The Temple of Understanding encourages voting for the environment. We are out of time for gradual changes and must reduce and re-organize our energy use immediately, and must elect representatives who understand that this is what the US public wants. We can rebuild our economy, create new jobs, and start to rebuild human security. As our colleague Jim Sniffen noted in our video, Roots of Change, change must come from both directions, up from the grassroots, through voting, as well as top-down, from governmental leaders. Both are needed.
Our colleague Dr. Tarunjit Butalia has offered an analysis that is exactly on point in his piece in Religion News Service, entitled, “Vote like your life – and everyone else’s – depends on it.” He captures the urgency, outlines the facts of common ground among the people of the US,
At COP27, the U.N. climate conference that begins in Egypt this week, the world hopes to see America lead the climate fight. Why? Proportionally, we are the world’s biggest polluter. As a big part of the problem, we have to be an even bigger part of the solution. We can become the world’s climate champion and make America stronger and safer in the process. Conservatives, independents and liberals should be able to support tackling climate change as a path to economic success and human security, as well as the morally right thing to do.
and he continues
The decisions we make in this midterm election will determine whether we have any hope of averting catastrophic human and planetary damage. If we elect candidates who push for unabated use of fossil fuels, ignoring pollution reduction and failing to advance toward a clean energy future, we put the U.S. and the world in grave peril. We will cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars for decades to come. Our sacred planet may never recover.
We at the Temple of Understanding agreed that we must put our collective well being and that of our one and only earth at the forefront. And pursuing eco-justice is the pathway to do that, because, as Tarunjhit writes,
It is also about security and safety. Our hunger for fossil fuels makes us dependent on a handful of dictatorships. It causes us to wipe out the rich biodiversity that sustains all human life. America is just 4.25% of the world’s population but accounts for more than 20% of its climate pollution. The irony is that we have the technology and capacity to become self-sufficient and wean entirely off fossil fuels. In the process, America has a real opportunity to ensure its place as a global leader economically and technologically by leaning hard into building a safe, healthy future that takes the climate threat seriously.
Vote for the environment, so we can as a country move away from the irony of what we’re not doing, into the collective action of what we can do! We highly commend Tarunjit’s entire article online here.
https://religionnews.com/2022/
Vote for the environment!