What of Ecocide?

My mind has been pretty global these past few days. Sunday came and went without as much ritual as I yearn for inside my little family. My mind has been awhirl with thoughts of the goddess, mother earth, god, nature, spirituality and how they are all combined. Many organized religions are finally waking up to the fact that we as species are destroying the planet and that something MUST change quickly. For too long these same religions hid behind their interpretation of Genesis as God giving man dominion over nature and whatever he chose to do with it was therefore his own business. Now they're realizing that with each species that becomes extinct, we are basically ripping apart creation -- some go so far as to say that we are ripping pages out of the bible. That doesn't mean much to me, but for people who look to the bible for their every answer, this is a powerful statement.
And so my mind has been on my own family and what I'm doing to foster a deeper sense of spirituality within my children (which, if they learn that goddess resides within them, I believe manifests as self-love and self-confidence) and on a larger scale, what are we doing to stop the obliteration of our planet? We recycle. We compost. We try really hard not to be gross consumers or wasters. We re-use our water and our paper and we try to rescue the leaves and grass from everyone we know for our compost -- to keep it out of the landfill. We do a little. But it truly is so pitiful. There is SO much more we can do. We have so much. There are SO many people who have SO little. What are we going to do to help re-balance the earth?
Here is a quote I found in a spiritual newsletter today: (to put it into context, the author is talking about what leads so many to become terrorists in this time of unrest) However, it also takes tremendous idealism for a person of means to brashly spend money on elaborate pleasure boats and cars when there are children racked by disease---starving daily in cities and nations all around him. The mental state of this latter type of person produces what we call a "Terrorist Situation." In order to support and defend your ideology of "I am not my brother's keeper," in all its modern forms, a person must choose to destroy certain neurons in his brain that could connect his consciousness to the cries of despair and serious need that rise up all around him. It is murder by omission, and the person you kill is always yourself.
Okay, so none of us want to believe that, right? Because WE WORK HARD FOR OUR MONEY AND WE HAVE A RIGHT TO SPEND IT however we choose, right? We desperately want to believe that we have the RIGHT to be disgustingly wealthy while most of the people on this earth live in squalor, and we insist that we do not have any obligation to help anyone but ourselves. We work hard, we've sacrificed so much, right? That's what we want to believe? But is it really true? Do most of the people in Sudan have ANY opportunity to escape the horror that is their birthright? I was born into comfort and I am one of those people who don't want to think too much about this subject. It makes me too uncomfortable. But read that quote again. Do it! Make yourself! If you're still reading this far, then you obviously have the courage to really think this through. I read the quote again and it I had quite a shift occur within me: a definite sign that something there is resonating strongly within me. We truly are one of the first generations to not feel moved to really help others. We easily turn our eyes from anything that makes us uncomfortable, and feel that we have EVERY RIGHT to do so.
But I want to really think about this for a minute. It wasn't very many years ago that there was NO HUNGER in our country because if your neighbour needed help, you helped her! It wasn't very long ago that if someone was going to a foreign land where you knew people had less than you did, you sent all your meager excess -- and that was in an age when people didn't have much excess. Look at us now!!! IT IS VULGAR how much we waste. How much we throw away. How we turn our eyes from the World Vision advertisements because we can't handle seeing such want, such hunger, such poverty, such lack, such pain. We want to believe that those mothers don't feel as strongly about their babies as we do, that somehow death and destruction and rape does not carry the horror for them that it would for us. THIS is insane. But where does it all come from? Why wouldn't we get one glimpse of such pain and be drawn in and do ALL WE CAN to help??? WHY???
Is it because we are so completely out of balance that we can't stand to see OURSELVES as we truly are? And if we look too deeply at the imbalance it will illuminate our own lives a little too brightly?
Do you know anyone who is doing ALL THEY CAN to heal the earth? Do you know ANYONE who is fully in the game to help rebalance even our own species? Do you know anyone who can look full-on at those starving, crying children and their pleading eyes and know that they can sleep well, rest assured that there isn't a thing more they could do to help that child sleep well too? And that child's mother? And father? Anyone? I don't. I'm definitely not one of them. Not yet. Are you?