Environment
HEGE Series
Matter Matters: The Goodness of Creation | YouTube Channel Y2AM - Be the Bee
The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 | Amazon
The time has come to destroy those who destroy the earth! — Revelation 11:18 I am... making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? ... — C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man 1943 Pearls to the Pigs and Communion to Dogs Animals do not possess rationality' and have no free will. They possess however, through their instincts and the spirit of life planted in them, a certain basic understanding of the world, enough for them to never fail in recognizing God and serving His will. This is why Christ did not specifically minister to animals, not because they were unworthy, or because He didn’t care about them, but because the creation already knew Him and obeyed him as God. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together as it suffers together the pains of labor, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. — Romans 8:19-23
See —
Cosmology
John O‘Donohue
The Spiritual Roots of the Ecological Crisis
One Earth Navigator
— Explore Earth’s Bioregions | One Earth
Environment | Wikipedia
Salmon Migration as Earth Expression Living Earth Community | Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing
Living Earth Community
Emergence Magazine: Connecting the threads between ecology, culture, and spirituality
East to Eden | Emergence Magazine
A Rant Against Satellite Photos and in Defense of Starlit Skies
Biblical Prophets and Contemporary Environmental Ethics
The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions...
Quinoa, new enemy of the environment. What about health?
Seeing God through the eyes of a wild creature
My Life as a Turkey — DailyMotion
My Life as a Turkey Makes Timely Return to PBS Nature
Wild at Heart: At Home with Joe Hutto and Rita Coolidge
Religious Right
The Nature of the Religious Right: The Struggle between Conservative Evangelicals and the Environmental Movement | Amazon, Cornell University Press
— “Pogue carefully delineates the backtracking of many conservative evangelicals on environmentalism, even as he presents the valiant but unsuccessful efforts of the Evangelical Environmental Network's Ron Sider and climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, among other evangelicals, to forestall this abandonment of environmental stewardship.
This book examines how white conservative evangelical Christians became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation. Before the 1990s, this group used ideas of nature to help construct the religious right movement while developing theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies that can be described as Christian environmental stewardship. On the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, members of this conservative evangelical community tried to turn their eco-friendly philosophies into action. Yet this attempt was overwhelmed by a growing number in the leadership who made anti-environmentalism the accepted position through public ridicule, conspiracy theories, and cherry-picked science. Through analysis of rhetoric, political expediency, and theological imperatives, the book explains how ideas of nature played a role in constructing the conservative evangelical political movement, why Christian environmental stewardship was supported by members of the community for so long, and why they turned against it so decidedly beginning in the 1990s.
This book offers an important, persuasive corrective to the history of religious conservatism. Pogue argues that Evangelicals' dogmatic opposition of environmentalism is historically contingent rather than an inevitable result of theology and political ideology. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Pogue documents a doctrine of "Christian environmental stewardship" that was clearly articulated among prominent Evangelicals beginning in the late 1960s and shows how this environmentalism was purged from the religious Right only in the early 1990s. Though the book's accounting of evangelical theology, particularly the analysis of "the natural" and a land-based nationalism, will not particularly surprise scholars, Pogue successfully shows how these ideas might have been compatible with early conceptions of stewardship long before being deployed to oppose actions protecting the environment. The book also offers lessons for the environmental movement, noting that the first Earth Day activists' critique of Christianity helped lay the groundwork for Evangelicals' eventual rejection of environmentalism. Required reading for historians and analysts of the conservative movement, the religious Right, and/or the environmental movement.
Introduction
...The Nature of the Religious Right challenges two fundamental ways that scholars traditionally understand the relationship between the reigious right and environmental protection. This relationship is presently understood in the following two ways: The first suggests that politically conservative evangelicals developed anti-environmentalist views on the basis of their biblical or theological beliefs, which includes the view that the world would end soon (premillennialism) and/or that humanity should have “mastery over nature”; the latter perception stems mainly from an interpretation of Genesis 1:26-28, in which God commanded Adam and Eve to “subdue’ the Earth and have “dominion” over all living things. The second is that the community opposed environmentalism not due to biblical interpretations but out of loyalty to conservative politics often connected with choosing a strong economy over the health of nature. Both explanations undoubtedly have merit, but they are usually presented as reasons that always existed within the religious/political community, or that the issue was simply ignored until they decided upon environmental opposition....
