[No time to read this? You can go right to the donor page!]

Right now, we are working to raise funds because we are in need of them in order to continue – but more than continue, we want to expand, to increase our outreach and program capacity, to move out in some new and exciting directions. The times are simply calling for this and we want to be able to respond effectively and with a little dose of inspiration and encouragement for the challenges ahead.

And they are many. We write before each new post, Fostering Ecological Hope. That is no small task given the tremendous stresses on the natural world that evolved us, holds us, nurtures us with such generosity. Yet despite those stresses (and no small amount of actual destruction and abuse), early in May a dozen or so of us gathered in the cool spring breezes, under the trees and the late afternoon sun in a public park, to spend a couple of hours in silent contemplation and shared reflection. It was a glorious afternoon.

What I mean is this: despite the abuse, despite the damage, there is still so much beauty, still such enchantment within this planet in which we live and move and have our being. And we don’t want to lose that. In fact, we know the human will die spiritually as well as biologically if we lose that.

We’ve been gathering once a month since the year began, forming a little core community for what we call, Centering for New Creation, a little play on the name of our sponsoring non-profit organization. It is healing and renewing for all of us, a time to quiet the craziness of our times and just – stop. The deep listening leads to some extraordinary wisdom and insight shared out of the silence.

In that space we foster ecological hope.

Or on Good Friday, speaking to 140 teenage boys, along with faculty and staff, at St. Lawrence Seminary High School in Mt. Calvary WI – their rapt attention as I presented with photos and graphs the state of our earth and made the case for scaling down our whole consumer culture in order for life as we know it to survive, their magnificent questions and thoughtful responses.

More ecological hope.

Or introducing the film, Journey of the Universe, at an Earth Week event at Edgewood College in Madison and facilitating a discussion on the new cosmology and the ecological crisis, and seeing the dedication and deep commitment of so many activists, students, teachers, and more.

One of the best parts of my work is this opportunity to engage people from so many walks of life, multi-generational gatherings, good decent people wrestling with what it means to be alive at this moment in time when most everything seems to be in transition and not always in a good way.

Why do we ask for your donations? For the work that includes:

1) ongoing research and study of our ecological challenges and the ways in which different communities are trying to meet those challenges, creating the new way of life as the old one based on the industrial growth model crumbles all around us, or crumbles our earth all around us;

2) ongoing work on presentations, workshops, and retreat days so that each one is geared towards the group that has invited me, to match my contribution to their searches, questions, and needs – I don’t have just one standard presentation given over and over again, but try to make these programs as relevant and inclusive of questions and dialogue as possible within each unique community;

3) supporting this website, including the writing of essays “On Meaning and Culture” at least once or twice a week – one of our dreams right now is to raise funds to support a revamping and enhancement of our website to make it more user-friendly, more participative, and inclusive of the larger community with which we collaborate;

4) acting as a point of gathering in the Milwaukee area among those who are inspired by and committed to a new vision for humanity within this planet inspired by the work of new cosmologists, deep ecologists, and various faith traditions, the first step being our Centering for New Creation group;

5) collaborating with other groups and networks in Milwaukee and beyond to help build the connections that are vital to the creation of the ‘new way of life,’ or, echoing the words of Thomas Berry, creating a mutually enhancing relationship between the human and the rest of creation to replace the destructive mode in which we now live.

Examples of this collaboration include: working on the program committee for the biannual conference of Sisters of Earth planned for this July at St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana; collaborating each year with the Peace & International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee on their annual March lecture series, always a success; participating in a sustainability education collaborative that gave birth in Wisconsin but has participants from other parts of the country, now in the process of rethinking and re-creation into the Abundance Collaborative.

Now we do all this work with almost no staff (I work as a consultant to move the project along) and no overhead (most of the work is done out of my little flat). Our budget is small at the moment (we can do a tremendous amount of work for $60,000-$75,000 per year), which means that every contribution makes a real difference, no matter its size.

One of our dreams right now is to build our capacity for outreach. Throughout the Midwest, and the whole country for that matter, are small, vibrant eco-spirituality and eco-education projects, many of them founded by Catholic religious women, and all of them giving evidence of the new life springing up amidst the wreckage of the old ‘paradigm.’ We don’t have a center like that in Milwaukee, but the city could use one – if not a physical center, then at least a point of coordination that could connect with these other communities.

