On this 50th anniversary of Earth Day, the Religion and Socialism Working Group of DSA provides opportunities for reflection and action on today’s themes.
The first is an excerpt from a new article on “War and Warming” by Nathan Albright, a friend of the RS Working Group who lives and works at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York. The article is published in full at the website for Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
Second, we link here to a video composition by active RS Working Group member Ken Quam. "The Whole Earth" combines carillon music, a chant inspired by a quote from the utopian architect Buckminster Fuller, and gorgeous images of natural beauty.
Finally, in the spirit of following reflection with action, we share an invitation from DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group to a mass call with the authors of “A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal,” set for this Sunday, April 26th at 8PM ET.
Here is an excerpt from Nathan Albright’s article, with the full piece available here:
Make no mistake, the most level-headed assessments of the climate crisis are predicting that the coming decades will see hundreds of millions of new climate refugees added to the tens of millions already displaced by the crisis. Once we accept the unavoidable, seismic changes that the climate crisis promises for the coming decades, we are faced with two worldviews.
In the first, after coming to terms with the crisis, people work together and pool resources to support one another – a process that would require addressing massive disparities in wealth and power. The second, preferred by elites, involves a hardening of inequality in which those who already have excess upon excess decide to further horde resources and label anyone in need a “security threat” in order to justify elaborate, systematic violence.
The vast majority of humanity would benefit from the first view while a small handful are currently profiting from the second, including the world’s largest weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, nearly all of which help fund the think tanks envisioning a future that falls to pieces without them.
Image by 4Me2Design (pixabay.com)