Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

This depressing story from The Times in the UK: the great tropical Andean glacier will disappear by 2012 because of global warming. The snows of Kilamanjaro will be gone by then, too.

Said Lonnie Thompson, climate scientist at Ohio State:

Tropical glaciers are the canaries in the coalmine for our global climate system, as they integrate and respond to most of the key climatological variables — temperature, precipitation, cloudiness, humidity and radiation.

This article from Salon.com gives you an idea of what is at stake here, beyond the breakdown of this once awesome ecosystem. The Andean glaciers are the water source for millions of South Americans. It is also the principle source for the region’s irrigation. Without this water, millions get thirsty and agriculture withers.

Get ready for more environmental refugees.

We have to stop talking about global warming and climate change as something we can prevent if we take action sometime soon. It is already occurring, already having dramatic impacts on vulnerable parts of our world — island nations, villages on the islands and coasts of Alaska, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Europe. And then there are the two poles where the changes are already truly frightening.

Keep in mind that global warming is only one aspect of the ecological crisis that we face now. We are living far beyond the means of the planet to support us, and the pace of that is accelerating rapidly. We have posted before about this reality, called ‘overshoot.’

A few weeks ago I finished an emotionally difficult but beautifully rendered book, The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit and Politics, by Tom Hayden. It is a revised and updated version of a book written by Hayden in 1996, republished this year. I had no idea Hayden had moved in such a profound direction, writing exactly what this website is about, spirituality and ecology — not environmentalism, but ecology.

I want to end today’s post with a short excerpt:

With the loss of nature and community there is inevitable loss of imagination, as well. This culture of frenzied growth causes a spiritual emptiness and stress… living in a culture that only emphasizes the moment, a rootless space… The loss of the past is the loss of the dreams and ideals of the original place… We are in danger of losing the sense that nature is connected with the meaning of life. This is a loss of the spiritual resource that could be the basis for a challenge to the modern consecration of development without end…

The privileged position of the human race, backed theologically by most religions, has to be dismantled or reformed on all levels before we can arrive at an acceptance of kinship and our common natural fate foreseen by visionaries like John Muir, who wrote of all life forms sharing “a common law of death and love”…

In trying to conquer nature to build empires, we have left ourselves weakened. We have forgotten another possibility, of being modern villagers in the country of nature, souls participating in creation itself.

How else is it possible that we have allowed so much to be lost already, so much beauty, so much of the magnificent, intricate, complex ecosystems in which we and other species have thrived for millions of years? How could we treat this Earth so badly? What else but this death-of-the-spirit way of life could have cut us off so completely from our own biology, our own sense of participation in what gives us life, that in which we live and breathe and have our being?

Perhaps that is what we most need to recover if we are to find within ourselves what we need to alter this destructive course.

Photo credit: Felicia Mello, The Heat on Ecuador, Salon.com

[tags] global warming, Tom Hayden, melting tropical glaciers[/tags]