Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

When I finally got to posting today, it was nearly bedtime. I’m tired, but wanted to do a quick perusing of the day’s ecological news. Its not good.

Here’s one – drought in China that is threatening water supplies for millions. More extreme weather is predicted in Henan province this year because of global warming.

Here’s another – a storm surge has inundated coastal villages in Bangladesh. There are few parts of the world in greater danger from rising seas than Bangladesh, nor more densely populated.

Here’s still another — a storm surge that swamped coastal areas of the Maldives. Not unusual during monsoon season, but not to this extent. Climate projections show that the Maldives could disappear by the end of the century as a result of rising sea levels because of global warming.

It’s not that ‘new’ weather will be happening in some cases so much as more extreme versions of old weather — like hurricanes in Florida. The first named tropical depression came several weeks before season, which probably means nothing. But I did make note of one weather report that said waters off the coast of southern Florida were in the 90 degree range. Waters must be 85 to spawn hurricanes, so there is lots of warm water already, which means plenty of energy available.

To go with the wildfires and drought.

Australia is in a history-making drought. Arizona is in its 8th year of drought.

Okay, stop already. How does all of this add up? As we have said before, weather is not the same as climate and so we can’t consign any specific weather to climate change. It’s the patterns that are worrisome. It appears more and more that some of the impacts of climate change are becoming quite apparent already, and we are back to that question of just how bad things are going to get before we realize that the Earth’s atmosphere has already been altered, already dynamics have been set in motion that will change the weather.

So these reports, daily now, from around the world, are our wake-up calls — so what will wake us up? How loud must the alarm be?

I attended a wonderful gathering this morning with some Washington religious and NGO-type folks who came to hear a presentation by Fr. Sean McDounough, a Columban priest and missioner who has been working many years on these issues. His presentation was wonderful, but I was especially impressed with the dialogue, its sober nature, how clearly people from these national organizations see the need for us to draw down our consumption drastically if the human species is to have a future.

But we were all struggling with the question of how we get our people and the leaders of religious institutions to appreciate the nature of the disaster we are facing and to take up a prophetic call to change how we live. That leadership needs to come from every place we can find it, wake it up, nurture it and support it.

Ecological hope comes hard sometimes, but I saw it in these people, and in their struggle about how to bring this about.

So many good people out there. We must gather ourselves together. We must become a force for change.

I hope you will become part of this conversation.

[tags] extreme weather, china drought, australia drought, inundation of coastal communities, Maldives, Bangladesh, Sean McDonough[/tags]