Welcome to This Sacramental Earth!

With this post I'm rededicating this blog (yet again) to what it's new title, "This Sacramental Earth!", implies. As a Catholic, I believe in sacramentality, and as a budding environmentalist, I believe that the earth itself is a sacrament.

A sacrament is a visible sign of invisible grace, and grace includes every freely made gift of God. God was under no compulsion to make the universe. He made the natural world because it was pleasing to him. We humans evolved in and are part of God's divinely ordained natural order.

Why do we Catholics, as Christians, have such a hard time seeing God in the creation he has made? Is it because we, as humans, have set up a historical pattern of deprecating nature, then plundering it for our own supposed enrichment?

I believe that's so. Now we have to find ways to break our disastrous exploitation which, if left unchecked, will paradoxically turn the planet into a wasteland and leave us impoverished.

I for one can no longer turn a blind eye to the harm we are doing to the earth. It was sort of a "last straw" for me when I read in yesterday's Washington Post an article by Juliet Eilperin, "Whitebark pine tree faces extinction threat, agency says."

The story bespeaks yet another in a long-running series of man-made insults to Mother Nature. The whitebark pine, "a tree found atop mountains across the American West," is facing extinction because:

An invasive disease, white pine blister rust, along with insects such as mountain pine beetle, has infiltrated the historically colder altitudes where whitebark pines thrive. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Amy Nicholas said these factors, along with fire patterns and global warming more broadly, are undermining the tree’s viability.

As a result:

The Canadian government has already declared whitebark pine to be endangered throughout its entire range; a recent study found that 80 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem are dead or dying ... The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the whitebark pine could disappear within two to three generations — from 120 to 180 years from now.

As I interpret that, the whitebark pine is adapted to regions that once were colder than they are now. They were accordingly not prey to pine blister rust and the mountain pine beetle. But humans have changed the climate, making it warmer. Now the whitebark pine is nearly gone.

To lose the species would be a sacrilege. Eilperin writes:

The tree is a critical part of the West’s high-elevation habitats: It helps to slow the annual melt of snowpack and provides food for animals such as grizzly bears and Clark’s nutcracker, a bird that can cache thousands of pine seeds in different places and remember later where it put them.

We could save the whitebark pine, but to do so would mean putting it on the endangered species list ... where I think it belongs. However:

This month, the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee voted to eliminate any funds for listing species under the Endangered Species Act as part of the 2012 budget.

So the current brouhaha over the debt ceiling and the budget may kill the whitebark pine.

That's why I'm rededicating this blog. We Catholics are widely known to believe in causes of social justice. Now I'm hoping we can take up the cause of environmental justice as well!