Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

You recall we had a bit of rain in the DC area over several days last week — a foot in many places.  It rained so hard that much of it was simply runoff, causing streams and rivers to flood, washing over the ground, pushing everything in its path towards — towards wherever water goes.

Sign of the times — whenever it rains like this, we get a sense of how polluted our earth is.

This is what the Washington Post reported the other day.  Some 172 billion gallons of water fell on top of DC, Montgomery County in Maryland, and Fairfax County in Virginia.  All this water heads towards the already tragically polluted Chesapeake Bay, one of the most magnificent bodies of water in the nation.  Said Bill Goldsborough of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation:

“This is like one big slug of fertilizer coming into the system.”

What comes flowing down along with the water is all that chemical fertilizer from farm fields and chemically treated suburban lawns.  It washes all that car oil off of parking lots and dirt from our city streets, all joining together in one great big toxic mess.

The Post tells us, “All that nitrogen and phosphorous feed ‘blooms’ of microscopic algae too numerous to be eaten by other creatures.  The algae die and decompose in a process that hogs oxygen.”

The resulting condition is called hypoxia, a ‘dead zone’ in the water where there is, well, almost no life at all, as in, dead.  It occurs in many of our oceans, seas and bays.  There is an enormous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico below the delta that receives all that runoff from farms and suburbs all along the Mississippi River.

How bad is the situation in the Bay?  The Foundation says that 40 percent of it was in this condition last year and it will probably be worse this year.

Really — read this article to get the full scale of what these rainstorms have brought to the rivers and bays of this area.

It ends with predictions of a bumper crop of mosquitos — within days now — and along with that, an increased rate of West Nile Virus, a problem already well-established in this area.  I had it a couple of years ago — and did not feel well for a year and a half.  Not a nice disease.

Do we need these perfect green lawns?  Would it really be so bad to end subsidies for wasteful and destructive agri-business and instead put them towards renewing organic family farming?  Just think of the tons and tons of poison that we spray over this land every year.  And we wonder why cancer rates increased so rapidly with the rise of industrial civilization, including industrial agriculture.

We poison our land, our water, our bodies.  This is stupid — especially when there are healthy alternatives.

We need to reclaim our right to clean air, water, food, the ecosystems in which we live and breathe.  Right now we have a government that cares more about corporate profits than your health and well-being, much less the health and well-being of the earth.

The earth has an incredible capacity to clean itself, to filter out the poison, to heal and renew, but we have overwhelmed its ability to do so.  If we could stop fouling our environment, the earth could restore itself — and be able to offer us abundant, healthy life, instead of toxic waste, polluted waters, air and soils.