Holy Spirit Blowing

Sometimes
I go about pitying myself
While I am carried by
The wind
Across the sky
(a Chippewa song)

As San Diego County gets ready to make use of the "clean energy" of the strong winds in our backcountry, I wonder if we ecologically-minded folk ought to look for a spiritual solution to a knotty problem that seems to divide our community into two opposed camps: on one side, some environmentalists say that human beings need to stop using such destructive technologies to create and distrubute power--we need to start developing renewable energy sources such as wind power quickly, in the most effecient, easy manner possible, in hopes that our slide down a polluted, globally warmed path will cease; on the other side, locally-based conservationists, who also feel the armegeddonish crunch inherent in our ways of producing energy, still want to save what's left of our wild spaces. (For example, read David Suzuki wrestle with both sides of the issue in his own mind here and here.) Two recent reports in the San Diego Union Tribune (which is kind of surprising when one considers its major patrons/advertisers) point out these difficult issues: an article about Altamount Pass and the problems caused by giant windmills that kill birds and bats along this important flyway, and the recent article in Sunday's business section about the issues surrounding development by Big Energy of windy places in the East County of San Diego. These places are valuable ecologically and, because people were living here in harmony with the planet for thousands of years before we white folk got here, valuable in a spiritual sense; three-hundred foot-high windmills seem to take away some holiness from culturally important places, the sacred spaces in our habitat. What to do?

Perhaps we should start from a more humble position:

Oh Great Spirit
whose Voice I hear in the Winds,
whose Breath gives life to all the world,
hear me! I am small and weak; I need you strength and wisdom.
(From a Sioux invocation)

Verses from Earth Prayers, ed. by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon