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Earth: Sacred/Possession is intended to be a reader — like a Norton’s Reader — of writing about our Earth’s natural environment, as our Home and our only Habitat. It is intended to raise questions, provoke discussion, expand awareness of human engagement with the Earth that supports our lives and our living. It is, as well, intended to provide a text resource to assist in teaching students and thus to foster a way of developing a Culture of Care for Earth, leaving behind a Culture of Consumption of the Earth’s resources.

Granted, along the way, it will consider how the Earth, the land, our environment defines humans, and how humans define the Earth, the land, our environment, through our engagement with our habitat. Not all engagement need be destructive, obviously. Creating a way to discuss the values and ethics of use and care of the Earth — our land, natural resources, wildernesses, wildlife, Home and Habitat — from a religious, ethical, spiritual, and scientific point of view is the goal of the Earth: Sacred/Possession reader and project. Through it, using it to create a curriculum for the upper grades and university-level courses to enhance this thoughtful discussion among the next generation is also an important goal. We need to create a Culture of Care that infuses our daily choice-making rather than leave it to political will or what’s new and of interest in the whims of news reporting.

Although still very much in progress, here is a brief project/book outline of the moment. Readings would be grouped in these tentative categories:

I Land (Environment) as Sacred

II Land (Environment) as Possession

(in both senses of the word, of belonging to place as well as ‘ownership’)

III Land as ‘Destiny’

IV Land as Source

V Land as Cradle

VI Land as Home (Lonely Earth)

VII Land as Male/Female

VIII Land as Temporal

IX Land as Eternal

I’m actively seeking a home and institutional/non-profit partners in which to develop

Earth: Sacred/Possession Reader and Curriculum,

and would love to hear from those interested in supporting such a pursuit.

Elizabeth Darby

Elizabethdarby.com