Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I found this story in the NY Times this morning so appalling that I had to blog about it.  In all sorts of ways, the global economy is making a wasteland of parts of Africa, with no regard for the fact that actual real human beings live there.  Hey, they’re poor and have no power, so who cares?

But this story of the dumping of lethally toxic waste — hundreds of tons of it — on the Ivory Coast is especially shocking, in part because of the callous nature of this act.   Now people are dying and tens of thousands are ill.

Greenpeace issued a report on the toxic dumping a couple of weeks ago, and you can read about it here.  The toll in death and illness has risen since then, of course.

How conscious is this dumping on Africa?  Well, a few years ago, there was quite a stir when remarks by Harvard’s Dr. Lawrence Summers became public — basically arguing that Africa should receive more toxic waste from industrial countries because people there don’t live long enough to get some of the cancers we get in rich countries.  “…under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted…” he argued. 

Good god, what makes this morally different from violent genocide? But it sure does reveal the attitude of some of the elites of the west towards Africa — a dump heap for our western excess and vile ecological practices.

A spirituality of ecological hope is centered on the awareness of the preciousness of all life and that, in specific regard to the human community, no human being has a greater right to live, and to live with dignity, than any other human being.  In this case, it was a concern over the cost of proper clean-up that led to this ecological disaster — $300,000 or the lives of thousands of people. 

This is why we must argue over and over again for international laws that make this kind of activity criminal, laws with teeth, laws that are enforceable.

And it’s why ecological hope rests in our ability to restore our deadened sensibilities, our human compassion, our connection to other people and the land that is violated by such acts.  If we don’t reconnect in this way, we have a grim future indeed.

For more information on this, and on attempts to put an enforceable regimen in place to stop toxic dumping, you can visit the Basel Action Network.  I found lots of good information here, as well actions you can take to stop this obscene practice.