Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Al Gore hasn’t gone away.  He is still out there talking to anyone who will listen about the new hot age, about climate change and what it will mean for our world.  This week in Scotland, he lashed out at the media for missing the story (only one of the biggest in human history).  This is what he said:

“Gore said there was a link between control of the media and a lack of political action to control climate change.

“‘Questions of fact that are threatening to wealth and power become questions of power,’ he said. ‘And so the scientific evidence on global warming - an inconvenient truth for the largest polluters - becomes a question of power, and so they try to censor the information.’”  (article link)

It’s good somebody is saying this, especially someone to whom the public and the media (to a certain extent) pay attention.  Imagine if climate change were a part of daily weather reports, as it should be, or if its effects were reported on the news the way the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case fiasco has been.  Which of these two stories will have a greater impact on your life and the lives of your children?

Even the World Bank has finally figured out that climate change is real, already happening, and threatening most especially the future of poor countries.  But here’s what kills me.  Now I haven’t read the report cited in this article, but you get the sense that it is all about helping developing countries ‘adapt’ to the terrible impacts already begun — rising ocean levels, droughts and floods, etc.  These changes will exacerbate long-standing problems of maldevelopment, land degradation, damming of rivers, and more, some of these programs long funded and enthusiastically supported by the Bank.

The Bank is also a cheerleader of corporate capitalism and the ideology of ecomonic growth, which is leading us down the path to disaster as we have already over-shot the earth’s carrying capacity.

And nowhere in this article is there any suggestion that rich countries, especially this one that pollutes the most, consumes the most, benefits the most from the current economic contruct of our world, should do anything drastically different.

It’s like the Iraq war — most of us can party on while others bear the cost of this political catastrophe.  No real changes or sacrifices are asked of us.  Even among those who say they don’t support the war, how many are actually doing anything to stop it?  Last night on NBC Nightly News, Brian Williams asked Bush directly why the American people have not been asked to sacrifice more, given the Iraq war, the Katrina disaster, etc., and this guy had the nerve to say that we do sacrifice because we pay taxes.  I wanted to hang my head and cry.  This is the ‘leader’ of the nation, and I use that word lightly.

The central question of this project I am starting, Spirituality and Ecological Hope, asks what I believe is one of the most critical questions for this society as our world, our whole earth community and human beings within it, enter a time of great crisis and transition:

What kind of human begins are we going to be as we go through it?

Think about it.