Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore

“The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

—Psalm 23, 1

By Mary Liepold

From September 1, when the Orthodox church year begins with the story of creation, to October 4, the feast of St. Francis, Pax Christi International joins the World Council of Churches in celebrating A Time for Creation.

I didn’t know that when I decided to get arrested at the Tar Sands demonstration on September 1. I’m not Art Laffin, God bless and keep him; I’m a bookish grandma. The other two times I was arrested, once in the Capitol and once at SOA, the cause was peace and the obstacle was militarism. But my friend Beth Adams came from Massachusetts to take part in Tar Sands Action, and I am inspired by the way Beth merges peace on earth and peace with the earth in her full-time personal activism. When she invited me to join her I did some quick online research to find out why the Keystone XL, or tar sands pipeline, has become a rallying point for the environmental movement.

Climate scientists like Bill McKibben and NASA’s James Hanson, First Nations activists, and environmental organizations worldwide are asking President Obama not to sign off on this exotic, extra-dirty technology because it replaces boreal forests with lakes of garbage and produces three times the greenhouse gas emissions of conventionally produced oil.  The Athabascan Cree and Métis people are already experiencing the damage it does to human health. Like fracking and mountaintop removal, this plan to pipe tortuously extracted oil from Alberta, Canada, all the way down to Texas expresses the desperation of the fossil fuel industry and its political backers. The monster Big Oil is so threatened by change that it thrashes about more and more wildly to grab and hold its accustomed prerogatives.

To me, this behavior is of a piece with the desperate violence of the Taliban and our own crumbling, kleptocratic empire. Collectively, it’s the death throes of the patriarchy. Change is inevitable. What remains to be seen is how much violence women, the earth—all of us—will endure before it comes, and where each of us chooses to stand.

My commitments to peace, feminism, and environmentalism grow from the same root. Every creature of God is holy. Yet through humanity’s long, tragic history, the rulers of the earth have treated the earth like a woman, and treated women like dirt.  By and large, those whose safety is not directly affected in the short term choose not to notice. So I’m grateful for my personal invitation to join the 1,251 other citizens who came to the White House over the last two weeks to disobey orders, proceed to the paddy wagon, and pay a $100 forfeit so they could deliver a message.

The least I can do is pass the invitation on. You’ll choose your own message and your own time and place. Here’s mine. The fossil fuel lobby is powerful. The President of the United States is powerful. But the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.

Mary Liepold is a Pax Christi Metro DC-Baltimore board member.