12/2020 Creation Corner Column
Quotations, Podcast, Pandemic Books, Intersectionality, Climate Crisis Action, etc.
Opening Quote: "Right there on page one, it explains that our job is to exercise careful dominion over the planet, which God has just made and found good. It's literally job one. We are failing to meet the first instruction laid down in Genesis."
source: Bill McKibben's article "Job One" in the November 2020 Sojourners magazine. McKibben, a layman in the United Methodist Church, is an environmentalist, activist, and author of 17 books on ecology since 1989, and helps fight against fossil fuels through the grassroots campaign 350.org.
The 350 mark of "parts per million" is what climate scientist Jim Hanson thinks is the upper boundary for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to maintain the ecological integrity of our civilization. The 2019 global average atmosphere CO2 level was 409 parts per million (ppm).
Podcast
How to Save a Planet (Gimlet). Weekly chat by conservation strategist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson with Gimlet Media co-founder Alex Blumberg.
Pandemic Book Titles
Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory. Katharine A. Foss.
Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology. Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier.
Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World. Fareed Zakaria.
A World Out Of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown. Meghan O'Rourke.
On-line Video Series
Earth's Great Seasons. BBC America.
Cooperation for the Paris Climate Agreement
The "We Are Still In" coalition supports the Agreement. The "Climate Action 100+" partnership includes more than 500 investors helping to move the largest greenhouse gas emitters to take meaningful, measurable action on climate change.
A New Kind of Environmentalism: The Intersectional Environmentalist (IE)
The interconnected intersections of our identity (class, race, gender, etc.) as they apply to systems of disadvantage (or privilege) become, for example, a link between social and environmental justice that can result in "environmentalists for Black Lives Matter."
Anniversaries
2020 was the the 35th anniversary of the International Coastal Cleanup.
December 2, 1970, fifty years ago, the Environmental Protection Agency was established.
December 28th is the 47th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act.
Quotations
"We need a revolution of compassion for the planet and all its inhabitants...(T)his beautiful planet is our only home...(T)he earth's future is our future." The Dalai Lama's Call to Action on the Climate Crisis.
"Inspired by faith, committed to action" is the motto of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), that will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2021. Among its goals are leveraging investor power to catalyze social change and to press for bolder corporate action to address the global climate crisis. Look to its web site for your church's participation.
"The welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all." Helen Keller
"In the woods, we return to reason and faith." Ralph Waldo Emerson.
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Mike Ochs finds common ground between religion and politics in his concern for the environment.
Politically he self-published the first "Greens Bibliography" of the English-language literature on the international Green Party movement (1989), the project for his Master of Liberal Arts in International Studies degree at Lock Haven (PA) University. He also helped plant the seeds for the Green Party of PA at that time, and remains a cyber-activist with it.
For a monthly newsletter of the ecumenical United Churches of Lycoming County (PA), he has written the "Creation Corner Column" since 1997. It became a blog in 2011 at
He received a B.A. degree from Gettysburg College in 1965.
