The Great Work of the Planet Earth

It was 40 years ago on Christmas eve of 1968 after I had just moved close to the University of North Carolina campus in a coal-fired little Piedmont house that we watched Apollo 8’s pictures of the planet earth from the moon. Goose pimples accompanied sentiments that would lead me later to answer to the question, “Where do you live?” with – “My address is Saipan; my home is planet Earth.”

French Jesuit Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s writings and his ‘sense of the earth’ got grounded in profound earthbound significance then, particularly the quote, “The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.” The year would see hawkish Nixon trouncing Humphrey for the US Presidency after promising an end to the American incursion into Vietnam. A resigned and weary nation would also live through the riotous aftermaths of the MLK, Jr. and RFK assassinations, but this naïve and idealistic rural boy from Northern Luzon in the Philippines found time to sing Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine” in student marches downtown Greensboro oblivious of the fact that the city had the most active klavern of the Ku Klux Klan of America at the time!

Colleagues around the world, with diverse political persuasions, would later sing together in the 70s – “Oh, WE behold the wonder of our time: A fragile planet hurled in space. New worlds of wisdom, nations unfolding, all the peoples of the earth join in the common march. We have turned the universe within, the vantage of the void our way. New worlds converging, courage emerging: burst the barriers of time with tools to build the earth. … All the earth belongs to all of us. And all of us belong.”

Participatory democracy and the parliament of the street met up with the rising environmental movement. Brit James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis to the scientific community that projected the image of the living and non-living parts of the earth forming a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Aussie Peter Russell would later acknowledge human’s participation in an organic Gaia as that of the brain, albeit, a cancerous one, and one only had to look at the heavily polluted City of Los Angeles to recognize the truth of the assertion.

In the 90s, Greensboro native Thomas Berry, a monastic priest in the tradition of Chardin, wrote The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, to cap his ecozoic era trilogy that began with The Dream of the Earth and The Universe Story: A celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (with physicist Brian Swimme).

To rephrase Semitic holy writ, “the fear of the Way Life Is, is the beginning of wisdom.” ‘Fear’ in this sense means deep concern and care for reality, more in the nature of awe than being afraid. Forty years later, this finds expression to this earthbound wayfarer in the proposed Marine Monument in the Marianas that now awaits GWB’s signature.

In the first instance, my support is not just in the protection and conservation of marine and land life in the three northernmost islands of the Commonwealth, along with the submerged geologic formations in the Marianas Trench. The three islands are already constitutional reserves and NOAA already has jurisdiction over the economic zones surrounding the islands. Never mind that WesPac has historically protected the interests of longline fleets and other extractive industries; we can allow its concerns to be legitimately addressed in an open consensus table.

The possibility ushered by the symbolic power of the Marine Monument harkens more to the resurgence of the human spirit, for to be in awe of Gaia is to dare reinvent the human, to care to construct a viable human presence on this planet, including its islands. It is not primarily for the sake of the fishes that we care, it is in the rediscovery of our human soul that is at stake. Berry writes, “The human is neither an addendum to the universe nor an intrusion into the universe. We are quintessentially integral with the universe. In ourselves the universe is revealed to itself as we are revealed in the universe.”

Oliver Morton of San Francisco writes his week (reprinted by the NYTimes) to remind us that the Earthrise picture of the lonely planet hurled in space, isolated, small and fragile, is in the cultural mind’s imagination. In fact, the planet is a third of the chronos of the universe, and has had continuous life on it for 3.5 billion years.

Human life and other creaturely forms of life may be threatened by extinction, but life in the planet, objectively, will go on. For us certified tree-huggers, this is good news. We no longer need to be avatars aflame with our strategic scimitars to smite the spoilers of our pristine environment; we need not be saviors of anything at all. All we need is to rediscover what Berry wrote of the bondedness of the natives of the North American continent to mother Nature: “The peoples who lived here first, with their unique experience of this continent have much to teach us concerning intimate presence to this continent, how we should dwell here in some mutually enhancing relation with the land.”

In our case, I will add, “and with the sea.” Indeed, both the traditions of the taotao tano (people of the land) and the taotao tasi (people of the sea) embody within its intellectual, emotional, and imaginative capacities, a oneness with nature, temporarily disjointed by post-medieval science but in rapid recovery by today’s earth science. Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics is not foreign to our native ‘sense of the earth.’ It is not our task to save the earth, only to love it!

This week, I dipped my toes into the lagoon along Beach Road. I used to swim there when there was still a recognizable waistline in my booty, and hoping to recover the shape, I had designs of scheduling my workout again in the buoyancy of the lagoon waters. But my toes stepped on two inches of slimy goooooie stuff that was not there before, and felt alarmingly funny between my toes. Until I can check with CRM what the ‘creatures’ are, I shall stay away from the shoreline awhile. I suspect that visiting tourists have the same response on the lagoon as I did!

This has implications to Perry Tenorio’s programs at the Visitors’ Bureau. We would move away from just marketing the islands as a gathered collection of objects/subjects of diverse ethnicity, devising ways to divest them of their accumulated self-hoods expressed in Yens, Wons, Yuans and Rubles, but rather as the site of continuous celebrative communions of human lives, and other valuable creatures on land and sea. That we must welcome tourists is a no-brainer but that we might engage travelers who welcome the opportunity of communing with fellow denizens of the planet and their immediate environment, takes some loving doing.

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness … the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man (sic) will have discovered fire,” wrote Chardin. Here’s my earthrise slogan: “Love it. It’s your life!” I’m working on making love to the lagoon!