[Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd Wednesday

[R Williams]

Jaime,
 
You are a much better poet than I!  Part of our problem is, we seem to approach resource depletion as a supply-side problem, when the real problem is, as you imply, excessive demand.  So instead of conserving, say water, we think we'll just dam a river and build a lake.  And then it doesn't rain and the river runs dry.  The only area where a supply-side approach has any relevance is in alternative energy.  Natural law is, we can neither create nor destroy matter and energy.  We have to become much more creative in our conservation and reconstruction efforts.  Nature will renew our limited resources, but at about the pace of evolution itself.
 
Thanks for spreading the word.
 
Randy

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew.
-Marshal McLuhan
 

________________________________
 From: Jaime R Vergara <svesjaime at aol.com>
To: oe at wedgeblade.net 
Sent: Monday, June 3, 2013 10:23 AM
Subject: [Oe List ...] Fwd: OpEd Wednesday
  


I thanked Randy W. for his last reflection on Spaceship Earth.  It was the familiarity of the terrain that found us in the same ball park. 
 
I repackaged it for my Saipan audience. 
 
For the curious, am sending this copy to the listserv.


j'aime la vie 
 
Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate. In all, Celebrate!  


-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031 at aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago at saipantribune.com>; editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Mon, Jun 3, 2013 6:00 pm
Subject: OpEd Wednesday


Spaceship Earth 

The late Buckminster Fuller latched on to the metaphor of
the Earth as a spaceship hurling in an elliptical motion around an
insignificant star, the Sun, in a corner of a minor galaxy, the Milky Way. 

This emerging consciousness of what since fully evolved into
an environmental movement was aided by the powerfully evoking picture of the
planet taken by Apollo astronauts of a blue orb rising from the lunar horizon,
now dubbed the "earthrise".  
Spaceship earth showed no political boundaries that our map-oriented
minds took for granted, and the definition of nation-states that visa-separated
one earthling from another. 

I would later gaze at a fabulous Mactan sight with my eldest
daughter noticing how marvelous the sunset was until she said, "Dad,
that's an earth turn!"  

In the 60s, we were a youngish theolog gathered around a
coal-fired furnace with members of a Faith and Life Community House near the
campus of the NC-Greensboro U in the Piedmont when the earthrise image
rose.  Steeped in the medieval tradition
of gazing up unto Heaven, but increasingly getting lucid about the
Egyptian-inherited practice of Rah-veneration as totally irrelevant to an
earth-centric existence, we were pleased to replace Zeus of Olympus and Deus of
the Roman pantheon with the old YHWH of Moses, and the Tao of Lao Tze, the Way Life Is. 

In 1962, Rachael Carson penned disturbing Silent Spring that revealed extensive
poisoning of North American air and aquifers caused by agrarian pesticides,
insecticides, and fertilizers.   That led
to the banning of DDT, a common chemical in many households. 

We were a guest camp counselor in Maine for the United
Church of Christ in the summer of '67 at a lake in Litchfield near Augusta when
we encountered the DDT residual effect on mosquitoes.  The State tried to eradicate the critters
earlier with widespread spraying of the chemical.  It resulted in a resilient breed that buzzed
like mini-drones and stung like Mohammad Ali's bees! 

We returned to Manila as an effete religious social activist
with a Caucasian spouse ready to battle the forces of evil in the comfort of
ecclesiastical garb at Ferdinand Marcos rather riotous watch.  He declared Martial Law in '72, though not
without the assent of the US State Department, and quietly toasted by the
merchants of war materials, as the move purportedly was cooked around a
military camp in Korea.  Clark Air Force
Base and the US Naval Base at Subic Bay were at the time Pentagon's hub in the
Far East. 

Right about the same time, the Club of Rome issued its Limits to Growth that highlighted the
reality of the demand-and-supply equation as not infinite.  Earth as a supplier of natural resources is
not limitless, so demand had to be more intentional. 

Serendipitously, we joined an intentional community of
religious clergy and laity the day Marcos declared martial.  For a decade, a corporate body sought to
express their intense faith in the trustworthiness and goodness of life by
fearlessly plumbing with their lives the profound depth of life's mysteries,
deriving intense height of ecstasy from unconditional human expenditure, done
within a comprehensive view of history and prophecy, (genesis to apocalypse),
focusing on the human factor in world development.  A tall order, it was, but an engaging one in
the new dispensation of politico-ecological awareness that was coming to vogue at
the time. 

We resided in Canada in 1976 when we staffed our NGO at the
Vancouver United Nations Conference on Ecology. 
Marshall McLuhan of the Medium-is-the-Message fame is often quoted as
saying: "There are no
passengers on Spaceship Earth.  We are all crew." 

As a secular-religious in the 60s, we were only too aware of
the boundaries of fragility, the intimations of our mortality, and the nuances
of our finitude, but we were not yet ancient, and we soldiered on for a decade
of relentless prodding the wealth of the human psyche around the world.  

The UN's Bruntland Report of 1987 got our mission code into
public discourse.  The report defined
"sustainable development" as meeting the needs of the present without
compromising future generations.  It
identified three pillars: economic growth, environmental protection and social
equity. 

Economic growth continues today oblivious of a limitless
supply of resource.  The earth consumes
150 percent of its regenerative capacity. 
Definitely not sustainable.  The
protest on the Keystone pipeline and northeast fracking of fossil fuel
extractive industries challenges the nation's political union, reveals the reach
of the oil political lobby, and questions the very nature of Wall Street
itself.  Citizen's participation against
Monsanto's chemically aided farming reached the global stage this week. 

Entropy is the law existence.  Spaceship Earth is a singular trip, a
one-time-only journey, and mine is but a measly 87-yr segment of it, not even a
blimp in the HDTV of life.  I am but a
crewmember, albeit, of a cancerous global brain.  Still, I aim to ride this baby with gusto,
knowing that while intentionality may falter, the journey is what journeys on!  

Hi-ho, tally-ho, around the sphere as it careens into the
stars!  Oblivion will occur, mine and later, the
spaceship.  Meanwhile, Gaia journeys on. 

 j'aime la vie 
 
Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In all, Celebrate!      
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