Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Well, despite the global warming deniers, there are measures of what is going out there as temperatures rise, and those who do the measuring simply report the impacts of climate change as the daily news that it already is.

And so this morning’s front page article in the Washington Post, In Northern France, Warming Presses Fall Grape Harvest Into Summertime.

Hey, this is a hard one for me. My first reaction was, “Oh no! Not French wine!”

Seriously though, it turns out that the grape-growing regions of France are among the best places in the world to measure the Earth’s human-induced warming trend and its rapid acceleration in recent decades. Wine from Britain? Hard to imagine it.

But the point here is that this is just one indication of the major disruptions to come as local ecosystems begin to be altered by the warming of air, water and soils, as those systems begin to break down. In France, it’s the grapes. In New England, it’s the sugar maples.

Each one of these disruptions will mean disruptions in local economies and cultures, in the cohesiveness of communities, in the stress levels on families and neighborhoods.

We are not preparing ourselves for any of this. I see it rarely, and mostly in self-organized, or intentional community life. These little pockets may offer some signs of hope, but they are a long way from the kind of cultural mobilization that will be required to get our regions and peoples through the crisis that is coming, the initial signs of which are appearing everywhere, from the fires in Greece to the floods in Britain to the disappearing lakes in Africa to the desertification of large sections of northern China.

We humans don’t seem well suited to proactive change. We have a very hard time with reality when it conflicts with the habitual messages wired into our brains about how to live. With the rise of the era of commercialization, the commodification of everything, consumerism, and advertising, and then the technology that really does wire stuff into our brains, we are robotic like, going on about our business like none of this could ever possibly really happen — like New Orleans 2 years ago.

If a week before that happened, someone had told you that a storm could destroy a major US city, displace hundreds of thousands of people, many of them permanently, and that the government’s response would amount to catastrophic failure, would you have believed it?

But discovering that we are not immune does not seem to mean that we accept any more now than we did then our vulnerability to nature of which, like it or not, we are a part and on which we are completely dependent.

[tags] grape harvest, French wine, sugar maples, regional cliamte change impacts[/tags]