The Other Environment

by Rod Taylor

Everyone seems to be talking about the environment. From air quality to wind currents, ocean levels and bio-plagues of epic proportions, our planet seems challenged daily by new assaults on the complex relationships between species and food sources, temperature and growth cycles. As we learn more about the complex and amazing world in which we live, we are awe-struck by the delicate conditions without which, we and our fellow-creatures would die in moments. We look for ways, not only to understand the forces at work in and around us---social, economic, and biological---but to counter them with proactive and creative policies to shape a more hopeful tomorrow.

Within our psyche as a nation, we also are entering another climate change of unknown proportion. Our collective conscience and consciousness groan for certainty and hope, while with frantic tuggings at the anchors and tiller, we seek familiar waters for our national soul. The complexities of this shift have thrown mankind and the creatures with whom we share this earth into cataclysmic reelings to and fro. The very foundations of all we've known seem to be moving...

The gropings and guessings with which we are daily tossed have also caused a climate change in our land. Our ability to establish and maintain a moral and social environment which will sustain a dignified human existence past our generation and into a caring and sustainable future hangs in the balance.

A few of the destructive forces at work :

• Toddlers now spend their early years with someone else's parents and the ideas most repeated and reinforced come not from their primary caregivers and their biological link to past generations but from admen, intent on developing their consumer-identity and social idealogues who may never have children themselves.

• Links in young minds between cause and effect are weakened by distance and softened by the constant fantasies portrayed in living colour by those with deadened hearts. While children may never have seen a headless chicken flap its last before becoming supper, they have seen thousands of young men and women die tortured deaths between the commercials.

• Insecurities abound as violent offenders are loosed to re-offend and the deaths of millions of the most innocent are ignored by those who claim to bring us the "news".

• We move heaven and earth to find miraculous cures for the most difficult cases, then deprive the living and breathing of the most basic needs---food and water.

• We lurch along uncomfortably freeing the guilty, apologizing for things we didn't do and teaching the innocent that they should try things our parents knew were wrong. Later on we will feel new pangs of guilt and spend any amount of money to provide new drugs to offset the lethal diseases thus contracted. All the while, we put guilt itself on display in a museum along with sexual morality and patriotic sacrifice.

• We attempt to hold in our minds a coalition of mutually exclusive ideas in the name of tolerance and punish those who point out the contradiction (also in the name of tolerance).
  We consider life too sacred to admonish and too valueless to protect.

We worship the earth and reject the Creator of the earth. In this our poverty of mind becomes absolute and our attempts to preserve the greatest values ring hollow against the declarations of the eternal God:

"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein." Psalm 24:1