We want to be one of the spiders in those spider webs building the connections, or a weaver among weavers, part of the ecological community that is earth’s response to a time of growing peril. We hope our work can have regional resonance; but we also hope that it can have culture-wide implications and impacts around the country.

Big ambitions for a small operation, so we are inviting you to help make us less small, to help us grow our capacity to build the new community of ecological hope.

Our country is in real upheaval. The competing visions for the future of this nation could not be more stark, a sign of what is at stake as well as of the magnitude of the evolutionary changes underway. How will we do as we approach multiple tipping points – energy demands and population growth, global warming and climate change, reaching the limits of industrial growth leading to vast damage to our oceans and rivers, forests and farmlands, our ability to feed ourselves or have enough water for all the creatures that need it?

The western industrial model of growth is reaching a crisis point even as the demands of the human world are increasing dramatically, and will throughout this century. How will we live through such a time? What earth will we pass on to the next generations? Or, as some have put it so eloquently, what kind of ancestors will we be?

So we ask for your support. Know that your donations will go to enhance this one unique expression of earth’s need for solidarity from one of its most troubled species,  but still a species full of potential, a species from which the earth invites a deeper, more intimate friendship as we seek our way through the crisis to the new way of life.

So for whatever you can offer at this time,  I thank you!

Margaret Swedish

Photos credit: Margaret Swedish

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Visit the donation page to contribute by credit card or by check.

Wounded Earth, Mary Southard, CSJ

Well, okay, not the end of the world. Mayans smile on we poor westerners who interpret their calendar – which indicates that we are transitioning from one era into the other – to mean that next year is some sort of apocalyptic end times. But you know, thinking of the political year coming (and if you live in Wisconsin, you get political season to some mindboggling exponential degree), maybe it is apocalyptic… Batten down the hatches!

That said, the chaos of these political times is certain indication of the end of one era and the emergence of another. Those with power are taking more and more of it as their way of dealing with this transition, while they leave increasing numbers of us struggling, fearful, anxious, on the margins of their world. More and more of our politics is in their hands.

Another way of dealing with it is to engage the transition fully, to embrace it, to ‘go with it.’ In part, we have no choice about whether everything we know is going to change – it already has and the pace of change is quickening. Those with wealth and power can hold on to what they have a while longer, but nothing will escape the forces that are bringing us to crisis. Maybe the question that really divides us is this one: whether or not we will attempt to hold this industrial western-dominated world in place (and only those with the means of power and wealth will be able to play that game), or give way to the change underway, open ourselves to the transition, allow it to shape our lives, and begin to take on in earnest what Thomas Berry called, ‘ The Great Work.’

2012 and the Center for New Creation

The phrase, ‘end of the world,’ has been a favorite of mine for some years now, since using the phrase in the title of the book that began this project, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope.  It’s there in the title because, as I spent 2 years researching and writing it, it became apparent to me that a world was ending – rapidly. Western thought, a Western mode of being, that had separated the human from nature, made the human the center of the universe, the center of meaning, even the singular image of God, that had put that human in charge of nature to use for our benefit, that had made us superior to nature (something like fish being separate and superior to water until – oops, turns out I can’t live outside of the water), but not all humans, really, rather only white Western mostly Christian humans – that approach to life had brought us to the brink of disaster.

Not a little disaster – really big, enormous, catastrophic disaster.

We are reeling from the change that already engulfs us and which will only quicken and engulf us the more. This is not merely an historical era that is ending, or the dominance of one particular culture or empire, as we have known in human history. This is a transition that embraces the whole planet. We are moving into uncharted territory here because what is collapsing is not only the planet’s ecosystems, but a whole framework of meaning deeply rooted in religion and philosophical thought, a belief in the centrality of the human venture that has given meaning to cultures, nations, historical interpretations (many of them grandiose beyond reason).

Center of our galaxy. Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) et al.

Now we know we are just a small appearance in a vast cosmological history that went on long before we emerged and will go on long after we’re gone. And we have found that all our mechanistic manipulations of nature, exploiting it for our use and pleasure, the ingenuity behind industrialization that has brought such a privileged way of life to a small portion of the world’s people, has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse. And we have found that all our assertions of ideological certainty and rigidity and superiority have served to divide the human community in ways violent, destructive, paranoid, fearful, and, well, sad.

