I will be away from my computer for a few days, so I wanted to leave on the home page here something reflective of this magical time of year in the Midwest.

Orange marks the spot where I live - source: EPA, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Forget for a moment that Southern Wisconsin, from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan, is suffering under the worst cloud of air pollution in the country right now (hard to forget given how it makes one feel after several days of this – thank you, coal industry); what I want to do is grab our attention away from all that is wrong with the Earth to all that is right with it.

Like Spring, for example.  Just a couple of weeks ago, I was taking photos of fresh snow and ice sculptures formed by the waves crashing onto the shore of Lake Michigan near my home. This week, the air warmed, snow melted, fog developed each evening from the mixture of all that melting moisture and the warm stagnant air, and those ice sculptures became another transient and magnificent work of art.

The fog dance over Lincoln Park, Chicago - Photo by Deanna

Lake Michigan ice sculptures - Photo: Margaret Swedish

These photos remind us how important it is to fall in love over and over again with this beautiful planet, with all its wonder and daily miracles, its constant unfolding, its wondrous secrets great and small, its generosity, the way it holds us – if we let it.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

It reminds me each day that when we love the Earth enough, and when enough of us love the Earth enough, we will stop trying so hard to kill it, to crush its beauty, to trample its wonder underfoot and under-machine, to stop pouring toxins into every one of the gifts it offers us for life – air, water, soil, plants, forests, animals, our very own bodies.

Spring melt, Lake Michigan shore - Photo: Margaret Swedish

Spring is an annual reminder of what the Earth can re-birth, regenerate, re-create, renew – if we just let it.  It can heal us. It really can.  It can teach us how to live, if we open to its wisdom, wisdom lying latent in every cell of our bodies connected as we are, created as we are, by everything that came before us since the first explosion of creation 13.7 billion years ago.

A font of wisdom available to us from the beginning of time.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

Folks who have read my book, heard my talks, or visit this website know that one of my favorite things to do is to put together seemingly disparate pieces of our ecological puzzle, connect seemingly separate dots, to try to present a more accurate picture of the human predicament, this moment of crisis in which we find ourselves.

You know, like what does global warming, economic recession and high unemployment, and the unnatural and ecologially damaging Chicago canal (the one that reversed the flow of the Chicago River and created a connection from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River that should never, ever, have been created), have to do with one another?

A couple of things are crucial for me – that we get honest about our world, and that we see the connections.

Whatever else, we need to get rooted in reality. If you watch cable news, you know that is certainly not where we are rooted.

So here are the pieces I present this evening:

Photo: Margaret Swedish

This first one should terrify us all: Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Hampering E.P.A. This story explains how a court-restricted definition of waterways that fall under EPA rules is so narrow that many businesses are dumping toxic waste into the sources of our groundwater, tap water, rivers and lakes – with impunity. It explains how things are actually getting worse, our water more and more toxic.  I urge you to read this story – and to think about that glass of water, and to think about your kids, and to get angry and do something about this.

Next: while the industry-funded global warming skeptics and pundits ridicule the science because there was a lot of snow in Washington DC and Georgia this year, the reality is that, elsewhere on the planet, the crisis of HEAT keeps getting worse.

From this week’s Earthweek-A Diary of the Planet:

Neville Nicholls of Melbourne’s Monash University told an online climate science media briefing that initial satellite data indicate “January was the hottest we’ve ever seen.”

He also told the briefing that last November was similarly the hottest on record, while November-January was the hottest three months for that time of year “the world has seen.”

In early February, the worst heat wave in 50 years across southern Brazil and Paraguay killed more than 60 people and turned Rio’s pre-Carnival environment into a blast furnace.

But, hey, it’s South America, so who cares?  Who is even paying attention?

Mexico oil field, Gulf of Mexico

Okay, onward.  This, from today’s business section of the NY Times: Mexico’s Oil Politics Keeps Riches Just  Out of Reach.  Now this is really interesting from the perspective of peak oil, a theory that has fallen into some disrepute lately. Folks that predicted that we were approaching or already at peak oil – that point of maximum global production, after which the slide begins – have been warning that Mexico, a major U.S. supplier and one of our few friendly ones, was reaching peak.  Now, peak means not that there is no more oil.  It means that the easiest to get has been gotten, that more and more investment and technology will be needed to get to the harder stuff, with diminishing economic returns, until ultimately the supply begins its inevitable downward spiral.

Here’s the text I find interesting:

The basic problem is simply that Mexico’s readily accessible oil is used up — pretty much the same thing that happened to the United States when production began falling in the 1970s.

Got that?  The US reached peak oil back in the 70s, and it is to this peak that Mexico’s looming shortages are being compared.  You see, those that insist that there is still plenty of oil don’t talk about this other part – that it is getting harder and harder to get it out of the Earth. That is actually part of the definition of the peak oil theory.

The national oil company created after the 1938 seizure, Pemex, is entering a period of turmoil. Oil production in its aging fields is sagging so rapidly that Mexico, long one of the world’s top oil-exporting countries, could begin importing oil within the decade.

Mexico is among the three leading foreign suppliers of oil to the United States, along with Canada and Saudi Arabia. Mexican barrels can be replaced, but at a cost. It means greater American dependence on unfriendly countries like Venezuela, unstable countries like Nigeria and Iraq, and on the oil sands of Canada, an environmentally destructive form of oil production.

