Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Two paths diverge. That’s how we ended yesterday, and I just wanted to follow up, because there was more news today about these choices in front us, other dramatic examples of what I mean.

First, this thought towards the end of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book, The Upside of Down, , which I referenced yesterday:

…our values must be compatible with the exigencies of the natural world we live in and depend on… The endless material growth of our economies is fundamentally inconsistent with these physical facts of life. Period. End of Story. And a value system that makes growth the primary source of our social stability and spiritual well-being will destroy us.

Yesterday, we wrote of the Marcellus Shale, which runs through hundreds of miles of the eastern U.S. now being prospected for natural gas.

Today we read that two of the largest oil companies, BP and ConocoPhillips, are working to free up a long-sought project to build a 3,500 natural gas pipeline, called the Denali Pipeline, from Alaska’s North Slope to Chicago.

Honestly — they really plan to do this. The cost? $600 million for the initial lobbying, then a mere $30 billion for the project, including a $5 billion processing plant on the North Slope!! This would be one of the largest private sector construction projects, well, like, ever.

It’s for “the energy hungry markets in the United States and Canada.”

That would be us. That would be us when we raise the thermostats on our forced air natural gas heating systems, or lower them for the forced air natural gas a.c. in the summer. And that would be industries that use natural gas as their energy source. That would be all those affluent people who feed suburban, exurban, and nature-destroying sprawl with their second, third and fourth homes. That would be us when we pump air, warmed or cooled, into those rooms with cathedral ceilings and into the inefficient McMansions that have gone up in recent years (you know, the ones now being foreclosed on).

We do not have enough natural gas sources for this growth at the moment. Energy companies and geologists are aware that peak natural gas follows closely behind peak oil, and so we must find every bubble we can and get it to the energy-hungry.

Let me give you another example that motivated this second post on spirituality and hope today.

The 1985 Farm Bill created a program called ‘Conservation Reserve.’ Under this program, the federal government paid farmers to set aside a portion of their farmland for conservation. It has been quite successful, a total of 35 million acres left to woods and wetlands and wildlife rather than going under cultivation.

But things have changed. With the rise of the corn ethanol and soy biodiesel industries, and the sharp uptick in grain prices, farmers are looking to their own financial interests. Many of them, seeing the profits to be made, are opting out of the program. You can read about it here, from the front page of today’s NY Times.

This article is interesting also because of how it delineates some of the competing economic interests. If you are a baker, you want grain prices to go down. If you are a farmer benefiting from the prices, created in part by shortages, including global food shortages, you might be torn — produce more grains and take advantage of the prices, risking that greater supply might cause prices to fall; or keep the program, keep supplies tight, and keep the upward pressure on prices.

None of which has much to do with how we feed the world. Did you hear about the food riots in Haiti? That’s the other side of our corn ethanol/soy biodiesel economy.

Okay, one more from the Times. Two electric companies want to put up a 260-mile, 500-kilowatt transmission line (electricity fed by coal-fired power plants in the Ohio Valley) from Pennsylvania through West Virginia and across Virginia to Loudoun County (the Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line). This is because the old transmission lines are being strained by population growth around Washington DC, in Northern Virginia, the Maryland suburbs, and the Eastern Shore. They will reach capacity very soon, so the power companies see this project as critical to support, well, you guessed it, growth.

This Times story focuses on one of the communities that will be affected — the Bhavana Society Forest Monastery for whom the forest is their sacred space — but many local communites are very upset and intend to fight to get their state authorities to deny permits. But here’s the kicker. In the 2005 Energy Policy Act, Congress included language that gives the federal government the authority to overturn decisions made by local or state agencies in areas included in the richly named, National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors.

You see how our powers to determine our energy future are being taken from us. Remember who has been in charge in the White House all these years — former executives from energy companies.

Constructing transmission lines, those things we see strung across the US, involves clear-cutting huge swaths of forests and putting down herbicides to control plant growth — basically destroying the ecosystem and then contaminating the Earth along the path of the lines.

And they wonder why some people get upset?

Now, if we look at this from the logic of the growth mentality, all these companies are doing is following demand, trying to make sure we have the energy we need and want to ensure this growth continues. After all, this is good for the economy, for jobs, for rising living standards.

And very bad for the Earth. This is exactly the growth logic that “will destroy us,” as Homer-Dixon and a host of others have tried to point out.

Our current values serve the interests of today’s political and economic elites, and so are aggressively defended by these elites. Growth, even in already obscenely rich societies, is sacrosanct. This central value won’t change until it’s discredited by some kind of major shock, which probably means some kind of system breakdown…

Which, of course, is what we fear — that there is already too much momentum in the ’system’ and too much inertia to keep the breakdown from happening.

It is possible, of course, that we are seeing the beginning of these breakdowns right now in the multilayered collapses going on all around us with energy prices, the recession, disasters fueled by our abuse of natural habitats, and more. Our economic crisis is looking less and less cyclical and more and more structural, like the end of something.

Here’s Homer-Dixon’s hope against hope, that a breakdown might allow “alternative values that are centered on the idea of resilience” to “flower.”

They might, for instance, promote the merit of smaller populations that tread lightly on nature, of decentralized communities that can take better care of their own needs, and of lifestyles that are far less complex and fast paced.

Kind of like those School Sisters of Notre Dame in Mt. Calvary, Wisconsin, whom we highlighted yesterday, as they create their SUNSEED Eco-Education Center and their organic garden. More and more these projects look like the viable future, if we are to create one. That other path leads us to the edge of the cliff — and over.

Unfortunately or not for us here in the U.S. and other affluent western countries, and like it or not, in a world of great scarcity, growing population, stresses on ecosystems everywhere, rising hunger, growing gaps between rich and poor, the spiritual truth of the matter is that the moral onus is on us to make the decisions that pull us back from the cliff. It is our demands for energy for these lavish lifestyles, our demands for the resources of the planet to supply those lifestyles, that has created this crisis, whether intended or not (surely not, but that doesn’t change things). And so it is we who must lower those demands — and soon.

Does this require a dramatic change in our values as a society, in our economies, our priorities, our reason for living, working, breathing?

Well, in a word — yes.

[tags] spirituality of hope, Denali pipeline, Alaska natural gas pipeline, Trans-Allegheny Interstate Line, Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down, SUNSEED Eco-Education Center, School Sisters of Notre Dame[/tags]

Photo Credits:

Natural gas pipeline, Cygnet Risk Group, Ltd.

Coal fired power plant, Conesville OH, National Geographic, photo by Peter Essick

Electric transmission pylon