Happy Earth Day 2020!

Sunflower - © 2020 Dawn Egerton

"Every man of discernment, while walking upon the earth, feeleth indeed abashed, inasmuch as he is fully aware that the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is, as ordained by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all men. There can be no doubt that whoever is cognizant of this truth, is cleansed and sanctified from all pride, arrogance, and vainglory...."

~Bahá'u'lláh,

 Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, Wilmette, Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1988, p. 44

Earth Day 50th Anniversary -Halldor Thorgeirsson with Rainn Wilson

In this episode, I’m in Reykjavik, Iceland with Halldor Thorgeirsson, the Chair of Iceland’s Climate Council, and retired Senior Director of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat (UNFCCC). We talk about the environment, and Halldor teaches me about how Carbon Matter really matters. He tells me about Iceland, his work, how he became a Baha’i, the importance of consultation and accompaniment, Baha’is who have influenced his life, and the importance of moral leadership and engaging in constructive forces in our society. I hope you enjoy the conversation!  -Rainn Wilson

"Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator."

DuPont Falls - © 2020 Dawn Egerton

"Nature in its essence is the embodiment of My Name, the Maker, the Creator. Its manifestations are diversified by varying causes, and in this diversity there are signs for men of discernment. Nature is God’s Will and is its expression in and through the contingent world. It is a dispensation of Providence ordained by the Ordainer, the All-Wise. Were anyone to affirm that it is the Will of God as manifested in the world of being, no one should question this assertion. It is endowed with a power whose reality men of learning fail to grasp. Indeed a man of insight can perceive naught therein save the effulgent splendor of Our Name, the Creator. Say: This is an existence which knoweth no decay, and Nature itself is lost in bewilderment before its revelations, its compelling evidences and its effulgent glory which have encompassed the universe."

Bahá'u'lláh, Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh, p. 142

"Man is organic with the world."

 © 2020 Chuck Egerton

"We cannot segregate the human heart from the environment outside us and say that once one of these is reformed everything will be improved. Man is organic with the world. His inner life moulds the environment and is itself also deeply affected by it. The one acts upon the other and every abiding change in the life of man is the result of these mutual reactions."

Letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, 17 February 1933, Compilation on Social and Economic Development, p. 4

Earth Day - Fiftieth Anniversary!

First Earth Day 1970

Blue Ridge Mountains  © 2017 Dawn Egerton

First Earth Day 1970

by Arthur Lyon Dahl
President, International Environment Forum

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22 April 2020 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, which was organized in the United States on 22 April 1970, helping to launch the environmental movement. It was initiated by Senator Gaylord Nelson after seeing the environmental damage from the Santa Barbara oil spill on the California coast the year before. and was organized by a group of young activists in Washington, DC. Twenty million Americans took part. I participated in the Earth Day events in Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, where I was a Visiting Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Botany at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. I volunteered to be a speaker, and was assigned to the Walt Whitman High School in Arlington, Virginia, across the river from Washington. There was a student Earth Day assembly with a large audience, where I spoke on environmental problems such as air and water pollution and their world solutions. In particular, I described my first-hand experience with the Santa Barbara oil spill, after a leak from the sea bottom during offshore drilling sent large volumes of oil and tar onto the beaches for weeks in 1969. I was finishing my doctorate in marine biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara at the time, and participated in the initial studies there of the impact of oil pollution on coastal ecosystems.

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Santa Barbara oil spill 1969

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This was the beginning of my own 50 years of environmental action, including research on long-term changes on coral reef ecosystems in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, representing the Bahá'í International Community at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972, spending a decade as Regional Ecological Adviser to all the Pacific Island governments, and then a long career in the UN Environment Programme.

Source: International Environmental Forum  https://iefworld.org/node/1042

Joyous Ridván!

"Praise be to Thee, O my God, for having cast in this Day the radiance of all Thy names upon all created things, O Thou Who art the Lord of glory, majesty, and grandeur; of power, might, and blessings! This is the Day whereon He Who is the Mouthpiece of God, the All-Possessing, the Inaccessible, the Most High, hath called out from the realm of eternity, saying: “The Kingdom is God’s, the Almighty, the Most Exalted, the Most Glorious!” 

Lauded be Thy name, O Thou Who causest the winds to blow and the dawn to break, Who revealest the verses and unveilest the proofs! All things proclaim that Thou art God, and that there is none other God but Thee, the Sovereign, the All-Powerful, the Most Exalted, the Most Great. Magnified be Thy name, O Thou Who art the Fashioner of the heavens and the Creator of all names, Who sheddest Thy splendour upon all things through the power of Thy Most Great Name. This, verily, is the name whereby the Mystic Dove hath warbled upon the celestial bough, proclaiming: “All dominion belongeth forever unto God, our Lord, the Most Merciful!” ...

~ Bahá'u'lláh

(Days of Remembrance)

“From time immemorial,” He declares, “they who have been outwardly invested with authority have debarred men from setting their faces towards God."

"Dear friends! For the trials which have afflicted the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh a responsibility appalling and inescapable rests upon those into whose hands the reins of civil and ecclesiastical authority were delivered. The kings of the earth and the world’s religious leaders alike must primarily bear the brunt of such an awful responsibility. “Everyone well knoweth,” Bahá’u’lláh Himself testifies, “that all the kings have turned aside from Him, and all the religions have opposed Him.” “From time immemorial,” He declares, “they who have been outwardly invested with authority have debarred men from setting their faces towards God. They have disliked that men should gather together around the Most Great Ocean, inasmuch as they have regarded, and still regard, such a gathering as the cause of, and the motive for, the disruption of their sovereignty.” “The kings,” He moreover has written, “have recognized that it was not in their interest to acknowledge Me, as have likewise the ministers and the divines, notwithstanding that My purpose hath been most explicitly revealed in the Divine Books and Tablets, and the True One hath loudly proclaimed that this Most Great Revelation hath appeared for the betterment of the world and the exaltation of the nations.” “Gracious God!” writes the Báb in the Dalá’il-i-Sab‘ih (Seven Proofs) with reference to the “seven powerful sovereigns ruling the world” in His day, “None of them hath been informed of His[the Báb’s] Manifestation, and if informed, none hath believed in Him. Who knoweth, they may leave this world below full of desire, and without having realized that the thing for which they were waiting had come to pass. This is what happened to the monarchs that held fast unto the Gospel. They awaited the coming of the Prophet of God [Muḥammad], and when He did appear, they failed to recognize Him. Behold how great are the sums which these sovereigns expend without even the slightest thought of appointing an official charged with the task of acquainting them in their own realms with the Manifestation of God! They would thereby have fulfilled the purpose for which they have been created. All their desires have been and are still fixed upon leaving behind them traces of their names.” The Báb, moreover, in that same treatise, censuring the failure of the Christian divines to acknowledge the truth of Muḥammad’s mission, makes this illuminating statement: “The blame falleth upon their doctors, for if these had believed, they would have been followed by the mass of their countrymen. Behold then, that which hath come to pass! The learned men of Christendom are held to be learned by virtue of their safeguarding the teaching of Christ, and yet consider how they themselves have been the cause of men’s failure to accept the Faith and attain unto salvation!”

Shoghi Effendi citing Bahá'u'lláh and the Báb

(The Promised Day Is Come)