The project, Spirituality and Ecological Hope, was created to provide one locus for a reflection on the meaning of these times, to offer programs that encourage people to look at their world deeply, see what is really going on not just ‘out there,’ but also within. This world is a reflection of us. We can work on that reflection all our lives, as so many of us have, but we also need to look within – within our culture, belief systems, our relationships with humans and with the rest of nature, even our beliefs about ourselves and our own sufferings and joys – in order to discover the source of that which is reflected out into the world.

The Center for New Creation is sponsor of this project. Once a vibrant peace and justice organization in Northern Virginia, it now serves to sponsor certain projects that reflect its mission: to work for social justice, help create a culture of peace, and to model a willingness to engage the ‘signs of the times’ with unflinching spiritual courage.

It is that ‘Center’ that we would now like to bring forward as we continue on. We have reflected these past few years on the ecological crisis, what brought it about, what we can do to become sources of healing and renewal within that crisis, and the inescapable link between spirituality and ecology.

What we want to do now is use that foundation to focus more attention to the ‘new creation’ part of this mission. The phrase, of course, comes from Isaiah 65:17-25:

“Lo, I have come to create new heavens and a new earth; the things of the past shall not be remembered or come to  mind. Instead there shall be rejoicing and happiness in what I create…”

The passage is a reminder that the God of the Hebrew scriptures, rock bed of the Gospel tradition, did not intend a world that looks like this one, a world torn by war, hatred, racism, cultural and ethnic discrimination, dominance from those who have added house to house and field to field until they own all the land, vast disparities in wealth, want and hunger and misery and insecurity for the majority of people in the planet, and the rape of the very gifts of the natural world out of which we were created and within which we are deeply embedded.

In 2012 we want to make a transition from one mode of being to another, from one era to another, in our small project. While it remains a central focus to continue raising awareness where we can to the ecological crisis and the links between that crisis and the frameworks of meaning, principles and values that have supported this way of life, we want to focus more now on the meaning and content of new creation. What is its substance? How would we articulate our own hopes and longings as we seek to be part of its emergence? How would we begin to describe concretely what that might look like?

Plans and intentions for 2012

With that in mind, this is the work we hope, intend, plan to do in 2012:

* we will collaborate with others in the Milwaukee area to create a ‘space’ to reflect on new creation, the implications emerging from crisis and the end of the western industrial era, the fears and longings that are often hard to articulate, and from that space begin to describe what a ‘new creation culture‘ might look like and the spiritual ethics and principles that would support that culture;

* we will offer more workshops, presentations, retreats that open that reflection, building on the work we have been doing and will continue to do – looking deeply at the crisis, searching for what it tells us about ourselves and our world, and surfacing what that reveals to us about how to move forward in a time of profound inner and outer transition;

* we will use this website to communicate what emerges from these programs;

* and we will deepen our collaborations with several cutting-edge initiatives:

1. Sisters of Earth: we are working with the program planning committee to help prepare the agenda and process for the next conference in July in Indiana;
2. The New Confluence Project: rather than describe that here, I recommend visiting the website and then contact us if you would like to plan a small gathering to add to this ongoing reflection on what we call, convivial life. The tag line for the project is apt for our little organization, “Communities seeking conviviality through friendship, fellowship and foolish renunciation…”;
3. Midwest Regional Collaborative on Sustainability Education: an umbrella for an inspiring and challenging ‘confluence’ of colleagues and friends, the collaborative is now undergoing transition as it continues to ‘emerge’ as a new creation here in the Upper Midwest. We have learned much from this network and hope to learn a lot more;
4.  Peace and International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee: I have worked with PIIC on their annual Tuesdays in March lecture series, helping to bring issues of ecology to the agenda and the awareness of the faith community. The 2012 focus will be on the crisis of democracy.

I could make a long list. By supporting this project, you enable me to be a part of these groups, to offer my time and energy to support their work, to collaborate with others as we seek together to find our way through the transition, as we do ‘the great work.’

