Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Take a deep breath and then ponder these words:

“We estimate that in the next 25 years the number of people living in water-stressed countries will up from around 800 million to 3 billion people.

“We argue that we are heading for an entirely predictable humanitarian catastrophe.”

These are the words of Kevin Watkins, author of a United Nations report on the threat climate change poses to agriculture, especially in drought areas, and especially for the poor farmers of our world — a totally predictable catastrophe.

Keep in mind that we talking about farmers who are utterly dependent on the weather in countries that do not have all the sophisticated irrigation projects that we do in this country to move water around, many of which are completely inappropriate for the times that are coming (like making the deserts of southern California a national bread basket).

I fantasize a world where this kind of information — the threat to the lives of 3 billion people, a figure many of us have been trying to communicate for some time now — causes people around the world at all levels of political and cultural life to say, okay, we have to stop now and look at this.  We have to keep this from happening.  We have to pull together all our energies, our spiritual strength, the best that is in us to meet the challenge of climate change and resource depletion.

We have to start acting like one humanity part of a global life system and figure out how to reorganize our human reality so that we do not consign 3 billion people to death from the collapse of agriculture — this being only one of the dire things that will happen if we don’t start acting now.

In other words, ecological hope — which rests with us and in the decisions we make now.