A
collaborative
project with support from the Sisters of the Holy Names
Dedicated
to the mission of education. Within this mission, we
promote justice and create community.
The purpose of this website is to offer educational and informational
resources in support of our SNJM commitment to becoming a transformative
presence in the world.
The Law of Limits is one of the most fundamental of the biological
laws. By that we mean that if every species and every individual
within a species - including the human species - has opposed
species, conditions or restrictions that limit them, then
no single species or group of species will overwhelm the other
members in the Community of Life. In a real sense, the survival
of living beings in relationship to other groups of living
beings in this evolving cosmos depends on the recognition
of limits in the actions of each group.
We humans have a great deal of difficulty with this Law of
Limits. In fact, our entire modern industrial economy has
been committed not only to unlimited growth, but to
helping us escape from any limitations, constraints
or restrictions that the larger Earth Community might impose
on us. We have so violated this Law of Limits through our
population growth and through the mechanical inventions that
we have created, and through our extravagant uses of energy,
that we have upset the chemical balance of the atmosphere,
the soils and the oceans - the life support system, in other
words - upon which all creatures, including ourselves, depend.
Unlimited growth is the ideology of a cancer cell
that has become disconnected from its genetic memory. It grows
exponentially and ends up consuming the very body that supports
it. Cancer always kills itself by consuming its own environment,
not unlike what our unlimited growth economy is doing to the
planet.
Sister Mimi Maloney SNJM Sister Katherine Gray SNJM
Letter to the Editor, The Olympian, December 2009
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