Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

A deep and persistent drought has taken hold of much of the Great Plains, Texas up to South Dakota.  Temperatures this summer reached unprecedented heights — 118-120 degrees in that latter state.  With less snow in recent years, little rain, and warmer soil meaning more evaporation of moisture, especially during the extreme heat this summer, farmers are in big trouble.

Global warming, or the new hot age, as some say?  Hard to tell from one weather pattern, but things are not looking good out there in the Plains.  The visual is striking, and you can see a drought map here.

This drought did not suddenly appear this year.  It has been persistent over several years, deepening, it seems each summer.  Some compare it to the 1930s Dust Bowl, while others say there are local areas where it is worse than that.

Drought has been part of the life cycles in the Great Plains for a very long time.  The heating of the earth, which warms soils and increases evaporation, will likely deepen these cycles, make them more extreme.  If nothing else, we ought to be asking ourselves some fundamental questions about the way we do agriculture here in the US and whether or not our large-scale, fossil-fuel dependent industrial agriculture is sustainable any longer — well, it never was – that is one reason we have come to this moment.

Always in search of good links to support these posts, I found this most interesting article, going back 8 years.  I guess the NOAA meant it when they said ‘next century.’  An excerpt:

“Conditions that lead to severe droughts such as that of the late 16th century could recur in the future, leading to a natural disaster of a dimension unprecedented in the 20th century,” Overpeck said. “Besides the fact that natural variability could have more severe droughts in store for us in the future, two human factors could make the Great Plains even more susceptible to a severe drought in the future. These are land use practices and global warming.”

Now, instead of waiting for disasters like this, we could actually read the science and be proactive, actually prepare for them, reorganize society and such.  But on this anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, one cannot help but notice that US society seems unable to ever grasp the magnitude of natural challenges to the way we have constructed our lives here.  And that is not a hopeful sign for our future.