Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Okay, this is depressing. Pay attention, folks who live east of the Mississippi River, those of you in Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and Plains states — folks in DC, NYC, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis…..

It is going to get very hot.

Our lack of effective action to cut greenhouse gas emissions has put a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere and the delay time, even if we cut carbon right now today, ensures a few degrees of warming by the end of the century. It takes a century for CO2 to dissipate from the atmosphere, so a certain amount of global warming is already built into the system.

How hot is it going to get? Found this article this morning on the website of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This isn’t me predicting doom and gloom, it’s one of our premier science institutes. [For the short 'science briefing' on the study, view this page.]

Average July-August temperatures between 100 and 110F by 2080. Does that year still sound far away? Maybe, until we remember this is the lifetime of today’s children. And it will be getting warmer and warmer right up until then.

Now imagine this — we will not be able to cool all of our burgeoning urban populations with air conditioning because we are going to have severe energy crunches by then. Oil production will peak sometime in the next couple of decades (if not sooner), and probably natural gas as well. If we are planning to power our a.c. with coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of all and the one we have in the US in abundance, then we will be pushing these areas towards temperatures in the next century that will be a lot like living in hell.

Does this help focus the mind?

Meanwhile, the daily scenes of wildfires in California, Georgia, and Florida give all of this an apocalyptic feel. Are they caused by global warming and climate change? Well, I found this article on the ABC News website from June of last year, ‘Is Global Warming Fueling Western Wildfires?’ It certainly helps inform what is going on in our Southwest and Southeast right now.

The answer, by the way, is yes. Many scientists believe these drought patterns are a result of global warming, something predicted in computer models for exactly those parts of the country where the fires are occurring. In mountain areas, it has to do with shorter winters, earlier snowmelt, leaving forests drier and more vulnerable. Add drought into the picture, as Southern California is experiencing right now, and conditions are ripe for explosive fires. Not only the number of fires, but their intensity is changing noticeably. In this ABC article, Mat Fratus from the San Bernadino, California, fire department, said:

“I had talked to people who had been in the fire service their entire career, and not only this fire, but fires in preceding years, because of the drought, because of the fuel conditions, they produced fire behavior, flame links, intensities that we had never really experienced before.”

I’m sure firefighters in southeastern Georgia, much of Florida, and Southern California would say much the same thing right now. Reported ABC:

Today’s wildfires are part of a worsening pattern most everywhere.

Since 1970, the number of major wildfires has soared not only in North America but around the world.

So this is part of our future. Fire and heat. And so I ask again, how bad do we want this to get before we do the things we need to do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions?

This weekend, as these lands go up in flames, might be a good time to sit with your families, communities, friends, and neighbors to talk about what you can do about the global warming crisis that is upon us. Neighborhoods need to get organized, churches need to start speaking out, politicians need to be pushed to take drastic actions to alter laws and regulations to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And we all have to look at our own lives and values. We must change our consumer habits. We must. You can start with things like replacing incandescent lightbulbs with compact flourescent lights (more expensive to buy but last a whole lot longer), replacing appliances with energy saving models, getting rid of gas-guzzling vehicles, taking more public transit, spending more time at home with your families, turning up your thermostats this summer, or going without a.c. as much as possible.

Meanwhile, as you ponder these changes, remember that what we need to do more than anything is change how we live on this planet — to move away from economies of growth to economies that work with, rather than against, the Earth’s life-giving ecosystems.

This is a lifestyle issue, and therefore a values issue, more than anything. This is about our fundamental priorities as we begin to experience this very difficult world we have created with our industrial and post-industrial growth. Remember, we are talking about 2080, and God knows what happens after that, how much of the planet could become uninhabitable for the next generations, our children’s children.

Again, how bad it’s going to get is still in our hands; that average temperature, how high it’s going to get, is integrally related to the content and substance of the choices we make from this point on.

[tags] California wildfires, Georgia-Florida wildfires, rising temperatures in east, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, GISS[/tags]

Photo credit: Associated Press, found here.