnation, transfiguration and resurrection. Yet, all the practical theology one needs for creation care is in the Sermon on the Mount. Of course, that depends on how inclusive and expansive your Kingdom of God is. 

The climate catastrophe now unfolding, and irreversible, will rekindle community. Bubbles will be burst. We'll survive if we can truly live Micah 6:8 and Matthew 25:35-45. If we can't, we'll face the dilemma of the Medieval scholar who first encountered the Gospels in a Monastery library and mumbled: "Either these are not the Gospels or we are not Christians." 

Photo credit: Rob Bearden

Does a tree falling in the rainforest make a sound in the neocolonialist mind?

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds..."--the Prophet Bob Marley.

If a tree falls in the forest and there are no humans to hear it, does it make a sound?

In post-Soviet times, we harp--legitimately--about neoliberalism yet often fail to conflate it with neocolonialism. Neoliberalism is an elitist tool using the global legal system to steal and direct the flow of resources from the poor countries to the rich countries. It is aided and abetted by the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Climate change is the ultimate form of colonialization: plundering resources to feed the insatiable appetites of those whose addiction to comfort, choices, convenience and personal security overrides any sense of equity, obscures the suffering of millions in the Majority World and the frontlines rural people, and shows no respect for the Commons. If you are reading this right now, the odds are good you join company with me as one of those elites who are amusing themselves to death with the ease and flippancy of fossil-fuel fed keystrokes.

Decarbonization and decommodification of Nature are essential features of decolonization. From the Berlin Conference to Bandung, plunder has been the primary instrument of domination and supremacy. In recent decades, the International Criminal Court has made a paltry attempt to redress crimes against humanity. However, until we codify ecocide and the legal rights of Nature, there simply are no tools to stop the plunder. While the crime of genocide is in the Rome Statute, genocide will continue unabated until we stop the ecocidal looting. The current definition of genocide is not sufficiently expansive to protect indigenous people and the land upon which their survival depends. We can do that legally amongst the community of nation-states, or as Naomi Klein suggests, the laws of Nature will prevail over the laws of [capitalist] economics. She wrote:

"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature." In other words, the biosphere will collapse.

In the immediate, near-term, please remember that there is no true enforcement mechanism on the frontlines of the Developing World. A corrupt, bad-faith multinational corporation can toss a few $thousands to bribe government officials to look the other way, throw a few worthless beads, blankets and assorted trinkets at an impoverished community, and plunder the timber, rare-earth minerals, gold, diamonds, fossil fuels that modern technology requires to keep us deluded in our comfort and pomposity. It is truly the "Wild West" where "might makes right." And soon enough, we see the level of deforestation that changes microclimate, then global climate, but moreover deprives locals of their heritage and livelihood, and denies us the forest's gift of carbon sequestration. Since the Age of Exploration [circa14th-19th Centuries CE), we've lost perhaps one-half of the estimated 6000 pre-contact societies--each a unique manifestation of the human spirit and the accumulated wisdom across the millennia about how to be fully human and live in communitas.

That lovely dining-room furniture set made of rare mahogany or teak you enjoy comes from a round log [ancient tree]--since it was stolen and had no intrinsic value placed upon it by capitalists--cost only a few $thousand to extract, transport and fashion into consumer items worth an aggregate downstream rich-country value of $1million for every round log.

By the way, watching one of those towering, majestic creatures being felled is a horrendous, PTSD-inducing physical and emotional experience. As it creaks, moans, cracks and begins to topple--being attached in communion to nearby trees with vines and branches intertwined--it pulls down all vegetation with the forest creatures in residence, the entire canopy of plants and animals screeching, wailing, and screaming in a high-pitched cacophony of tongues such that it deafens the bystander. The massive roots, rootmass and buttresses are ripped from the forest floor community, leaving a gaping-pit wound that swallows even the tallest bystander. The final sensory experience the bystander feels is the knee-buckling, chest-rumbling earthquake caused by hundreds of tons crashing with a death-rattle rustling of leaves and somber thud onto the forest floor that echoes interminably across the forest. Then, eerie silence. Like that in the savanna after the lion roars. Nothing dares to breathe. Or, make a sound. Or move. In the chaos that ensues next, and provided no bystanders have been crushed in the football-pitch sized treefall zone, the wildlife poachers begin shooting the stunned and maimed animals--some rare and endangered--to cook as bushmeat stew to feed the timber workers. "Living off the land," they say in laughter. And then, it all begins again when the treefinder designates the next giant to be felled, ad infinitum, to appease our wellbeing and complacency in the style to which we've become accustomed.

