Greenblade - creation - faith - justice

Imagining a World

A priest friend told me about a small Episcopal community that was dying. My friend was called in to help them negotiate that process. He outlined changes they would need to make if they were to survive as a community, changes that would bring in young people to be the next generation. Their decision? They did not want to make the changes; they did not have the energy to make the changes. They preferred to die.

I have remembered that story recently as I think about the lifestyle we have here in the United States, the one that is using up fossil fuels so quickly that we are making decisions that pretty much prove we have lost our minds. Rather than face the changes we would have to make to survive, we choose to maintain that lifestyle at whatever cost to ourselves, to the next generations, to the world we have been given.

“But we need the energy.” That is ... MORE

Broken Treaties

Near the mountains
footsteps on the groundsound hollow

as if to remind us this earth
is a drum.


We must watch our steps closely
to play the right tune.

Joseph Bruchac, Near the Mountains


We drove east along the Allegany River toward the Finger Lakes. Where the river and the highway loop north between the hills, with Allegany State Park to the south, signs announced the lands of the Seneca Nation. We stopped at Salamanca where a casino on one side of the highway contrasts with streets lined with cigarette stores and gas stations on the other. Here as elsewhere Native people have used their (extremely limited) sovereignty to build a precarious economy based on gambling, tobacco, and gasoline.

We found the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, a low building with wampum patterns around the exterior, next to the equally unassuming Seneca Nation Library. Inside there was an exhibition of photographs ... MORE

Stepping up

A speaker I heard recently referred repeatedly and disparagingly to something she called “the dream of the machine.” I don’t know exactly what she meant by it but it was evidently something true lovers of creation should avoid because she wanted us to waken from it. This opposition of  “nature” and “technology” is common, ironically, both with environmentalists and with … what is the opposite of “environmentalist”? Both camps see irreconcilable differences between the two ideas, the first because they consider nature pure and technology corrupt and the second because they regard nature as chaotic and quite possibly malevolent and technology as the means to bring about control and predictability.

The problem here is setting things up as opposites. Both camps have plenty of evidence on their side; it is just a matter of choosing which evidence one wants to marshal at any particular time. We all have had experiences in the natural world that convinced us of ideas of ... MORE