Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

On this blog, and in this project of ours, the focus is on the need to change our lives, and soon, as in, right now, in order to begin to get the human species back into balance with nature. If we continue to live out of balance with it, given our enormous impact on the Earth’s biosphere since the age of industrialization and accelerated population growth, we will bring ruination to this planet and it’s life-nurturing ecosystems.

We’re in trouble. Are the unprecedented firestorms in Southern California a result of climate change? Well, it looks that way, folks. We heard this on CNN yesterday, and now we have articles from scientists making this same assertion. Here’s one from the Science Daily

Now, in case you wondered if we should be surprised by what is occurring, if this is something we could not have anticipated, I give you this link to an article from December 1998. Read it and weep. This is about us, friends. This is about society-wide denial. This is about a political culture whose leaders will not tell us what is really going on. This is about a people that just cannot wrap their minds around the need for limits, the need to change course in our economic lives, to change priorities and a whole orientation to how we live in this fragile and wonderful world.

The natural forces of this planet are far beyond anything we humans can contain or control, and we have been, literally, playing with fire.

Here’s what researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were saying in 1998:

“In most cases, climate change would lead to dramatic increases in both the annual area burned by California wildfires and the number of potentially catastrophic fires — doubling these losses in some regions,” the researchers conclude. “These changes would occur despite deployment of fire suppression resources at the highest current levels, implying that climatic change could precipitate an increase in both fire suppression costs and economic losses due to wildfires.”

Do you think this information did one single thing to slow down development in the dry desert canyons and mountains of the dry desert that is Southern California? Am I the only one who despairs when we praise people for their feisty spirit to rebuild right in the very same places?!

You know that raging fire around Lake Arrowhead where hundreds of homes were burned to the ground? Check out this article that goes back to 2003, Global Warming Could Worsen California Fires. This is USA Today, for crying out loud — a major media source!

Have we forgotten already the raging wildfires in southern Georgia and Florida earlier this year?

As I sit here, the local news has just announced that a town in Tennessee named Orme has just run out of water. Folks there awoke this morning to find that their mountain-spring-fed wells had gone dry.

Nearly half the country remains in drought. Atlanta has 90 days water supply left. And there’s this — the record low water levels in the Great Lakes. Check out this article from Monday’s NY Times — The Great Lakes Shrink, and Cargo Carriers Worry.

This is our future — unfortunately, it is also our present. Our future of catastrophic ‘unnatural’ natural disasters is already upon us.

We have altered the planet, and now we have to begin to think about how we are going to proceed. This is going to require great spiritual strength and commitment to recreate human life on the planet, and especially in this rich nation that still consumes more and puts more waste into the Earth’s precious ecosystems per capita than any other people in the world.

The responsibility on our shoulders is great. We need strength, we also need community, a sense of common purpose as we come together to figure out what to do now. We have to let a new spirit rise up and force the changes in our political and economic culture that can turn this around and allow the Earth to find a new balance — one that hopefully can include the human species.

Think of your kids. Things are changing fast. If all this is happening now, what will be happening 20 years from now, 40 years from now?

Let’s start coming together in communities to talk about this and begin what has been called the “Great Turning,” from a destructive way of life to a healing way of life, or as ecologist Joanna Macy puts it:

the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.

This is our task, the challenge of this generation, to begin to make this turn.

How many more of these climate change driven disasters will we endure until we get this essential point — we are subject to the forces and balances of Nature; Nature is not, is not, subject to us.

[tags] california wildfires, balance of nature, great turning, Joanna Macy, orme tennessee, drought, atlanta running out of water[/tags]