Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I was just reading the Washington Post’s front page article this morning on the Hurricane Katrina FEMA fiasco — a fiasco that is apparently as much by design as it is by gross incompetence and cruel indifference.

A federal judge this past week has once again helped disclose the insurmountable (’kafkaesque’) obstacles set up to ensure that hundreds of thousands of people who needed assistance to find housing and get their lives pulled back together would never get that assistance.

That, of course, would mean people on the economic margins.  The wealthy are doing just fine, thank you.

Said Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition:

“I cannot name another circumstance when so many public servants have worked so hard to provide such dehumanizing and shoddy service to citizens who were entitled to basic help and deserved fundamental respect.”

Why does this matter to this blog, indeed to the fostering of ecological hope? 

 It matters because FEMA is the federal agency that will be responding to the climate disasters to come, and the likelihood of more disasters at the scale of Katrina rises with each passing day that we spew more greenhouse gases into the atmopshere.  It rises as the Earth warms, releasing more and more methane and CO2 from oceans and soils to add to the gases from our automobiles and power plants.

And this agency is not only dysfunctional, it has actually been designed by the Bush administration to be dysfunctional. 

I try not to be partisan, but under the Clinton administration, FEMA was considered to be a well-run agency managed by competent professionals.

It is one thing not to believe in ‘big government,’ it is another to abandon the citizens of this country by abandoning the most essential obligations and responsibilities of government.

This administration has refused to take meaningful action on global warming, allowing 6 years, and most likely 2 more, to go by as the Earth cooks and more extreme weather events prove all those computer models that have created scientific consensus on our crisis to be frighteningly accurate.  During these years, US carbon emissions have risen steadily.  With 5 percent of global population, the US contributes more than a fifth of total CO2 emissions, yet this administration feels no obligation towards the Earth and its people to sacrifice anything at all economically to change this equation.

So, you take no responsibility for the cause, and then you take no responsibility for the result.  And those who bear the cost are the poorest among us.

This has got to change.  We must do all we can to change this political culture, and fast.  I cannot say this often enough.  These are the issues that must rise to the top of the list as we consider our future political leaders — global warming/climate change, depletion of the resouces we and other creatures need to live, a reorganization of the human way of life to bring it into balance with the Earth’s living systems, and preparation for the disasters whose potential is already written into forces that are altering the biosphere and changing life as we know it forever.

We must find the leadership that can change the dynamics of governance in this country towards that of care for this Earth and compassion for those who will suffer the worst effects of how we have lived in these past two centuries of industrialization.