Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Back from a week in New England. It was a great trip — met many folks who care about the same things we do. New England is very sensitive to things like global warming. Here it was, typical late March — cold nights, cool-ish days, the old snow melting off the mountains, streams swollen with snow melt rushing through the valleys, smoke billowing from the sugar houses.

And as we have written previously at this site, by the end of the century, the sugar maples will be gone from New England, if current warming trends continue. They will have migrated into Canada, to be replaced by oaks and other trees common to where I live in the mid-Atlantic states.

So, it’s Palm Sunday, and I want to offer my own reflection for this Holy Week, one that is about the violence we have done to this Earth and the suffering it is causing to human beings and the whole Earth community — because, if we are to find within us that spiritual and psychological strength to do what we need to do to save us, we are going to have to enlarge our traditional spiritualities, especially one so based on the centrality of the human. We need to include within the traditional Passion Story of Holy Week the passion which this planet is undergoing right now because of how we have treated it, the passion of a planet under great and turbulent stress.

This following quotes are from the book I am currently reading, The Upside of Down, by Thomas Homer-Dixon:

When we build houses, office towers, and highways, and when we till our fields, excavate gravel, and erect dams, the 6.5 billion of us move countless millions of tons of dirt and rick — an amount that is now ten times larger than the total moved through the natural action of wind and water around Earth. Partly as a result, we’ve transformed and often degraded about half the world’s ice-free land. Row-crop agriculture, cities with their suburban sprawl, and industrial zones alone cover about 15 percent of Earth’s ice-free land — an area larger than the United States, Canada, and Mexico combined.

When we change the Earth’s landscape, we also wipe out our fellow species… the rate of species extinction…is now a hundred to a thousand times greater than it was before the Anthropocene [the name given to the era of the human]. We’ve extinquished a quarter of the planet’s bird species and endangereed a quarter of all mammals and reptiles. And by inadvertently but carelessly transporting aggressive species from their normal habitats to new regions…we’ve disrupted ecosystems and endangered native species far and wide.

…each year humans and their livestock consume directly (in the form of food, fuel, fiber, or timber) about 4 percent of the energy that land plants trap and store through photosynthesis… in the ecosystems we dominate — like cropland, pastureland, and cleared forest land — we manage or destroy an additional 27 percent. If we add the energy that plants would have stored if their ecosystems had been left in their natural state, then… we use, waste, or disrupt nearly 40 percent of all the energy that Earth’s land plants could potentially store.

The results of this ravaging of the Earth? — ecosystems breaking down, the ability for the planet to support the human species deteriorating each day we continue on like this — and we are going to add another 2-3 billion to the planet by 2050.

Just one of many consequences of this:

As a result of both pollution and overuse of our rivers and lakes, about 40 percent of the world’s population now lacks sufficient water for basic sanitation and hygiene, and nearly one out of every five people has not enough to drink. If we extrapolate current trends, by 2025 about 3 billiion — or more than a third of the world’s population — will live in countries with water stress or chronic water scarcity, a sevenfold increase since 1997.

The Passion of the Earth. And, whether or not we are ready to receive this insight, or revelation, of our times, this Passion Story can no longer be separated out from the Passion Story of our Christian traditions.

Resurrection is a story of Spring, of the renewal of Life. If we continue as we are, it is that essential story that we are putting in jeopardy.

Perhaps this gives new meaning to the passage, ‘even if all these were silent, the very stones would cry out.’ (Luke 19:40).

Photo credit: Yankee Grocery

[tags] passion of the earth, passion story, holy week, earth spirituality, resource depletion, water scarcity[/tags]