New in Chicago

Yesterday I just happened by as this new riverfront parklet was dedicated (21-gun salute, aircraft salute and everything). It is located on lower Wacker Drive, between Wabash and State. The weather being unseasonably warm (fine by me), the park can be used a bit before the cold renders it effectively off-limits until June.
Speaking of warm and cold, there is an article on global warming in the latest issue of Rolling Stones. (Sr. Helena is an ardent subscriber.) Their journalism seems really first-rate, to be honest, and the article carefully points out the many and varied scientific tests, all of which are not only confirming the reality of global warming, but emphasizing that it is happening at an unexpectedly rapid, and even accelerating, pace. Even the growing season has extended by 12 days since 1980--and that's not totally good news, because the growing plants are emiting more carbon, and that is being joined with the carbon being released by plant matter previously embedded in permafrost, which is now in a defrost cycle. There are some who steadfastly refuse to accept the conclusions that are being drawn, even though the same conclusions are pointed to from something like a dozen different scientific disciplines. Among the deniers are persons who seem to have a lot riding on maintaining the status quo, whether for economic or political reasons. Others just don't think it's that big a deal, since the heavy impact (extinctions and the like) won't affect them personally, and probably won't be measurable for another century. And other people seem just plain apathetic. I can't understand that. Even if there's only a "good chance" that "some" of the predictions will come to pass, don't we have a moral obligation to act in view of the greater good, instead of give preference to immediate advantage? It is impossible to deny that decreasing our dependence on things like fossil fuels and diminishing excessive consumption and unfiltered waste (and I mean on a corporate and multi-national level, not merely on the household level) would be beneficial to the overall environment. I suspect that so much of our economy depends on not just maintaining but increasing consumption, that the common good is totally lost.
Some people seem to think the planet is indestructable. Yes, it has been through mass extinctions before and recovered, though with enormously different flora and fauna. There is no doubt that if our behavior destroys the ecosystem for the kinds of life it now supports, in tens or hundreds of millennia new forms of life could arise. But we would have closed the curtains not just on the beautiful handiwork of God we see now, but the very handiwork that God Incarnate saw and delighted in. We will have even succeeded in inadvertently hastening the Second Coming by obliterating from the face of the earth the species which God himself chose to unite with in the person of Jesus.
So there you have it: the Incarnation as a motive for greater environmental awareness.