Spiritual Ecology

Virginia and I are collaborating on our section of the "Finding the Light On-line" web page. Our topic is "spiritual ecology." We both have our own interpretations of what that term and concept means, but we found that our definitions and interpretations are not contradictory. In fact, they harmonize quite well together.

I started with bicycles, bicycle commuting, and bicycle activism in my surfing. Since my hometown of Berkeley, CA is a hot bed of bicycle activism, it was easy for me to locate the Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition.

http://www.blossomassociates.com/bfbc/

From there I found a link to Critical Mass http://www.gallaudet.edu/~kjcole/Bike/CriticalMass.html , groups of bicycle riders who ride together once a month through the downtown areas of many large cities throughout the world. Their goal is visibility. Taking up a lane of traffic, they are able to compete with the cars that would otherwise dominate the road. I was interested to learn that the Philadelphia ride obeys traffic signals http://www.libertynet.org/~bcdv/critical.html . Other mass rides do not stop at red lights.

Another resource I found was at Bicycle Lane http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dole/bikelane.html .

I showed Virginia the site for Earthlight Magazine, and we both agreed that the current edition on Exploring the relationship of Ecology & Spirituality was appropriate for our contribution http://www.earthlight.org/ .

To find out what Virginia found…

Other explorations outside of this class led me to Steve Kretzmann of the Twin Oaks Income Sharing Community. It is located not far from James Madison University and is committed to living in harmony with nature. Though it is not a Quaker community, the Quaker values of simplicity and sharing of resources is at the heart of Twins Oaks life.

In conclusion, I would like to acknowledge Carl Stieren who has created Peaceweb http://www.ottawa.net/~peaceweb/ and who facilitated last year’s Internet workshop at FGC in Hamilton, Ontario. That is a good resource for Quakers surfing the Internet, as well as http://www.quaker.org/ and my Internet Service provider Peacenet http://www.igc.org/igc/.

 

Tyamaguchi@igc.apc.org