Last week’s devastation in Nepal and Chinese occupied Tibet was more than a freak accident of nature, but the result of our increasingly warming planet. The glaciers in the Himalayas belong to a geological world called the cryosphere, the portions of the earth where water is in solid form – ice. Geologists have pointed out that melting permafrost and the warming earth can create such disasters.
Our continued reliance on fossil fuels, not to mention the refusal of petrostates that only see a quick buck to be made, continues to scuttle advances in renewable energy. Over the past weekend the White House announced a new deal on Venezuelan oil reserves, a desperate measure to promise lower prices at the pump ahead of the midterms.
The real issue, of course, is why the White House continues to rely on fossil fuels and gut renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar. It has a lot to do with money, political contributions, and the promise of an imagined past that never existed. It’s always easier to reimagine the past than to create a future.
Prayer for the Day
Listening for your voice in the quiet of the early morning,
We must learn to hear it in the wind through the trees;
Straining to open ourselves to your Spirit, O God,
We attend to the stillness and silence.
Break into our lives, Holy One, waking us to the day,
And the magnificence of your creation.
In the name of the One who accompanies us,
Even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Thoughts for the Day
If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.
Howard Rheingold, American writer and social critic
There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.”
Bill McKibben, environmentalist, from The End of Nature
The righteous flourish like the palm tree, and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the Lord; they flourish in the courts of our God.
In old age they still produce fruit, they are always green and full of sap,
Showing that the Lord is upright and is my rock,
And there is no unrighteousness in the Lord.
Psalm 92: 12-15