MARFAM FAMILY MATTERS WEEKLY E-NEWSLETTER 4 SEPTEMBER 2024

The Season of Creation is a interdenominational Christian  5 week ( 1 September to 4 October)  focus on the world around us with the stated aims of www.seasonofcreation.org, to renew our relationship with the Creator, through celebration, conversion and commitment.  It’s theme  “Hope and Act with Creation” provides quite some food for thought on these aims. What is there to celebrate? In music, “For the Beauty of the Earth” is a good start, visual and audible,  giving praise and blessing, and hope and action. Preserving and not killing fall into the conversion and action domain. Articles from MARFAM’s booklet BECOMING ECO-FRIENDLY FAMILIES highlight how.   

Some of the articles from the booklet are combined with the regular THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY published on www.marfam.org.za  which use the well-known SEE-JUDGE-ACT.

PRESERVE WILD LIFE. (From Becoming Eco-Friendly Families)

Talking of “preserving, ”I remember being amused by a car bumper sticker I saw ages ago that read, “preserve wild life, pickle a squirrel.”   Today, with a much more finely honed environmental conscience I don’t find that funny. We have done too much harm to wild life, destroying their habitats and migration routes, poaching and trafficking in rhino horns and pangolins. However, while that is going on nature conservation is a growing industry,  enjoyed widely by tourists – families of course too. It is very much also to study and be able to protect species that are at partial or total risk of extinction. Many thousands of plant and animal species do become extinct each year.  

Few things can beat a couple of days in a game park where many of us chase around looking for the big five – lion, leopard, elephant, rhino, buffalo.  There are other, more educated and sophisticated visitors, who study birds, trees and all types of vegetation, insects and the myriad other elements that are needed to make up a successful eco-system.   

And then there are the vast majority of people who haven’t experienced those luxuries, but still have a vast knowledge and love of wild life. Then there are those who know little and care less.  Who really cares that many species e.g. springbok whose vast herds of thousands of animals have been hunted almost to extinction in the last few hundred or so years in parts of Southern Africa?  Encouraging is that writers and interest groups who are newly conscientized to this evil, through rewilding programmes are beginning to re-introduce game and endangered species back into their natural surroundings.    Laudato Si’.  Praise and thank God.   PS the pic is of the wildebeest, also called a gnu…

Pope Francis:  It may well disturb us to learn of the extinction of mammals or birds as they are more visible.   But the good healthy functioning of ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an innumerable variety of microorganisms to maintain the equilibrium of a particular place.  LS34. Many birds and insects which disappear due to synthetic agrotoxins are helpful for agriculture: their disappearance will have to be compensated for by other techniques. A sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention often in the service of business interests and consumerism is making our earth less rich and beautiful.  We seem to think that we substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievably beauty with something which we have created ourselves.  LS 34. It is hard for us to accept that the way natural ecosystems work is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients which feed herbivores, those in turn become food for carnivores, which produce significant quantities of organic waste which give rise to new generations of plants. Our industrial system at the end of its cycle of production and consumption has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by products. We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production. LS 22

ACTION AND PRAYER. During the Season of Creation consider our human role in wild life protection and pray this short Laudato Si prayer. “Father, we praise you with all your creatures. They came forth from your powerful hand, they are yours, filled with your presence and your tender love.”  

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY 4 SEPTEMBER 2024

4 SEPTEMBER.   FEED THE WORLD, DON’T KILL THE WORLD.  (From Becoming Eco-Friendly Families)

The Boney-M song “Don’t kill the world” goes back some 40 years. Environmental awareness was just starting to take off.  It made a strong impact then. but hasn’t  stopped us killing the world. In those early days activists were often ridiculed, seen as tree huggers or bunny huggers but they were already aware of the hunger caused by droughts, famine and the extreme weather patterns which are now almost accepted as normal.  The average world temperature is rising almost every year, heating the oceans, melting icecaps, affecting marine life, causing hurricanes and floods as well as drought in other places. 

Killing the world is killing opportunities to grow and produce food to feed the world, resulting in hunger. This affects especially the poorest people living in villages and small towns, who often grow some of their own food.  Feeding the world and the hungry is also providing aid to those affected by no, or low, rainfall and crop failures or floods and destroyed farmlands. Those displaced due to the wars and internal conflicts in parts of the world are among the hungry.  Such conflicts kill the world through the massive damage to infrastructure that we see daily on our TV news programmes.  War cuts food production, as in Ukraine where reduced wheat and sunflower exports are affecting staple foods of other countries. In addition wild fires brought on by temperature rises destroy many of God’s creatures and their habitats.  Pope Francis:  with the money spent on weapons and other military expenditures let us establish a global fund that can finally put an end to hunger and provide  development in the most impoverished countries so that their citizens will not resort to violent or illusory solutions or have to leave their countries to seek a more dignified life.  FT 262.  Eco-tip and Prayer. As families revive the song, listen and meditate on the words, share, sing along and GO AND DO!.   Loving God, make us more and more conscious that our homes are good places to start to become eco- and family- friendly.

 TR FAMILY WEEKLY 4 SEPTEMBER 2024

DON’T KILL THE WORLD.

Don’t kill the world, don’t let her down
Do not destroy basic ground
Don’t kill the world, our means of life
Lend ear to nature’s cry

Don’t kill the world, help her survive
And she will be gone, you will die
And don’t just talk, go on and do
The one who wins is you