Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Last evening, the Catholic peace organization, Pax Christi USA, gave its Teacher of Peace 2007 award to Glenmary priest, Father John Rausch. Fr. Rausch is director of the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, an organization with a long history of defending worker rights, economic justice, and the environment in the Appalachian region of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. Rausch has been a leading voice in the mounting opposition to the practice of mountaintopping coal-mining, something about which we have posted often on this blog.

The group had an impact on me many, many years ago when, sometime in the late 1970s, I laid hands on the groundbreaking document, This Land is Home to Me, issued by the Catholic Bishops of Appalachia in 1975. Long ago, folks started working to defend the integrity of the mountains and the communities that live among them. It has been inspiring work, and Rausch certainly deserved his award.

I mention this today because of the sharp contrast with what is happening in Congress, where attempts to pass meaningful energy legislation are now likely to go down in flames. Here’s the link to today’s NY Times article about this fiasco. Looks like the auto industry, and the oil and gas industry, who pay well for the legislators who defend their interests, are about to win one more time.

Folks, we are running out of time. In Appalachia, communities are waging political battles literally for their lives, while we can’t, in all these years, figure out how to alter the energy base of our society. We would rather just keep blowing up mountains and burying rivers and streams in toxic waste, killing and sickening hundreds of people every year, to keep away the inconvenience of shifting to energy sources that do not harm our Earth, our lives.

The values of this society remained skewed and pathological. We are destroying ourselves to keep the inconvenience at bay for a bit longer. And the longer we put off the necessary decisions, the more that inconvenience will become catastrophe for which we are woefully unprepared.

There was better news on the Times’ front page. Absent federal leadership, many states are taking matters into their own hands, passing their own auto emission standards, and limits on greenhouse gas pollution, for example. The feds don’t like this, but the effort just passed an important legal threshold when Vermont’s proposed standards were upheld in a federal district court.

This is democracy at work, and let’s hope it becomes increasingly contagious, irreversible, and passionate. The only way we are going to break the stranglehold of the fossil fuel and automaking industries on the politics of this nation is by strengthening democracy from the bottom up, strengthening grassroots organizations working to defend our precious Earth and the human communities most impacted by the practices of these industries. It is citizen action that can save us, and we must ratchet it up a whole lot, and soon.

I give thanks for folks like those who work with the Catholic Committee of Appalachia, along with their many colleagues and friends from throughout that region, who work to defend the people, the mountains, the sacredness of this land.

It is the mountain’s spirit of resistance which must be defended at any cost, for at stake is the spirit of all our humanity.

There are too few spaces of soul left in our lives.

From: This Land is Home to Me

Amen, friends. Amen

[tags] Father John Rausch, Catholic Committee of Appalachia, this land is home to me, mountain removal coal mining, mountaintopping, emission standards[/tags]

Photo credits:
Spruce Knob
Southwings.org