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In recent times, humanity has been waging war
on nature: felling trees, tearing down mountains, and polluting waters,
wherever these natural phenomenon get in the way of what people call progress.
In many parts of the world, the nature spirits have been forced to withdraw,
along with certain plants and animals that have become extinct, because their
habitats have been destroyed. Those humans whose soul shells have become as
impenetrable as coats of armor are so disconnected from creation; they no
longer see any reason to preserve the health and beauty of the earth we live
on. When people buy their food and bottled water in supermarkets, they forget
that food needs fertile land in which to grow, and water needs a clean source
from which to flow. When people spend most
of their time in buildings and cars, they don’t care what’s happening to the
land that lies between their home and the places to which they go. (No, this is
not poetry, but the rhymes just presented themselves so they had to come out.
Perhaps it was Ecanus, angel of writers, having a bit of fun.) Anyway . . . .
It is fortunate for creation that legions of
nature lovers have been growing in numbers to counter-balance the devastation
caused by those who choose self-centered goals over compassionate ones.
Horrendous actions always stir up protests from those who maintain their
connection to Love; so myriads of protection agencies and organizations have
sprouted to prevent the warriors from eradicating the world of its forests,
waterways, and wildlife. These nature advocates
are supported by the agents of Love, which include angels and gods who have
been revered in different parts of the world at different times: Faunus and Pan
in Greece and Rome . . . . and the
angels: Ariel and Sofiel, angels of nature;
Orifiel, angel of the forests; Zuphlas, angel of trees; Hayyel, angel of
wild animals, and Trgiaob, angel of wild birds.
All of these angels and more were present in
June of 1992 when the First Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil. This was the first time in human
history that 176 world leaders assembled in one place for a common cause: the
healing of the earth. In addition to these world leaders, 40,000 people
attended the event, representing organizations that are dedicated to planetary
healing. Unbeknown to most of the summit’s attendees, their numbers were
boosted by myriads of nature spirits and angels, who were so encouraged by humanity’s
positive intentions, that their efforts to help us save our mother earth from
destruction were greatly intensified.
The humans who strive to protect nature have
not usually been aware of the support they receive from the non-material realm;
but the angels, gods, and nature spirits are at work behind the scenes,
offering inspiration and encouragement to people like John Muir, Rachel Carson,
and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Of course there is no way of knowing whether or not environmental
activists are in communication with the angels and spirits of the natural
world. They have to keep such information to themselves if they want powerful
people to take them seriously. The men who were in Congress in 1890 took John
Muir so seriously that, with the help of his friend, Robert Johnson, and
perhaps an angel or two, Muir was able to convince them to establish Yosemite
National Park. The creation of this park protected the central Sierra Nevada
from stockmen and others who saw ways to profit from the land without a thought
for the consequences. Muir, who was also influential in founding national parks
at Mount Rainier, Sequoia, the Petrified Forest, and the Grand Canyon, is known
as the Father of the National Park System in the United States, as well as the
founder of the Sierra Club, an organization of nature lovers who have been
working to protect the natural environment since 1892.
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| Yosemite National Park |
It is probably impossible for one who spends as much
time in the wilderness as John Muir did, not to recognize the interrelatedness
of creation and the intelligence of nature. Omniel, Angel of Oneness, may have
whispered these words in his inner ear as he was writing My First Summer in the Sierra: “When we try to pick out anything
by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” (p. 110) And
then these insightful words, composed as part of a letter to Catharine Merrill, while he was
in Yosemite Valley in 1871:
We all flow from one fountain
Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only
from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and
places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over
creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts,
saturating all and fountainizing all. (Life and Letters of John Muir by William Frederic
Badè)
When the Sierra Club was created, Muir said
that its founders were doing “something for wildness” and to “make the
mountains glad." He treated the mountains and trees as friends, with the
ability to respond to their experiences the way people do. Perhaps the Angel
Zuphlas inspired him to write these words:
It has been said that trees are imperfect men,
and seem to bemoan their imprisonment rooted in the ground. But they never seem
so to me. I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they
liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go
wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like
ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and
through space heaven knows how fast and far!
(Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, p.41-42)
John Muir and his colleagues were successful in
saving millions of acres of wilderness and their wild inhabitants from
destruction by stockmen, loggers, miners, and hunters. By the mid-twentieth
century there was a new and even more dangerous threat to the environment: the
burgeoning use of chemicals to control pests and the use of toxins for
not-so-nice reasons. This menace contaminated the environments in which people
live and grow their food and acquire their water. As Rachel Carson so
eloquently pointed out in Silent Spring,
published in 1962, these poisons affect the lives of all people, not just those
who enjoy hiking through the backcountry. Unlike Muir, Carson was a scientist, so
she would have been inspired by Dewi Saraswat, goddess of science, and Harahel, angel
of knowledge, as well as the angels of nature. Yes, Dewi Saraswat is a Hindu
goddess, and Rachel Carson was not a Hindu, but the agents of Love do not
restrict their influence to one particular group of people if they see a way to
help humanity as a whole to achieve Love’s goal of oneness.
