The ecological crises of our times call for mobilizing leaders (political, corporate, religious) and all citizens of communities and nations through the Sacred Earth Movement in an Era of Change (S.E.M.E.C).
S.E.M.E.C is a liberative movement that will engage in a “bold cultural revolution” (Laudato Si’ 114) to free the global community from the iron clad of “technocratic paradigm” (LS 101), and the misguided and tyrannical anthropocentrism (LS 116, 118) that have caused the warming of the planet Earth and the subsequent climate change, to the destruction of our common home and the poor (LS 28, 29, 49, 158, 170).
S.E.M.E.C is a transformative movement that resolutely attempts to transform humankind amidst the ecological crises in collaborative partnership with all the other movements of goodwill and diverse faiths. This movement has recourse to the religio-cultural wisdom of the farming and indigenous communities in the Asia, the global South and north. This pool of wisdom represents the living memory of grassroots’ local cosmologies of sustainability nurtured by the rich (re)sources of their everyday mysticism that is embedded in local knowledges, spiritualities and theologies.
S.E.M.E.C embraces all grassroots and affiliated organizations of Asia and the global South/North who subscribe to the earth as “en-spirited or divine”[i] suffused with the “spiritual powers”[ii] or Spirit power of the nature, ancestral and Great Creative Spirit. As A. Orabator (2008) of Nigeria/Africa has insightfully advocated, “the earth is a footrest of the divine. Nature is a privileged focus for encountering the gods, goddesses, deities, and ancestral spirits.”[iii] The 2012 Kari-Oca 2 Declaration of the Indios of Latin America calls for “a new paradigm for civilization based on Buen Vivir in the spirit of survival, dignity and well-being”.[iv] In this way, the earth’s “desecrated godless space” is ritually re-created/re-sacralized and humans are re-enchanted with a spirited and sacred Earth in which the poor and the vulnerable always find their gifted/rightful places in our common home.
[i] J. Baird Callicot, “Toward a Global Environmental Ethic,” in Worldviews and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy, and the Environment, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim (eds.) (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 30-40, here at 32.
[ii] John Grim, “Native North American Worldviews and Ecology”, in Worldviews and Ecology: Religion, Philosophy and the Environment, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim (New York: Orbis Books, 1994), 48-49, here at 49.
[iii] A. Orabator, Theology Brewed in an African Pot, Nairobi, Pauline Publications Africa, 2008, 132.
[iv] See http:cupuladospovos.org.br/en/2012/06/indigenous–peoples-international-declaration-on-self-
determination-and-sustainable-development, accessed on November 19, 2012; also see Jojo M. Fung, SJ, “Sacred
Space For Sacred Sustainability,” Landas 26 (2012): 267-290.
