Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

This is a blog about the challenge of our ecological crisis to US society, and later I will post about some more alarming news in that regard.  But I am so shaken by the news this morning about the true extent of mortality in Iraq since the US invasion that I feel the need to write something — out of rage and grief.  There is a connection to my ‘ecological hope’ theme, which I think I need to write more about in the future.

A team of epidemiologists has carried out a more thorough survey of the numbers of people who have died in Iraq as a direct result of the war, and estimate the number to be –  God help us — 655,000.  Even the margin of error in this study yields a range from 426,000 to 793,000.

How will we live with ourselves?

Today, while Washington again obsesses about sex scandals and who’s to blame for N. Korea’s nuclear test – Clinton who has not been in office for 6 years, or Bush — this story will probably quickly disappear off those interior pages where it appeared this morning — meriting only page 12 in the Washington Post and somewhere inside the NY Times (I read their article online so I’m not sure of the exact page).

Without a doubt, this is the moment’s biggest news story and a true measure of the moral crisis of this nation.

Here is the connection with ecological hope.  This story and the unimaginable human tragedy that it underlines is also a reflection of this culture’s attitude towards human life and life.  This extent of violence, reported with so little moral indignance (in fact, with an air of doubt, as if it is too unbelievable to be true), is the measure not just of what some will do for their power plans, for energy resources, for ideology, but also of the level of indifference to the human toll of war.

If this is the meausre of our regard for human life, what does this say about our regard for all life, the fabric of life which we are tearing to shreds by how we live?

Unless we can begin to feel a real human connection, a spiritual connection, to the human lives that are being taken in our names, we will hardly feel the connection to a planet whose evolution of life over millions of years made us possible.

Iraq is not only losing those of its people who are dead by violence, but also its dead by all the other suffering caused by war.  In addition, it is suffering the long death of diseases caused by the toxins of our weapons — like depleted uranium which is spread all over the country, something we add to our rockets so that they penetrate their targets more efficiently (such male terms, no?).  And then there is the terrible economic toll that will take still more lives, one example being the breakdown of the country’s medical system.  And then there are the seeds of long-term poverty which we have planted by destroying the country’s economy.  And then there is the psychological toll, especially post-traumatic stress syndrome, which will impact the country through this generation.

Ths list goes on, and in the end, the death toll may well pass a million Iraqis, if we are honest with ourselves.

This is a spiritual crisis of grave dimensions.  We will know we are beginning to heal from our current national psychosis when a story like this is screaming from the front pages and the TV screens, when the outcry about it overshadows tales of corruption and political posturing and the vapid political culture that is ours.

God help the Earth if this is the best we can do.