[T]his book reveals that those in the religious right attempted to find a compassionate balance between humanity and the nonhuman natural world, but due to a variety of factors, they found themselves opponents of views they once, at least philosophically supported. In short, the present day animosity toward environmentalists held among those associated with the religious right evolved over time an is truly complex....
[T]he secular environmental movement accused Christianity of perpetrating the ecological crisis....[B]oth politically liberal and conservative evangelicals were forced into a defensive posture and therefore lost the momentum toward possibly developing a solid position that produced pro-environmental activity....[T]hey continued in their acceptance of Christian environmental stewardship and furthermore connected to ideas of nature in alternate ways stemming from Christian Reconstructionism and dominion theology.
According to the primary founder of Reconstruction, Rousas John Rushdoony, getting back to this original heirarchy [set up by God in the Genesis creation story between humanity and the rest of the natural world] would bring balance and harmony to all areas of life....[F]ounders of the religious right movement...[factored that] into their arguments to challenge the counterculture-inspired social movements of the late 1960s, such as women‘s and gay rights, whose advocates they perceived as lobbying for the social acceptance of “unnatural” or “artificial” lifestyles. The differentiation between “unnatural” and “natural” justified, in the eyes of poltically conservative evangelicals, their quest to socially and politically support God-ordained separate gender rold, traditional marriage, and fighting against abortion, the latter being a product of what they saw as destroying the ordained hierarchy by replacing God as creator with humanity‘s medical science. Therefore, politically conservative evangelicals believed that when humanity restored its God-ordained design or natural design, then all social ills would be remedied. It was these views, framed as “God‘s creation” versus “manmade artificial,” that in part drove conservative evangelicals to form the religious right movement. Reconstruction‘s recipe for a better future in part conflicted with the group‘s accepted pre-millenialist prediction that the world would end soon and was therefore never accepted in its entirety. The religious right nevertheless, cherry-picked useful aspects of it to help fuel their social and political efforts.
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese
Greening the Parish | GOARCH
YouTube
“How To” Green Your Parish — Episodes
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Tree of Life
Tree of life (biblical) | Wikipedia
Tree Of Life Bible Society
"Tree of Life" Bible translation?
Tree of Life (Mexican pottery) | Wikipedia
The Mexican Tree of Life
Ethiopian Church Forests
The Church Forests of Ethiopia: A Mystical Geography | Emergence Magazine
The Church Forests of Ethiopia film | Emergence Magazine
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church | Wikipedia
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Faith and Order
Church forests of Ethiopia | Wikipedia
Ethiopia's 'church forests' are incredible oases of green | National Geographic
Saving the Forests of Ethiopia – One Church at a Time | TreeFoundation
Conservation of Ethiopia's Church Forests | CanopyMeg
Saving Ethiopian Forests One Church at a Time | YouTube
Ethiopian Church Forest Conservation | YouTube
Global Warming
See — Oil (Petroleum), Merchants of Doubt, Sun & Climate
An Inconvenient Truth | Wikipedia
An Inconvenient Truth | Paramount Plus YouTube
The Trick (film) | Wikipedia
The Trick | PBS
TV meteorologist quits after receiving threats and harassment over climate change coverage
Global Temperature Trends From 2500 B.C. To 2040 A.D.
A third of Americans will soon live in dangerously hot areas: study
What is the RISKIEST Region in the US as the Climate Changes? PBS Terra | YouTube
Second heat wave expected to bring temps above 100 for 20% of people in US 20 Jun 2022
These maps show how excessively hot it is in Europe and the U.S. 18 Jul 2022
What are El Niño and La Niña?
