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Experience
of Suffering or Empathy with Suffering Joanna Macy, coauthored with Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (New Society 1998) When we are distracted and fearful, and the odds are running against us, it is easy to let the heart and mind go numb. The dangers now facing us are so pervasive and yet often so hard to see—and painful to see, when we manage to look at them—that the numbing touches us all. No one is unaffected by it. No one is immune to doubt, denial or disbelief about the severity of our situation—and about our power to change it. Yet of all the dangers we face from climatic change to nuclear wars, none is so great as the deadening of our response.(page 24) Leonardo Boff, Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm (Orbis 1995) Boff, a primary voice among Latin American liberation theologians, addresses the challenges of ecological thinking. “Ecology is not an expansive whim of the rich, something trendy restricted to ecological groups, or to the Greens and their respective political parties. The ecological question has to do with reaching a new level of globalization, of world awareness and conscience, where there is a universal understanding of the importance of the earth as a whole, the welfare of nature and of humankind, the interdependence of all, and of the apocalyptic catastrophe menacing all creation.” p.8. Persons living relatively comfortable lives in industrialized societies are isolated from those in their own society or those in developing countries who have barely enough to survive. The physical, economic and psychic gaps between those at the top and those at the bottom are a threat to sustainability and are growing larger. Experiences that bring those at the top of the economic pyramid into the world of those at the bottom can be life-changing and provide keys to bridge the gap in ways that move toward sustainability. Likewise we are isolated from the effects of our actions
on the fragile ecosystems of the living earth.
From polar bears whose food sources are diminished by new pollutants in
the arctic to deformed sheep in South America receiving excessive radiation
through the ozone hole, the earth and its creatures are suffering.
Experiencing this suffering and reconnecting it with our actions opens
new perspectives on interdependence.
But these books from an independent bookstore in your neighborhood and support the local economy. Click here to buy Coming Back to Life from Amazon.com Click here to buy Ecology and Liberation from Amazon.com
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