The Positive News Thread

[Nía]

Earth Day 2016

The current demand for deep change corresponds to an emerging third stage in humanity’s awakening environmental consciousness.

1. The first stage, provoked by the publication of Silent Spring, focused attention on the impact of industrial toxins on the health of humans and other animals.

2. The second stage, spurred by the image of Earth in space and MIT’s “The Limits to Growth,” introduced a planetary systems perspective.

3. The third stage features the voices of indigenous people whose traditions have long honored Earth as our living mother, of scientists who speak of Earth as a living superorganism that self-organizes to maintain the environmental conditions essential to life, and of religious leaders, such as Pope Francis, who opened his “Care of the Earth” encyclical with a reference to Mother Earth.

Those of us who succumbed to the false promises of Western consumerism at great cost to our Earth mother, our living Earth family, and ourselves, are Earth’s prodigal children now returning home.

We have only begun, however, to confront the implications for how we must now learn to live. This Earth Day let us share and celebrate the possibilities.

Source: Alternet, Earth Day 2016

Also interesting in this regard:

Blessed Unrest
How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being
and Why No One Saw it Coming

A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change

Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.

Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another.

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