January 2020 Creation Corner Column
Dates, Quotations, Books
Dates: Past and Future
1/21/1935 The Wilderness Society founded
2/2/2020 World Wetlands Day
2/14/2020 Great Backyard Bird Count begins
2/26/2020 World Spay Day
2/27/2020 International Polar Bear Day
3/3/2020 World Wildlife Day
3/22/2020 World Water Day
4/22/2020 50th anniversary of first Earth Day (1970)
4/24/2020 Arbor Day
4/26-5/3/2020 Soil and Water Conservation Week and Sunday (sponsor: National Association of Conservation Districts)
Quotations Worth Remembering
You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up can never ever be an option. Greta Thunberg.
The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world. Dr. Paul Farmer.
The world has known since 2011 that at least 80 percent of all fossil fuels must stay in the ground to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. This means that 90 percent of U.S. and Australian coal, and all Canadian tar sands, must stay in the ground. Stephen Quirke, in Sojourners "Blueprint for Change" article, January 2020. Also from that article is the following quote---
Christianity and climate action should be synonymous. Michael Foster, a tar sands pipeline "valve turner" of an action Oct. 11, 2016. Biog. in New York Times Magazine, Feb. 13, 2018.
In truth, we don't know which of our acts in the present will shape the future. But we have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might. Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road.
If you assume that there is no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world. The choice is yours. Noam Chomsky.
This new decade could be the most determinative in human history. Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director.
Books Worth Noting
After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair,and Restoration. Holly Jean Buck.
Atopia. Sandra Simonds (poetry).
Censored 2020: Through the Looking Glass (The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2018-2019). Edited by Andy Lee Roth and Mickey Huff. (includes environmental and climate change stories).
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime. Bruno Latour.
Earth is Our Business: Changing the Rules of the Game. Polly Higgins.
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Julie Sze. (volume 11 in the American Studies Now series: Critical Histories of the Present).
Eradicating Ecocide: Exposing the Corporate and Political Practices Destroying the Planet and Proposing the Laws needed to Eradicate Ecocide. Polly Higgins.
Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Terry Tempest Williams.
Fragile Earth: The Naturalist Impulse in Contemporary Art. Jennifer Parsons, editor.
The Green Good News: Christ's Path to Sustainable and Joyful Life. T. Wilson Dickinson (forthcoming).
The Hebrew Bible and Environmental Ethics: Humans, Nonhumans, and the Living Landscape. Mari Joerstad.
Horizon. Barry Lopez.
How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Eduardo Kohn.
I Dare You To Be Great. Polly Higgins (also available as a video talk by this "earth lawyer").
Images of Conservationists (series of books for young readers) includes John Muir, America's Naturalist; Rachel Carson, Preserving a Sense of Wonder.
In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Isabelle Stengers.
Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. Tatiana Schlossberg.
Jesus and John Muir: A Wilderness Novel. Chris Highland.
Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food. Benjamine Aldes Wurgaft.
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. Michael McCarthy.
Natural Rivals: John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and the Creation of America's Public Lands. John Clayton.
A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal. Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos; foreword by Naomi Klein.
The Political Economy of Resource Regulation: An International and Comparative History, 1850-2015. Edited by Andreas R.D. Sanders, Pal Thonstad Sandvik, and Espen Storli.
The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Andreas Malm.
Rainforest: Dispatches from Earth's Most Vital Frontlines. Tony Juniper.
Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity. Anna Grear. A. Grear is the founder of both the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), and the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.
Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm. Isabella Tree.
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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.
