Years ago, I decided to listen to the call of Africa in the hope that a safari, which is the Swahili word to embark on an adventure, would be the perfect vehicle for my personal and spiritual journey.

I realized my son, who was young at the time, was concerned about my trip when he picked up the State Department fax on the travel advisor.  I heard his incredulous cry "MOOOOOM" (you always know you are in trouble when mom all of the sudden has eight vowels.)  "Aren't you afraid" he asked?  "Don't you know it could be dangerous?"

It was hard to explain to my son why I was less afraid of the dangers of venturing out into the African wilderness, than I was about becoming complacent in our own consumer jungle. We live in society where how much we can produce and ultimately consume has become a measure of our impressive progress.  

Yet the negative results of this consumption have been staggering.  Since 1940 Americans alone have used up as large a share of the Earth's mineral resources as all previous generations put together.

In the last 200 years, the United States has lost 50% of its wetlands, 90% of its northwestern old-growth forests and 99% of its tall grass prairies.

How could this happen?  Why are we letting the precious balance of life on Earth tilt? 

In the past, when our sheer numbers were less, we did not worry about our ecological footprint because it was lighter and nature was vast and endlessly self renewing.  As this was no longer the case, I wanted to explore a new level of collective personal and spiritual responsibility.  It was my hope to gain insight by listening to the ancient wisdom of indigenous people and observing the instinctual behaviors of wild animals that have long lived in harmony with our earth.

So I embarked on my African adventure.  When I arrived in London, for my connection, I was informed of a confirmed intelligence report that a Nairobi hotel, my next destination, was targeted that evening for a terrorist attack, so I was free to cancel. Africa's call remained strong and I decided to go on.  Since I knew I would never be able to articulate "why", I just uttered the word Akunamata.   The representative seemed reassured that I had made a clear assessment of the risk by my obvious knowledge of Swahili.  He allowed me to go ahead and board the plane.  I never confessed that my knowledge of this old and beautiful language was limited to words sung by the Warthog in the Lion King.

After a blessedly uneventful night in Nairobi, I headed off into the African bush.  It was December, winter and the dry season in Kenya.  In the isolation of photo game drives I had a heightened awareness of how no species exists in isolation. 

As the dry season of Kenya came to an end with the arrival of the rain, the African bush and my own sense of purpose were refreshed. I left with the renewed sense that it is only through a commitment to protect and nurture our environment that we create health for the planet and ourselves.

This morning I want to celebrate four of the elements that we share and make up the web of life in our interdependence with nature.

First the air, an invisible force that surrounds us, fills us up and gives us life.  And just as air has shaped and sustained living beings so living beings created and still sustain the air.

There is a fascinating study by the late eminent Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley that points out that while 99 percent of the air we breathe is highly active oxygen and mildly reactive nitrogen, about 1 per cent is made up of argon, an inert gas which is breathed in and out without becoming a part of our bodies or entering into metabolic transformations. Shapley's calculations show how within minutes the argons are diffused through the air far beyond the spot released so you are sharing air with not only people in the room but with the animals in Africa, and past generations including Neanderthal people even the Woolly Mammoths.  According to Shapley, your next breath will contain more that 400,000 argon atoms that Ghandi breathed in his long life!

Since it is clear air is not a national or local resource, we must be concerned with quality on a global scale. 

Remember, the world was first alerted that something catastrophic had happened at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl by Swedish scientists many miles away. In Wales, radioactive fallout was so intense that sheep became contaminated and were banned from sales

Last summer, (6/11/06) a front page of the Sunday NYTimes showed how pollution from China's coal industry was now affecting the West Coast of the U.S.

A global agreement to protect and augment forests and marine plants is an essential beginning, affirming the priority of air as the bottom line for life-our life, all life.

The second element is the water the raw material of creation, the elixir of life, without which this planet would have remained barren. 

Living beings need this elixir because they are made of it.  Protoplasm, the living matter of all plant and animal cells, is mostly water.  The average human being is roughly 60 per cent water by weight.  We are basically each a blob of water with enough macromolecular thickening so we don't dribble away.  Every day, about 3 per cent of the water in our bodies is replenished with new molecules.  These water molecules that are in every part of our bodies have come from all the oceans of the world, as well as the canopies of the great rain forest and other living things. Knowing this- it just makes sense to try to control the factors that we know cause problems with water and to protect nature, which has provided clean water since the beginning of time.

