Ecological Grief

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Five, Number Three
January/February 1996

Call to Action:

Work Through Ecological Grief

An insight of ecopsychology¹, is that much of the anxiety, frustration and depression so prevalent in our society is caused by our failure to acknowledge grief over the continuing destruction of our beautiful planet. Naming our grief is the first step in recovery.

We use rituals to help us become aware, to express our feelings, and to create meaning out of our loss. Sometimes it is only through rituals that we can name our grief and realize how much we loved that which we have lost. Grieving over the loss of species, or dying streams or forests, gives us new insights into our relationship with them, and energy to love the earth at a deeper level.

Each group can create its own rituals to work through grief, and reconnect with the nonhuman part of God's creation which sustains us.

But ritual is not enough. We need to do something about the causes of our loss. Now is a golden opportunity to work with a group in Congress to repeal the "Logging Without Laws" rider of the Recisions Bill which the President signed into law last year. The rider's small print defies common sense. It prevents public participation, eliminates legal protection for endangered species, and overrides all existing laws regarding clearcutting old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. It gives the logging and pulp industries carte blanche.

The rider is being used to push forward timber sales that will harm wildlife, silt streams, destroy salmon runs and the billion dollar fishing industry salmon once supported. Due to a federal judge's interpretation of the salvage rider's language, there is little Forest Service staff or the public can do to stop these sales.

A group of 40 Congresspersons are so outraged that they have co-sponsored HR 2745, Restoration of Natural Resource Laws on the Public Lands Act of 1995, and are gathering support for it in the halls of Congress.

If your representative is one of the original forty co-sponsors of the bill, thank him or her. If your representative is not one, urge him or her to become a co-sponsor. More co-sponsors, and wide public outcry, will give the repeal bill the momentum it needs to pass before further irreparable damage is done to our forests.

Corporations, which are legal fictions, are more powerful than people and they are treated by the courts as citizens with First Amendment rights. Our founding fathers gave citizens power to control them through state chartering laws. But now the American legal system has a bias in favor of the private corporation, over against the common good. How could we have allowed this to happen? How can we take back our sovereignty?

An important resource for studying how communities can struggle against the debilitating power of corporations to shape our lives and destroy the environment is a 32 page pamphlet, Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation, by Richard L. Grossman and Frank T. Adams, ($4.00 plus postage; quantity discounts), Charter, Ink, PO Box 806, Cambridge MA 02140.