[Oe List ...] FW: Tropical Marianas at Christmas

[SVESjaime at aol.com]

Thanks, Elaine.

I used the older quote, but it serves just as well.

Jaime

The Great Work of the Planet Earth

It was 40 years ago on Christmas eve of 1968 after I had just moved close to 
the University of North Carolina campus in a coal-fired little Piedmont house 
that we watched Apollo 8's pictures of the planet earth from the moon.  Goose 
pimples accompanied sentiments that would lead me later to answer to the 
question, “Where do you live?” with - “My address is Saipan; my home is planet 
Earth.”

French Jesuit Pierre Tielhard de Chardin's writings and his 'sense of the 
earth' got grounded in profound earthbound significance then, particularly the 
quote, “The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not 
perish, is to build the Earth.”  The year would see hawkish Nixon trouncing 
Humphrey for the US Presidency after promising an end to the American incursion into 
Vietnam.  A resigned and weary nation would also live through the riotous 
aftermaths of the MLK, Jr. and RFK assassinations, but this naïve and idealistic 
rural boy from Northern Luzon in the Philippines found time to sing Lennon's “
Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine” in student marches downtown Greensboro 
oblivious of the fact that the city had the most active klavern of the Ku Klux 
Klan of America at the time!

Colleagues around the world, with diverse political persuasions, would later 
sing together in the 70s - “Oh, WE behold the wonder of our time: A fragile 
planet hurled in space. New worlds of wisdom, nations unfolding, all the peoples 
of the earth join in the common march. We have turned the universe within, 
the vantage of the void our way. New worlds converging, courage emerging: burst 
the barriers of time with tools to build the earth. … All the earth belongs to 
all of us. And all of us belong.”    

Participatory democracy and the parliament of the street met up with the 
rising environmental movement.  Brit James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis 
to the scientific community that projected the image of the living and 
non-living parts of the earth forming a complex interacting system that can be thought 
of as a single organism.  Aussie Peter Russell would later acknowledge 
human's participation in an organic Gaia as that of the brain, albeit, a cancerous 
one, and one only had to look at the heavily polluted City of Los Angeles to 
recognize the truth of the assertion.

In the 90s, Greensboro native Thomas Berry, a monastic priest in the 
tradition of Chardin, wrote The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, to cap his 
ecozoic era trilogy that began with The Dream of the Earth and The Universe Story: A 
celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (with physicist Brian Swimme).

To rephrase Semitic holy writ, “the fear of the Way Life Is, is the beginning 
of wisdom.”  'Fear' in this sense means deep concern and care for reality, 
more in the nature of awe than being afraid.  Forty years later, this finds 
expression to this earthbound wayfarer in the proposed Marine Monument in the 
Marianas that now awaits GWB's signature.

In the first instance, my support is not just in the protection and 
conservation of marine and land life in the three northernmost islands of the 
Commonwealth, along with the submerged geologic formations in the Marianas Trench.  The 
three islands are already constitutional reserves and NOAA already has 
jurisdiction over the economic zones surrounding the islands. Never mind that WesPac 
has historically protected the interests of longline fleets and other 
extractive industries; we can allow its concerns to be legitimately addressed in an 
open consensus table.

The possibility ushered by the symbolic power of the Marine Monument harkens 
more to the resurgence of the human spirit, for to be in awe of Gaia is to 
dare reinvent the human, to care to construct a viable human presence on this 
planet, including its islands.  It is not primarily for the sake of the fishes 
that we care, it is in the rediscovery of our human soul that is at stake.  
Berry writes, “The human is neither an addendum to the universe nor an intrusion 
into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe. In 
ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe.”

Oliver Morton of San Francisco writes his week (reprinted by the NYTimes) to 
remind us that the Earthrise picture of the lonely planet hurled in space, 
isolated, small and fragile, is in the cultural mind's imagination.  In fact, the 
planet is a third of the chronos of the universe, and has had continuous life 
on it for 3.5 billion years.

Human life and other creaturely forms of life may be threatened by 
extinction, but life in the planet, objectively, will go on.  For us certified 
tree-huggers, this is good news.  We no longer need to be avatars aflame with our 
strategic scimitars to smite the spoilers of our pristine environment; we need not 
be saviors of anything at all.  All we need is to rediscover what Berry wrote 
of the bondedness of the natives of the North American continent to mother 
Nature: “The peoples who lived here first, with their unique experience of this 
continent have much to teach us concerning intimate presence to this continent, 
how we should dwell here in some mutually enhancing relation with the land.”

In our case, I will add, “and with the sea.”  Indeed, both the traditions of 
the taotao tano (people of the land) and the taotao tasi (people of the sea) 
embody within its intellectual, emotional, and imaginative capacities, a 
oneness with nature, temporarily disjointed by post-medieval science but in rapid 
recovery by today's earth science.  Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics is not 
foreign to our native 'sense of the earth.'  It is not our task to save the earth, 
only to love it!

This week, I dipped my toes into the lagoon along Beach Road.  I used to swim 
there when there was still a recognizable waistline in my booty, and hoping 
to recover the shape, I had designs of scheduling my workout again in the 
buoyancy of the lagoon waters.  But my toes stepped on two inches of slimy goooooie 
stuff that was not there before, and felt alarmingly funny between my toes.  
Until I can check with CRM what the 'creatures' are, I shall stay away from 
the shoreline awhile.  I suspect that visiting tourists have the same response 
on the lagoon as I did!

This has implications to Perry Tenorio's programs at the Visitors' Bureau.  
We would move away from just marketing the islands as a gathered collection of 
objects/subjects of diverse ethnicity, devising ways to divest them of their 
accumulated self-hoods expressed in Yens, Wons, Yuans and Rubles, but rather as 
the site of continuous celebrative communions of human lives, and other 
valuable creatures on land and sea.  That we must welcome tourists is a no-brainer 
but that we might engage travelers who welcome the opportunity of communing 
with fellow denizens of the planet and their immediate environment, takes some 
loving doing.

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we 
shall harness … the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history 
of the world, man (sic) will have discovered fire,” wrote Chardin.  Here's my 
earthrise slogan: “Love it. It's your life!”  I'm working on making love to 
the lagoon!


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