– confused this Earth Day?

What, exactly, is the world coming to? How worried, precisely, should we be about the state of our climate, our energy system, our food supplies, our water, the air we breath? What really is — or might soon — be the problem with any of these?

It’s hard to keep track and easy to feel overwhelmed.

A good place to start feeling a little less swamped and a little more informed this Earth Day might be this useful round up from the folks at AlterNet: “Eight Reasons Our Changing World Will Turn You Into an Environmentalist, Like It or Not.” To quote the editors:

Alternet picked eight topics — water, global warming, food, health, energy, pollution, consumption and corporations — that pose real dangers to the future of human life and selected a series of recent essays that illustrate these problems, along with links to organizations and further resources that address these issues.

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– to pollute is to sin, says the Vatican

Being a Quaker means believing that clergies are more of a hinderance than a help when it comes to leading a righteous spiritual life. And for a case study in the convoluted, self-sustaining theological bureaucracies that clergies happily make for themselves, it would be hard to beat the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary — a ‘tribunal of mercy’ mostly concerned with deciding who gets forgiven for what sins.

Still, we’re glad to see Monsignor Gianfranco Girotti, head of said Penitentiary, declare that pollution should be regarded as a modern sin.

In comments to the Vatican’s own newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, last Sunday Girotti listed “drugs, pollution and genetic manipulations as well as social and economic injustices as new areas of sinful behavior,” to quote CNN’s story on the announcement.

CNN speculates that this is a warm up for a new Papal initiative on ecology and the environment.  We hope that’s the case.

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against golf — a trend that’s growing

It’s always struck us EarthQuakers as odd that golfers have long been allowed to portray their sport as beneficial to the environment. Golf course owners are adept, for example, at receiving tax breaks, on the grounds that they protect ‘green’ space.

For sure, the first golf courses were relatively low impact. They were carved out of temperate coastal ‘links‘ areas, most of which was left untouched, and with the turfed tee and putting-green areas watered by natural rainfall.

But as the game has spread around the world, and as the idea of what a course should look like has changed, the typical course has become a voracious consumer of water and a reliable vector for vast amounts of inorganic chemical run-off in the form of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.

So we’re cheered, here, by the news that in America golf is a game in apparent decline. Or it’s at least over-extended itself. The NY Times reports this week that “Between 1990 and 2003, developers built more than 3,000 new golf courses in the United States, bringing the total to about 16,000.” Now, it turns out, many are going bankrupt as Americans lose interest in playing the game.

The report cites people’s general busyness, changing family values and a culture less interested in exercise as reasons for the change. Another factor, though, may be that more and more Americans are recognizing that to be on a golf course is to be in only a simulacrum of nature — and one that too often directly threatens nature, to boot.

Is it time, we wonder, to scale down golf’s global footprint? Let it stay, perhaps, on those sandy coastal bluffs, where it can co-exist quite nicely with the native flora and fauna. But let those thousands of other courses earn their tax breaks, finally, by reverting back into space that’s truly green.

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