“As you lose Mexican oil, you lose a critical supply,” said Jeremy M. Martin, director of the energy program at the Institute of the Americas at the University of California, San Diego. “It’s not just about energy security but national security, because our neighbor’s economic and political well-being is largely linked to its capacity to produce and export oil.”

So, among other things, expect more war, since the U.S., still so woefully dependent on oil, as is the global economy, is entirely committed politically and militarily to ensuring reliable supply. But expect that supply to become increasingly unreliable, increasingly costly, and a source of great turmoil.

Okay, one more: Childhood depression: Why is it increasing?

How can kids be depressed when it seems like they have never had it better? Children are being raised in environments that generally offer them more of everything… Key indicators of child abuse, health, academic achievement and an overall standard of living suggest this is a relatively privileged generation for most children.

Even so, kids are clinically depressed and exhibiting serious emotional problems.

Okay, what is the connection between this story and those above, if any? You know what is most depressing to me? It’s that the writer seems so mystified: our children have more of everything, what in the world is their problem?! Must be bad parenting.

Or else it might be the world we have made. It might be that having more of everything is not what they need. It could be that what they need is simplicity, love, availability of primary relationships, play, and some assurance that they have a future on this planet that is not full of fear and danger and ecological wreckage.

We need to become reality-based, folks. Not just you and me, but we, as in this culture. It is so disturbing, how much we don’t know about the forces that are impacting our lives, and that are going to shape our future. We are on our way to becoming incredible victims of forces we don’t want to look at or understand, or…

Or what? Or we begin to look full on at what is going on all around us, who is making the decisions that have put us on this terrible course, the role we play in it as individuals, as communities, as a society, and begin to say no, no, we don’t want this future!

What hope looks like

And we can accompany our no, our refusal to participate, with a yes, with one big affirmation of life, one that entails a commitment to getting involved in the work to create a different kind of future for our kids – a future in which their disposition will not be marked by increasing depression, but increasing joy. That joy has content. It refuses the degradation of the planet and the human spirit at the mercy of economic exploitation and meaninglessness, but rather affirms a new meaning for life itself within the context of a new Earth community that is also coming to birth all around us.

If we don’t understand our world, we can’t make good decisions. If we don’t know how the Earth works, we will not know how to heal it, to restore it to the health our ignorance and human hubris have done so much to damage.

Greenland ice melt - photo: NASA/GISS

Two bits of info to put side-by-side, both stories reported in the NY Times:

Statement: there is ’solid evidence’ that the Earth is warming because of human activity.  Number of people who agree with this statement = 36 percent.

36 percent!!!!

That factoid was cited in a front page article on Thursday, March 4, about the connections among those who doubt anthropogenic global warming and those who do not believe in evolution.

Today, this, as summed up in my own words:

One of the global warming impacts climate scientists have long feared is that methane locked in Arctic permafrost would begin to release as it melts. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 and some of these scientists have warned that a big methane release could trigger what is called a ‘tipping point,’ a point at which warming greatly accelerates and becomes irreversible.  Evidence suggests that this process has begun in an area of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf – (Ref: Undersea Greenhouse Gas Gains New Notice in Study, by Cornelia Dean).

Wow, what a headline! Nearly puts you to sleep, doesn’t it? “…Gains New Notice in Study.”  Hardly a shrieking warning.  How ’bout – “Release of methane in the arctic permafrost may trigger runaway global warming!” That might even get somebody’s attention. The headline is a bit better online, but still…

So, these two bits of info side-by-side:

1) increasing doubt about human-caused global warming among the US population; 2) more evidence that it is occurring.  1) More doubt about climate science computer models; 2)  more indication that trends are following those models.

The best proof of scientific theory is when the research affirms the theories in repeat, peer-reviewed studies – like evolution, which isn’t even a controversy anymore so vast is the research that supports the overall theory – except that it is for a substantial portion of the US population, despite the evidence, despite the knowledge.

From the article, Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets:

“Wherever there is a battle over evolution now,” [said Lawrence Krause, physicist at AZ State University], “there is a secondary battle to diminish other hot-button issues like Big Bang and, increasingly, climate change. It is all about casting doubt on the veracity of science — to say it is just one view of the world, just another story, no better or more valid than fundamentalism.”

Some 54% of people in the US believe in the literal biblical version of the creation story (see, The Classroom as Climate Hot Zone)

Climate scientists are beginning to own up to the fact that they have done a poor job of communicating the research on global warming to the public (see another NYT article from Wednesday, Scientists Take Steps to Defend Climate Work, by John Broder). Their miscalculations of the campaigns against the science, their often bruising academic competition and rancor, and reluctance to own up to some mistakes in research, have cost the reputation of the science dearly – despite the fact that none of these mistakes have been in the essence of the science itself – which continues to indicate that we humans are warming the atmosphere dangerously and that the ‘weirding of weather’ in recent decades is one result.

Changing opinions about global warming - Pew Research Center

But what concerns me is a growing divide in this country between those who believe in science and knowledge, and those who don’t when science and knowledge conflict with religious beliefs. And it concerns me that many politicians and corporations wedded to industries most responsible for GHG emissions are manipulating those who hold these beliefs for the sake of undermining the consensus we need to build in this country in order to address this ecological emergency – only one of several we face.

But more, it seems to me that this skepticism and the larger retreat from troubling information about the conditions of the planet and the threats we face of real catastrophe reflect the larger reality of the loss of faith in institutions of all sorts – from government to business to religious institutions to education systems and medical care systems to banks and mortgage companies. Trust is gone; institutions are collapsing; corruption seems to be everywhere; so why not retreat into systems of denial, psychological escape, the certainty of various forms of fundamentalist belief?