Now let me share with you how we actually do this work. We don’t have an office, we don’t have a staff. I make this work happen from my space at home, this computer, and a whole lot of collaboration. Obviously, with a bigger budget, we could do a whole lot more. What has been a grace, though, is to know how much can get done by paring the project down to the simplest. At least you can be assured that whatever you donate to it goes directly into the work itself. We are one of those small non-profits for whom small donations can make a huge difference.

Whether or not all these intentions can be realized depends on contributors large and small. We would like to grow this project now that we see its potential impact. You can help us in the following ways:

1. by sending a tax-deductible donation;
2. by promoting this website and the project in your communities and networks, linking to our website, adding our website to your resource lists and blogrolls;
3. by inviting us to do programs in your community. Stipends are a major source of survival here. I did many, many presentations, workshops, one weekend long retreat (a very special time to go more deeply into these themes), and many shared reflections in 2011. I hope to do more of that in 2012;
4. by sharing information on potential funding sources, sharing funds and other grant possibilities. We know that we are not a typical ‘project’ for many funders, that we don’t fall neatly into a lot of grantmakers’ categories, that we don’t lend ourselves easily to a ‘goals, objectives, anticipated outcomes’ grant proposal form. Yet we know there are donors and grantmakers out there who share every bit of our priorities, concerns, and hopes. We hope to find more of them.

Blessing and hopes for the new year

Finally, I want to make this bold announcement: the world will not come to an end in 2012. There is no apocalypse on our immediate horizon. We are not going to get off that easy. Life is going to go on right through the crisis and beyond, and our challenge is to figure out how to live through it – to do all we can now to minimize the suffering that will come with the transition and then to dig deep down into the bottomless well of compassion to find what we need there to begin to live the new creation, the new way of life – convivial life – a new era in which the human learns again how to live within the community of nature of which we are a part.

For any support you can give us to help us realize our hopes and dreams for 2012, we would be most grateful.

Peace in this season of hope, and many blessings for the new year.

Margaret Swedish

This is intended for the “News” page, but I wanted all my readers and visitors to see this message. It’s an update on the project, but I find no way to disconnect that update from the urgency I feel – no, more than urgency, let’s be honest, more like fear – over how quickly this ecological crisis is grabbing hold our entire earth community.

In my regular blog posts, I often list articles that may seem disparate, but actually provide pieces of the puzzle of our predicament. As the pieces fall into place, the full picture comes into view.  Today, for example: Why current population growth is costing us the earth, then Snapshots of Poverty’s Surge in the Suburbs, then Drilling in fast-growing areas ushers in new era of tensions, then Worst food additive ever? It’s in Half of All Foods We Eat and Its Production Destroys Rainforests and Enslaves Children. Some of my morning reading.

Part of what it means to commit to a project like this is to face the world as it is, to look at the big picture and try to describe our reality. We believe here that hope does not come from denial of reality or withdrawal from it, but from facing it full on, with courage and faith that we have what we need to find our way through the crisis to a better way of life than this one.

And I do want to make an appeal for donor support for this project. We can’t see a good income stream into 2012, and we need one to keep going. We are trying to do something different here – from activist groups, research sites, advocacy campaigns, e-publications, etc – all of which are crucial contributions to the work of necessary change.

What we are trying to do, well, is what I wrote – put the pieces of our scary predicament together, reflect on how that is shaking every paradigm on which my generation was raised, from the old American Dream to old religious frameworks, from our constitutional democracy to the survivability of the life and ecosystems from which the human emerged and on which we are dependent, a fabric of life now threatened and fraying with breathtaking speed.

Sign at Occupy Milwaukee protest. Photo: Margaret Swedish

We reflect on this ecological crisis in terms of meaning frameworks, of how we talk about meaning in the human journey, what we’re here for, how we experience, see, the reason for being alive at all. We want to get at the ‘spirituality’ that lies beneath that search for meaning, how the world we have created reflects that back to us. Because if we were honest, we would realize that the mirror reflection we are getting right now is one of increasing waste and want, brutal exploitation of the Earth and the human, incredible recklessness with the fabric that holds together our biosphere and atmosphere, a widening chasm between the financially powerful and everyone else, a concentration of global power in the hands of corporations that are wrecking the planet with mindnumbing speed.

