Photograph Source: Jason Thompson – CC BY 2.0

My friend the late Very Rev. James R. Morton, Dean of the cathedral of St John the Divine in New York City, declared that “Ecology is the science of the body of Christ through which we of the earth community learn our sacred connections.”

These sacred connections, long recognized in native American Indian culture, have been broken, as the Climate and Extinction crises affirm. From a Christian mystical tradition, when we empathize deeply with the natural world, we receive the stigmata of an Earth crucified.

At least one scientist acknowledged these kinds of wounds. The late Aldo Leopold, a former government wolf exterminator who became America’s leading conservationist and natural philosopher, wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” (1)

But now a more ecologically-aware public, especially the youth, are suffering those wounds and without some direct action or other solution-seeking outlet feel despair, helplessness, and hopelessness. Climate grief, eco-anxiety, and other terms are being applied to people of all ages and from different cultures who are suffering emotionally from experiencing and knowing about the harmful consequences of climate change, many mourning the demise of other species more immediately harmed than most people, those in coastal, island and poorer communities being especially vulnerable. (2)

Young people in many countries are now rising in protest, establishing such networks as the Extinction Rebellion, fearing for their future which will never be secure until all nation states and political and religious leaders embrace equalitarianism, the antidote to anthropocentrism, by giving equal and fair consideration to all living beings. This is the justice and compassion-based foundation of One Health, of a sustainable economy, a healthy environment (the good of the Commons), world peace and the common good.

The Climate Crisis exacerbates the Extinction Crisis and vice versa and all are exacerbated by overpopulation and overconsumption, the loss of species, biodiversity and wild lands being the wounds also of those who care as well as being harmful to our health, air and water quality, food, and economic security.

Christianity’s Second Coming, from the perspectives of evolutionary biology and transformative psychology, can be seen in what St. Francis of Assisi called our Second Birth, awakening spiritually to the existential reality of the human condition that we are not powerless to address and heal, along with responsibility for “all our relations.” Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this the Omega point of Christogenesis in human evolution, Krishna-consciousness in Hinduism, Self-realization in Zen Buddhism. Biologically, it is our metamorphosis.

This realization is the apotheosis of the Vision Quest of native American Indian tradition, a rite of passage and initiation from egocentric adolescence into mature, eco-centric responsibility for other sentient beings, plant, and animal, in the life community: all our relations indeed. We humans, like all other sentient life forms, are spiritual beings experiencing life in one form or another which makes up our Life Community wherein we share so much with other species, from joy and suffering to fear and revelation. This realization extends from the Christian doctrine of “treating thy neighbor as thyself” to the nonhuman members of our communities. This is the essence of the Golden Rule, a core principle in the world’s major religions that is ultimately enlightened self-interest.

As a life unexamined is a life unlived, so is a culture where its ethics and morality are not examined and confronted when there are transgressions of the........

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