DK GreenRoots

Paul Hawken (in "To Remake the World") describes "the largest social movement in all of history" made up of "tens of millions of people willing to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world."

He ends with,

Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act.

Bringing up the sacred in all this is dicey, I know. It tends to piss off atheist scientists who are doing their damndest to bring to light the nature of those wounds we are causing. To them halting climate change is a rational, logical act – nothing spiritual about it.

On the other side it arouses the ire of the rapture folks. They believe that Jesus is coming back to remake the world (remember James Watts?) into a new Paradise. Therefore, people who consider green activism as a “sacred act” (and who also tend leftward) are seen as servants of Satan with no faith in the Return of the Savior.

To be fair to Christians it must be acknowledged that these folks are in the fundamentalist minority among Christians. Lots of Christian sects are pretty green - those on the liberal side of the religion. But there is even a large movement of generally conservative Green Evangelicals who consider saving this earth we have now as a biblically ordained duty of stewardship.

What if this really is a spiritual movement? A new major religion? A spirituality firmly grounded in science? Are you comfortable with that idea? Paul Hawken sure seems to be. And his figures would seem to indicate that it is a pretty big spiritual movement.

I have a candidate for a "prophet" of this new religion. He's got the right name for it - "St. Lovelock." (Even though he's getting more curmudgeonly as he gets older. Let's say I nominate the young James Lovelock.) In “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth” he says:

The evolution of homo sapiens, with his technological inventiveness and his increasingly subtle communications network, has vastly increased Gaia's range of perception. She is now through us awake and aware of herself. She has seen the reflection of her fair face through the eyes of astronauts and the television cameras of orbiting spacecraft. Our sensations of wonder and pleasure, our capacity for conscious thought and speculation, our restless curiousity and drive are hers to share. The new interrelationship of Gaia with man is by no means fully established; we are not yet a truly collective species, corralled and tamed as an integral part of the biosphere, as we are as individual creatures. It may be that the destiny of mankind is to become tamed, so that the fierce, destructive, and greedy forces of tribalism and nationalism are fused into a compulsive urge to belong to the commonwealth of all creatures which constitutes Gaia. It might seem to be a surrender, but I suspect that the rewards, in the form of an increased sense of well-being and fulfillment, in knowing ourselves to be a dynamic part of a far greater entity, would be worth the loss of tribal freedom.

He does have his darker side:

As we hold our meetings and talk of stewardship, Gaia still moves step by step toward the hot state, one that will allow her to continue as the regulator, but where few of us will be alive to meet and talk. Perhaps we were celebrating because the once rather worrying voice of the IPCC now spoke comfortably of consensus and endorsed those mysterious concepts of sustainability and energy that renewed itself. We even thought that this way somehow we could save the planet and grow richer as well, a more pleasing outcome that the uncomfortable truth.
I am not a willing Cassandra and in the past have been publicly skeptical about doom stories, but this time we do have to take seriously the possibility that global heating may all but eliminate people from the Earth

And :

Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable

But this all adds to his gravitas as a prophet. They were often curmudgeonly and had unpleasant truths to convey.

Whether one agrees with my proposal for St. Lovelock or not I think anyone who has spent time in the wilderness, wandering alone in an old growth forest, must be made of stone not to feel some sense of spiritual grandeur in these places. Having spent such quality time with Gaia, as I have, it’s impossible not to develop very deep, very strong feelings about the harm our species is causing. It is easy to see “healing the wounds of the Earth” as a sacred act. I think it is.