Eco Catholic

“We are called to care for Creation.” said Fr. Bob Stagg of The Church of the Presentation in Upper Saddle River, NJ. Presentation is the first Catholic parish nationwide to be accepted into the GreenFaith Certification Program, the country’s only interfaith environmental certification program for houses of worship.

The Program is designed to help churches, synagogues, mosques and temples earn recognition as environmental leaders by carrying out more than two dozen environmental activities over two years. “We are very enthusiastic about joining the GreenFaith Certification Program because it gives us the tools to become strong environmental leaders,” said Fr. Stagg. “We want to live out these ‘green values’ in everything we do – from our preaching and education to the operation of our building,” he added.

Mattel, the world’s largest toy manufacturer is in the ecological and public relations hot seat. A protest staged by Greenpeace International earlier this month put them there. On June 7, several Greenpeace staffers unfurled a pink and blue banner from the top of the 15-story company headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. A frowning Ken, devoted boyfriend of the world’s most famous doll, Barbie, is pictured on the banner with the proclamation, “Barbie, It’s over. I don’t date girls that are into deforestation.”

Barbie’s dark preoccupation has to do with the kind of paper and cardboard packaging she is wrapped in. It comes from rainforest materials manufactured by an Asian paper company and supplied to Mattel.

As onlookers took photos of the event, another Greenpeacer pretending to be Barbie and outfitted in pink and blue spandex, arrived at the protest site driving a pink skip loader. After police ticketed her for being in an illegal parking zone, Barbie sat down on the curb and proclaimed in bored tones that caring about cute little furry animals “is so last year.”

Of all the areas being revitalized by the Relational Shift, the education of our children may well be the most poignant. While the relational perspective is, as yet, more influential in the academic disciplines at universities than it is in elementary and secondary schools, this is a moment of tremendous potential for reshaping the educational experience of young children starting out on their journey from kindergarten to high school graduation – and beyond. For the first time in the modern era, they are increasingly likely to be taught not the misleading mechanistic worldview but, rather, a coherent presentation of the relational nature of reality, a study of the fundamental relationships of the physical world and the cultures of the human family.

An organic progression would begin for very young children with a focus on the internal relationships that allow their own bodies to work so well (that is, a version for 5- and 6-year olds of the recent discoveries in relational physiology that reveal how creative and smart our internal bodymind relationships are).

RELATIONAL REALITY
NEW DISCOVERIES OF INTERRELATEDNESS
THAT ARE TRANSFORMING THE MODERN WORLD
By Charlene Spretnak
Published by Green Horizon Books, $14

Charlene Spretnak’s new book opens with this sentence: "Our hypermodern societies currently possess only a kindergarten-level understanding of the deeply relational nature of reality.”

In her previous book The Resurgence of the Real, cultural historian and ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak shows how the modern outlook handed down from the Enlightenment is now losing ground to an emergent worldview, one rooted in what she calls “the real” — the realities of nature, our bodies, and our physical surroundings.

Bioregionalist Kevin Kelly writes about The Big Here.

"You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital."