Taking Care of Mother

Although it is still three weeks until Mother’s Day, I am writing today about taking care of Mother Earth. This week marks the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, so it is a fitting time to think about taking care of our planet. 

The First Earth Day

Earth Day was first observed on April 22, 1970. Do you old-timers remember that important event that celebrates its 50^th birthday this week?

To be honest, I don’t remember that day. I was living and teaching in Japan at that time, struggling at the beginning of a new semester to teach Christian Studies in Japanese to hundreds of university students. And at home, June was in the third trimester of her pregnancy with our third child.

Actually, though, for the first 20 years, Earth Day was mainly an event celebrated in the U.S. and did not become international until 1990. But those early years were important for the environmental movement in the U.S.

Gaylord Nelson, the Democratic Senator from Wisconsin, was the founder of Earth Day. In 1995, Nelson (1916~2005) was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of his environmental work.

In its beginning, Earth Day was bipartisan in its support and appeal. The co-chair who served with Sen. Nelson was Pete McCloskey, who was at the time a Republican U.S. Representative from California.

One of the ongoing effects of that first Earth Day was the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). President Nixon proposed the establishment of the EPA in July 1970 and it began operation in December of that year after he signed an executive order.

The Clean Air Act of 1963 came under the aegis of the EPA, and then the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973 were signed into law by President Nixon.

Yes, taking care of Mother Earth used to be a bipartisan concern.

Earth Day Now

There are extensive plans for the celebration of Earth Day 2020, and I encourage you to check out the website (here) for this year’s events, which they say will be “the largest secular observance in the world, marked by more than a billion people.” 

Enthusiastic observance of Earth Day in the U.S. is especially important now, for the Trump Administration has rolled back many of the programs/activities that started 50 years ago.

Ten days ago, PBS posted “During the Coronavirus Crisis, the Trump Administration’s Environmental Rollbacks Continue.” And it has already been two and a half years since PBS aired “War on the EPA” on their 10/11/17 Frontline presentation.

Much of that war on the EPA, as documented in the PBS program, was led by Scott Pruitt, DJT’s first appointed head of the Agency. Pruitt, a conservative Southern Baptist from Oklahoma, served as head of the EPA from February 2017 to July 2018.

It was no surprise to learn (from this 3/27/18 CBN article) that Pruitt was “one of President Donald Trump's Cabinet members who sponsors and attends a weekly Cabinet Bible study led by Ralph Drollinger, president and founder of Capitol Ministries.”

(If you missed reading my previous blog post about Drollinger, check it out here.)

Things did not improve much when Andrew Wheeler became head of the EPA in February of last year. He previously worked in the law firm that represented a coal magnate and lobbied against the Obama Administration's environmental regulations.

Yes, much needs to be done to take care of Mother Earth—not only because of what is being undone now but also because of the many necessary things that have not yet been done.

And don’t forget, as I quoted at the beginning of the only other blog post I made about Earth Day (here, seven years ago), “The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1, KJV).

Ironies of American History

It has been two weeks now since the historic meeting between DJT and Kim Jong-un in Singapore. You likely heard/saw much about that at the time. What can we say now about that meeting, which is surely one of the ironies of American history? (“Irony” as used here means “a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects.")

The Irony of American History

The noted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (about whom I wrote in a June 2017 article) gave two lectures at Westminster College in Missouri in May 1949. Those talks became the basis of his book The Irony of American History (1952).

Rather than try to summarize Niebuhr’s book here (which cannot be done briefly), let me just refer to “What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr,” a review article that appeared in the March 26, 2009, issue of The New York Review of Books.

This article is about two events that have happened since Niebuhr’s book was published. It is, however, partly about two countries that have embraced Communism, the focus of Niebuhr’s reflections.

Nixon’s Visit to China

Richard Nixon, the only POTUS to resign, is primarily known for two things: the Watergate affair that led to his resignation and his visit to China leading to the normalizing of relations between the U.S. and that country.

Nixon’s strategic visit to China was twenty years after Niebuhr’s book was published, but that visit is surely one of the ironies of American history. Nixon was chosen to run as Eisenhower’s Vice-President partly because of his strong anti-Communism stance.

Nixon, though, became the first U.S. President to visit the People’s Republic of China, and that visit ended 25 years of no diplomatic ties between the two counties.

For several reasons, Nixon can be seen as one of the worst Presidents in U. S. history. But his visit to China was a highly important strategic and diplomatic achievement—and part of the irony is that if Humphrey had been elected in 1968, he likely would not have been able to pull off that feat.

It is also ironic that that successful political action occurred just four months before the Watergate break-in, which, of course, led to Nixon’s resignation.

The Trump-Kim Meeting

So, what about the historic meeting of the current POTUS and Kim Jong-un, the Supreme Leader of the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea?

One ironic aspect of that June 11/12 meeting comes from the saber-rattling rhetoric and derogatory language used by both leaders against each other just a few months earlier.

Trump publicly called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and in private with his aides referred to Kim as “a crazy guy.” Kim, in turn, has called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” At the Singapore Summit, however, Trump and Kim appeared to be bosom buddies. 

As was widely reported, Trump “gushed with praise” of the North Korean dictator. But that was not highly regarded by some Americans, including David A. Graham who wrote a June 12 article for The Atlantic titled “Trump’s Effusive, Unsettling Flattery of Kim Jong Un”.

But others lauded DJT. On June 14, Deroy Murdock wrote in the National Review (here), “President Trump’s extraordinary Tuesday-morning Singapore summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un was an encounter that eluded every American president from Eisenhower to Obama.”

Who’d have thought that the President who last year threatened “fire and fury” and early this year bragged to Kim, “My nuclear button is bigger than yours,” would be the one to meet with the Supreme Leader of North Korea and come away claiming that there is no longer any threat of nuclear confrontation?

Ironic indeed!