We are the guests not the masters of nature

"We desperately need to recognize that we are the guests not the masters of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism." Mikhail Gorbachev, Chairman of the Board, Green Cross International

"No sane person seeks a world divided between billions of excluded people living in absolute deprivation and a tiny elite guarding their wealth and luxury behind fortress walls. No one rejoices at the prospect of a life in a world of collapsing social and ecological systems. Yet we continue to place human civilization and even the survival of our species at risk mainly to allow a million or so people to accumulate money beyond any conceivable need. We continue to go boldly where no one wants to go." (David C. Korten, "When Corporations Rule the World")

"The nations were angry, and Your wrath has come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged. And that You should reward Your servants the prophets and the saints, and those who fear Your name, small and great, and should destroy those who destroy the earth." Revelation 11:18

THE RUSSIANS WERE FLABBERGASTED

We swerved in and out of the two-lane streets of the Presidio next to San Francisco Bay. Our little group of Russian tourists had no idea where I was taking them-they simply thought we were heading for an underside view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Little did they realize they would shortly stand aghast at the small two-story gambrel cottage where the International Green Cross headquarters, headed by the deposed President Mikhail Gorbachev, stood in obscure testimony to the once mighty colossus of the Soviet Union.

I was amused. More than reluctantly these Russian coal miners, now in 1994, were coaxed by me to get out of our large van and literally enter into this unbelievable sight-a military facility donated by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev’s fledgling, altruistic ideal at earthly redemption: The International Green Cross.

Sight seeing is one thing-peering into "how are the mighty fallen" is quite another! "How could this have happened? Gorbachev winding up in this hole in the wall underneath the Golden Gate Bridge in an old US Coast Guard facility huddled amongst warehouses and rickety old buildings of little import?" The surreal scene of it all was altogether bizarre, eerie, and even prophetic in its condescension. My Russian guests, most from Siberia, left this esoteric experience flabbergasted, embarrassed, and even angered that their once dynamic, articulate, and feared leader of the world’s largest communist empire had embraced such a humiliating conclusion to his ignoble career. Alas! President Vladimir Putin this month bemoaned the Soviet Union’s demise: "The greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON HERE? . . . "THE GLOBAL ETHIC"

Lee Penn in his article A Case Against the United Religions Initiative (URI) exposes the soft underbelly of Gorbachev’s real agenda. How on earth (no pun intended) did folks like Mikhail Gorbachev, former California Senator Alan Cranston, George Schultz, et al, get behind this slogan: Give Humanity a Chance, give the Earth a future?

"I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. Look at the sun. If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals" (an interview with Gorbachev).

Penn deliberates on the New Age religion of Maurice Strong, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the likes of Ted Turner, who like Episcopal Bishop William Swing (founder of URI), back the new "Global Ethic" and its "Declaration of Human Responsibilities" in their new "Earth Charter." Gorbachev calls the Earth Charter, the new religion of Ecology (a.k.a., the GREEN CROSS) . . .

". . . a kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount,’ that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century and beyond . . . the protection of the Biosphere, as the Common Interest of Humanity, must not be subservient to the rules of state sovereignty, demands of the free market or individual rights" (The Earth Charter: The Green Cross Philosophy).

The religious philosophy behind the Green Cross, epitomized in Bishop Swing’s URI, is strongly supported by dissident Catholics like Hans K

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