When I ponder the long, ugly, manipulated debate on health care reform, the lies and subterfuge, the rancor and insane nature of some of the exchanges, I could hang my head thinking about these looming challenges ahead of us, weighted as they are with the import of our children’s future.

Wounded Earth - Mary Southard

I fear this divide, and I challenge us all to figure out how to bridge it. We have got to be able to teach our children the science they need to know in order to understand the world they live in, how it works, what must be done within the workings of the planet to make it possible for this species to survive and to have a rich and viable future. I fear the belief that God will somehow save the righteous and punish the rest, and if the Earth goes down in flames so be it. I respect anyone’s right to hold those beliefs. But those beliefs must not interfere with the process of giving our kids and our people the tools they need – given to us by God or the Creator or Creation, however you want to describe its origins – for a reason.  Our minds, our ability to make conscious decisions, are gifts to be used, not denied as if using them was some form of attack on faith itself.

But I also want to insist that withholding this necessary knowledge from our youth, or not teaching it all along the way of their education – Earth science, the workings of the atmosphere and biosphere, the interconnections among the beings within Nature and the water, air and soil that nurture us all, what scientists know, what research is still needed, etc. – to withhold this knowledge, this education, is immoral because it denies our kids what they need to know in order to make the crucial decisions regarding the future of the human species on this planet.

Sorry if you’ve been waiting for the latest post. Last week got out of hand.  I will continue to attempt to post twice per week, but now and then, things come up.

Gave a talk yesterday for the Sunday Forum at the First Unitarian Society of Milwaukee, a wonderful, active, welcoming, inclusive congregation on Milwaukee’s east side. I told them at the beginning that I’m getting this reputation of being a purveyor of bad news. They laugh kindly, but we always share a certain anxiety in these moments when we are about to ponder together the true nature of our human predicament, and the indictment it is of our way of life on this planet.

World map of countries by ecological footprint - Wikimedia

Anxiety because we know, we all really know, that life on this planet as we know it cannot be salvaged, healed, regenerated, and renewed unless we are willing to give up much that we have enjoyed of privilege, affluence, and even comfort here in the U.S.  We are not the only ones living lavish lifestyles, but we cannot keep waiting for some other society of rich people to figure this out and start doing the thing that needs to be done – scaling back the human presence on this planet by a lot and in a hurry (see, for example, this article by Jared Diamond, or this thoughtful essay, US Consumption Deserves Reappraisal).

God, folks, leadership has to come from somewhere.

And I always share the thought that we cannot get to authentic hope unless we are rooted in reality – otherwise the hope we offer is false.  We either find hope within the crisis, or there isn’t any. And both the crisis and the authentic hope must become spurs to action.

Perspective – I hadn’t intended to write all that, but out it came.  What I did intend to write, and briefly, or to share, really, is this image that came into my email queue last week. NASA itself chose the title – The Possibility of a Brand New World. The image comes from the Spitzer Space Telescope, one of the instruments by which we humans are exploring our universe right now.

Possibility of a Brand New World - NASA Spitzer Space Telescope

The text reads:

“The pictured galaxies of Hickson Compact Group 31 will pass through and destroy each other, millions of stars will form and explode, and thousands of nebula will form and dissipate before the dust settles and the final galaxy emerges about one billion years from now.”

Right?  Got that? Over the next one billion years or so, this violent crash of energies beyond our imagining, of galaxies and gases, will continue to explode, form stars, and explode again, until at last a final galaxy is formed from all that. Perhaps with a gabillion suns.  Perhaps with a gabillion planets. Perhaps with life forms one day, billions of years later. Perhaps even conscious life forms.

Kind of de-centers us, doesn’t it?  Do we really believe that all this was created just for the human life forms on this planet, a mere cosmic moment in the grand act of Creation that goes on and on as the forces unleashed by the Big Bang continue to create and re-create our universe?

So, then, how we do want to spend our time? Wrecking the only planet we humans have? Shopping for disposable objects? Doing work we hate for reasons we cannot even articulate anymore other than paying the rent or the mortgage? Emptying our lives more and more of meaning?

Unless we really do believe that all of this was created only for the salvation of individual souls attached to individual and separate human bodies on this one planet in this brief moment of time in all the universe…

Or, did we evolve exactly for this – to be an expression of awe within the universe, a wellspring of wonder, to learn and explore, to expand and be at the service of whatever is at work within us as in all Creation, including the billion year long birth of this brand new world – the beginnings of which we are privileged to view through this aide to the human eye which is Spitzer?

Can we finally leave this industrial, technological, unjust, cruel (to the majority of human beings, other life forms, and the eco-communities that hold us), empty, superficial wreckage of an economic life behind as this search, this reach deep into the spiritual meaning of the human, empties that world of meaning?

By the way, the group at the forum received the news (many of them of course knew this stuff already) and the hope we articulated together with enormous sincerity and generosity of spirit – which just keeps on adding to the hope part.

If you’re paying attention to the news, you’ve seen reports from the Madeira Islands, Portugal – the massive floods, the torrential rains that caused torrents of water to wash away hillsides, homes, whole communities. This morning’s figures: 42 dead, 120 injured, many unaccounted for.

