Like many citizens of Planet Earth on Tuesday, September 11, I couldn’t turn away from the television coverage. My text for this column was due the following day, but I made no attempt to start the writing process. I was paralyzed.

Originally I planned to write about the high quality of our region’s uncelebrated drinking water systems. I promptly switched my topic to environmental terrorism. But the next evening when I sat down to write, as the rescue efforts and investigations got into full swing, I was looking for something more uplifting.

It seems to me that the horror we are feeling is directly linked to something that must have been missing from those who funded, planned, and carried out the attacks: a reverence for life.

Those I have met in our environmental community represent the widest spectrum of beliefs – many Protestants and a smattering of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and even a few devout Atheists. But whatever our associations with the organized (and unorganized) religions, we environmentalists have a reverence for life that manifests itself in the energy and determination that we bring to our professional and volunteer efforts to make this a better place to live.

A reverence for life starts with a deep respect for our own personal life, then grows to include those humans around us, and increasingly, the other living and even nonliving things on Earth. That there are those who respect their own life and that of the others so little that they could participate in acts like those perpetrated on September 11 is truly a deep environmental issue that we must all face. For where there is no reverence for life, there can be no work done on the quality of life.

Many more Americans will die this year from environmental causes than from the attacks on September 11. The environmental work that we do is a critical part of improving the quality of lives of all of us. It brings meaning not only to us individually but also to everyone around us.

On behalf of the Board of Trustees of the Citizens’ Environmental Coalition, and of the almost ninety environmental non-profits who make up the greater Houston environmental community, we send wishes of peace to all those who are mourning, who are bereaved, who need comfort. And we promise to choose life by continuing the work that we do to make Houston a better place to live.