"Environmentalists say the fire prevention claims made for 'Healthy Forests' are just a cover for big giveaways to timber to industry loggers.
Critics also worry that the bill doesn't protect old growth forests or allow for environmental and citizen reviews before forest thinning begins.
Those who live in fire-prone zones (who must be thinking a lot more than usual about this kind of thing right now) argue the bill doesn't even protect those wildfire-susceptible areas we should be most concerned about: 'red zones' that surround urban areas.":
----Smokescreen , Mother Jones, October 2003
...you're killing your father's father, and your mother's mother: the history of this nation, your nation, itself. You're killing the very core of the frontier spirit that, as Wallace Stegner so eloquently explained, has shaped our American character and spirit.
----- The Right to be Wild, by Rick Bass
Wild, intact ecosystems hold answers to questions we haven't begun to ask. They run on contemporary sunlight.
---Wes Jackson
What were the ecosystems like 10,000 years ago, after the retreat of the ice? Those ecosystems featured material recycling and they ran on contemporary sunlight. Humans have yet to build societies like that. Is it possible that embedded in nature's economy are suggestions for a human economy in which conservation is a consequence of production? Let's open that up. The day after 9/11, I wrote a piece suggesting that what George Bush should say is, "My fellow Americans, from this day forward we will evaluate our progress by how independent of the extractive economy we have become."
...This struggle that we're involved in is not going to be won with the bumper sticker. It's going to be won across the ecological mosaic of the country; it's going to be the particularities.
An Interview with Wes Jackson
This is a lot bigger than parties or elections, but inherent in a society that puts money flow above all else. So why are politically "faith-based" people, as a group, so blind to all that is going on environmentally? What about social justice?
Fr. Pat's solid Catholicism doesn't have that blindness. We kind of took it for granted while he was with us, and didn't realize that it was his unique skill to make the counter-cultural Gospel message so appealing.
The one who gives the banquet is told, “Don’t consider yourself a host if you arrange things in such a way (by inviting, for example, only the wealthy) so that the invitation will come back to you."
“Humility” is to correctly ascertain one’s God-given talents and then to share those blessings with others—with the community (one’s family, friends, coworkers, those who care for us). And to do so in such a way that we do not manipulate them so that the good we do comes back to us!
----Fr. Pat Creed, in last Sunday's homily, 22nd Sunday OT:
No comments:
Post a Comment