El Niño is here, and it could become a big one. Here’s what it means for our weather. 8 Jun 8 2023
July 2023 El Niño update: learning the steps
The world’s oceans are extremely hot. We’re about to find out what happens next. 16 Jun 2023
Climate-heating El Niño has arrived and threatens lives, declares UN 4 Jul 2023
Hundreds of Menhaden fish die at Quintana Beach County Park 9 June 2023
Monday was hottest day for global average temperature on record, as climate crisis bites 4 Jul 2023
Earth reaches hottest day ever recorded 4 days in a row 7 Jul 2023
America's cruel summer 8 Jul 2023
Four alarming charts that show just how extreme the climate is right now 17 June 2023
Global heat in ‘uncharted territory’ as scientists warn 2023 could be the hottest year on record 8 Jul 2023
Is this extreme weather the ‘new normal?’ There’s no such thing, some scientists say 19 Jul 2023
July 19, 2023 - Millions face extreme heat across the globe 19 Jul 2023
2024 will probably be hotter than this year because of El Niño, NASA scientists say 20 Jul 2023
July 27, 2023 - Coast-to-coast heat wave scorches the US 27 Jul 2023
This month is the planet’s hottest on record by far – and hottest in around 120,000 years, scientists say 27 Jul 2023
It’s the summer of changed climate. Get used to it July 29, 2023
Watch: World's largest permafrost crater in Russia
Code Red
Humanity at ‘code red,’ facing climate emergency, scientists warn 10/24/23
Secretary-General Calls Latest IPCC Climate Report ‘Code Red for Humanity’, Stressing ‘Irrefutable’ Evidence of Human Influence
Climate: Can We Really Trust the IPCC?
Fraser Institute: Climate Change Denial | Wikipedia
The Hand of Government in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Executive Summary Full Report | Fraser Institute Sep 13, 2022
Merchants of Doubt
Naomi Oreskes | Wikipedia
Merchants of Doubt | Wikipedia
Merchants of Doubt (film) | Wikpedia - DocumentaryArea
Merchants of Doubt: A Film that Connects Climate Change & the Rise of Public Relations
Fred Singer | Wikipedia
Frederick Seitz | Wikipedia
— Singer & Seitz are the original spearheads for denial of global warming (climate change), whose fanatical anti-communist delusion rather than blatant love of money (usually the case) induce them into being schills for the Corporate American schtick built on the foundation of Oil without which it could not exist. Both “scientists” (for whom climatology is neither of their area of expertise) are throwbacks to the Cold War era, and as such are fanatical anti-communist ideologues whose post WWII political ideology opposes as “socialism” (codeword for “communism”) any issues that involve need for government action. Their attack on health issues are not about science, but about political debate around the role of government. They slur environmentalists as creeping communists, reds under the bed, watermelons (green outside, red inside), incessantly obsessing over environmental regulation (needed only due to Corporate American malfeasance) as a slippery slope to socialism. The ultimate effect of Singer & Seitz is to promote the same old Corporate American agenda (Hamilton‘s wet dream) that began after the Civil War (railroads were early American corporations, and the Transcontinental Railroad an early example of corporate welfare, corporate control of American government). Main ingredients of the Corporate American schtick are Individualism and Consumerism with its nightmare illusion of the so called American Dream.
George C. Marshall Institute | Wikipedia
History
— “The George C. Marshall institute was founded in 1984 by Frederick Seitz (former President of the United States National Academy of Sciences), Robert Jastrow (founder of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies), and William Nierenberg (former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography). The institute's primary aim, initially, was to play a role in defense policy debates, defending Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars"). In particular, it sought to defend SDI "from attack by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and in particular by the equally prominent physicists Hans Bethe, Richard Garwin, and astronomer Carl Sagan." The institute argued that the Soviet Union was a military threat.[5] A 1987 article by Jastrow[6] argued that in five years the Soviet Union would be so powerful that it would be able to achieve world domination without firing a shot.[5] When the Cold War instead ended in the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the institute shifted from an emphasis on defense to a focus on environmental skepticism, including global warming denial.”
Global warming
— “In Requiem for a Species, Clive Hamilton is critical of the Marshall Institute and contends that the conservative backlash against global warming research was led by three prominent physicists—Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, and William Nierenberg, who founded the institute in 1984. According to Hamilton, by the 1990s the Marshall Institute's main activity was attacking climate science. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway reach a similar conclusion in Merchants of Doubt (2010), where they identified a few contrarian scientists associated with conservative think-tanks who fought the scientific consensus and spread confusion and doubt about global warming.”
Albert E. Burke
See — Albert E. Burke
Sun & Climate
Solar activity and climate | Wikipedia
Ask NASA Climate | NASA
What Is the Sun's Role in Climate Change? | NASA
FAQ: How Does the Solar Cycle Affect Earth's Climate? | NASA
Is the Sun causing global warming? | NASA
Sun & climate: moving in opposite directions
How do we know more CO2 is causing warming?