I had watched the care by which Samburo people handled water.  On average a person living in rural Kenya may use 2 to 5 liters of water a day.  Compare that with the averaged daily consumption of you and I or most people in rich industrialized countries of between 350 and 1000 liters.

The third element the soil is as Genesis 3:19 states "for soil thou art and unto soil shalt thou return."

The first man of the Bible is named Adam, from the Hebrew adama, meaning "earth" or "soil".  The first woman created from Adam's rib is Eve, from hava meaning "living" Together they make the eternal connections: life comes from the soil.

Subsistence farmers show responsibility for the soil they till, feeding and tending their land so that it in turn will feed their families over the long term.

Technologically advanced nations, however, have not been using the soil in a sustainable way; instead, they have been "mining" the soil, giving up the promise of future productivity for the sake of the enormous harvests of today.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said "A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself"

Organic produce is one solution.  I know it cost more.   It is crucial as soils productivity and health are a crucial link in the chain of life upon with we depend.

When visiting with the Masai Mara, I learned that land is still viewed as the foundation of life, identity, history and meaning.  It is both supermarket and drugstore.  As nomadic hunter-gathers they do not have the same concept of land ownership.  They believe they have a right to use the land and a responsibility to take care of it.

I also learned that while it was true that the Masai Mara man might take several wives, it is the first wife who picked the next for very practical reasons.  One of the women (a homemaker in the truest sense of the word) in the process of trying to explain how she built their house handed me a large poll to ram into the earth.  I not only failed at that (apparently years of Pilates has not given me the arm strength of a MM woman.  However, when she then gave me a chance to grab some of the loosened dirt and mix it with the cherished cow dung- I'm afraid my reservation must have been apparent because she walked away from me in disappointment.  Fortunately, I am already married to a wonderful man because it was clear; she wasn't picking me to be second wife. 

Once we get over our distaste for dirt…we can regain our sense of earth as our origins and that upon which we are dependent.  Once we have unearthed the truth, we will also find pay dirt.

The fourth element fire is the engine that drives the Earth. 

Life is the organic expression of energy.  To move, to breathe, to see, to grow, to metabolize, energy is needed.  Living things have a high degree of organization that requires much high-quality energy to keep them running. (Even when we are fast asleep, our bodies generate as much heat as a 100-watt light bulb.

Since cave people and fire, we have also learned to manipulate the energy not created by our bodies for our needs.

When I consider the ambiguities of fire power, I am reminded of the myth of Prometheus, that cunning trickster who steals fire from the Gods for mankind. Zeus then is forced to punish such audacity by chaining Prometheus to a mountainside where daily an eagle tore out his immortal liver.  Bad as things are for our hero… it is the human race that would really be made to suffer as Pandora is sent to Earth with the box which when opened disease, despair, rage, envy and old age were some of the miseries let loose to plague all humans for all time...  And if we consider fire as the first true technology with which we began to change Earth, we can see the implications for our actions today.

Of current concern is our use of energy from fossil fuels.  Hydrocarbons from once-livening organisms buried in the sediment that inhibited oxidation and compressed- over millions of years until the organic molecules underwent chemical changes to form petroleum and natural gas.  During all that time these substances kept carbon out of circulation helping to balance the proportion of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

These accumulated reservoirs were a once-only gift of ancient life-forms.

Yet, in the brief period since the Industrial Revolution, we have suddenly become dependent on fossil fuels on a global scale.  At the current rates of use, we will eventually reach the limits of oil deposits, and potentially discoverable world reserves of oil while further straining our environment. For as well as depleting most oil reserves, we are returning CD to the atmosphere at a rate that exceeds the capacity of natural recycling mechanisms to remove it. 

While there is scientific debate on when we will no longer have fossil fuels, there has been no debate on the fact of global warming (at least among the scientific community).  When I first started to speak on GW in early 2005, I would reference an essay in Science which looked at 935 peer reviewed papers - 700 on GW which appeared since 1993.  NONE, challenged the consensus that humans were causing global warming. 

Unfortunately, it has became evident that some people were confused by the time honored technique of "cherry picking" of the science that appear occasionally to suit policy or political goals as came out this January (2007) in hearings in the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental reform.