Then this morning, I read this, in this week’s Earthweek update:

Researchers from the Australian Antarctic Division say they have discovered that Australia’s recent crippling droughts have been caused by a shift in precipitation southward into Antarctica.

Ice core samples reveal snowfall during recent decades in eastern parts of the frozen continent has been higher than at any other time in the past 750 years.

Australia drought

The increase corresponds to the onset of parching and prolonged drought in Australia.

Tas van Ommen and Vin Morgan wrote in Nature Geoscience that the shift was brought on by drier air blowing over southwestern Australia from the Southern Ocean, redirecting moist air southward into Antarctica.

The researchers say there is no evidence that the shift is due to “climate change,” but such a shift in rainfall patterns represents a change in climate itself.

That last sentence mystifies me. This shift is not caused by climate change but IS climate change. Well, however one wraps the term ‘climate change’ in a sentence, the report is not good news for Australia.

Two stories that add to the weirdness of the weather lately, and getting weirder with every passing year.

How ’bout what’s going on across the Pacific Ocean – Philippines ‘Bracing for the Worst’ in Drought.  The Philippines cannot afford a disaster like this.

Well, add your own weird weather story. There are thousands of them. The world is changing all around us.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

In economics as well. I’ve written this before – our economic crisis which has led to our crisis of jobs, millions of people falling into poverty, barely held together by our badly frayed social safety net (from which our politicians continue to pull out threads), is not temporary; it is a permanent restructuring of global capitalism, which no longer needs so many human beings to produce its products and make its profits. The post-World War II ‘way of life,’ built as it was upon manufacturing – the making of stuff by workers who because of a vibrant union movement could achieve a middle class lifestyle in factories, and then in white collar jobs programming computers, in high-tech industries, etc, and now even folks who worked in bank and investment firms, Ph.Ds and lawyers – that era is coming to a depressing and gloomy end for the majority of US Americans.

I found this long NY Times article, The New Poor: Millions of Unemployed Face Years Without Jobs, a very good analysis of the dynamic behind this shedding of jobs, bad loans, overexposed consumers, from the economy. The recession is ending because the shedding has been done, and now global capital can get back to its money-making enterprises, leaner – and meaner.

We are shedding jobs, decent pay, benefits, and the social safety net all at the same time. Now Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are also on the chopping block. Get ready for some prolonged hard times.

Most of these disappeared jobs are not coming back.  And, as we have also said, unless we begin to create a new economy as this one throws off the majority of human beings, while destroying the ecology of the planet, the future looks pretty grim.

But the point I want to make here is this: we live in a time of tumultuous change, yes, change whirling all around us – and within us as we begin to lose our familiar moorings.  Now, there are all sorts of ways to deal with tumultuous change, from head-in-the-sand/hands over the ears (“la! la! la! la! – I can’t hear you!!”), to assigning enemies and fomenting fear (front page of the local section of our Milwaukee paper today, a photo of two women wearing guns on their hips to assert their right to open carry – god help us all!), or like the guy my brother and I watched last night at a restaurant trying to walk from the bar to the restroom (his weaving made me feel nauseous, and I wasn’t the one drunk!).

Fear, denial, guns, our drugs of choice, assigning blame to someone we can then target with our wrath – these are all possible and occurring.

Another trajectory is to peer into the crisis with courage to see what is going on behind it, to realize what is broken, what has brought it about, see what it has to teach us, and then begin to set out on a new path – because this one hasn’t worked out very well.

Why this matters

Some call it a paradigm shift (I have a couple friends, thinking that word quite overdone, who always reach into their pocket for change whenever they hear the word), or call it a seismic shift in consciousness, or the collapse of the old familiar version of capitalism, or the end of the US empire with its assumed role as superior nation of the world, or ecological overshoot – literally overshooting the planet’s biocapacity to support the human presence – whatever you call it, there is a threshold being crossed here from one way of life, one era in human history, to another.

It is crisis and tragedy, or crisis and opportunity. I look around at what this era produced in the way of war, violence, ecological destruction, alienation of the human, loss of meaning and the retreat into old religious orthodoxies or New Age escapism, drawing line after line in the sand between “us” and “the other,” and I want to say, good riddance – yes, please, let’s find another way.

But I know there will be great pain involved in this transition – because we are very late in getting to it. So as we chart our new path through the whirlwind of change, I know for certain that we must be rooted in compassion, deep, bottomless wells of compassion, which starting point is our recognition that we all helped create this crisis, we are all in it together, and only together can we find the path-of-least-suffering as we give birth to the new.

Thin blue line - NASA photo

Last year nearly 1 in every five people here in the US lacked the money at some point to buy food, according to a Gallup survey released in January carried out on behalf of the Food Research and Action Center.

One in every five.  Think about that – in a country with more than enough to go around, where financial industry CEOs rake in millions in bonuses after bringing the economy to its knees, where baseball stars make more then $20 million in a single season.

More than 38 million people in the US received food stamps.

Something is so very wrong here.

Unemployment line - Oregon Business Report

Bob Herbert, a NY Times columnist, shared these facts in an Op-Ed on Feb. 9: in the 4th quarter of 2009, folks that make more than $150,000 per year had an unemployment rate of 3.2%; folks with incomes between $100,000-$149,000 had an unemployment rate of 4%.

Folks with annual household incomes of under $12,500?

30.8%!

On this website, part of our reflection has to do with who bears responsibility for the ecological wreckage of the planet, and for the injustice that is another profound reflection of it. Sometimes stats provide an unsettling response to that challenge. Sometimes stats give us a troubling image of the world we have made.

