Last night I went to hear Mary Evelyn Tucker talk at the Brower Center. She’s the co-director of the Yale Forum for Religion and Ecology. Here’s a short video of her speaking. It was quite an evening. There were maybe 60 people in the audience and I’d guess that half of them were already engaged in some form of working on behalf of the environment and the others all having a strong wish to be serving the greater good in one way or another. What attracted me is Tucker’s work at Yale. For several years, it’s seemed to me that a spiritual component in our approach to environmental sustainability is essential. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to say that in all traditional cultures, a vision of the sacred always underlies any understanding of human life and the realities of the natural world. I got to briefly meet Ursula Goodenough, Sacred Depths of Nature, who heads up RNA, the Religious Naturalist Association and also Susan Stephenson, executive director of Interfaith Power and Light. There was a lot of love in the room for Thomas Berry, a seminal figure in this movement ["If there is to be any true progress, then the entire life community must progress. Any progress of the human at the expense of the larger life community must ultimately lead to a diminishment of human life itself"]. There are so many encouraging things going on here in the Bay Area. That’s not news, but it’s powerful to get a larger glimpse into this.