Explaining how the water vapor greenhouse effect works
NOAA forecasts quicker, stronger peak of solar activity Oct 25, 2023
Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun's chaotic peak be?
4 factors driving 2023’s extreme heat and climate disasters 27 July 2023
The Role of Sunspots and Solar Winds in Climate Change
Couldn't the Sun be the cause of global warming?
The Sun and climate change
Myth vs. Facts
6 Claims Made by Climate Change Skeptics—and How to Respond
Climate Denial Crock of the Week - Solar Schmolar | YouTube
No, it's not the sun. | YouTube
Henrik Svensmark | Wikipedia
Beware barkers of “solar driven climate” like David DeByrne
“Sun driven climate” is DeByrne‘s theme around which he‘s built his schtick, yet another P.T. Barnum hawking amusement, entertainment to fools who are easily parted from their money.
Mini Ice Age Conversations Podcast
— I've done due diligence and found discrepancies in his blather, babbling about the Chinese and silk roads and thousands of years experience observing climate change, when the Chinese never ventured out on the silk roads, or their Asian sphere of influence. They had no need to as they were the center of the world, and Europeans (like Columbus) were all tripping over themselves trying to find a better way to China to get their goods. Major red flag is adverts for sale of gold on his site. Hopefully, I've finally learned to never, never, ever, ever trust what any American has to say who's selling something, and that's mostly everyone in US with a big mouth. I've lived too long in the belly of the Mammon Beast to expect anything different to be true.
Grand Solar Minimum
Adapt 2030 | YouTube
DeByrne also gets commissions from product sales on Amazon.
Carbon Footprint
Carbon Footprint Calculator | EPA
What is your Ecological Footprint?
How many Earths over budget is your lifestyle (aka "standard" of living, the American Way)?
Orthodox Spiritual Life and the Environment
The Face of God: The Orthodox Church on Climate Change | Vimeo
Orthodox Christians as Priests of Creation
The Whole of Material Creation Will be Transfigured
A two-day dialogue on Orthodoxy and the Environment —
Nature and Other Modern Idolatries
The Orthodox Church and Non-Orthodox Eco-Justice Movements
Environmental Concerns and Orthodox Christian Witness
The Desert Sea: Early Irish Ascetic Landscapes of Creation
Cosmic Cathedral: Orthodox Liturgy and Ecological Vision
Monasticism, and the Renewal of Creation
Our Care for God’s Precious Environment
Christianity & the Environment: Rev. Dr. Michael James Oleksa | YouTube 13 Mar 2017 — see references to “monster”
PROBE — Transcripts: The Monster Slayer, Part I - IV 1962
We Need to Pay Attention to More Climate Change Indicators — George P. Nassos
Illinois Institute of Technology IIT-Stuart Students Thank Their Professor George Nassos
Fr. Andrew Damick
Orthodox Environmentalism | YouTube
Have you ever seen the bumper sticker that says the earth does not belong to us we belong to the earth? Or maybe you've seen the one that says save the planet kill yourself. These things are an expression of what we might call liberal environmentalism, and the basic idea behind liberal environmentalism is that mankind is bad for the planet. Now this way of thinking about the natural world is countered by what we might think of as a kind of conservative environmentalism, although it's not usually called environmentalism, where it's not so much that we belong to the earth, but rather that the earth belongs to us.
How does that look to the Orthodox Christian faith? Do we have anything to say about environmentalism? Do we have to pick either liberal environmentalism or conservative stewardship environmentalism?
Well, I think we don't have to pick between those two, and in fact, we actually have a different vision in the Orthodox Church of what man's relationship to the natural world should be. I would say that both we and the earth belong to God. We are both creations of God and everything is ultimately referred back to God. Man's purpose is to offer the creation back to God for God's blessing, and then God blesses it and then returns it to man, and that blesses man in turn. This is the basic narrative and dynamic of sacrifice on altars, the basic narrative and dynamic of all prayer of liturgical action and so forth.
And so rather than being an alien on the earth, which is sort of the liberal environmental vision for mankind on the earth, or being the owner of the earth, which is a more kind of conservative approach to environmentalism, man is rather the priest of this earth. His job is to offer the natural world back up to God for that blessing.
