Creation Corner Column, December 2017
Advocacy for Sustainability and American Indian Wisdom
Advocacy: supporting, recommending, promoting, championing, backing, pleading, arguing in favor of, defending a cause or proposal.
Sustainability:
the endurance of systems and processes for long-term ecological
balance; the quality of not being harmful, or permanently damaging, to
the environment, or depleting natural resources.
Advocacy
for sustainability takes many forms, as within the Lutheran (ELCA) and
Episcopal churches, and with the "2030 Agenda for Sustainable
Development" promoted by the United Nations. The latter includes 17
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and both religious denominations
share a similar vision.
Clean
water and sanitation; affordable and clean energy; climate action, life
below water and life on land are five UN examples (see others at www.globalgoals.org
. The Lutheran and Episcopal emphases encompass those of the UN, so as
to create a "sustainable and sufficient world where there is enough for
all to thrive." These churches seek to do this by "working through
their service, reconciliation and justice ministries." The Lutheran
effort may be seen at www.elca.org/prayfastact .
Those
who lived on our soil of this USA nation prior to Europeans, and whose
descendants live here still, were advocates of sustainability and from
whom we can learn much, and we would be wise to pass along their wisdom
to our children and grand-children, our descendants.
Consider the Iroquois: "In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."
Chief Seattle: "All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the children of the Earth."
Chief Seattle: "This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth."
Chief Seattle: "Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it."
Shawnee
Chief Tecumseh: "No tribe as the right to sell, even to each other,
much less to strangers. Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great
sea, as well as the earth? Didn't the Great Spirit make them all for
the use of his children?" (in a speech to William Harrison, Governor of
the Indiana Territory, on August 11, 1810).
Cree
proverb: When all the trees have been cut down, when all the animals
have been hunted, when all the waters are polluted, when all the air is
unsafe to breathe, only then will you discover you cannot eat money."
