Connecting the legacy of MLK to the environmental crisis

The Summit Environmental Commission received one of the Keeper of the Dream Awards on Martin Luther King day Monday.  Mayor Nora Radest presented the EC's award, and Dr. Marian Glenn delivered the following remarks:

“Thank-you, Mayor Radest, on behalf of all the Environmental Commissioners, over the course of 45 years, and thank-you to all those who dedicate their creative energy to implementing Dr. King’s Dream of hope and change in our community.

We live in a community created by dreams. This beautiful sanctuary began as a dream, Summit’s tree-lined streets were a dream of its founders, even the underground pipes that bring us water and carry off our sewage out of sight began as a dream.  Summit is a community blessed with the resources to make dreams come true.

Reverend, Dr. King saw the whole world as one community.  In a sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., back in 1968, and recorded in the United States Congressional Record, he said:

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

What an image, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny”.  Today, I think of this garment as the broad encompassing cape of Mother Earth:  her oceans, her atmosphere, her soil, her climate system.  How true it is today that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

And today, a half century after Dr. King’s Dream, keepers of the dream recognize that Dr. King’s evocation of an interdependent world community includes the environment and all of its services that support the well-being of the human family. 

But Mother Earth is not so much a big Mama standing over us, with a worldwide cape of destiny flapping in the storms and fires of the future, rather, she is more like a sister, tied together with us, in the same garment of destiny with us.  And we are all traveling into the future together and mutually interdependent.  And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

As Dr. King would have it, “We must all learn to live together as brothers and sisters or we will all perish together as fools.”  The Environmental Commission is honored and inspired by this award given by Shaping Summit Together.  We have a lot of work to do together.  Thank-you.