Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I’ve lived in Maryland now since 1983. Though I spend less time in my adopted home state these days, I have strong feelings of affection for its natural beauty — the mountain ranges in the west, the ocean shore (that part, that is, which is not built up with high rise hotels and crowded summer beach tourism), and the magnificant Chesapeake Bay.

The Earth is not a static, stable reality. It moves and churns and changes and creates and recreates over and over again. That creative process is what makes the beauty that inspires awe and renews our spirits. It is also what can reap such havoc in our lives — because we humans tend to live and build and make lives under the assumption that these changes will not take place, that we can tame the Earth and make it live according to our desires.

In the hubris fostered by the industrial revolution, the development of engineering and science, we came to believe that we could master the Earth. Instead, we are putting it out of balance, and quickly. We are putting the energies of the Earth far out of balance and the result is that Nature is being altered all around us in ways that may seem natural, but are not.

Water levels in the Chesapeake Bay are rising far more rapidly than ocean water levels, beyond the estimates of climate scientists. Global warming is a factor, but not the only one. There is also our drive for development along our beautiful shores — development that renders them no longer our natural wonders but our summer playgrounds — vacation homes, hotels and condominiums and beach resorts.

What brought all this to mind was the lead article on the front page of today’s Washington Post. It made me sad. Water levels are rising in the Chesapeake Bay, and shoreline and islands are disappearing.

It’s not that it isn’t perfectly right that the Earth and the Bay might claim these islands and historic cemeteries; it’s that this may not have been the disaster that it is if we had not warmed the globe and abused this natural wonder through the way it has been ‘developed.’

Rising water levels — an old problem, apparently accelerated by climate change — are threatening to erode away a number of historic burial sites. Some are already gone, leaving bones and coffin handles as ghoulish flotsam.

Eventually, experts say, rising seas could worsen flooding in the D.C. area and redraw maps of the Eastern Shore.

You see, this just makes me sad:

In the mid-Atlantic region, scientists say, an old problem gives the new one greater impact: The land is sinking. It’s a geologic hangover from the last ice age, the earth’s crust slowly unkinking itself after being bent out of shape by the weight of huge glaciers.

Because of that subsidence, scientists say, sea levels in the region may seem to rise four to six inches more than the global average over the next century.

Already, rising water has profoundly altered the Chesapeake.

Okay, sad is something we are going to have to get used to as the Earth adjusts to our pollution and destructive modes of development. We have lived on top of the Earth rather than in balance with it, being, after all, merely one of the species that evolved out of it, not some force that came from outside of it.

This article focuses on the impacts of global warming on the Bay’s rising water levels and erosion. But in my internet search for supporting material, I found this article from 1990. Here you can read how global warming does not explain entirely the rising water levels and the rapidity of erosion, how some of the shoreline is collapsing back into the Bay because it is also being eroded ‘from below.’

Worldwide estimates of sea level rise due to climatic warming range between 1.2 and 2.4 millimeters per year. “The increases in sea level rise we are seeing in the Bay are some 3.4 millimeters a year,” Stevenson says. “There have to be other things going on - global warming alone cannot account for it.” Both he and Kearney believe those other things are land erosion and subsidence, or sinking, due to underground water withdrawal.

The sediment load Chesapeake Bay receives, the result of land clearance and development, is massive - some 2 million metric tons a year. Under this weight, Kearney and Stevenson argue, the Bay crust is sinking, literally “downwarping” the bottom and displacing upper mantle material. At the same time, they hypothesize, groundwater withdrawal from surficial aquifers has been increasing for more than a hundred years.

I offer these two articles as a reflection today on how the way we have ‘managed’ and built up these precious habitats is contributing towards their destruction — graves, history, habitat, beauty — so much sacrificed to our inappropriate way of living with our Earth.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a Chesapeake Bay Office. To read what they say about this, go here.

And if you want to help save the bay, visit the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.