Rachel Carson needed a lot of support from Love’s
messengers, because after challenging the practices of agricultural
scientists and the government for their misuse of pesticides, the chemical
industry and certain government leaders labeled her an alarmist. Carson’s
critics tried to get the public to scoff at her warnings, but bolstered by
the reassuring presence of Nemamiah,
angel of just causes, she was able to testify before Congress in 1963, to
request new policies that would protect the environment and the health of all
people who depend on the environment for food, air, and water. Carson was
successful in convincing Congress and the public to support her views because
she had been a well-respected scientist and author even before the
publication of Silent Spring. She
backed her findings with specific examples, such as the declining salmon
population in an area where DDT had been sprayed to kill the spruce budworm.
She explained that the DDT also killed the aquatic insects that the young
salmon depended on for survival. Carson
helped people to understand the oneness of creation in scientific terms:
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For each of us, as for the
robin in Michigan, or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of
ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies
in the stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. . . . We spray our elms and
following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins
directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now
familiar elmleaf -earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record,
observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of
life-or death-that scientists know as ecology. (Silent Spring, p. 189)
As Nemamiah points out to the other
angels, “It’s easy for people to see through arguments and accusations when
they come from businesses that are making a profit from a controversial act or
product. Like John Muir before her, Rachel has nothing to gain from her
position except the preservation of the natural environment we all live in.”
Rachel Carson left this world in 1964, just a
year after President Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee
issued a report that vindicated her thesis and recommended that the use of persistent
toxic pesticides be discontinued. Following this victory for the environment, increasing
numbers of individuals have felt encouraged to stand up in defense of Mother
Nature. Many of these brave souls have been murdered by those who making
profits from their destruction of the environment. Among these martyrs were
Chico Mendes, a Brazilian rubber
tapper who fought to preserve
the Amazon rainforest,
and advocated for the human
rights of Brazilian peasants and
indigenous peoples. He was assassinated by a rancher on December 22, 1988.
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| Ken Beeson Saro-Wiwa |
Then there was Kenule "Ken" Beeson Saro-Wiwa, an environmental activist in Nigeria, who led
a nonviolent campaign
against the environmental degradation of the land
and waters of his homeland, Ogoniland, by the operations of the multinational petroleum industry. He also spoke out against the Nigerian government for its reluctance to enforce
environmental regulations on the foreign petroleum companies that dumped their
waste in this area. He and eight of his colleagues were executed in 1995. In 2011, environmentalists, Fr. Fausto
Tentorio, Gerry Ortega, and several others
were killed in the Philippines, where they had been speaking out against a
mining project that threatens to contaminate the
watershed and destroy the forests in the province of Palawan.
These are just a few of the hundreds of people who have been
killed while trying to protect Mother Nature from the benefactors of her
destruction. “If only we could have protected the ones who sacrificed their
lives for creation,” cry the angels of the forests, wildlife, and water. “But,”
Ariel reminds the others, “All we can do is offer guidance and little nudges in
their subconscious minds. We can only protect those who ask for help, and none
of these martyrs even believed in us.”
The murder of one human being by another is the pinnacle of evil –
the evil that results when people feel separate from one another. Martyrdom
occurs when someone stands up for Love and Oneness, and those who live only for
themselves see that person as a threat to their wealth and power. The one
redeeming factor to martyrdom is that it does draw attention to the cause for
which the victim died. So all of these murders, intended to squelch the
activists’ crusades, have actually had the opposite effect. Each time a person
or group of people is killed for altruistic achievements, the murderers broadcast
their avaricious and ruthless behavior to the world. In many cases, such as
that of Kenule
Beeson Saro-Wiwa and his colleagues, the international community holds the
murderers responsible for their crimes – not only the executions, but the degradation of the lands that the
victims had been protesting.
The agents of Love were excited and busy
during the 1960s, a time of great change and awakening for the children of
Love. Yes, the sleeping ones waged war and mayhem around the world, but these
antics served to awaken others who were beginning to understand that much of
what was done by those in power was not intended for the benefit of all. The
1960s saw the establishment of new environmental groups, such as Greenpeace and
the Environmental Defense Fund, and the angels supported the work done by these
groups to preserve the health and beauty of Love’s creation.
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