CREATION DOESN'T COME WITH A PRICE TAG

There's one hell of a forest fire burning just outside Yosemite National Park.  Warning. If you do follow the link to the comments section some of what's being posted is pretty damned toxic. I don't know where these folks come from. Their concern for their fellow Americans is indeed touching. For folks whose moral dipsticks are so dry they crumbled years ago.

I finally decided that for the sake of my sanity, my blood pressure and the well being of my psyche to get the hell out of Dodge. So to speak. Anyway I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't agree with this.

The Declaration of the Four Sacred Things

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with many cultures from many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water and earth.

Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood and body of the Mother, or as the Blessed Gifts of a Creator, or as the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws and our purposes must be judged. No one had the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit can flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, beauty and freedom can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

Intro to the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk (born Miriam Simos) a feminist neopagan writer. She has two novels to her credit plus a fair amount of non fiction. This book has been sitting on my shelf for several years. I guess I finally have enough pegs to hang it on. As I typed this I flashed on all the comments that hold that a tree doesn't have any value unless it's been cut, milled and had a price tag slapped on it. And I can type answers to these commenters until my fingers fall off and I won't make a dent in their bubble of adamant. They will never accept that those trees and the ecosystem they support has a value simply because they exist and are part of Creation. Unique in the universe and irreplaceable. 

God/dess how do we get through to these people.