Because the same forces that are causing the unraveling of the ecological life of the planet in which we are embedded are also behind inequity that is this glaring, intractable, unfair, immoral.

Meanwhile – and are we surprised? - job satisfaction in the US is at an all-time low, that’s if you have a job, and, if you do, you probably hate it. US Americans find their jobs to be largely uninteresting, wages have been stagnant for a couple of decades now, and the health care costs and insurance premiums combined with depressed income are destroying the middle class.  Again, those with jobs lucky enough to have insurance may hate those jobs  but dare not leave them.

What a world we have made.  What an awful unhappy world.  May I just venture to say – human beings did not evolve for this.

Evolution did not take 13.7 billion years of turbulent creation to make this beautiful planet and grow all this life to arrive at human consciousness so that we could be miserable, alienated, struggling with self-worth, dignity, real meaning for our lives and in the work we do.

Income groups by percentage of US population based on US Census Bureau

Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel (who has become a real moral voice in the midst of the economic collapse), wrote in a December column:

Today, one in five Americans are unemployed, underemployed or just plain out of work. One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans is on food stamps. More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month. The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings, has left family balance sheets upside down, and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street.

Money still exists, of course, but more and more of what once was shared more broadly among a US middle class is now being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, especially investors using it to make still more money.

Once upon a time, many workers had guaranteed pensions. Then the society was talked into replacing them with 401ks. What was once guaranteed income for retirement was now put in the hands of investors using the life savings of workers for Wall Street gambling.  They wanted (and still want) to do this with our Social Security money, too. You already know how well this 401k thing turned out.

Folks, it’s not like there is a plan to reinvent the US middle class, or bring back good-paying union jobs in the manufacturing industry, or make higher education affordable, much less free, for the middle class (forget the poor – they’re already eliminated from the calculations about ‘rebuilding’ the economy).  You can’t win elections admitting this, but those days are over.

Inequality graph - Source: Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science, University of Arizona

The US now boasts one of the most extreme gaps between rich and poor in the world, and it is getting worse, inexorably worse. The economy as structured, and as restructuring, cannot possibly include the growing masses of workers, laborers, subsistence farmers, even Ph.D.s, in its evolving structures. In fact, the whole point is that it is shedding workers (like replacing coalminers with enormous machines that blow up mountains and scoop out the coal). It has a glut of them, which is why once good-paying jobs now barely provide enough food on the table.

This is depressing – and urgent – but why write about it on a blog dedicated to spirituality and ecology?

Because the very same economy, the very same economic model, that creates this profound injustice and vast human suffering and anxiety, is the one ravaging the Earth at a mind-numbing pace. That economic model cares as little for the working poor, or the unemployed, as it does about trees in the way of suburban development, or groundwater where shale holding potential for natural gas production exists, or mountain ecosystems that contain coal veins.

It’s an attitude towards the world that is the problem – the profound moral problem – of our times. And the folks with the worst attitudes, the most destructive attitudes, towards wealth generation, towards the planet which it views as resource for that wealth generation, that feels the suffering of the vast majority of poor, hungry, economically insecure a matter of their bad luck as compared to their own marvelous good fortune – well, those are the ones who have most to lose if we begin to chart out a different path for the human.

It’s going to be a monumental struggle. But one way we can most serve the collapse of such a damaging model of human economy is to remove ourselves as much as possible from the role of holding it up.

It is important to insist over and over again on this point – we do not need to make a choice between justice, human well-being, and the eco-communities of the planet. The choice for justice and dignity rests in the choice to pull back the damaging ecological footprint of the human species, damage fueled by economics of growth from which the already-affluent benefit most.  They are the same choice. But more – neither one can be had without the other. As we continue to damage the biosphere and atmosphere of the planet, we make increasingly impossible the prospects for social and economic justice and equity.

We are part of one vast organic web of relationships that make up the life of the planet. Greed, obscene wealth generation, economies of growth on an already depleted planet – these are forces that block the possibility of pulling ourselves back from the brink of ecological breakdowns of all sorts. We cannot continue growing economies of high-tech gadgets, plasma screens, defense industries, more and more synthetic chemicals, factory farms, and long-distance transportation of the goods and services we consume and think we can avoid those breakdowns.

We cannot keep putting our most vital economic and environmental decisions into the hands of huge profit-making corporations or Wall Street investors. Unless we find economic democratic processes not geared towards the defense of the interests of wealthy humans, or even of humans alone, but also the interests of the whole of life and its generation within the living systems of the planet, we face a terrible future.

Decisions get starker and starker with every passing day.  I know we don’t want this to be true, but there it is. All over the world groups are beginning to forge this new path. That is the good news. And that movement holds within it not an ecological hope apart from the notion of social justice, but ecological hope that has embedded within it the project of justice and human dignity. That is the whole of our struggle – and its promise.

…we westerners have lost our ancestral knowledge of how to survive on the Earth.  — Chellis Glendinning

The more I delve into the underpinnings of our ecological crisis, the larger, deeper, more profound the picture becomes.  Now I’m reading a book that takes me right back to the original alienation, the one that began when humans separated themselves from nature and started cultivating the land, the one that began with agriculture.

What? Isn’t agriculture all good? Isn’t it how we feed our growing numbers of human beings on the planet?

