Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Surely by now most of us have had to come to terms with the fact that our energy world has changed forever. No more cheap oil and gas. This changes everything. And while we search for the simple explanations, someone to blame, it just comes back to us. We are the problem, we and our insatiable thirst for cheap gas, powerful vehicles, bigger houses, long commutes, easy travel to long distances, and consumption as our raison d’etre.

Back in the 1970s we knew this time was coming. We did not want to believe it. We hated that 55 mph speed limit and being told to adjust our thermostats and dim our lights — this is America after all, and mere actual real natural limits cannot be allowed to actually and really limit our fantastical dreams.

We elected Ronald (”It’s morning in America!”) Reagan who waged a campaign to destroy any hope that we might actually anticipate these times and adjust our economy, production lines, energy sources, consumption habits, accordingly.

We gobbled up SUVs, put vaulted ceilings in our bloated houses, and traveled in record numbers in airplanes and along highways in a world of limited oil and natural gas supplies as if our sheer wonderfulness would ensure that the end would never come.

So we are learning the limits the hard way. We want to believe that Congress, if it just acted boldly, could roll back these gas prices and bring us back to normal.

Normal is gone, it’s not about speculators and hedge funds, it is about rising demand and limited supply, along with the falling dollar, and the only thing Congress can do is begin empowering this society to find the technologies, conservation efforts, and economies that can help us live through this hard lesson.

We have to relearn how to live here.

Churches, where are you? Where are your voices helping to lead people through these hard times with a good dose of honesty and a commitment to carry the burdens justly (like not forcing the poor to bear the worst of the impacts), reclaiming the values of our faith traditions, which for those inspired by the Gospel tradition means the Beatitudes and Woes, the story of the rich young man, the loaves and fishes, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and turning over the table of the money changers.

That camel’s eye is getting smaller and smaller for a morally compromised culture of affluence, still less than five percent of the world’s population doing most of the damage.

Let’s remember where the promise of life came from, what words and actions, what made Jesus so threatening to the religious and political authorities of his time.

For Christians, it is passed time to pull from this tradition a prophetic critique of the irresponsible way of life of this society on our already badly diminished planet.

In my book, I ask the question, “must nine billion people be my neighbors?” That’s how many we will be in a few decades, in the lifetime of my nieces and nephews and godson and other young friends and relatives.

If we are honest, we know the answer is inescapable. The answer is ‘yes,’ and that answer forms the moral and ethical mandates for how we approach this crisis time.

[tags] oil prices, oil consumption, who is my neighbor, beatitudes and woes, loaves and fishes, dives and lazarus, affluence[/tags]