Far too often we think and act as if the world were made for us rather than seeing ourselves as being made from the world. This contributes to our tendency to see the world primarily as an object for use, consumption, or some other human benefit rather than living in the world as our community.

One of the greatest errors in human self understanding has been the mistake of thinking that which makes us special in nature also makes us separate from nature.

For centuries, a segment of humanity guided by greed has used reason for conquest and control of nature and of the peoples who have lived in harmony with their ecological communities. Our only sustainable path forward is empathy and compassion for all life to guide our reason towards regeneration and restoration of nature and persons such that both ecological degradation and human deprivation come to an end.

We do not enhance the inherent worh of human life by denying the inherent worth of nonhuman life. Just because we have evolved to possess rational capabilities does not mean that we have a right to enslave the rest of nature.

This summer we are being reminded of where our greed and attempts to conquer and control nature are taking us as we have witnessed a new level of extreme events connected to our climate crisis. Just in the last two months we have experienced the hottest June on record, the hottest week on record at the beginning of July, the hottest day on earth ever recorded in the first week of July, and now we know that July was the hottest month ever recorded since we began keeping global temperature records in 1880. 2023 is also on pace to become the hottest year since record keeping began.

We see record wildfires in Canada causing almost unbreathable air over vast swaths of North America, record breaking heat waves all over the planet, 101 degree waters off the coast of Florida wreaking havoc on marine ecosystems, and record breaking floods and extreme droughts around the world. And this past week we witnessed the horrific fires on the island of Maui that were exacerbated by factors related to our climate crisis. To borrow some words from the Christian tradition, the whole creation is groaning in travail.

If we needed another reminder of our human capacity to destroy each other and even destroy most of life on earth, a movie came out this summer that reminded us all of just that. The movie Oppenheimer explores the events leading to the development, testing, and use of atomic weapons from the perspective of the scientist who led the work to create the atom bomb. Perhaps Oppenheimer was in a sense speaking for all us when after the detonation of the atom bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico he quoted the words from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Our capacity and willingness to destroy each other and the rest of life on earth hold our world in bondage.

There are roughly two possible ways for the earth to heal from and eventually be set free from the immense damage and bondage caused by human exploitation:

One way is for us to immediately engage in a multi decade process of transforming our current ecologically degenerative economic systems that treat nature solely as a commodity and as a resource to be consumed and do the necessary work of creating regenerative systems as we find a way to thrive in balance within the carrying capacity of the planet. This will require moving away from the use of fossil fuel as quickly as possible in order to preserve a livable climate, and it will require intentional and systemic efforts to restore habitats and ecosystems for the recovery of wildlife populations that have been decimated over the past 50 years. It will require transformation of our economic systems, our political systems, our energy systems, our transportation systems, and our food systems.

A second way that earth might heal from the damage caused by humanity is for us to continue our current exploitative, extractive, and ecologically degenerative systems and practices that have created our climate emergency and have led to an extinction rate of species that is so high that we have entered the sixth great extinction on earth. In this second scenario, earth will soon no longer be able to sustain human civilization and there will be a massive economic and ecological collapse involving the suffering and death of billions of people and thousands of species. Eventually, after a catastrophic die off, the earth will begin to heal slowly over time, and it will even likely at some point fully recover its diversity of life, but it will take approximately ten million years for it to do so.

I would like to think if we fully realized the extinction event humanity is currently causing will take the earth 10 million years to recover from that we might act a bit more urgently to stop it.

The choice is ours – an intentional path of regeneration in which we as humans and most of the species currently living on Earth will survive, or a path of unsustainable exploitation and ecological degeneration that leads to the end of human civilization and the vast majority of currently existing species, followed by ten million years of evolutionary recovery.

If we as humanity continue down our current path, those most responsible for perpetuating our current ecocidal systems and practices, will, like Oppenheimer, have become death, the destroyer of worlds. The choice is clear. We must become life, the restorers of our world.

And the good news for us this day and every day is that we still have a choice to follow the way of love and justice and the way of hope and regeneration. We still have the choice to love each other and to love all life on Earth. We have a choice to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with each other in ecological community. We will still have a choice to live into the hope that can make beloved community a reality. But in order to create this beloved community, we must reject the misconception that only human beings have inherent worth. We must come to fully realize that when it comes to the well being of the community of life, it is not just all about us. So in the most positive way I can possibly say this, it’s time we get over ourselves so that we can be most fully open to the beauty and value of the beloved community of all life.