Source: Wikicommons based on US Census Bureau data

Much has been written about this in past decades, but it is good to remind ourselves – agriculture began driving population growth beginning 10,000 or so years ago, and it began driving the human species’ destruction of the ecology of the planet (Jared Diamond has called it, “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered“).

As populations grew, humans committed more land to agriculture, and then populations grew some more at a rapid rate.  And so on.  Until we arrive at the era of industrial agriculture where we can put all sorts of chemical toxins into the soil, along with human engineered seeds, to coax yet more food out of ever-expanding swaths of ecologically devastated lands to feed ever more people, now totaling 6.8 billion and headed to more than 9 billion in the next 4 decades.

Tropical forest cleared for palm oil production - Indonesia

Once we lived sustainably in small numbers in small communities within the balance of the Earth’s eco-communities. With agriculture, we tore down forests, cleared lands, domesticated plants and animals, and became dependent on a form of labor and organization that has led us to our fragmented, overly complex societies in which most of us would not know how to survive if civilization broke down.  We also had to begin preparing defenses so that we could fight to keep our food and income sources, or, worse, go get others’ when we ran out of our own, a driving force of European colonization of the Americas.

Another more current example is oil. The US reached peak oil back in the 70s. As our domestic supply began to dwindle, we had to go get other countries’ oil or ensure our supply from foreign sources, driving an increasingly dangerous, military-oriented foreign policy, which drives the engines of a military industrial complex which is wasting more of the planet, using up enormous amounts of oil and other energy sources, and getting a lot of people killed, but enriching corporations and investors. Imperial overreach, a main source of empire collapses, is all about the need to obtain the energy, including food and other basic supplies, to continue to feed the engines of empire, in this case, industrially and technologically based empire. Petroleum, by the way, is a critical input to chemical fertilizers used in industrial agriculture, as well the the principle fuel used to deliver food from faraway places to your local grocery stores.

Oil reserves - Source: CIA The World Factbook - Wikimedia Commons

Now we read more and more about nations and investors that are aware of looming food crises because we are running out of arable land as a result of agricultural practices, climate change, disappearing water sources because of overuse combined with climate change, and more population growth. So they are buying up land in other countries to try to ensure future access – oh, and by the way, to also make a fortune as arable land and food become more precious commodities in the face of growing shortages (good source of info on this: Food Crisis and the Growing Land Grab). Nothing like planning to make a profit off a future human catastrophe!

Many civilizations have come and gone because of ecological devastation caused by agricultural and consequent economic and military practices, from Romans to Sumerians to Mayans, and we keep proving that we are subject to these same forces, or Laws of Thermodynamics (see the Zine, or, for more info, read, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization).

This wasn’t exactly what I intended to write about today, but I am intrigued, fascinated, and deeply unsettled by the book I’m reading right now, My Name Is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization, by the brilliant ecopsychologist, Chellis Glendinning. It was first published in 1994, and I am thrilled to see it is still in print.  I recommend it highly, even though I am only halfway through.  She provides a great summary background on how the transition from small hunter-gatherer communities to cultivation and sedentism gave rise to exponential population growth, while also creating deeply buried trauma, alienation, disorientation, anxiety, loss of centeredness and identity, and a host of other psychological and social problems from which we all suffer.

Industrial farm

I have mentioned the work of ecopsychologists here before because I think their work is crucial if we are to understand our predicament and begin to find a way through the crisis, beyond the ‘end of the world,’ as my book title suggests. To address an alienation that is this deeply rooted, we have to begin to reconstruct our relationship with nature - as in, go out and be in it, observe it, feel your body embedded within it. This will not be an easy journey now because the damage is so great that we will need to muster up a whole lot of courage to face the extent and depth of the loss.

But if we keep protecting ourselves from this experience, we are likely to continue placing false hope in techno-solutions and more engineering of the planet as our path to salvation – the very path that has led us to this crisis. It reminds me of an uncle-in-law who developed a sore throat and then a cough and then laryngitis and then more pain, but refused to go to a doctor – then died a horribly painful throat cancer death.  He was a smoker. There was a truth there too hard for him to face, or a denial that insisted that somehow things would work out okay.

Or he could have faced it and stopped doing the thing that made him sick.  Denial kept him from acting in time.  Denial killed him.

An apt metaphor, no?

This is turning into a longish essay, but here’s what I want to conclude about it.

As much as possible, we need to begin extracting ourselves from industrial society. We have to stop consuming its products and supporting its practices. We need to learn again how to live within the Earth, rather than within an artificially constructed industrial-techno world that is our drug to cover over our pain and our symptoms of deadly disease – disease of the body and spirit.

We need to start building resilient and nurturing communities that cherish and care for their children, spending time within those relationships, talking and sharing and doing creative work together, building little cultures of ecological hope and life.

We need to live radically simply and then start relearning the things we need for real survival - how to raise and cook food, or if we aren’t raising it to support those who do raise real food, healthy nutritious food grown on small-scale farms nearby. We need to learn again how to eat seasonally and organically. We need to learn again how to fix things, how to save and reuse things, how to share tools and expertise in our communities and neighborhoods.

These are the seeds of resilient life that must be created as ‘civilization’ as we have known it begins to break down, victim of the wreckage of its own making.

It’s odd to think about actual planning for an imminent reduction in the entire human footprint on the planet, including rapid decreases in population growth rates, halting the expansion of industrial agriculture and saving those lands that the Earth will need for its own regeneration process, and beginning the deliberate unraveling of industrial society. But it seems to me we don’t have a whole lot of other choices, other than to continue the course that has brought us to this crisis that now stretches across our planet. And we need to do this in community because we also have to learn again to rely on one another, to give one another the safety and personal security we will need in order to go through this transition.

