"It is impossible and pointless to lay blame for our peril, nor do we have time. We are all responsible for our earth, and we are all called to the fullness of life in God. 'Respect' is a key word among the Inuit, Yupik, and Aleut peoples, the people most hurt by the walrus deaths. Respect means the humility that is clear sight, the recognition of our interconnectedness, the limits of what we know, the sacredness of individual integrity and individual choice undertaken for the sake of community. On it depend our survival inhered with the fragile creation, the precious gift of life, and the mystery that sustains it.
"Repentance for what we have done to the earth is not possible without this respect, without our acceptance of pain and death as part of life and joy, without the freedom from the fear of death that is the gift of silence, without the gift of silence that brings to birth in us a compassion that is the new creation. From this space of silence we receive freedom simply to be. With balance restored within ourselves, we are released from the chains of fashion and exploitation. In this way we can live with greater sensitivity to the environment, and listen for possible solutions to the ecological crisis that will not merely compound it.
"When the Buddha achieved the openness of enlightenment, he touched the earth. When oil from the Exxon Valdez drifted southward to blacken the crystalline waters around the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska's children went grieving to the beaches to write in the sand letters of apology to the earth and the sea.
