Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

If you’re James Hansen, you face silencing and criticism from the Bush administration, but in Britain you receive awards.

Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and one of our leading climate scientists, was in London just before Thanksgiving to receive the Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal from the WWF, one of the world’s leading environmental organizations. 

And this is what he said:

The world has less than a decade to take decisive action in the battle to beat global warming or risk irreversible change that will tip the planet towards catastrophe, a leading U.S. climate scientist said on Tuesday.

…the United States, the world’ biggest polluter but major climate laggard, has a vital role to play in leading that fight, Hansen…told Reuters on a visit to London.

“The biggest problem is that the United States is not taking an active leadership role — quite the reverse,” he said.

“We have to be on a fundamentally different path within a decade”…

You can read his presentation, with power point projections, at this link. 

Now here’s what I want to say about the problem of the US taking action.  We the people have to get empowered to make our government act.  That is, after all, what democracy is about — government of, by, for… you know, what we learned in grade school.

We have surrendered an awful lot of power to the federal government, have become passive except at election time, and even then most of us do not vote.  I get a bit weary of hearing “US” equated with the White House.  “Bush doesn’t act” translates into the “US” not acting.  But the US, that is, we puny citizens, can act whenever we get up the nerve, get over our complacency, begin to reclaim democracy.

Last time I checked, nearly every significant social movement in this country began from the bottom up — from the abolition movement to women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement to the antiwar movement to the Central America solidarity movement — each of these movements that made significant progressive change in this country started with citizens taking charge of their lives and their democracy.

And that’s what we need now — a bottom-up movement to force our federal government to take strong, urgent, meaningful, drastic action to address global warming/climate change, the crisis of ‘overshoot‘ (living beyond the means of the Earth), and the energy crisis that will arrive with the diminishment of available fossil fuels over the next few decades.

So today, this blog is a call to action.  Some of us are ready and willing to come to communities to talk  about this, to get resources out to folks, to work with churches and community groups to begin making our voices heard.  There are many organizations and resources available, some of which are listed on this blog.

So, please, let’s heed Hansen’s call and get to work.