Earth Day: The Beginning of New Commitments

Today is Earth Day, when people all over the planet celebrate our beautiful, life-giving, and fragile Mother Earth.

This year our eight Unitarian Universalist organizations teamed up and created an unprecedented network of concern and action: Commit2Respond. Climate Justice Month, which has been running since World Water Day (March 22), ends today—and we ask you to join us in committing to action in the face of climate change!

Saving our biosphere is possible, but it will take a paradigm shift and a revolution of values to get there. Our framework is simple: to meet this challenge, we need to shift to a low carbon future, advance the human rights of affected communities, and grow the climate justice movement.

Over the course of this month, spiritual leaders have led us through a transformative process. We have connected with our love for Earth, reckoned with the great loss we are experiencing, reconciled with our current reality while remembering the joy of being alive, and committed ourselves to serious action to save our planet and ourselves. Thousands of us have found inspiration and hope in these messages.

This has been an exciting month, and the work has only just begun. Powerful programming on climate change and climate justice is being planned for General Assembly this year as well as an Action of Immediate Witness to galvanize support for a sustainable treaty in Paris during the United Nations Summit on Climate Change. Through Commit2Respond,we’ll stay connected, organize ourselves and we’ll celebrate our progress together. 

Today is Earth Day. It’s the day for all of us to commit in love for our planet and all the beings who live and thrive here. Today is the last day of Climate Justice Month, but the first day for us to shift, advance, and grow.

The road before us is long. Dismantling the current paradigm will take great intention from all of us. But it is possible. And it is necessary. Today is an end, but it’s also the beginning of creating a new world—together.

Wishing you a peaceful, joyful, and hopeful Earth Day.

Sincerely,

Rev. Maria Cristina Vlassidis Burgoa
President
Diverse Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries (DRUUMM)

Cathy Seggel
President
Liberal Religious Educators Association

Rev. Peter Morales
President
Unitarian Universalist Association

Rev. Kathleen McTigue
Director
UU College of Social Justice

Rev. Peggy Clarke
Steering Committee
UU Environmental Justice Collaboratory

Rev. Don Southworth
Executive Director
UU Ministers Association

Irene Keim
Chair, Board of Directors
UU Ministry for Earth

Rev. Bill Schulz
President and CEO
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee


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  • commented 2015-04-23 10:34:44 -0400
    Earth Day Reincarnate Commitments

    Buckminster Fuller and Julian Jaynes recently reviewed their cultural and scientific influence on health and well-being ecological and economic outcomes during the current Transitional Era.

    Bucky: I wish I had spent more time speaking as a Unitarian Positive Teleologist. Perhaps that would have taken care of the overly recessive trends in cultural awareness of what, in retrospect, was published but not really read or comprehended fully; undervalued and ignorantly ignored:

    1. “Synergy,” everything I ever published about the topic of “synergy,” is spiritually and intuitively defined as love, in Western cultures, and naturally and organically defined as compassionate mindfulness in Eastern traditions.

    2. The encoded regenerative fractal structure of Physical Universal Intelligence follows DNA/RNA thermodynamic, electromagnetic, permacultural, economic, and ecological Prime Relationship balance; and evolutionary dynamics are fractal-dipolar revolving harmony Convex-Exterior-Yang OVER Concave-Interior-Yin (0)-Core Vector Rooted octaves and branching tree structures. And, if I had run into Lin Yutang and Taoism before I published, I think I would have connected Yang metaphysical principles with Convex-Exterior physical principles, and Yin metaphysics with Concave-humane natured Interior physical principles of bicameral consciousness.

    Julian: Yes, I can see that same sense of ethological and ecological and teleological dynamic and emergent awareness in the Left-brain’s evolution out from RNA regenerative temporal memory. My neural theory of bicameral older-right v. linguistic-deductive organized left information processing, cultural, and historical development, seems to support your equivalency between “synergy” and “love-confluent consciousness,” as well as Gregori Perelman’s work, and William Thurston’s too, in Group Theory, and I wonder if there isn’t something in there that pertains to the logistics and statistical/strategic trend predictions of Cooperative Game Theory, using reverse-hierarchy Win-Win assumptions. You know, so no one id-entity can optimally win until the weakest link in our chain of interdependence achieves equivalent outcome values?

    Bucky: Absolutely. Synergy and love retain integrity, balance, harmony between Left-languaged deductive memory and Right-proportional inductive experiential conscience codex of positive v. negative feeling and personal awareness, like what Polanyi calls “Personal Knowledge.”

    Julian: So synergy and love and confluence are neurally appositionally responsive to messages that do not cause cognitive dissonance, disease, dismay, lack of equivalent metric balance and energetic harmony. Compassionate mindfulness becomes eco-comprehension optimized through balancing Left-brained Yang and Right-brained Yin bicameral functions.

    Bucky: Yes, I wish the Clay Math Challenge folks would have realized that Synergetics is really all about the Polynomial v. Not-Polynomial information lack of integrity v. entropy problem, just as Thomas Kuhn’s work in deductive cultural revolutions became troubled with the Problem of Incommensurability.

    If +Polynomial information does not equal rational and sustainable Universal Optimized Intelligence, then positive does not equal a double negative.

    (-)(-)Reverse-Polynomial Right-brain DNA/RNA regenerative systemic Prime Relationship balancing trends, when disrupted, cause cultural depression, autistic trend development in populations that feel over-crowded and under-nourished, anxious, post-millennial dismay, climate change self-correction urgency, sense of crisis.

    Julian: You want to bet on how long it takes the scientific and religious sectors to recognize that binary information systems translate +/-(0)-Core QBits of form and function as humane natural comprehensive systems transliterate binomial

    Yang+P Space Exterior Landscape = (-)(-)Yin-ReversePolynomial Time Interior Landscape?

    Bucky: Well, sure. I always bet on Here-Yang = Now-Yin, to optimize Universal Intelligence cultural comprehension.

    Julian: Yes, and you are also the Plan B guy who understood Universal SuperEco = Panentheistic God = Mutual Messianic Interdependent Speciation and Evolution, but those Transition Generation permaculturing bicameral brains almost inevitably ask, “Bucky who?” and what is a Julian Jaynes, isn’t that some kind of an orange drink?
  • commented 2015-04-23 08:44:29 -0400
    Thank You!..
  • commented 2015-04-23 08:44:27 -0400
    Thank You!..
  • commented 2015-04-23 00:19:46 -0400
    Thank you UUA for a message of transformation!!! As great as the challenge is, a collective transformation to a geo-centric world view will solve the root problems causing climate change. And to me, evolution evidenced in Big History teaches us we can unlock creativity. The creativity of cooperation and symbiosis can transform communities, indeed, transform the earth itself with humans as an integral part of the whole.
  • commented 2015-04-22 12:17:15 -0400
    I want to commend you on a brilliant campaign. The daily reflections and concrete action steps have been immensely helpful. I feel as though I am a part of an expanding, loving, collective response to the major we and our Mother are facing. Thank you!