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By David Richo, PhD
Psychotherapist, author, pastoral counselor
www.davericho.com

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How do I contribute to a planetary shift from the three poisons of our human environment: greed, hate, and ignorance, to the three drivers of our evolution: justice, peace, and love?

 

A zeal for the transformation of society and the world is how we personally evolve in love. This means that when we fight against the domination systems of aggression and inequality, we are showing and growing in love for the world.

 

Once earth is no longer the ground we walk on but our living mother, we are called to protect and nurture her as she does us. Only when we love earth and its people do we fully love. Then we pray with mother earth not just for our personal satisfaction or gain. When we love we co-create and co-heal the world so it can evolve. Connection is implicit in co-creation since we all join to help the world evolve by conscious intention and specific actions.

 

To love the world is to become planetary citizens. Our individual consciousness and our earth consciousness become one and the same, no division, no dualism, no ranking. Once love and connection are accepted as our authentic identity, war and hate have no place in our hearts or our world. Care for the ecology and cooperation with others become our intensely held commitments.

 

We work in whatever way we can to stop any further denuding of the earth of her natural resources and we do what it takes to renew the powers of the earth. That is love for the world shown in action. Love is then our new primary principle and value.

 

We can expand our earth-and-its-people love by consciously checking into our attitudes toward and contributions to the following social sins:

 

A common element in all five of these forms of social injustice is domination, what happens when egalitarian relations towards others are denied. Love can’t survive with domination, patriarchy, control, rapacity, violence, and repression.

 

I close my reflections with two quotes that help me expand my horizons of possibility:

 

Politics and the life of the spirit are inseparable. –Mahatma Gandhi

 

Politics is the supreme expression of charity. –Pope Pius XI

The Declaration of Interdependence expresses our values as an organization [The David Suzuki Foundation]. It was written for the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

 

This we know

We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.
And we share a common future, as yet untold.
We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.
The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.
Linked in that web, we are interconnected — using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life.
Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

This we believe

Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction, dammed the great rivers, torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain and wind, and ripped holes in the sky.
Our science has brought pain as well as joy; our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions.
We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin, and we now build a new politics of hope.
We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water and soil.
We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong.
And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development.
We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase.
So where knowledge is limited, we will remember all those who will walk after us, and err on the side of caution.

This we resolve

All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live.
At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity, to interdependence.

SIGN THE DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE

at the David Suzuki Foundation web site.  Visit the David Suzuki Foundation web site.