Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Sometimes I step back and try to view the human species from the perspective of millions of year’s of evolution, millions of years of life forms coming into and out of existence, significant breakthroughs toward greater complexity, huge setbacks, then one time — consciousness, and that, too, emerging, unfolding, over time.  The Earth just teeming with all this activity.

And now here we are, this species, successful beyond imagining, developing new technologies from that first discovery of fire to support our burgeoning social organizations, creative ingenuity one reason for our success, and now overpopulating like crazy, gobbling up ‘earth product’ as our reach and demands continue to expand and grow.

And sometimes this ends up in species extinction - because the product is finite and one species goes way beyond the limits, beyond the Earth’s ability to replenish.

What does this have to do with oil drilling off the Gulf of Mexico? 

I don’t know.  But it is what came to mind as I read this article from yesterday’s NY Times Business section.  As we “advanced” (I use the word loosely), we just kept gobbling up what we needed, dominating and subduing the Earth as if this was a rational way to live, as if dominating and subduing our own womb, or web of life, could go on without ultimately killing us.  You know, take the fish out of the water…

Is that what we are now — fish thrashing about as we lose our source of water/oxygen?

How rational is this — that we created a way of life that is using up the Earth’s available fossil fuels, most of which (not just oil) will be used up by the end of this century, and it doesn’t occur to us that this is nuts.  So we drill a little deeper, sink our tools deeper and deeper into the Earth’s crust, spend mindboggling sums of money to get more and more of this thing we are going to run out of –

rather than plan for another way of life that might keep the inevitable from happening — the collapse of global economies, the heating of the planet to temperatures we cannot survive, the depletion of the main resource on which we built this industrial and post-industrial global economy and therefore our social organization.

When I think of the huge expense of this oil extraction business, subsidized by your tax dollars, and the destructive means for getting oil and gas to our cars and homes and businesses, the damage we are wreaking, the profound imbalances that will cause the ecosystems of this planet to begin to unravel, I ponder the reality of consciousness.  What this gift of evolution makes possible is the ability to become aware of our situation, to understand what we’re doing, and to change our behavior, to reorganize our lives.  That is what the gift of consciousness makes possible.

But to do that, we need to back away from the craziness of our everyday lives and get a perspective far larger than the one that keeps us immersed in this insanity.

We could have begun decades ago to reorganize our societies to live within the means of the planet without fouling it with our toxic waste and excess.  We could have decided that oil was not our god, and oil companies not his all-powerful servant.  We did not have to put our lives and our future into the hands of corporations that care only for the bottom line, and the earth be damned.

The reckoning time is coming.  We can still alter this pattern of behavior.  We can decide that the meaning of life is something else beyond freedom to get into our own cars each day and drive on congested highways, to shop till we drop, to have bigger houses and more houses, to have wealth accumulation as the goal of our lives.

A change in that value system could bring new meaning to the human journey and just might make we human beings worthy of evolution’s gift of consciousness.