Keep in mind that this must be done with justice. This world can no longer tolerate the kind of wealth generated in recent decades by banks, investors, and multinational corporations. They have gained wealth off the planet’s crisis and the hunger and insecurity of the majority of this planet. No ecological program will work unless the sources of that grossly unjust wealth generation are also dismantled.

Organic farm

The Earth and its abundance ought to be available for the well-being – physical and spiritual – of all beings. That was the goodness of creation from the beginning. It is time for us to go back deep into our psyches and remember the source from which we came.

El Niño - Source: NOAA

How do you like El Niño so far?  Wild isn’t it, the volumes of water falling over this country, some of it in monumental snowstorms.  El Niño comes and goes, and is part of what creates weather across the planet. But as the atmosphere and oceans warm, El Niños may become stronger, say climate scientists.

According to the the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Climactic Data Center (NCDC):

…it has been hypothesized that warmer global sea surface temperatures can enhance the El Niño phenomenon, and it is also true that El Niños have been more frequent and intense in recent decades. Whether El Niño occurrence changes with climate change is a major research question.

It’s not just the snows out east, it’s also the rains in California and Mexico and Australia – incredible weather events taking place at the same time as the mid-Atlantic snows.

My brother Bill lives near Seattle and he has emailed me from time-to-time about how he has experienced a changing climate out in the northwest.  So I asked him to write a post describing what is occurring:

In the seemingly never-ending search for evidence of global climate disruption that will begin to at least give the skeptics pause, how about Seattle’s winter to-date?   Not only was it the warmest on record, but the old records were smashed.  The average temperature was 47 degrees, compared to the normal of 40.7.  That average temperature was even higher than the average high temperature of 45.8 degrees – January’s actual average high was 51.5 degrees, including one day where it hit 60 degrees.  The lowest temperature recorded in Seattle in January was 35 degrees, making it the first time in history that Seattle never got below freezing in the month of January!

El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Phenomenon - Source: UNEP

Meterologists are chalking this up to the weather phenomenon called El Niño, named after the cyclic warming of Pacific Ocean surface temperatures that change weather patterns.  A typical El Niño results in wet weather for California and Arizona and warm weather for the Pacific Northwest.  However, it also usually results in below normal precipitation for the Pacific Northwest.  This winter January has been wet – 6.71 inches of rain.

Want more evidence?  8 of the last 10 years have seen above-normal temperatures in Seattle, and 3 of those 8 set records for warmth!  That has been hard to ignore…

The heart of the matter for us is this:

We are living in a state of ecological overshoot. We are already living beyond the biocapacity of the planet.  The earth is no longer able to absorb the damage we are doing with our economies of extraction, consumption, and waste.  This crisis is not only economic and political, it is also ’spiritual’ in the sense that it reflects certain values that shape our worldview, frameworks of meaning that fuel the dynamisms of the economic lives of humans.

We challenge those frameworks and their assumptions.  We do this in writing (like this website and my book), in various kinds of presentations and reflection days, and in working with communities to articulate a spirituality of ecological hope, new frameworks of meaning, values, ways of life, that are consistent with what we have learned about our planet and our cosmos, what we have learned about the impact and the place of the human within the story of evolution, within the biosphere and atmosphere of our precious Earth.

Part of our intention here is to create, or foster, in the greater Milwaukee area and upper Midwest a community of folks and a program that begins to articulate this ’spirituality.’ Since hope is not a pie-in-the-sky dream world, but must be based on something real, such a spirituality needs to have roots in a commitment to actually live it.  Embracing a spirituality of ‘ecological’ hope would mean making a commitment to a way of life whose values, frameworks of meaning, and deep reflection would foster the healing and regeneration of the ecology of the whole, the eco-communities in which we live, including the human communities living under great stresses from poverty, injustice, violence, and an aggressive competitive economics of growth capitalism.

(c) What hope might look like

A fundamental aspect of what we do in this project is to help us all recover a sense that we are part of the whole of our ecological reality, that when we overshoot the Earth’s limits, violate the planet’s natural organic integral processes with massively destructive policies of extraction, consumption, and waste, with modes of human development that are disrupting and destroying habitats required to nurture healthy living systems, we are in effect tearing out from under us the ground of our own being.

In the past year, I was privileged to be in many different communities helping to lead interfaith programs, speaking in parishes and at conferences, leading discussions and reflections, that focus on 2 general themes: 1) the roots of the ecological crisis created by industrial and post-industrial societies along with the economic and social values that support that way of life; then, 2) alongside this deepening awareness of crisis, our discovery of the vastness of the universe in space and time and our place within the story of its unfolding.

These two ‘awarenesses’ are at the base of a great deal of disorientation, anxiety, and fear that have become pervasive in our human community.  They describe in broad strokes the dynamics of the great transition in which we humans find ourselves.  They also invite us to delve deeper than ever into the meaning of the human, offering us a path out of the crisis by embracing the truth of this one round finite world of which we are a part and outside of which we do not exist.

Apollo 8 NASA image

These workshops, presentations, reflections are a source of inspiration and energy for this project.  They also keep on creating it, shaping its directions and content.

