Ecology… It IS Important

TUES., OCT. 26, 1999, 1:58 PM
TURLEY PARK, CARBONDALE

What a nice place to be early on a Fall afternoon. You hear the traffic to your left, but in front of you are grass and the trees of a city park. The breeze is balmy. The conditions are fine for some reflections on the two meetings of your morning. I was there, as you would expect. You took some notes, but they will become less “useful” if you don’t transcribe them soon. There may be some points you’ll want to ponder about spirituality. At your age and with your losses you almost have to choose between taking good notes and thinking about what is being said. Your compromise this morning was “about right.”

You should find it interesting that the longer morning session was on spirituality, with very little attention to the environment and to ecology. In contrast, the noon presentation dealt with environment and ecological challenges, with hardly a mention of the spirit and spirituality. You know, by now, that I see these as quite related, and I would have liked it if you had voiced some of My observations. But here you are, anyway, and I shall help you fill these three pages.

You did share with Hugh My prime observation in relation to this aspect of earth life: an absolute necessity for your culture to nurture and maintain and sustain the environmental health of your land (and, indirectly, of others) is attention to the spiritual as the relevant dimension to your culture’s health. This means cutting back on production, use of resources, and waste generation, with the spiritual motivation – giving up something good for something better. Given the perspectives of social progress, politics, and economics there are few reasons to “cut back”… live more simply, and many good reasons to “do what you do… and do it better.”

Obviously the money, resources, and energy that goes into armaments, with new “models” replacing those now used, regularly are actions of which I can’t approve. Your culture’s dominant rationale is that you must have a good defense against aggressors, but what you produce encourages other nations and cultures to compete in this arms race. As I have told you I have had a hand in preventing most use of these devastating weapons, but I may have to allow some interchange to again let you see how destructive these can be. The lessons of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have dimmed with the more than 50 years since the bombs were dropped that ended that war.

You realize, of course, that I have guided you to this region, even to your special Farm, to enjoy, for the last half of this earth life, the beauty and serenity of a region that is not considered “ideal” in your culture’s values. You avail yourselves of some of what your culture provides and encourages, but you also live fairly simply, and you will continue to do so, I’m sure. You are pleased that this is not a popular site for American enterprise, yet it is far from primitive.

And I will tell you, yet again, that ecology is, finally, a “hard task-master.” You cannot maintain a “disturbed environment” for much longer. The “good adapters” will survive best and longest, while others “lose out.” Your news reports feature and bemoan many losses of human life, but still the total human population increases. I still am giving you humans a chance to let your sense of the spiritual guide your actions, certainly including reproduction, but ecological truths proclaim that there must be some increase in deaths, some simplification of life (meaning that all that can be done will, willingly, not be done) and some decrease in births. And, again, the central ecological premise is that the fittest, the most adaptable survive, whatever the “threats.”

Also remember that the souls of those who die, of whatever causes, have more opportunities for growth or to be come part of a “larger whole.” You have some sense of what this means, but it is not quite the most accepted Christian theology.