Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Sorry about my absence last week. The deadline loomed for the book I’m writing on the subject of this blog/project and I just had to bury myself in it. A couple of notable things since I last posted –

For one, it’s been a little warm out west, and a mite wet in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

One hates to think about what the searing heat out west means if it is part of a permanent weather pattern change due to global warming. This was predicted for the future, but here it is right now. Let’s hope it’s just simply some bad weather, but also a wake-up call about what the future will mean here if we don’t change our way of life, and soon.

Then there was the big music event, Live Earth. I don’t know what to think about it exactly, since these things tend not to change very much. At the same time, anything that helps raise consciousness, right?

But I wanted to mention here a brief snippet I heard on TV this morning from an interview with Dave Matthews. About the event, Matthews says that he doesn’t think they can change the world, but if we’re going down, “at least we’re giving people some straws to grasp.”

Yikes! that’s bleak. I’m always surprised to hear from someone ‘famous’ who actually gets how dire is our predicament, but I hope we don’t encourage despair.

Meanwhile, I went to see “Sicko” yesterday. SEE IT! While it is about a different topic, I am very moved by Michael Moore’s message — in many ways he is still a true romantic about the basic goodness of this country, and this is what he appeals to in the end. If we could rise to those values, we would not only have a national health system to be proud of, but we would also be living differently on the Earth.

Anyway, one of the trailers they showed is a preview for Leonardo DiCaprio’s upcoming film, “11th Hour.” Now this guy really does get it. He has been talking not just about global warming and climate change but the the wasting of the planet caused by our heavy ecological footprint — our consumption and waste. It looks to be an exceedingly important film. Watch for it.

To view the trailer:

So, as a reflection today, I wanted to share this from a 1994 essay by the monk ‘geologian’ Thomas Berry, who has inspired many of the Earth spirituality centers, Earth literacy projects, and more that are coming out of the religious community. It is entitled, Ecologist vs. Developer Conflict Replaces Liberal vs. Conservative and appeared in the newsletter, Earthkeeping News of the North American Coalition for Christianity and Ecology:

The older political tension between conservative and liberal, based on social orientation, is being replaced with the dominant tension between developers and ecologists, based on orientation toward the natural world. This is now the primary all-pervasive tension throughout every realm of human affairs.

In this new alignment those committed to industrial, commercial and housing development of natural areas see these as inherently progressive. Those committed to the integrity of the natural world see this as degradation, since the intrusion of the human upon the life systems of the planet has already gone far beyond any acceptable limits… The oppression of the natural world by the plundering of the industrial powers has so endangered the basic functioning of natural forces that we are already on the verge of a total dysfuntioning of the planet…

The violence already done to the Earth is on a scale beyond all understanding. It can only be considered as the consequence of a deep cultural pathology. The change required by the ecologist is a drastic reduction in the plundering processes of the commercial industrial economy.

Never before has the human community been confronted with a situation that required such sudden and total change in life style under the threat of a comprehensive degradation of the planet…

A special poignancy is experienced in a realization that future generations will be living amid the ruins, not simply amid the ruined infrastructures of the industrial world, but amid the ruins of the natural world itself…

The profundly degraded ecological situation reveals a deadening of some parts of human intelligence, and also the paralysis of human sensitivities. Developers have lost the capacity for experiencing the loss of beauty and magnificence as we devastate the woodlands and ruin the habitat of birds and butterflies and so many other living creatures…

It is important to understand the inherent difficulty of reconciliation, and the new language that has come into being. Every institution of American society is involved at its deepest level. We must reinvent all our professional instititutions in this new context. We must in a manner reinvent the human as a mode of being. Eventually this implies rethinking the planet itself and our role within the planetary process.

Yes, and we must do this immediately, yesterday, before you go to bed tonight, and then when you wake up in the morning.

[tags] heat wave, Texas floods, Live Earth, Dave Matthews, Thomas Berry, Sicko, Michael Moore, developers, ecologists, North American Coalition for Christianity and Ecology[/tags]

Photo Credits:
Industrial pollution, South Africa — BBC News
Suburban sprawl, Bucks County PA, photos at davidhanauer.com