Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

What would your Mother say if you walked through her house disposing of trash on the floors and furniture, leaving your body waste in her sinks and shower stalls, filling it with clutter, making an unhealthy mess of the place, disease and germs feasting on your waste, fouling the air and the water?

What would this reflect of the self-respect and the mutual respect of the people who lived in that house?

You get my point. A house like that gets people fined and arrested in many cases, attracts social workers and complaints from neighbors, gets children removed by courts who consider such conditions a danger to their well-being.

An AP article printed in many papers today, caught my attention. It is about a monumental trash problem at a precious new national monument, the 140,000 square mile Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the northwestern edge of Hawaii. Getting this designation from the environmentally-unfriendly Bush administration was a distinctly rare accomplishment, but once again, a White House accomplishment with a short attention span.

I don’t know, this stuff really bothers me. It reflects an attitude of so many humans around the world towards nature — one big trash dump — out of sight, out of mind. It is a huge problem in our oceans where it remains common behavior for big ships, fisherpeople, pleasure boat travelers to dump their waste into the biggest toilets in the world.

Except these toilets don’t flush. They just circulate the stuff ’round and ’round the globe.

I think we blogged about this long ago, but the biggest trash heap in the world floats in the Pacific Ocean gathered together by ocean currents. It has been dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Much of it is made up of our plastic waste, gathered in a swirling current from all across the glolbe.

Our garbage, our waste, wasting the oceans of life, the oceans from which life emerged, the oceans now warming dangerously because of our greenhouse gases, now polluted and trashed and over-exploited until their ecosystems are in grave danger.

It is just too inconvenient to dispose of our waste properly, much less to create a whole lot less of it.

What is wrong with the human species? How did we get so alienated from all that gave birth to us and sustained us so generously until we reached this point of ruin?

There will be no going back from this ruin, so what are we going to do? Can we restore our relationships with our surroundings enough to stop the damage — and in so doing our collective suicide — and allow them to regenerate new and healthy ecosystems out of the destruction?

Or will we save that responsibility for a future species long after our own extinction?

A home not cared for eventually crumbles and falls. If left to itself, the Earth will reclaim it and then something new will begin.

If that is the role we choose for ourselves, it will be sad indeed.

Go out and take a walk, wherever you are; look around at all that surrounds you, holds you, feeds you, keeps you alive. Think about what it means to be wrecking all of that.

When we love nature, when we love the planet, we come to the most honest love of self. Right now, our home increasingly reflects self-degradation and disdain, broken and abusive relationships. What would a world look like that reflected healthy relationships, love of home and all who dwell within, mutual respect and solidarity?

Not a beach strewn with trash.

[tags] Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, ocean debris, NOAA, Great Pacific Garbage Patch, trashing the planet[/tags]

Photo Credits:

Map of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Debris pile on Kamilo Beach, AP Photo/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Carey Morishige