Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Before we march headlong towards biofuels to keep us out on those congested highways, once again, be careful what you wish for. Often, we in the affluent West go for something we think is good for us by doing something bad for others, but out of our view.

This has been part of our problem with plant-based fuels, which are being touted as clean and therefore good for our global warming/climate change problem. But this time, the largely invisible dark side is going to come right back at us, because there is nowhere to run from climate change, except to another planet.

These thoughts came as I was purusing a newspaper I never see, the New York Sun, which was at the doorstep of a friend’s apartment in Manhattan this morning. Inside was an article reprinted from England’s The Daily Telegraph, so I went there to view the full text, EU Green Targets Will Damage Rainforests.

Well, that’s clear. Europe is moving to biofuels more swiftly than we are. Here in the US, we are going to rely on the wholly unsustainable corn ethanol industry. In Brazil, they are building their energy base on sugar cane ethanol, much more efficient than corn, but riddled with environmental issues, like the threat the industry poses to the rainforest, for one, along with horrific labor problems.

Across the ocean, Europe is looking to palm oil. The soaring demand for palm oil-based biofuels is bringing about exponential growth in palm oil production, an industry that has a truly terrible history of environmental destruction, ravaging of land, and degrading working conditions.

You see why we best we careful what we choose; we best be very well informed. We could find ourselves feeling virtuous while replacing one evil with something far worse.

Besides all the moral and ethical problems of the industry, there is also the reality that our demand for biofuels to tackle global warming or achieve energy independence will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions, destroying some of the most important ’sinks’ — rainforests and other natural wonders that absorb and remove some of these gases as part of the natural cycle.

It’s not just the carbon we put into the atmosphere that is causing global climate change, it is also the ’sinks’ that we are relentlessly destroying around the world with industrialization and thoughtless development that are contributing to the crisis. While we add gases to the warming atmosphere, we are also breaking down the Earth’s natural cooling systems.

Meanwhile, we may also be supporting industries that are making life truly miserable and degrading for millions of people around the world through horrific working conditions and miserable wages — a cost of our fuel consumption that no one particularly wants to show us. But we must look at this; we must know what we are doing. Respect for workers rights and the Earth go hand-in-hand here. They are both at the heart of our moral and ethical conundrum as we try to figure out how to get out of the fossil fuel trap we have made for ourselves.

Photo credit: mongabay.com
[tags] corn ethanol, sugar cane ethanol, biofuels, global climate change, workers rights, environmental degradation[/tags]