And that mirror image reflects what we value, or rather, reflects our values, what we believe, how we understand the meaning of the human and the gift of the planet itself. More than any belief system, it’s the image, it’s what we create and how we live, that tells us where our true values and principles lie, what the content really is within our moral and meaning frameworks

So if our ecological predicament is not a crisis of values and meaning, I don’t know what is. And wherever I have had opportunity to speak with groups about that – the seriousness of the crisis, the narrative that created it (the various myths of industrial society), and how we need to come up with some new ways for humans to live that are commensurate with the crisis, and how we need to do that immediately, as in, right now – which means profound, radical change with no time to waste – when I speak with groups about this, I meet far less resistance than I expected when I first began this work a few years ago. Because deep inside, most of us know this – we know this if we are at all in touch with the world around us.

The world we don't want. Photo: Vivian Stockman

Mostly people get it, and the room becomes quiet at first, heavy, sober, fearful – until the conversation begins and then a burst of creativity begins to come through. We are not happy humans. We know we’re in trouble. Our families and communities are stressed. When you don’t understand the drivers and dynamics that are making that happen, you feel frustration, rage, fear, helplessness. When you do begin to see it, you begin to see what can and must be changed – another way of life begins to appear not only as necessary, but also possible. It becomes a cause that can give new meaning to this generation and those to come.

So what do we do beyond this website?

This past year, I have had opportunities to present to many groups, from middle and high school students in Green Lake WI to a chapter of the Capuchin friars to sustainability classes at Marquette University to leading a retreat at Springbank Retreat Center in SC to Earth Day events in Merrill and Wausau WI, and more. I have been able to collaborate with the Peace and International Issues Committee (PIIC) of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee to bring more awareness of the intersection between our ecological crises and prospects for peace or conflict in the world. One reflection of this was a highly successful lecture series last March focused on corporate control of all the things we need for life, food, water, and energy, why this is happening and what we can do about it. We are already well into planning for the next March series, which will focus this time on threats to democratic governance.

This past summer I again participated as a ‘Wise Elder’ in the unconference of the Midwest Regional Collaborative on Sustainability Education (now undergoing a process of re-envisioning as well as a name change – whew!). This year the collaborative joined with the Alliance for Sustainability in the Ashland/Washburn WI area to create an “Abundance Learning Event,” rich with creative energy and mutual sharing of skills, knowledge, and culture. There is much potential here to be tapped, and next steps in that direction are coming.

I am also collaborating with the network, Sisters of Earth, to help plan their 2012 conference which will focus on ‘deep transition,’ both inner and outer, both necessary if we are to re-create or re-envision the human presence in the planet.

Your support makes possible my participation in these networks. It makes possible my nearly daily research and reading that forms the background for my presentations. It makes possible the time it takes to maintain this site and write at least two posts per week.

The world we do want. Photo: Margaret Swedish

We would like to build this project and its sponsoring organization, the Center for New Creation, so that our contribution to this work can deepen not only here in Wisconsin but as part of a national conversation about the need to articulate the new way of life and the ‘spirituality’ that can support it. New projects are emerging from our work, and we will write more about that next month.

For now, I just want to thank all of you who pay attention to our work, read our posts, make comments, share links on Facebook and elsewhere. There are many ways you can help us out right now:

1) donations for sure, we need them;

2) more sharing of links on your Facebook pages and websites;

3) invitations to come speak or lead reflections in your community;

4) visiting the site, getting more of your friends to visit, so that we can increase our profile on google and in other search engines;

5) by subscribing on line to receive our posts and updates.

This is a long work but also an inspiring one. While it may seem doom-and-gloom at times, my experience is quite different. I know we are headed for difficult times; but what I also get to witness are the many communities already rising to the challenges, often in creative and courageous ways. What we hope we can do here is help bind some of these efforts together into a new narrative that gives adequate expression to the new way of life emerging out of the crisis itself.

I hope you will stay with us on this journey. The company is good, and the work deeply meaningful.

