More than 10,000 people in 49 states gathered in vigils in early February to protest the expansion of the Keystone XL transnational pipeline because of its impact on wildlife and their habitats.

At Paul Quinn College, a 250-student, African-American Episcopal college in Dallas, Texas, the administration converted its 1.3-acre football field into a working organic farm to help local food pantries thrive in the midst of their food desert neighborhood.

A group of rice farmers in drought-stricken California partnered with an environmental organization to postpone the draining of their paddies for two extra months to create temporary pop up wetlands to help thirsty migratory birds survive.

And in Rome, word has come that Pope Francis will address environmental issues in an upcoming encyclical on the ecology of man.

There is a common-bond mover and shaker in these four diverse developments. Her name is Spirit, and she is surely amovin across the land. She has to work through us because we are all she has on this earth-plain.

Spirit is no respecter of rigid, fearful hearts. She moves where she will, delighting in toppling boundaries around politics (itll cost too much), social beliefs (but weve always done it this way), and religion (nature is there for us to use as we see fit). She scatters her pearls and amethysts of grace and wisdom in our paths, hoping that we will succumb to her sacred promptings for turning our oft-fearful selves into agents of hope, change and action.

As I added those four good news stories to my already overstuffed folder on hopeful environmental happenings, I remembered Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Spirit surely touched the thoughts of this Jesuit mystic and paleontologist. Teilhard was a prophet of good things to come, when he talked about noogenesis, the growth of the collective sphere of human consciousness for the greater good (later known as the global brain). Before his death in the middle 1950s, he was writing about the hope of transcending the barriers to human unity and peace.

In a 1997 issue of Computer-Mediated Communicationmagazine, PaulistFr. Phillip J. Cunningham noted that Teilhard predicted the emergence of an organic informational system in which we are linked together within a web of conscious reflection. It later came to be known as the Internet.

Before the Internets genesis, preceding technologies -- radio and television -- were already linking people across the world, bringing new ideas and cultures in touch with one another, according to social researcher Paul Ray.

That brings us to another level of Spirits workings through human beings, where she brings more of us together into a social caring bond called the "cultural creatives."

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Eco-centric worldview defines cultural creatives