Sacred Environment

Of this Earth

by Lisa Greber

We are stardust. Billions of years ago, a star went supernova, blasting its cache of carbon, iron, and oxygen far into space. Out of the wreckage and other nearby cosmic material, a new star, the sun, spun into existence, with the rocky earth condensing 93,000,000 miles away. Here where it is neither too warm nor too cool, a global ocean formed, and somewhere in that ocean, life. Over billions of years, bacteria learned to photosynthesize sunlight, banded together, grew nuclei, fins, lungs, legs. Our distant relatives: trilobite; ammonite; lycoptera. One day we walked on two feet, made fire and ritual.

We are part of this earth. Out of the death of a star came rockweed and mussel, moose and lady slipper, redwood and us. We breathe the oxygen cyanobacteria and green plants release into the air, and we in turn offer them the carbon dioxide we exhale. We drink water that has been cloud and rain, and that will return to the sea when it leaves our bodies to complete its cycle. We eat rice and corn, air and sunlight turned to carbon. We have only borrowed these atoms; they cycle through us now, and at our deaths all go back to the earth.

We belong. Do our religious traditions, through this or other origin stories, help us to remember that the earth sustains and nourishes us physically and spiritually? Do they remind us that we in turn need to sustain and nourish the earth? Some traditions understand this as humble stewardship; others that we are simply one strand, one creature, among many. How do we honor, cherish, and support those aspects of our traditions that are earth-loving, and repudiate those aspects that have been used to justify ecocide and genocide? The list of the earth's wounds is long and painful to remember: the passing of species at a rate not seen since the death of the dinosaurs; the poisoning of water and air; the rising seas. How are we called to live differently, and how can our spiritual traditions support us?

We recognize that the costs of environmental destruction are not borne equally by all peoples, but fall heavily on those already marginalized. The rising sea waters of the warming oceans flood low lying islands and lands like Bangladesh, whose people did little to contribute to climate change. Indigenous lands are taken for radioactive waste deposit sites, or the extraction of aluminum and oil. In the inner cities of the United States, incinerators and toxic dumps are disproportionately found in communities of color. The struggle to live in harmony with the earth is interconnected with the struggle to live in harmony among all peoples - the struggle for social justice. How do our spiritual traditions help foster a sense of responsibility for each other?

We live on one earth, sheltered by a few thin miles of atmosphere, bathed by sunlight, shepherded each night by the moon. How do we create harmony here, as Buddhists describe it, with self, others and the living world? May our work together be part of the growing movement to live out answers to these questions, and to bring spiritual and ecological wisdom together, in the service of all of earth's life.