I end with one my my favorite quotes from the great cultural historian, Thomas Berry:

The Great Work before us, the task of moving modern industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode of presence, is not a role we have chosen. It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves. We did not choose. We were chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historical task…we are, as it were, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that is beyond any personal choice. The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role

Yet we must believe that those powers that assign our role must in the same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfill that role. We must believe we are cared for and guided by these same powers that bring us into being.

from The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future, Thomas Berry, Bell Tower NY, 1999

First of all, our world will cross another population threshold this year. In 2011 we will surpass the 7 billion mark, adding another 100,000,000 million or so human beings to the planet. The year I was born, 1949, the population was around 2.5 billion. This is stunning unprecedented growth, and anyone who does not think it is having an impact all across the planet does not understand how nature works.

The good news is that the growth rate is slowing. Back in the 1970s, when books like The Population Bomb were being written, population projections for the middle of this century hovered around 12 billion with dire warnings about mass starvation and famine in the 70s and 80s. That didn’t occur, not yet anyway. At current growth rates, we will probably peak at about 9 billion – and then?

Many ecologists will tell you that the earth can handle 9 billion for a while – but not at current levels of human extraction, consumption, and waste. We must ratchet down the human ecological footprint and fast, and we must forge another type of human economy, if we are to go through this population bubble and keep the ecosystems of the planet relatively intact, or at least able to reestablish a new relatively stable norm.

Of course, that is not our current path, and not the agenda presented by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address.

Secondly, global warming drivers continue to intensify. 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest on record globally. Sea levels are rising and threatening coastlands around the world. Overuse of water and arable land, especially by industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops, is moving us headlong towards a crisis of food access. Desertification is underway over large areas of Asia and southern Europe. The Arctic Ocean is becoming open water for much of the year now and glaciers and ice sheets are shrinking all around the world.

Thirdly, the political culture in the U.S. is as polarized as ever and the November elections resulted in a congressional alignment that is likely to create a period of policy paralysis.

So, given our small project, how can we best contribute towards changing this culture?

First, Spirituality and Ecological Hope is an effort to bring people into a relationship with the ecological crisis by bringing them into relationship with their eco-communities. My presentations focus on presenting forthrightly the state of the planet and the extent of the damage inflicted on it by industrial society. I connect how and what we consume to that damage. Then I focus on what the human place within these eco-communities is and ought to be. We wrestle with the meaning of the human in the context of evolution of species and cultures, what drives us towards catastrophe, what it is inside of us that makes it so difficult to alter this course, and what is awakening inside us that could transform the human presence even fairly swiftly.

Second, we are collaborating with a wonderful group of people here in the Midwest in launching a project we call, The New Confluence Project. In this effort, we will bring together small groups of people over a period of 2-3 days, people who come from different pulses of thought (for example, the work of Ivan Illich,  Thomas Berry, Joanna Macy, Wendell Berry, Chellis Glendinning) to have conversation, to exchange ideas and reflections, to open up a dialogue on the substance and content of what we call ‘convivial life,’ a term used by Ivan Illich in his book, Tools for Conviviality. The idea here is to create clear, accessible, and inspiring alternatives for how to live ‘convivially’ in a world already beyond sustainability and headed towards various forms of breakdown. This is a thread of hope that we want to weave into the fabric of life, a cultural work that gets at some of the frameworks of meaning that block our path towards wholeness and healing, while articulating those that can move us towards a way of life that is, well, frankly, better than this one. We will share more about this project as it unfolds.

We also continue our collaboration with the Peace and International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. Each year, we plan a lecture series, ‘Tuesdays in March.’ This year’s theme is, ‘Threats to Peace: Who Will Control What We Need For Life.’ If you’re in the area, come join us.

The first weekend of March, I will be leading a retreat at Springbank in South Carolina. We also continue our collaboration with the Midwest Regional Collaborative for Sustainability Education.

Meanwhile, we have this other aspect of the real world to deal with. We are a completely donor-based project and the climate for fundraising right now is not exactly great. We could use more hours on this project and a lot more help. We don’t aggressively ask for funds via this website, but I insert a rather fervent request here at the end of our news:

If you are able, we invite you to contribute personally or by way of your communities or institutions to the Center for New Creation which sponsors this project. Your donations are tax-deductible. We do a lot with a very little, so be assured that whatever you contribute will have a positive impact on our work.

We look forward to sharing our ecological hope with all of you.

