God Bless the Copenhagen Conference

This coming week, delegates from some 200 nations will enter into talks in Copenhagen. There, they hope to replace the U.N. Kyoto Protocol with new agreements that will more effectively offset the climate change that is already affecting our world.

Despite considerable agreement within the scientific community that global climate change is well underway, there's still a great deal of dissension regarding what the nations of the world can or should do about these changes.

In all the arguments -- between conservatives and liberals, developed and developing nations, advocates of radically reducing CO2 emissions and those who feel climate change is a myth or would be happening regardless of humanity's actions -- it seems to me that one issue is frequently sidestepped: that of the interconnectedness of every aspect of the ecosphere and the respect and good stewardship required of humanity.

Undeniably, the world in which we appear to live is miraculous, whether one believes in a deity or not. And every detail, down to the vibrating (singing!) atoms, is intricately interwoven with every other, into a magnificent tapestry. Within this extraordinary interconnection, nothing can be touched without affecting every other aspect. A species becomes extinct: a wondrous detail is lost, and ripples run throughout all that that species lived with, and far beyond. As John Donne wrote in his Meditation XVII, "No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent . . . ."

The ecosphere is a grand, glittering wonder for those able to perceive it as such. How asleep so many men and women seem to be, to not cognize the beauty, the delicacy, the power, and the patterns that surround them.

At a deeper level, are that which we perceive as the "outer" world and mankind's "inner" world of mentality and emotion so very separate? What pollution of people's thoughts, what smog of their egos and inner dramas, are reflected in the poisoned world of chemical waste and coal-fired smoke-stacks?

The issues to be met at Copenhagen, and by each of us at home, seem complicated and far-reaching. To begin to resolve the climate crisis will mean to allow a radical restructuring of the way in which mankind inhabits, and takes care of, this planet. Ultimately, it will call for new societies, new economies, new approaches and perceptions. And especially, it will call for a fundamental change within men and women, a cleaning up of the mental detritus that has kept us locked in what appears to be a limited and fractured world.

But as the birds soar, so can we soar to places of the heart and soul, to vast vistas of compassion and love.

Pray for those at Copenhagen: that they may listen and hear, propose and create, with clarity, insight, wisdom, and -- yes -- with recognition and wonder at the divine tapestry that includes us all.