Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Okay, that’s a bleak headline, especially for a site named ‘hope.’ But hope, of course, is about what is not yet, not what is. It points forward. Ecological hope implies that we first deal with ecological reality.

I do that every day in this project, and it can deflate the spirit a bit. What raises it is finding out more and more about the growing number of people who are moving out of what some have termed our evolutionary adolescence (the party will go on forever!) into a mature appreciation of what one species has done in an incredibly short time (in evolutionary terms) to throw the entire earth biosphere out of kilter.

I just finished reading Lester Brown’s, Plan B 2.0 - Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. I highly recommend it. If you’re like me, the first 117 pages will give you some down days. But then he presents a plan, a way out for our civilization — if we begin now. The book left me with this sense that, okay, we can do this — but will we? The changes required are not small ones, and they will impact all of our lives.

So here’s a teaser from the opening pages:

Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it, moving our early 21st century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse. In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the earth’s resources. A centuray ago, annual growth in the world economy was measured in billions of dollars. Today it is measured in trillions.

As result, we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate [that, of course, is the meaning of 'ecological overshoot' - my addendum]. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing, and soils are eroding. We are using up oil at a pace that leaves little time to plan beyond peak oil. And we are discharging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb them, setting the stage for a rise in earth’s temperature well above any since agriculture began…

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an ‘overshoot and collapse’ mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level…

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980.

You see what I mean. We’re in trouble. We are especially in trouble if information like this doesn’t get us to change our ways, and quickly. It will take more than a few adjustments in our consumer habits, more then recycling bottles and cans and changing our light bulbs, or even buying hydrid cars. I mean, that is all needed and important, but will not be enough to save us from collapse. Nor is this about ‘energy independence,’ weaning ourselves from foreign oil, especially by putting vast amounts of our agricultural lands under biofuel production.

It means changing how we live. It means ratcheting our consumption downward and doing that quickly. Does that threaten our quality of life? Does it? Or does it begin to renew it? Because it is our quality of life that is under threat here.

This does not mean opting for poverty. Indeed, Brown lays out the scenario for how we can eradicate poverty worldwide while we also go about saving the planet. But it does mean some big changes. He writes in a later chapter:

Saving civilization means restructuring the economy — and at wartime speed.

Among the ways we start — changing our tax system and our markets so that they begin to accurately assign the ecological costs of the way we consume and do business. Now that would get people’s attention, if the costs of ecological destruction (and these are REAL costs, indeed) were added to the things we consume — like bottled water and gasoline.

Already, some governments, economists, and corporate heads are beginning to get this. But what is needed is a major shift in the consciousness of our people, and than a broad-based social movement in defense of the future of life on this planet.

[tags] ecological overshoot, ecological hope, Lester Brown, Plan B 2.0[/tags]