Workshops
June 2009
Friends and visitors:
Over the coming months, we will create some workshop models or outlines that you can use in presenting a spirituality of ecological hope to your community, inviting them into the process of articulating the values and way of life needed to support this spirituality. Thomas Berry, who passed from this life on the morning of June 1, charges our generation with the task of reinventing the human presence on the planet. We hope these resources will help create the communities and ignite the hope and energy that can make it possible for us to participate in this great adventure.
For now, we want to offer up suggestions for videos and presentations that we find especially powerful in addressing our program priorities. We hope you might view them together with others and reflect on their impact, the information and the challenges they pose for all of us who live in the most affluent and politically powerful societies of our world, and then what they suggest about the essential elements of the new way of life that must be created if we are to avoid ecological catastrophe.
If you do that and have thoughts you want to share, please do so using our comment feature.
And God Said It Was Good:
A Conference Weaving Together Science and Spirituality
It was my privilege to join the inspired group that created this event when I moved back to my home town of Milwaukee in late 2007. The conference took place October 17-18, 2008, at Marquette University in Milwaukee WI. Keynote speaker was Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution. You can watch plenary sessions and listen to the workshops by visiting, And God Said It Was Good. These sessions might make for some great group reflection and dialogue in your faith-sharing groups, Bible study groups, and more.
And while you’re at it, be sure to view The Genesis page to get a brief history of how this project came about. This was not an organization or institution with a budget and funds that created this ambitious event, but rather a study group, a book discussion group, that turned their passion to share what they were learning into a conference with nationally-renowned speakers and more than 350 people in attendance. We even managed to make a profit, which was turned over to a local non-profit community group.
So, visit to be inspired by the content. And visit also to be inspired by what a dozen or so sincere and deeply motivated people can do to have a positive impact on their world.
Recommended videos:
Blue heart of the planet
We have already consumed 90 percent of the ocean’s big fish. As we ravage the oceans with our insatiable appetites for fish and fish products, we are in the process of degrading an essential aspect of the Earth’s life support system. Without ocean life, without healthy oceans, all life on the planet is endangered.
Sylvia Earle is a world-renowned oceanographer. In the video below, she speaks of the ‘Blue Heart of Our Planet,’ with magnificent film of the oceans’ rich and diverse creatures, along with some hard footage of what some people are doing to them to feed our appetites. This is the link to her presentation on the website TED: Ideas Worth Spreading.
Mountaintop removal coal mining
Friends of this project know that mountaintop coal-mining is for us iconic when it comes to revealing the relationship of the human industrial, fossil-fueled way of life with the natural world. It is a relationship of profound abuse, an egregious violation of the Earth, violence on a vast scale. For more info, just put ‘mountaintop coal mining’ in the search engine on our home page to find many posts with links to organizations working to to halt MTR practices. Any of us who use electricity are involved in this abuse. To stop it, the efforts of all of us are required.
This video comes by way of Appalachian Voices and ilovemountains.org, two of our favorite groups. Their efforts, along with others in the Appalachian coal country, give us lots of ecological hope. You can help by asking your legislators to work to stop mountaintop coal mining.
The heavy footprint of industrial society
Edward Burtynski is a Canadian photographic artist whose canvas is most often the industrial world. His art formed the basis for a documentary film, Manufactured Landscapes, released in 2006. It offers deeply disturbing images of a world overwhelmed by industrialization, a ravaging of the Earth that is required for us to consume as we do, to have the way of life we have demanded and insisted upon in this generation.
Over on the website TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, I found this 35-min. presentation by Burtynski in which he speaks of our industrial footprint, shows photos focused largely on China’s rapid industrialization, and how these things have altered the landscapes of our planet forever. He ends with a wish list focused on the urgent need to find sustainable ways of life. The URL for this film is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2Dd4k63-zM