And so if man is the priest then what does that make the earth? The earth is actually a temple a church a cathedral a cosmic cathedral. And our purpose in this cosmic cathedral is to worship God, and to use the natural world as part of that worship, and this approach to the natural world, this kind of reverence because we see God as being present in all things — He is not identical with the world, but he is present in the world, the sense that God is present in all things and so therefore we approach the world with a natural reverence — this idea, this sense is something that a lot of the saints of the Orthodox Church have had throughout time, such as Saint Seraphim of Sarov and other Saints who spent a lot of time outdoors and had a real connection with the natural world, seeing it as being part of God's creation just as they are part of God's creation, and that we don't belong to the earth, the earth does not belong to us, but we and the earth are the Lord's.
Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinn | Wikipedia
American author whose ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as "new tribalism".
He sought to recognize and criticize some of civilization's most unchallenged "myths" or "memes", which he considered to include the following: that the Earth was made especially for humans, so humans are destined to conquer and rule it; that humans are innately and inevitably flawed; that humans are separate from and superior to nature (which Quinn called "the most dangerous idea in existence"); and that all humans must be made to live according to some one right way.
Quinn was influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following:
Takers and Leavers — "Takers" refers to members of the dominant globalized civilization and its culture, while "Leavers" refers to members of the countless other non-civilized cultures existing both in the past and currently. Quinn later regretted these terms, supposing that "hierarchical" and "tribal," respectively, may be better alternatives.
Mother Culture – a personification of any culture's inherently biased influences that are not perceived as biased by its members
Food Race – the phenomenon of ongoing human overpopulation and its accompanying global catastrophes, in which the giving of more food to starving, growing populations paradoxically yields only still greater population growth and starvation
Law of limited competition – a biological law that "defines the limits of competition in the community of life," according to which "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them... access to food in general," meaning across-the-board; species that violate this law end up extinct
Law of Life – the universal collection of all evolutionarily stable strategies
Totalitarian Agriculture – today's dominant form of agriculture that "subordinates all other life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food," unsustainable because it generates enormous food supplies that in turn generate ever-greater human population booms
The Great Forgetting – widespread historical ignorance regarding "the fact that we [humans] are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet; this also includes our forgetting of the fact that most of human history has been based on an ecologically sound way of life (largely hunting and gathering)"
Boiling frog – "a metaphor for so many circumstances in life when people are unwilling or unable to react effectively to crises that occur very gradually or imperceptibly," used especially by Quinn to refer to creeping normality in terms of escalating environmental degradation
New Tribal Revolution – a hypothetical, sociocultural period of global change that Quinn supports, in which civilization would gradually begin to transform into a collection of more sustainable, tribally-organized societies
Green Man
Green Man | Wikipedia
— “Superficially, the Green Man would appear to be pagan, perhaps a fertility figure or a nature spirit, similar to the woodwose (the wild man of the woods), and yet he frequently appears, carved in wood or stone in churches, chapels, abbeys and cathedrals, where examples can be found dating through to the 20th century.”
A Little Book of The Green Man by Mike Harding
— “For such a blatantly Pagan image to have persisted in Christian churches all over Europe surely implies a tremendous power and significance.”
Renaissance Parterre
Marie Antoinette | Wikipedia
Marie Antoinette (2006) Official Trailer | YouTube — Sony Pictures
Marie Antoinette - The Downfall & Death of a Queen | YouTube
The Really Bad Sex Life (And Reign) Of Marie Antoinette & Louis XVI | YouTube
The Terrible Fate Of Marie Antoinette's Children | The Lost Dauphin of France And His Siblings | YouTube
'Marie Antoinette': PBS Period Drama Gets Spring Release Date 2023
The Queen's Hamlet
The visible beginning of western conservative (anti-)environmentalism —
The Renaissance Parterre garden is an explicitly mathematical, geometrical icon of human power over nature, the human jackboot on the face of God, of whom Creation is an icon — not a Christian material-spiritual sacred icon, but rather an anti-christian materialistic anti-icon of the gnostically inspired, rising Western Whore of Babylon who rides The Beast until his final, actual appearance in the flesh.
Square away what you think you know about the parterre garden style inspired by 15th-century France
"After all, the point of the parterre is to show off. ..."
