The purpose of Climate Summer is to foster awareness. As they state on their website:
Climate change is the greatest threat facing humanity, and fossil fuels independently are responsible for thousands upon thousands of deaths. Society has failed to meaningfully address the harms of fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas -- because the fossil fuel industry has blocked our collective progress. We believe the only way we can overcome this inertia is through a potent social movement that is not afraid to challenge the fossil fuel industry and its deadly profit model directly. We seek to work with all those who share both our concerns about this deadly energy industry and our hopes for a better future.
On July 20, 2013, the Climate Summer riders that toured areas of Maine attended and assisted at an event hosted by 350 Maine. At 350maine.org, we learn:
350 Maine is a grassroots movement dedicated to solving the planetary climate crisis. We grow our power collectively to find real and lasting solutions, to end our dependence on fossil fuels, and to build a healthy, sustainable life for people and the planet...350 Maine believes that Maine holds a unique position in this global movement as a gateway to coastal waters and foreign markets. We are in the path of many corporate plans to profit from extreme extraction.
350 Maine is a local chapter of 350.org, which was founded by Bill McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on global warming for the general public, and a team of university friends.
Bill McKibben by 350.org
Among his most notable books are Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and The End of Nature. On his Amazon page, he sports 19 titles as well as heading up 350.org! Talk about someone caring for the future of the planet and our species! The url for his books is listed in the reference section.
Like Deep Ecologists, people like Arne Ness and Delores LaChappell, Deep Economists focus on relationships between people, economy, land and planet. These movements are also reflective of the movements in biology, such as the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock, in which the Earth appears to be an integrated system designed from the inside out to support life. Life, including human life, is revealed to create and sustain the atmosphere as truly as the atmosphere enables life.
How Lovelock speaks to the development of life on Earth is very much reflective of the interactive nature of our cells in fetal development. The planet in essence develops Herself through an interaction of the parts in the same fashion a fetus builds himself in the protective environment of the womb. Nature's Wisdom thus builds Herself a planet and a species through which She is able to see Herself!
McKibben's work is also reflective of findings in Quantum Physics, which shows that the entire universe appears to act more like an organism than like a machine. as proposed by scientists such as animal torturer, Rene Descarte, and stargazer, Sir Isaac Newton.
Could it be that our economies and technologies are dead and kindling a dead planet in the same image as us? Native Americans such as the Kogis of South America have said that about us upon their initial contact with white folk! We are the walking dead. Perhaps it is not an external God that is to be resurrected into life, but us of the Middle Eastern and European traditions? We are the ones that need to get a life!
McKibben's work also reinforces the likes of author Daniel Quinn. Quinn wrote the book Ishmael where he advocates that our ancestors were more likely to partake in a leaver economy, which contrasts with what we now live within in our corporate economy, which he calls appropriately a taker economy. Personally, I have another name for our economy and that is sociopath . Basically, though, we are calling the same destructive mentality by names that are one and the same. Sociopaths are takers. I would go one further than Quinn and deem the economy of the future--if we are, in deed, to have one--as a Lover's Economy. Love, which entails love of Earth as well as people, needs to be our foundation.
Ever since the beginning of last century, through the findings of Einstein, Bohm, Lovelock and others, there has been a new message being delivered by the universe to us human beings. The question is, do we have the power to let go to our conditioning in order to reclaim our lives. As one of the messages delivered by Lao Tzu, we need to become "newborn and free of ourselves." In like fashion, Christ gazes upon an infant suckling a breast and says, "be like that babe." How many times through how many different cultures do we receive the same message and yet not get it?
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