Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

You know, friends, if you are a visitor to this blog, if you have seen Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, if you have viewed videos, visited web sites, read news articles about the ecological crisis into which we are plunging rapidly, then you also appreciate how little time we have to turn things around.  You know that we have already altered the Earth in ways that mean the natural life we knew will not be the natural life of the future.  You know that to salvage human life within the fabric of a rich biodiverse Earth Community, we must act quickly.

That’s why this article linked here is so depressing.   The headline says it all — that the international talks on post-Kyoto efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will not arrive at any new agreements until at least 2010.  Four more wasted years on the part of governments to address the global warming crisis.

The Kyoto Protocol now in place runs out in 2012.  This first attempt to get international cooperation to cut greenhouse gas emissions was supported by the Clinton administration, then repudiated by Bush when he took office in 2001.

So, why the delay now in talks for an extension of the protocol, or better, a tougher, more effective treaty?  Well, it is tacit admission that nothing can be done without the US, and that, therefore, nothing will be done until another administration comes to the White House in 2009.

Talks began in May 2005 and anger towards the US surfaced quickly.  It remains incredible to me that our government claims that mandatory emission cuts will harm the US economy, while just ahead of us, very much in view, is the real collapse of the global economy because of the lack of preparation to address climate change, peak oil, and global resource depletion.  The future of our children is being put in jeopardy for the short-term profit margin of the corporate world.

I don’t know how you feel about living in the nation that combines two of the greatest threats to the Earth’s climate system — we are the largest contributor of global warming greenhouse gases, and we are doing the least among developed nations to address the problem at the federal level — but I find our situation enraging, even shocking — and morally repugnant.  We are talking here about the future of Life on this planet.

The change that needs to come to this political culture is huge, and it is urgent.  We just don’t have this kind of time.  Fortunately, there are many things happening at other levels — state, regional, local — some of which you have read about here. 

 We need to keep working from the bottom up to shift this culture.  People need to get scared, then angry, then active.