Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Okay, one last post before we launch the new website on Monday. Not to worry, the blog will still be there. Nothing lost. But now it will be one of a few features on the site, along with a new online magazine, news features, suggestions for things we can do to change the world, book reviews, and more. We will get a chat room going in the near future.

But for now, holy cow! what a disaster in the financial sector of the U.S. and the global economy! Not that we were lacking in economists and other analysts predicting the meltdown in this era of cheap and easy credit, of securities bundling, short selling and other wild schemes.

In chapter 6 of my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World,’ we anticipate the collapse of an economy living way beyond its means, piling up debt (the national debt is about to reach $10 trillion, and that’s before all the rescue plans go into effect), depleting the natural gifts of the planet, and destabilizing just about everything in our lives.

But here’s the thing, at least from the perspective of this project. Coming off these weeks of attentiveness to my Mother’s last days on this Earth, lots of things piled up around my desk, articles about all sorts of crises, breakdowns, and sincere efforts to change how we live. Just a sampling:

Worried about carbon dioxide? Try nitrogen, another greenhouse gas. “In addition to having a role in climate change, nitrogen has a huge, probably more important biological impact through its presence in fertilizer,” reports the NY Times. Yes, we fertilize all over the world and we are endangering the atmosphere, the oceans, and more. That’s why we talk about greenhouse gases, you know, plural.

The Arctic? Scientists confirmed earlier this month that the 4,500 year old Markham Ice Shelf had broken away from Ellsmere Island in Canada’s Arctic region, another sign of the rapid melting of the ice because of global warming. These scientists call the event “shocking.” Indeed.

But what is shocking to those who care about the future of humans on the planet is opportunity for others. Canada’s conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, is anxious to get up there and start drilling for oil and natural gas.

And so it goes.

Then there’s this — Deaths in oil, gas fields soar with energy rush, an A.P. article just a few days ago that ought to be challening us in profound moral and ethical terms as the popular sentiment moves towards rapid acceleration of drilling. We are killing people with our refusal to alter our way of life, away from fossil fuels. Those being exploited are the usual — immigrants, undocumented, those most easily exploited and least able to defend their basic human rights.

Reminds me of a fact I cite in my book — that more than 104,000 people have died over the past century mining coal — that would be for the energy we use to turn on the lights and run the A.C.

Do we think about these things?

This — Israel is running out of water.

Oh yea, water, that stuff we once had in abundance but which will soon become our most critical global resource shortage.

Yes, you should just see the pile of news that surrounds me here. But some of it is encouraging, too. Some projects of real scale are being created that could be the first signs that even political leaders are beginning to get it, at least at the state and local level.

Companies in California are planning to build two enormous solar power plants, response to a law that requires that one fifth of the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2010. And in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daly just announced plans to cut greenhouse gases through an aggressive efficiency plan, changing building codes, retrofitting low income housing complexes to reduce water and electricity use, and installing solar panels on city buildings. Now this is getting serious and is very encouraging news — would that other cities would follow suit, like my dreadfully cautious, behind-the-times, tax-obsessed City of Milwaukee (we still can’t get local counties to agree to commuter rail!!!)

Okay, the list of encouraging news is also long. But what does this have to do with the Wall Street debacle? Just this. At a time when our ecological crises demand enormous investments in making the switch to a sustainable way of life in balance with the frayed and endangered ecosystems of the planet, we will pouring hundreds of billions of public dollars into rescuing a financial system that is collapsing for reasons many and avoidable, including greed and an anti-regulatory national climate. Meanwhile, Congress has passed a defense bill that surpasses $600 billion for wars and weapons, we continue to flush $1 billion per month down the toilet that is Bush’s war of choice in Iraq, we continue to give tax breaks to the fossil fuel dinosaur industry, we pour more of your tax dollars into Earth-destroying industrial agriculture –

So, then, how in the world will we find the resources to make the turn, the big one, the ‘Great Turning,’ required now?

And yet, what an opportunity to change the conversation. Where are you church leaders, pastors, theologians, cultural workers now? We need you to begin making this shift. We have been living a deeply destructive way of life on this planet for far too long. In the years leading up to this Wall Street collapse, we saw some of the greediest wealth grabs in the history of the world.

Before the corporate ideologues convince everybody that we can go back to the old way of doing things, but with more regulations and reforms, lets seize the moment to change the conversation altogether.

Join me on the new website as we make our attempt at that conversation. Many are having it, for decades now. Perhaps we can begin to come together in the critical mass that can begin the great turning.

[tags] Wall Street, financial collapse, national debt, living beyond the end of the world, nitrogen pollution, arctic ice shelf collapse, fossil fuels, israel water shortage, great turning[/tags]