| This issue marks the end of the fourth year
of publication and online distribution of El Planeta Platica.
Next year will be the last year for this journal. It may be
continue in a different form, but five years is a good span
of time to develop and publish a journal. I'm very proud of
the work here, and my thanks to readers and contributors alike.
The next four issues will round out the publication cycle.
This website will continue and so will my environmental reporting
and information sharing. But I'd like to move in a different
direction, one I'm not sure I see clearly yet. The question
I ask myself is "what do I want to know?" If I'm truly interested
in environmental sustainability, I find that "official sources"
offer less and less information.
One topic I would like to explore is that environmentalism
and spirituality. Reading Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff's
Cry
of the Earth, Cry of the Poor this fall, I was reminded
of Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy's World
as Lover, World as Self, a book I first read at the
beginning of this decade and have reread several times since.
The environmental problems we're witnessing today will require
as much spiritual transformation as economic change. And it's
not a question of "getting religion" as much experiencing the
spirituality of place.
I've had as many negative encounters with fundamentalists
as I have had with newagers. The first believe that life gets
better after you're dead, the second group believe that life
is but a dream. Is there an alternative?
Macy writes about the Buddhist practice of "Sarvodaya" - which
means "everybody wakes up." She writes:
"In my mind I still hear the local Sarvodaya workers,
in their village meetings and district training centers. Development
is not imitating the West. Development is not high-cost industrial
complexes, chemical fertilizers and mammoth hydro-electric dams.
It is not selling your soul for unnecessary consumer items or
schemes to get rich quick. Development is waking up - waking
up to our true wealth and true potential as persons and as a
society." (p. 132)
Boff goes further and criticizes the notion of "sustainable development":
"For centuries all societies in the world have been
held hostage to a myth, the myth of progress and uninterrupted
and unlimited growth. Countries must show higher rates of production
of goods and services every year... All productive forces have
been harnessed to draw from the Earth all that it can provide.
It has been subjected to a true Procrustean bed." (p. 65)
He continues:
"Can the term sustainability be applied to the kind
of modern development and growth whose logic is based on plundering
Earth and exploiting the labor force? Sustainable development
is an oxymoron." (p. 66-67)
As much as I would like to believe in "sustainable
development," most of what I've seen is rhetoric or good-intentioned
tinkering of the status quo, advanced by international banks and
wealthy entrepreneurs. I don't see that much has changed.
Two years ago, when I mistakenly moved to Miami, a university
student asked me about spirituality and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
Did border planning, environmental management or NAFTA-related
concerns intersect with local spiritual values? I didn't have
a clue what to say.
I think that's because I wasn't looking in that direction
or asking those questions. But prompted, I'm now aware that
this topic that has long drawn my attention. How do we connect
to a place? How do we value our work? What is meaningful travel?
Obviously, these ideas need to be absorbed and they'll be what
I'll be looking at over the next few years. I certainly don't
have the answers I'm looking for, but I like these questions.
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