The Second Coming? Existential Reality of Global Environmental Crisis
Animals: Tradition - Philosophy - Religion

FROM Dr. Michael W. Fox
February 2021

These sacred connections, long recognized in native American Indian culture, have been broken, and which the Climate and Extinction crises affirm. From a Christian mystical tradition when we empathize deeply with the natural world, we receive the stigmata of an Earth crucified.

My friend the late Very Rev. James R. Morton, Dean of the cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City declared that “Ecology is the science of the body of Christ through which we of the earth community learn our sacred connections.”

These sacred connections, long recognized in native American Indian culture, have been broken, and which the Climate and Extinction crises affirm. From a Christian mystical tradition when we empathize deeply with the natural world, we receive the stigmata of an Earth crucified.

At least one scientist acknowledged these kinds of wounds. The late Aldo Leopold, a former government wolf exterminator who became America’s leading conservationist and natural philosopher, wrote “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen.

An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

But now a more ecologically-aware public, especially the youth, are suffering those wounds and without some direct action or other solution-seeking outlet feel despair, helplessness and hopelessness....

Please read the ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE (PDF)

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