Then and Now

Sister Annemarie Askwith, IHM

The Straits of Mackinac has a bridge over the current-filled and connecting waters of Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior. Calgary-based Embridge, Inc., continues to run a pipeline (line 5) in this water, carrying caustic oil from the Tar Sands of Canada. I am concerned because I don’t think we can risk any more damage to this massive deposit of fresh water in the world.

45 miles north is Sault Ste. Marie (Falls of St. Mary – fr) where I was raised and now live. It is a small border town where critical shipping is locked through from and to the east end of Great Lake Superior. It is a conservative town where three fourths of the year is covered white and most of us have lots of jackets.  It is surrounded by natural beauty, and although my concern with the danger of the pipeline is distressing, it isn’t the overriding aspect of my life.

Through the years, a main focus of mine has been identifying signs of human progress.

Most satisfying to me is today’s mindfulness that through eons of time, transitions, and billions of ancestors, all that exists today evolved from an unbelievably generous universe and Earth that gives humanity an opportunity to acknowledge and grow together our sacred core and relationships.

This conflicts with the fact that today, we human earthlings have, mostly without meaning to, forced the largest extinction ever of species, habitats and resources.

I stand with those who feel grief yet know our rich inheritance urges us to start, in our own sensible way taking nature into full account.  If we act with enjoyment for the well-being of others (all others- water, air and soil, those who swim beneath the waves, who live in the soil, who fly overhead, the flowers, meadows, and greenery, those we can’t see as well as all shades of humans) who knows what could happen or how quickly?