If we allow the environmental destruction around us to continue it will lead to a crisis of faith?

Everything around us is centred on us. We worship at the shopping mall.

We need to ask the question: How does my spiritual life connect with my ecological life?

The story of Job is a compelling and enduring one – it seeks to implant a new perspective into the mind of those who hear or read it. The received story is: Peoplle who suffer do so because they’ve been bad. The new story is: When good people suffer, God remains good.

We are brought into the events of Job’s life with vivid language, interpersonal drama, compelling scenery… leading to the “Hmmmm!” effect (maybe you’ve heard something and you’ve never forgotten it)

Howard Gardner (multiple intelligences) – “Leading Minds: an Anatomy of Leadership”

• Leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate.
• In addition to the stories they tell, leaders embody those stories… without necessarily relating their stories in so many words, leaders convey their stories by the kinds of lives they themselves lead, and through example, seek to inspire in their followers.”
• Read MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
• He lived within the cruelty of the competing story, learned its arguments, and loved those who embodied it
• He lived his alternative story: led the marches

The “Received” Ecological Story

- our planet is resilient – it’ll bounce back: take what you need
- don’t slow down progres
- environmentalists are way too paranoid – a little pollution is no big deal
- all the tree-huggers do is slow down the workforce

“Tell Me a Story… the Life-Shaping Power of Stories” (Daniel Taylor)
- people live by stories that cannot sustain them
- broken stories can be healed
- seeing ourselves as active characters in new and healthy stories carries the power to transform lives

An Alternative Story
- the work of the ecologically concerned leader is to develop an compelling alternative story, to embody it personally, and figure out the best ways to communicate it to the right people

Slideshow: art by Andy Goldsworthy

This is a challenge to us – to live differently and to communicate differently a better way, a better story, a better alternative
- creating this kind of art takes great difficulty and patience
- Homework: consider what aspect of your organization’s story is broken or diseased in regard to ecologicial concerns? What is the hope, challenge, inspiration, or paradigm shift that would be needed in an alternative story to make a compelling case for change?
- begin to live it out

The need for boundary cross storytellers: Sir Albert Howard, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingslover, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackson, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Wendell Barry

Lady Bird Johnson: an unassuming revolutionary; the first conservation since Teddy Roosevelt in the White House

Get it done, everybody!