Global War and the Assault on the Environment
A FAITH AND RESISTANCE RETREAT
TO REMEMBER & REPENT & RENOUNCE THE WEAPONS & MINDSET
OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI

August 5 - 9, 2007

at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Church
16th and Newton Street, N.W. , Washington D.C.

Who in their right mind would come to Washington, D.C. for a Faith and Resistance Retreat for August 5 - 9? The climate is hazy, hot and humid; the days are long; it's hard. But Dorothy Day Catholic Worker and Jonah House are organizing just such a retreat and we invite you to be with us if you can.

Climate has a lot to do with it; it's unlikely to improve. Nuclear Arms control is dead; Americans killed it. So we face Global War and Global Warming - one fueling the other. Over the past decade climate change has been responsible for nearly 500,000 deaths, over 2.5 billion impacted and economic losses of over $690 billion. 95% of the casualties occurred in poor countries. Rising sea levels could soon displace over 100 million people. The US, producing 25% of annual global carbon emissions, snubs international climate treaties and adds to the problem by its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - wars fought to monopolize some of the world's largest remaining oil and natural gas supplies. And all to ensure U.S. control of these resources and further its aims of global domination. and policies that kill thousands daily while destroying the Earth's life support systems.

•  We know that more than 10,000 overseas companies and 400 US universities grow fat on Pentagon contracts. These contracts are a legacy of the Truman Administration and its post World War II decision to bail out military industries.

•  We know that military consumption of fossil fuels and other materials is an enormous - maybe the largest - contributor to global warming.

•  We know that as long as neo-liberalism and oil fuel world economies, wars over resources will intensify, leading to widespread instability and violence. In a world already ripped apart by imperialist war and economic and military tensions, the potential for global warming induced upheaval to spark armed conflict, including the ultimate spectre of nuclear annihilation, is haunting. C ountries will develop nuclear weapons to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. War will define human life.

In a spirit of faith and hope, we choose, in these days to remember and repent - of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of our long love-affair with the bomb, of our indifference to all of life and the earth itself. We've all seen mountains move; may they move again. History has established that individual and communal acts do make a difference.

•  people he witnessed killed waiting in a bread line. "Why," he was asked, "are you playing cello while they are bombing?" He answered: "Why are they bombing while I am playing cello?"

•  We think of Franz Jaggerstatter murdered by the Third Reich for refusing induction into that nation's war. We celebrate his anniversary and his witness on August 9.

•  We think of the victims of those awful bombs whose images can never be erased from our consciousness.

•  We think of all who stood up, who acted humanly in inhuman times. If we can't turn around the thrust toward global war and devastation, we can yet witness to the human spirit in the midst of it. Such witnesses will people and inform our days together.

Each of us looks for ways to reduce our carbon footprints. But such responses to ecological disaster are the easy part. More challenging is revising the way we think about how we live. If the earth is to survive as a human habitat we must transform (transfigure) the meaning of...

•  Nature. We've created a gulf between ourselves and "nature." From worlds of concrete, we make forays into trees, rock, sand, or sea. We go "back to nature" as if we left it behind when we put on clothes or built cities. Our detachment allows us to imagine we can trash nature without trashing ourselves. We are part of nature; we cannot destroy it without destroying ourselves.

•  Nation. 19th-century notions of national sovereignty have allowed nations to pursue their agendae without regard to the whole. The U.S. has asserted its radical independence from other nations, but that both defines the source of America's disproportionate ecological destructiveness and impedes every effort to mitigate it. There will be no stopping environmental degradation until nations stop thinking of their sovereignty as an absolute.

•  Property. In the U.S., we are what we have. The pursuit of happiness equals the accumulation of possessions. This cult of "more" drives an economy that defines its health by growth, its market by the globe. Such consumption divides people into "haves," "the have less," and "have nots;" it also eats the earth alive. Sufficiency, simplicity, and a sense that the treasures of the earth are the property of all must become notes of the new America.

•  Power. Once, this nation took for granted that its power in the world depended on the sway of American liberal democracy, freedom, opportunity, equality. By the mid 20th century we moved from influence to imposition. Power came from an arsenal; ultimate power from a nuclear arsenal. Today's Pentagon budget is at Cold War levels because we no longer believe in our ideas. But military power is an illusion, as Iraq shows, like Vietnam before it. Resisting populations cannot be coerced, only killed. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons threaten the whole of creation - more than anything.

We will begin with supper at 6:00 p.m. on August 5, 2007. Simple meals and sleeping bag space will be provided. If you need a bed, let us know and we'll do what we can to accommodate you.

There will be a program for children.

The focus will be on building community, practicing nonviolence, and engaging in public witness against the atrocities of war – at the Pentagon, the White House and elsewhere.

Prayer and Reflection sessions are inherent to the process of the retreat. The dynamic that we seek to practice is one of reflection - action - reflection (planning resistance witnesses together, doing them, evaluating them and beginning again with the same sequence.

Please let us know if you can be with us.

Phone, email or write
Dorothy Day Catholic Worker - 202-882-9649 artlaffin@hotmail.com
502 Rock Creek Church Rd. NW Washington DC 20010

or

Jonah House - 410-233-6238 disarmnow@verizon.net
1301 Moreland Ave, Baltimore MD 21216
or, respond here