"When a tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. If you are going to chop down a tree, you had better ask permission of the Keeper of the Trees and of the Keeper of the Stars"--as told to me by a Lacandón Maya shaman.

The arrogant loggers do not even ask permission of the forest spirits to enter when they come to defile the forest and destroy the communities of the forest keepers. The Forest will have the final word.

The poisonous mercury used in gold-mining, and natural toxins [arsenic, uranium, etc.] released from massive extraction of minerals will cause immediate health effects in local people, and long-term congenital defects for generations, in areas totally without medical care, clinics, medications. The emotional trauma of experiencing the loss of sacred lands and being separated from one's native human and nonhuman community of beings will become epigenetically encoded in the DNA of victims and inherited by children and grandchildren whose suffering will last their entire lives.

Those indigenes living by their wits and ancient wisdom on the fringes of survival can, at best, hope to endure the intentional consequences: desecrated sacred groves, polluted water sources, poisoned earth and creatures, degraded land destined to be stripped by erosion such that it can no longer support subsistence gardening. Most likely, they will be forced into migration to urban areas where their survival skills and preliterate intelligence confer no means by which to subsist, forced to live in squalor and hunger, or they will be forced into local indentured slavery to the extractive multi-national corporations, primarily mining and palm-oil plantations.

They are us, our ancestors, only 100 years ago. Have we grown too smart by half? Unable to remember lessons learned, deceived by our affluence into a failure of empathy, unwilling to sacrifice for the common good which is the legacy of our shared humanity? Unable to rekindle our shared community on a very fragile, sacred Planet Earth? Does a falling tree make a sound? Listen. The sound is likely there in your genetic memory. If you can't retrieve it, sear the description above into your compassion and hear it every time you look at an online photo of deforestation and resolve to empathize with, to be in solidarity with, frontlines people in this war on Nature, on our communal soul.

As we live into allyship, know this: "Another world is not only possible...She is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."--Arundhati Roy

When Fear and Anxiety are Rational, Hope and Joy are Catalysts

In times of rapid social change, our leaders often speak glibly of hope and joy as antidotes to fear and anxiety. When we have deep attachments, fear and anxiety are very real, rational, justified. But hope and joy as cerebral nouns have no agency over visceral fear and anxiety. Certainly, hope--as well as joy--can be galvanizing, but as Hannah Arendt said, it can also be paralyzing. 

Passive hope and joy are not antidotes. Hope and joy must be catalyzing. Hope and joy are, and elicit, a promise by acting on a promise. 

In Nowness (sentience) with all the senses (faculties) centered, the nouns hope and joy become verbs with agency, and then as verbs they move from the infinitive to the participle. They become adjectives that describe, that activate, our agency. Work, Working, Working woman. Hope, Hoping, Hoping man. The working woman tills and keeps the soil. The hoping man plants a seedling.

When one plants a seedling, hope-the-noun becomes hope-the-verb and then hope-the-catalyst of one's agency. When you let joy-the-noun catch you, joy-the-verb becomes a catalyst for reciprocating joy. 

Hope and joy, then, are like infectious agents (nouns) that hijack the molecular machinery of our soul and churn out (verbs) prodigious quantities of clones of themselves amplifying hope and joy in ourselves that is transmitted to others. Hope and Joy become catalysts for promise.

The promise of Hope and Joy is revealed when a seedling pops up through the early Spring snow cover. Working woman and hoping man made a joyous, transformative promise and the seedling received and fulfilled it. And that is how we get out of this environmental mess. Or, as Inez Aponte more eloquently and poignantly explains: "The wrong question is: How do we reduce carbon emissions? The right question is: How do we meet our genuine needs versus our manufactured wants while regenerating the ability of the Earth to sustain life?" 

Photo attribution: An embed from Getty Images by Jana Engel