Dr. King’s Interconnected World

Dr. King’s Interconnected World
“Yes,” he said, “as nations and individuals, we are interdependent.” Then, with a sentence
that could easily have been uttered by John Muir or Rachel Carson, Dr. King stated, “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.”
Best remembered for his work and speeches on civil rights, Dr. King on
that morning, in his last Christmas sermon before his assassination, anticipated much of the ecological consciousness and environmental concerns of the next 50 years, and the links between ecology and social justice that are vital to our present and future.
Over two years before the first national Earth Day, before “ecology”
and “the environment” became catchwords of the ’70s, before popular knowledge of “Gaia theory” and “systems thinking,” Dr. King was tying his vision of justice and peace to the interrelated structure of the universe.
Starting in the 1950s, Dr. King expressed concern for “the survival of the world,”
and linked environmental and civil rights issues: “It is very nice to drink milk at an unsegregated lunch counter — but not when there’s strontium 90 in it.”
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Stopping to speak with Vietnam War protesters gathered outside, he told them, referring to civil rights
and antiwar activism, “I see these two struggles as one struggle.”
Dr. King was not, as some charged, calling for what he termed a “mechanical fusion” of the peace and civil rights movements.