In 2010 we will, of course, be doing more of this.  We will also be working towards establishing in this area more of a ‘presence,’ a space where this dialogue and reflection can deepen, where the conversation can continue, where together with others here, and with folks from other communities and eco-centers in the midwest, we can challenge the values that have supported the dynamics threatening the life-giving ecosystems of the planet.

For those of you whose spiritual roots lay in the Christian world, JustFaith Ministries in Kentucky will soon release an 8-week module, a course of study and dialogue, based on my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, published in 2008 by Orbis Books, Maryknoll.  I will announce the release when it happens and include information on how you can obtain the materials.  This is coming very soon!

Now, needless to say, like any other non-profit, we depend for our existence on donors.  Our sponsoring organization is the Center for New Creation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.  Your donations are tax-deductible. If you are able to make a contribution to our work this year, please click on the ‘DONATE‘ page.  If you contribute by check, please make the check out to the ‘Center for New Creation.’

Spirituality and Ecological Hope is a work in progress.  It is being created in the process of creating it, with input from many, inspired by the experience and insights shared by the folks engaged in the reflection.  We look forward to articulating this ‘new creation’ further in the year ahead.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Margaret Swedish

[WE'VE JUST ADDED A 'NEWS' UPDATE. CLICK ON THE TAB ABOVE AND FIND OUT WHAT WE'RE UP TO.]

In our last post we reflected on what it means to be part of one round finite world, a beautiful globe that we share with 6.8 billion people and millions of other species, and then the habitat in which all that teeming life is embedded.

The other side of that reflection is how we all share in the planet’s deteriorating condition. Even if we don’t all want to be one, we are one, like it or not. We are one ecologically. That is a biological truth as much as it is increasingly an economic truth. Globalizing industrial society has accelerated this process of the planet’s deterioration and our bondedness in the consequences of that deterioration.

A couple examples:

China air pollution - NASA photo

Pollution blown across the entire North Pacific from the smokestacks of Asia’s industrial belt is responsible for worsening air quality in the western United States, researchers say.

This story appeared in last week’s update from Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet, a favorite website here. The study was reported in the journal Nature and revealed that:

…springtime ozone levels 2 to 5 miles above the surface have risen by 29 percent as Asia’s heavy industry has expanded sharply between 1984 and 2008. Such a surge could only be accounted for by pollutants from Asia that are converted to ozone and carried to North America by strong and prevailing westerly winds…

So, you know, good luck with your pollution control policies out West.

Another example, this story from Wednesday’s NY Times, Courts emerging as battlefield for fights over climate change.

Kivalina is an Inupiat Eskimo village off the coast of Alaska that is being chewed up by the Arctic Sea. Until recent years, the Arctic’s ice blocks protected the coast. Now global warming is drastically reducing the annual ice formation allowing winter storm waves and high winds to rip chunks of coast away from the island. It has also disrupted fishing and hunting patterns that are at the heart of the villagers’ survival. [If you don't see the video, click here]:

Now the people of the village are taking an amazing step: they are suing ExxonMobil, Shell Oil and other fossil fuel corporations for causing the warming that is destroying their community and way of life. Since they are being forced to relocate at an estimated cost of $400 million, they would like those who caused this disaster to pay for it.

You see how we are all connected. After all, who are the customers of these companies? And while we can excoriate ourselves once again for driving our cars, I want to remind us that that is but one small part of our oil use. This disaster also comes from manufacture of all our plastics – our plastic bags and bottles – all that long-distance transportation of products, including food, to our stores, enormous amounts of oil used in the propagation of war, military training, and military manufacture, running factories to produce disposable goods, the pesticides and chemical fertilizers used in our enormous-scale industrial agriculture, and on and on.

Kivalina - Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

In other words, oil companies, yes, at the service of our whole way of life, national security, empire, and more. In other words, we are all responsible for Kivalina. And while it is fine to recycle plastic bottles and bags, they should not be made in the first place. While it is fine to eat, our diets should not support industrial agriculture. While it is fine to buy a Prius (if you are rich enough to afford one), that does not exempt us from responsibility to take political action to change the very basis of an economy and way of life that is destroying Kivalina and a host of other communities all around the world.

The “we are one” mantra is not some romantic spiritual notion; it is a radical call to open our eyes to what is actually taking place all around us in this one round world, everything interconnected and working together – for good or for harm.

Galileo Earth-Moon flyby - NASA/JPL

But when I speak of political action, I do not mean to wait for political parties to do something – I mean all of us taking part in creating a radically new way of life, one that accepts responsibility for the harm that has been done, seeks to quickly reduce the amount of further damage, works to alter the whole political culture around a project based on allowing the planet’s ecosystems to begin to return to health, to regenerate (as the earth will do, you can actually trust that), and end this adolescent state of denial about our place within the fabric of the whole.

We write this over and over:

if we keep tearing away at the fabric of this planet’s eco-community, keep pulling out the threads that hold it together, it will  not  be able to carry life as we know it, and you can be sure it won’t be able to hold this human species, built as it now is upon the dead heavy weight of this industrial and post-industrial growth economy.

We see out west how we cannot be small, selfish, or national anymore. What happens in China affects the air we breathe because the planet is one round world and air flows around that one round world. And global warming impacts us all; our burning of fossil fuels is tearing apart the island community of Kivalina.

The species is in trouble. We are poisoning and destroying one another. Only a global view will help us learn how to live in the truth of the whole within the one round finite world that is our home. At the same time, only a return to life at the most local and simplest will allow that whole to remain intact.