During the disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, my parents were living within the fifty-mile radius that some news reports said was the "danger zone." Unable to help with the physical work of solving the problems at the plant, we all prayed, each in his or her own way. God was the one power we felt we could turn to at a time like that.

There were plenty of other people praying—including, no doubt, employees who were working to control the accident. To everyone's great joy, this was accomplished.

In the years since then, citizens around the world have continued to face dangers from improperly stored chemical wastes, the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Soviet Union, oil tanker spills such as the one that occurred in February along the coast of Wales, and similar hazards. These conditions deserve our prayers—whether they are merely something we read about in the newspaper or, as my parents and I discovered, something happening "next door."

Whether the nature of the threat is to our well-being or to others', we can overcome it if we turn directly to the one All-power, namely, God. In her book Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy says, "The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God,—a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love" (p. 1).

Our prayers for ourselves and the environment, then, rest not on "hope" but on spiritual understanding. God is Spirit; and man, His idea, or reflection, is spiritual. This means that you and I are not actually mortal beings, eking out an existence on an evermore-polluted planet. In reality, we abide in the consciousness of divine Love, in a creation that is permanently pure and perfect.

This may seem hard to believe in the wake of news reports about pollution, but if we step back in time for a moment, we find evidence that spiritual facts do have supremacy over seemingly unchangeable material conditions.

One day, Christ Jesus was at the synagogue. A man with a withered hand was also there. To the people present, the withered hand must have seemed an unchanging fact about this individual. But Jesus, with his clear understanding of man's true nature, inseparable from God, said, "Stretch forth thine hand." The Bible tells us what happened next: "And he stretched it forth; and it was restored whole, like as the other" (Matt. 12:13).

For Jesus, then, prayer was a dynamic act—one that not only turns us to God but also literally restores and heals. So when there is a threat to our specific environment, whatever form it takes, we can first affirm that God—not nuclear wastes, oil pollution, or disease—is the only power. All of God's creation is perfect and forever intact. This spiritual fact is what actually governs our lives.

Our—and everyone's—true substance is good. This good is spiritual and takes form in intelligence, beauty, purity, love, honesty, wisdom. This pure nature can never be harmed, because it never has been—and never will be—material or subject to materiality.

Diligent prayer to discover more of our own spirituality—and that of our community—may well require us to face the mental elements that lead to pollution: greed, envy, ignorance, selfishness, pride, willfulness. We contribute to the purification of our environment by eliminating these elements from our thoughts and motives. Any other modes of thought that would pollute—sensualism, jealousy, malice, and so forth—also need to be overcome in this way.

Recognizing that only the goodness of God has power over us, defends us from the selfishness and greed of others. God, good, is the only Mind, and this spiritual fact helps us resist the belief that ungodlike mental traits such as stupidity and carelessness—and the misdeeds they lead to—can injure us.

At the same time, be sure actively to love your neighborhood, town, state, and so on by including them in your prayers. If a place you pass every day or every week seems desolate and unkempt, take a few seconds to know that there are no waste places in divine Love. This deprives materialism, or mortal mind, of a vacuum in which it would operate.

It is also useful to keep track of news reports and to pray specifically about problems they point to. Political corruption at city hall is just as polluting as hazardous wastes on Main Street, and indeed one may have led to the other. In such cases, especially, there may be temptation to indulge in blame and faultfinding. Jesus, however, tells us to love our enemies and even to "pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you" (Matt. 5:44). This requires less debate about who did what and more "aggressive" love—the love that demands in prayer to see evidence of God's presence and perfection.

Such love does not excuse sin, but it does open the way to reformation. In a loving, solution-seeking atmosphere, the sinner can more readily acknowledge his or her wrongdoing and act on the resolve to do better. A judgmental approach only tends to harden feelings and lead to self-justification. Our willingness to forgive as profoundly as Jesus did brings a genuine change in the mental atmosphere. It leads to healing.

Love that is based on the true, spiritual nature of man and the environment is like a great river that flows through our lives and our neighborhoods, cleansing and purifying them. Such love simply cannot be polluted by wrong thinking and doing. As the expression of infinite divine Love, it leads to intelligent action even when conditions seem insoluble. As the prophet Ezekiel wrote regarding his vision of great waters pouring forth from the temple of God, "It shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: ... for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh" (Ezek. 47:9).

Let's replace recrimination, anger, and fear with floods of love, which has its source in God. Wherever we are in the world, let's pray to see purity and goodness of God's wholly spiritual creation. We can expect results from such prayer.