What is "sacrifice"?

"To 'sacrifice' is to make sacred. In the long history of devotion, people made sacrifices to honor the Most Worthy, giving up something of great value--a goat, a rooster, sometimes a son. It is exactly this renunciation of self-interest that brings a person into closer relation to the divine.


"So a better way to think about sacrifice is to ask, What ways of acting will reduce my fixation on self-gratification, and so bring me into closer relation with what is Good-in-itself, the Earth, the unfolding of life?"


--Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson



As found in Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. (Trinity University Press, 2010)

"Dinosaur Slime"

"The term 'fossil fuels' is not a metaphor or a simile. In the geological sense, it's over. The internal combustion engine is so twentieth-century. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy, or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised you on a lie. Everything you plug in, turn on, or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on a fossil substance. Dinosaur slime, and it's running out. The geologists only disagree on how much is left, and the climate scientists are now saying they're sorry, but that's not even the point. We won't get time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we'll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent, within a decade.

"Heaven help us get our minds around that."

--Barbara Kingsolver
As found in Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson. (Trinity University Press, 2010)

"One Living Creature"

"Constantly think of the Universe as one living creature, embracing one being and one soul; how all is absorbed into the one consciousness of this living creature; how it compasses all things with a single purpose, and how all things work together to cause all that comes to pass, and their wonderful web and texture."

--Marcus Aurelius

"Leave each day behind..."

It's good to leave each day behind
Like flowing water, free of sadness,
Yesterday is gone and its tale told,
Today new seeds are growing.

--Rumi

"What hope is made of..."

"A dissenter might argue ... that the concept of obligations to the future makes no sense at all. The future does not exist. How can we have a responsibility to nothing at all? Or even if future beings can be imagined to exist, how can we know what their interests are, or what they might ask of us? How can there be obligations to abstractions?

"... people show strong loyalty to abstractions every time they act in ways that honor conceptual ideals such as freedom, liberty, and prosperity. Loyalty to abstractions is the stuff of this world. Arguments about responsibility to the future do indeed require us to imagine a world that does not yet exist. They further require us to be morally moved by that imagined vision. Loyalty to what we can only imagine is what hope is made of."

From Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson (Trinity University Press, 2010).

"Even the most conscientious probably can't claim only their just portion of the world's resources right off the bat. At the very least, though, you can acknowledge that your life is fundamentally unfair. There will be no arguments that you ought to have more than say, a Bangladeshi, or that you have a right to be richer. And it's worse than that. Even as you lead an unjustifiably consumptive life, it will be gracious to acknowledge that not only are you taking more than your fair share, but your lifelong history of taking more than your fair share has in fact exponentially increased the undeserved suffering of others. So there is a reparations issue to deal with as well.

"Next step? At this point, we'd all better tithe, donating 10 percent of our annual incomes to climate action or mitigation of the affects of climate change on the less advantaged. That's 10 percent that goes toward our debt to the world's poor, and it's 10 percent less that we're spending on consumer items that will hurt them even more. That's a minimally decent start."

From Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson (Trinity University Press, 2010).

If we could come face-to-face...

If we could come face-to-face with the ecological devastation that we casually leave in our wake, would we change our ways?


"Let no species disappear without public notice. If our ways of life are going to destroy infinitudes of lives, let us at least do so knowingly, and grieve for the terrible loss. Evolution is an infinitely branching tree. Each branch branches again, and branches again, budding and branching, a beautiful and endless complexity. Killing off a species not only wipes that creature off the earth forever; it also lops off the budding branch, eliminating for all time the infinite variation that might have grown from that limb. This is a loss literally beyond imagining. It is also a loss that is largely invisible."

"Create art that fills the forests with death notices. Transform every stump in the clearcut into a cross, so no one can drive by a ruined hillside without seeing it for what it is--a graveyard that stretches for miles. Let the roadside bloom with shrines adorned with plastic flowers to mark the extinctions of sparrows. Post 'missing persons' notices for the white-headed woodpeckers that used to frequent the ponderosa forest. Send an obituary to the newspaper each spring, when the frogs do not sing. Howl across the lake for the gray wolves that once roamed North America. Assemble the choir and sing hymns as the bulldozers gouge out the last checker-lilies in the valley. Print pictures of ivory-billed woodpeckers on milk cartons. Rent a hearse and follow the truck that sprays poisons in the ditches."

From Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril edited by Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson (Trinity University Press, 2010).