My foundational story is related to the intersections between my Quaker faith, protecting Mother Earth, and photography. This combination has remained a powerful and evolving influence throughout my life. My faith led me to try to share my spiritual experiences and show my love for the beauty of Mother Earth through photography. These three things came into play in many ways throughout my life.
It ended up taking many stories to describe the evolution of these foundational concepts.
[See: https://quakersandreligioussocialism.com/?s=foundational ]
Finally, I’m getting to the state of my foundational stories now.
Care for Mother Earth is brought into focus as we struggle to comprehend the utter devastation from Hurricane Ian. People are forced to finally begin to realize how bad environmental devastation can be, how horrific the chaos is, and will increasingly be.
People are wondering whether they should try to rebuild their homes or businesses in these parts of the country that will see worsening storms. Many have become climate migrants.
Other climate migrants will come from areas of ferocious wildfires. Places that no longer have water or are flooded by storms and/or rising ocean levels. Places too hot to live in.
There will be shrinking habitable areas and increasing numbers of migrants. Where will they go? What can we do to prepare for and welcome them? Will we become climate migrants?
Even if we are not forced to move, life as we know it will change dramatically. We will either choose to or be forced to decarbonize. That will require us to rebuild all our basic systems.
We need to rebuild all our basic systems. All of them. Let’s take food. We have next to no idea how to make food without industrial grade fertilizer, which comes from…fossil fuels. Our entire food system is heavily carbonized. Take energy. Much of the world is struggling without Russian oil and gas — precisely because we’re still dependent as a civilization on dirty fuel. Take water — where are we going to get it, precisely, in places like the American West, or as the temperature crosses 50 degrees? Or take construction — we have no idea, really, how to make the basic material building blocks of our lives, glass, steel, cement, without fossil fuels. Finally, take manufacturing: it’s obvious, painfully so, that we can’t just buy-use-dispose anymore, but that economics need to be made of closed loops — but where’s the infrastructure for it? When is Amazon going to send the Prime Guy over to pick up your rubbish so it can be remanufactured into tomorrow’s stuff?
All our basic systems need to be reinvented for an Age of Extinction. Or it is lights out. I mean that quite literally: Europe’s going to struggle to keep the lights on this winter, California was pushed to the brink over the summer, and all that’s emblematic of system failure on a mega scale. Lights out.
The Choice We Face Is Transformation or Extinction. What Trussonomics Vs Bidenomics Says About Building a 21st Century Economy by umair haque, Eudaimonia and Co, Sept 27, 2022
Joy is the soul stirred
J. Drew Lanham Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves. (excerpt)
underneath the journey,
gaze snagged on wonder,
not knowing final destination,
blessed as a witness,
moored to ground,
worshipful tears
dripped into grateful smile.
Quakers and Religious Socialism 
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