TO FRUCTIFY THE EARTH

“Our environment, our health, our future,” is the declared theme of this week’s Environmental Awareness Week. Earth Day on April 22 has become a global and communal observance. Earthrise consciousness is no longer the exclusive domain of the tree huggers. Commercial concerns have added the image of the fragile sphere into a lot of in-house and promotional publications.

As with everything where two or more are gathered, context is crucial. With the environment, our worldview, paradigm, epistemé, zeitgeist, story, Weltanschauung, myth, or operating cultural image determines our behavior.

Like it or not, we are in an age of global destiny. Decisions about the conservation, preservation and utilization of natural, human and technological resources can not continue to be the object of expedient immediacies where decisions are made with regard only to the quarterly bottom line, or the biennial election cycle, without looking at their long-range consequences. Nor is it sufficient to allow reduced context that allows decisions to be made only with partial aspects of a situation, usually guarded by agencies and bureaucracies out to defend their territorial turf or special interests.

A new metaphor of responsibility is emerging which understands that a person is “able to respond,” articulates indicative ethics with a methodology that explores comprehensively the total reality of any given situation including its historical setting and future implications. This sense of personal responsibility underlies the American vision and its worldwide promotion of its historic call to freedom. An example of this indicative awareness would note the rapid depletion of the earth’s fossil fuel resources, which reveals the indicative of resource stewardship. Here are three indicatives from my worldview.

All the earth belongs to all the people

The creation of NAFTA is an acknowledgement of what visionaries articulated post-WWII and indicated by the Apollo pictures of the “blue” in outer space. There are no geophysical lines that separate Canada, the United States and Mexico. The boundaries are human creations which can be uncreated or transformed. EU is successfully reworking some rather deeply ingrained historical boundaries in its continent.

The notion of stewardship as the basis of land use rather than the prerogative of ownership is rapidly accelerating. Saskatchewan province in Canada has long maintained that how one manages land one owns determines whether one gets to keep it. MPLA take note.

Saipan to the Carolinian mariners was known as the uninhabited island. The right of private ownership of real estate was a pontifical illusion when Rome declared Spain and Portugal as sovereign to each side of the meridian. While it fueled explorations and discoveries of new worlds, it also promoted a political reign of unbridled exploitation of natural and human resources, the consequences of which still haunts us with phenomena of worldwide pollution and global warming, on one side, and incidences of genocide and ethnic cleansing, on the other. Disputes on land ownership fracture many families worldwide.

All decisions of history belongs to all the people

The American call to freedom is our nation’s signature. Individual responsibility is a consequence. Children at my school sometimes ask why they are on occasion requested to contribute a share in the cost of some activities. “I thought public school is free,” is the common statement.

President Reagan was not a favorite but we agreed on one thing: there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone always pays. In the CNMI and elsewhere, when we train people to rely on the expertise of certain sectors to make decisions for them, we encourage a debilitating cycle of dependency that has been the bane of communist and socialist states. The power is in the middle of the table. One only needs to decide to take it. Increasingly, individuals clamor for this civic responsibility.

All the gifts of humanness belongs to all the people

My wife googled my name in the Internet a few weeks back and an old stomping ground was revealed. The Soil and Water Conservation Foundation in the Philippines keeps my name as a former director. In the ‘80s, utilizing the watershed as a planning unit, a few of us recruited 50-some newly graduated Aggies to take on a three-year, live-on-site-with-community-families project in the Visayas. We merged the traditions of Spartan discipline, Peace Corps idealism, Buddhist servanthood, and Mormon visible presence into our body politic. I was not around to see the completion of a cycle but it now appears that the group is healthy and well, as shown in their website.

The Flame Tree Festival’s parade of cultures and performances reveals a cultural richness in our midst. We would be shortsighted not to mine this wealth. All traditions are only a personal claim away.

“The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to shake off our ancient prejudices, and rebuild the earth,” wrote the Jesuit Chardin. The earth is my home. I live here. That’s the indicative. I love it. My choice. My credo: All of the earth belongs to all; decisions of history and the inventions of humanness belong to each one, even through me.

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Vergara is a Social Studies 6th grade teacher at San Vicente Elementary School