Margaret Swedish

We are very pleased to announce  that JustFaith Ministries has recently released an 8-week module “designed as a community learning process built around the book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World,’ A Spirituality of Hope,” by blog author Margaret Swedish.

Entitled, Faith Encounters the Ecological Crisis, this 8-week course follows the trajectory of the book, describing the various threads of the crisis and how they combine to present us with a challenge unprecedented in the human experience.  It identifies the ways in which we are already living beyond the biocapacity of the planet and challenges participants to identify elements of a spirituality that can get us through the crisis to a new way of life.  Participants will view several films, engage in small and large group discussion, and meet with several guest speakers as they consider various aspects of the ecological crisis.  Participants will also identify ways to ‘live beyond the end of this world’ with a rich and vibrant Earth community still intact, still able to support life.

For information or to register your group, visit JustFaith Ministries and click on to their JustMatters page.

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MEANWHILE:

What is going on in the Gulf of Mexico is changing everything.  Or at least it should.  I mean, it will, but the question is whether or not this society is prepared for what is necessary, whether we are prepared to make the personal, economic, social, and cultural changes commensurate, or on a scale, with those happening to our planet now.

This project often seems ever-shifting. The reason is that so is the subject of our work – our planetary crisis and how we humans are going about addressing it.  Unlike many other projects, our program is not an activist one – there are so many good groups organizing and mobilizing around various aspects of the ecological crisis and we support them wholeheartedly – it is rather one that seeks to articulate the values, the meaning frameworks and ways of life that are the underpinnings of the crisis, and then what values, meaning frameworks, and ways of life can move us out of crisis towards what Thomas Berry would call a ‘mutually enhancing’ human presence on the Earth.

Mutually enhancing for our eco-communities, the anti-thesis of what we are seeing in the Gulf of Mexico this spring.  What we are seeing in the Gulf is the wreckage of our industrial world. We could point to a thousand other locations where this wreckage is occurring, but few are as emotionally wrenching and as intimate for us here in the United States as is this one.

And we are clearly not getting the message the Earth is sending us.

So the conversation, the reflection keeps shifting to a greater sense of urgency. In May, scientists affirmed that 2010 will be the warmest year ever recorded.  Remember global warming and climate change?  What, does our society think this has gone away just because conservative pundits and local TV meteorologists have dismissed it? No, instead the science grows more certain, and more urgent. Seems the impacts of warming are coming at us at a faster pace than predicted as recently as the 2007 report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

We will continue to seek out opportunities to meet with groups, and to offer workshops and presentations on the crisis and the spirituality that can carry us forward. Just since the start of the year, I have had the opportunity to lecture for a liberation theology honors class at Marquette University, speak at a Sunday forum for the First Unitarian Society in Milwaukee, lead a reflection day for the local spirituality center, the Center to Be, participate in a 3-day meeting/retreat in St. Louis with the Integrity of Creation Committee of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, continue to meet with and offer support to the Peace and International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee, just to mention a few highlights.

I also participate on the leadership team of the Center for Sustainability of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Center, where the focus right now is on connecting farms and schools, healthy foods with inner city communities.

This summer, I will participate in the biennial gathering of Sisters of Earth in the Bronx, participate in the gathering of the Midwest Regional Collaborative for Sustainable Education here in Wisconsin, attend the summer institute of The Well in La Grange IL, speak at a Unitarian Congregation in Illinois – just a few things on the agenda.

And there’s keeping up with this website, the news, and the other writing I’m doing (a new book, for one, in its incipient stages). We are also participating in a couple of internet communities, among them, WiserEarth, an international community of tens of thousands of groups large and small.

So, this is a lot.  I don’t mind saying that we could use financial support right now to ensure that this work continues .  If you are able to help, we would be so grateful.  Just click on the ‘Donate‘ button to make a contribution via PayPal, or to get the address if you are sending a check.

Please let us know what you think of what we write here, what your own thoughts are about our planet’s grave challenges and what spiritual and cultural resources we will need to live through the crisis and create while we are doing so a new sense of the human, of the meaning of the human journey, on this marvelous, resilient, but deeply wounded planet.

Thanks for all you do for the vibrancy of that ‘new creation.’

Margaret Swedish

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