A surprising amount of today's homily focused on the following section from the first reading: "In the desert I make a way, / in the wasteland, rivers" (from Isaiah 43: 16-21). Our presider stated that the Lord was making an easy path of return for the exiles to Israel after their long years of captivity. This passage, he said, then shows the Lord's dominion over nature and thus our need to be better caretakers of our environment. He made a comment that, should this passage have been written in modern times it probably would have said something about the Lord removing the pollutants from our air as well. Although the sermon covered a wider breadth of topics, it returned to this idea several times throughout.
While I think the interpretation is a bit of a stretch and that there are better passages to use that do get this idea across, I certainly agree with the message. We are meant to be caretakers, not pillagers, of our world (and any world we go to). This is one area where I feel that native American, African, and many East Asian cultural traditions have a healthier relationship with nature than most European and Euro-American cultures. Our lives seem to be so much more focused on exploitation than cultivation. I certainly hope that this view changes in the near future.