Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

In light of my earlier post today, I want to make note of the moral weight that lies at the heart of our dilemma.  When we confront the reality of a new hot age and what this will mean for all life forms, including our own, we arrive necessarily at the gravest moral crisis.  Our choices involve radically changing how we live, reorganizing our societies immediately towards carbon-neutrality, giving up much of our current mobility, consumption, and comforts (like having that thermostat always at hand to make our inside environments to our choosing), or participating in the death of our biosphere.

So, drastically adjusting our way of life and our assumptions, or promoting the extinction of billions of human beings and other species.  We may not like the sound of that, but the choice is inescapable. 

Now, I bring this up because of today’s post from our colleagues over at Climate Ark.  The post is about how corporations like Exxon are paying for a campaign to debunk climate science, paying people to be expert skeptics for the purpose of undermining precisely the kinds of studies found in my earlier post, creating the illusion that there is significant scientific debate about global warming and its human-induced causes.

Hmmmmm — James Hansen, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Academy of Science v. Exxon and Exxon-sponsored disinformation.   Tough choice.

The Climate Ark blog post then links to this article with more info on the fake science campaign – how Exxon has teamed up with those experts in disinformation, the tobacco industry, specifically Phillip Morris, to try to invent controversy around the reality of global warming and climate change.   One has to wonder about any corporation (remember, these are actual human beings making these decisions) that would rather hold onto a profit margin than stop massive death.  A moral challenge indeed. 

We don’t always like feeling forced into major life and death moral decisions, and we especially don’t like people making us feel guilty for our lifestyle choices.  But there isn’t a lot of time to soothe our moral sensibilities here, or to take time trying to figure out the soft-touch approach to addressing the crisis.

What we can do to motivate ourselves is to fall in love with our Earth once again, to appreciate that from which we emerged - over millions of years - what made/makes us possible, what sustains us, that to which we will one day return so that other life can continue to be born.  We are shredding that fabric of life, and it is the fabric that holds us.

We can repair it.  There is still time.  How much time is not clear, but we know we are talking perhaps decades, or by some expert accounts, one decade, before it is too late to keep the worst from happening, meaning a largely uninhabitable Earth.  It will be hard, we will have some very rough times ahead, but just think about what we will be a part of — the Earth restoring its balance, working like crazy to maintain a place for rich diverse life, working with us instead of in spite  of us.  It is the greatest moral challenge, but also the greatest human endeavor we have faced.  If that doesn’t give life meaning, a reason to get out of bed in the morning, I don’t know what does.

If we can rise to this challenge, then, as the healing of our atmosphere, our oceans and lands, occurs over time, we humans may still be included in the Earth’s future.

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“This is really not a political issue, it is disguised as a political issue.  It is a moral issue, it is an ethical issue — If we allow this to happen, we will destroy the habitability of the planet. We can’t do that, and I am confident we won’t do that.”

Al Gore, April 7, 2006