Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Dr. James Lovelock, one of the original ‘articulaters’ of the Gaia theory (the theory that earth is a living self-regulating organism carefully balanced to make life possible), has become very controversial in recent years.  His very bleak predictions for our near-future as a result of global warming (the new hot age) has stirred up lots of emotion. 

His proposed ways for addressing the crisis raised more than a few eyebrows and has drawn lots of passionate opposition.  He has become a strong proponent for the quick and massive development of nuclear energy across the globe, a position accompanied by opposition to wind farms and his argument that no other energy sources can be developed in time to save us.  He also supports the very controversial, and we believe ecologically disastrous, genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

But because he is one of our leading scientists, it is impossible to ignore his predictions and the science on which they are based.  Therefore, controversy aside, Lovelock remains one of our most important voices raising frantic alarms about the fate that awaits us because of human-caused heating of the atmosphere.

I mention this because, at the venerable age of 87, a new book by Lovelock has just been released in the US, The Revenge of Gaia.  It is already a bestseller in England.  And because of the release of the book, Lovelock is in the news.  The Washington Post profiled him several days ago, after reviewing his book the previous weekend.

This material is grim stuff indeed.  And while we may argue with his proposed measures to address the crisis, we ignore his forecasts for the Earth at our peril.  Of course, while many scientists do not agree that the disasters will come so quickly — Lovelock believes the earth will become largely uninhabitable by 2025 — the consensus is that the disaster will come if we continue on as we are, if we do not make drastic changes immediately.

As I wrote yesterday, this is not a question of restoring the old atmospheric ‘normal’ to which we have grown accustomed, and which has supported ‘civilization’ and even the very evolution of life, for millions upon millions of years.  Rather, it is about working urgently to reverse the trends within our patterns of human consumption and pollution, literally our entire way of life, in order to keep the ‘new normal’ from being one in which we and the entire Earth community in which ‘we live and breathe and have our being’ cannot survive.

I have been sent a review copy of Lovelock’s book and will read and review it later this month.  First I must finish James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency, another not-so-cheery book about the future of this society.  I will write of it when I finish. 

Tough stuff, friends.  Hard to believe we would rather free-fall towards doom than change how we live.  Let’s look at our young people today, and our little ones, and try to see this from their perspective.  If that doesn’t motivate us, what will?