As of this month, there can no longer be any confusion.  On Feb. 2, 2007 in Paris, the most extensive report on GW to date was released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  In the report an international collection of leading scientists, representing 113 countries, warn that the Earth's climate will continue to heat up for centuries.  The report confirms that global warming is very likely man-made, with more than 90 % certainty, man's burning of fossil fuels is heating he planet.  Hurricanes are very likely the result of global warming.  By the end of the century, sea levels could rise by nearly 2 feet, swamping coastal areas worldwide. The temperature increase this century may be the most significant in thousands of years.  Arctic ice could disappear during the summers by the year 2100. Heat waves and downpours will be more frequent and ferocious.

The 20 page summary of the panel's findings represents the most authoritative science on global warming.  Most scientists even feel that it is very conservative, since scientists by their nature tend to be skeptics.  However, as one of the co-authors, Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria is quoted that the report was based on science that is rock-solid, peer-reviewed and consensus.

So now that the debate is over - it is our moral obligation to make decisions that make sense for the health of the planet. 

For example, there is a lot of talk about no longer being dependent on foreign oil and it has been suggested that we open the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.  However, the Union of Concern Scientist points out that if we open Artic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling today, it won't produce oil for 10 to 12 years and then only a drop in the bucket compared to raising demands.  Instead it suggests that the federal fuel economy standards be increased to over 40 miles per gallon by 2015 and 55 miles per gallon by 2025.  Adopting fuel efficient vehicle technologies to meet these standards would save three times more oil by 2025 than we could recover from artic refuge. And tapping technology avoids environmental degradation and air pollution that accompany increased drilling.

Pope John Paul II wrote in The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility "In the past, it was possible to destroy a village, a town, a region, even a country.  Now it is the whole planet that has come under threat.  This fact should compel everyone to face a basic moral consideration; from now on, it is only through a conscious choice and then deliberate policy that humanity will survive"

All the gods of all our stories know that fire is a double-edged sword.  Our current technologies can also burn us as well as aid us.  Our use of energy from fossil fuels is just the latest evidence of this truth  It has also given us a Pandora's Box of associated miseries; air pollution, soil erosion and environmental destruction. However, when Pandora opened her box and the plagues that torment all humanity scattered to the far ends of the Earth, one thing remained tucked into a corner.  It was the figure of hope.  And hope remains that we can achieve sustainable energy consumption by making existing systems more efficient using alternative sources of energy, and integrating conservation and efficient use of energy into every aspect of our communities and life.

One last thought from Africa.  I was working with two six month old white lions.  It was one of those cold raining South African winter days.  I decided to take a break and sit in a small sun beam.  Graham, my favorite lion, in a behavior very uncharacteristic for an adolescent lion, decided to come over, lie in my lap and suck my thumb.  In this position, we actually fell asleep.  Someone walked by and took a picture of us, which I cherish. Although, it is much more flattering of Graham than it is of me.  However, as we slept - the rain, the sun, the dirt beneath us and every breath was a sacrament - a sacred connection with all living things.

So

… at this critical juncture in our history on Earth if the plethora of goods that our high production economy delivers so effectively does not nurture us or the global web of life….what can We Do? (Glad I asked 100s just 5  now)

1. Think critically about the information that floods over us.  Consider its source carefully.  Organizations that are funded by vested interests such as the petrochemical industry, forest companies or the tobacco business may not be reliable.  Look into the science behind claims.  MIT put out a major new scientific study linking the strength and intensity of hurricanes to global warming.  Just three weeks later we watch in disbelief at the arrival of Katrina.  Non governmental organizations or grass roots groups also have great credibility as their motives are obvious. 

2. Think deeply about some of our most widely held assumptions; many underlie the destructive path we're on. The economic assumption that endless growth in a finite world is possible is as ecologist Paul Ehrlich says, the creed of the cancer cell and the result of adhering to it is death.   When evaluating the costs of our actions our emphasis must be less on the bottom line dollar and more on the impact to our planet In California they have recognized the need to create more fuel efficient vehicles to great opposition that it will have a negative effect on our auto industry.  Is it really true that by bringing our standards up over the next eleven years to what China has today….we really putting our economy at risk?  What will be the risk to our future if we do not consider such actions?

3. Project your mind far ahead into the future and consider the problems that we are leaving as a legacy for our children and grandchildren.  What will the quality of their air, water and soil be like?  How much wilderness will be left for them to enjoy?  If we can't act with seriousness to alleviate problems of toxic pollution, deforestation or climate change, will future generations be able to overcome the consequences we leave for them?  How will we explain that we did nothing to stop the tragic end of beloved recourses?