November 2005 Archives

Reacting to religious fanaticism and the challenges of advancing and sustaining a more equitable civilization, a global interfaith movement has sprung from the grassroots of religion and spirituality. InterfaithNews.Net (INN) seeks to chronicle this movement by focusing primarily on positive interfaith and religious news, events, and resources. Last week we released the November issue of InterfaithNews.Net (and updated the design). Click on over for stories about the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, Indian faith groups banding together in support of the Millennium Development Goals, the Story of the URI in the UK, and 5 other new articles, as well as links to several other provocative articles "seen elsewhere" on the Web.

Completed shortly before his death in 1948, University of Wisconsin forestry professor Aldo Leopold grants his readers the supreme privilege of seeing nature through the original ecologist's eyes. Leopold was probably not the first to use the term "ecologist", nor the first to be be so branded; surely he was the first to deserve it. Though it may appear a quaint historical piece at first glance, its message is no less potent and relevant in the 21st century: nature, the land, deserves full respect and love without regard to traditional economics. Without this, effort at conservation will be a vain half-measure at best.

I can't think of anything witty or funny to say, so here's a boring pitch: check out the Extreme Auto Makeover, from the Union of Concerned Scientists (an organization I finally officially joined just yesterday). Its an educational preview of some of the technologies currently available for boosting fuel economy in American cars, and a sarcastic demonstration of how auto industry lobbyist hijack the regulations process. While the message is right on and it is good, it sadly does not meet the same standards as The Meatrix and Store Wars, also produced by the same company.

"To love what was is a new thing under the sun, unknown to most people and to all pigeons," writes Aldo Leopold in his Sketches Here and There. "To see America as history, to conceive of destiny as a becoming, to smell a hickory tree through the still lapse of ages — all these things are possible for us, and to achieve them takes only the free sky, and the will to ply our wings. In these things, and not in Mr. Bush's bombs and Mr. DuPont's nylons, lies objective evidence of our superiority over the beasts."

"In short, Rosa Parks didn’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision. She didn’t single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain." So says Paul Loeb in his article The Real Rosa Parks. His description of the movement for racial justice in America, as exemplified by its leading lady, Rosa Parks, offers many lessons for other would-be movements, including the Interfaith Movement or even the "Baha'i movement."