Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Maybe this is how we will eliminate hundreds of millions of us over this generation — we’ll simply eat ourselves to death.  You already know, I’m sure, about the epidemic of diabetes that is sweeping this country as we gorge on fast food and our young people drown themselves in soda pop.

Now here is one of the fastest growing exports of ‘modernity,’ of our unbelievably misguided way of life in the corporate capitalist world — yes, diabetes.  This article is about India, but it is about much more.

Reports the NY Times: “…more people worldwide now die from chronic diseases like diabetes than from communcable diseases.  And the World Health Organization expects that of the more than 350 million diabetics projectd in 2025, three-fourths will inhabit the third world…”

Says one expert quoted here, diabetes follows ‘modernization.’   We have literally created a way of life that makes people ill and kills them.  And it is a deeply rooted matter of culture, not easy to address.  We are gaining weight, obesity just about the gravest threat to our health, yet we go on gorging ourselves on the stuff that is killing us.  Now, one has to be in pretty bad shape psychologically, pretty depressed, perhaps, to live like that, not to have the desire for health and energy kick in at some point to counter what is nothing less than a ‘bad food’ addiction. 

Maybe diabetes is a perfect expression of our cultural illness.  It eats away at us, sores fester, limbs need to be amputated, as if we are rotting from within.  It is not a nice death.  Research indicates that there are strong links between depression and diabetes, and I have little doubt that our epidemic of clinical depression and our eating habits are deeply related.   We are not a happy people, so let’s eat.

So, in India, this is what becomes of the people who answer the phone with our computer or tax questions, those who service the corporate global business boom.  They put on weight, they start to eat more really bad food, and they get diabetes.

Here’s another great symbol of the corporate consumer culture — 30 percent, that’s 30 percent, of people over 20 in the US are obese.  What we are doing to our children in this culture is even worse, tragic, even immoral.  We are passing this health crisis on to them at a very early age.  I reference children a lot in this blog because ecological hope — hope itself — is future-oriented, and the future rests with the generations that follow us.  But we are killing millions of our children in the future by this pattern of consumption, what we put into our living, breathing, precious bodies.

As you will read on the first page of this PDF link, what is bringing this about are cultural values.  We made this world, chose it.  We think this is better than living simply and healthily.  But the diseases from inside us are telling us the truth about this way of life.

Is this really what we wanted?  Is this the purpose of the human journey — to drink Coca-Cola and down 1,000-calorie hamburgers and 750-calorie specialty lattes with sugary syrups and whipped cream while sitting in front of our home entertainment centers, or sitting for hours in our cars commuting to work?  Is it?

This pattern of eating is deeply related to other ecological crises, including how we produce food and how the society is organized economically.  Most urban and suburban folks do not have any real connection to food production, to the plants that grow out of the ground.  We consume food as advertised, much of it coming from nutritionally compromised industrial agriculture.  Taste is added artificially, fast food and packaged food drenched in sodium until we want more and more of the worst stuff.

I believe that if we lived again into healthy, vibrant, energized bodies, closer to the natural world, we would look at this culture with astonishment and disbelief that we ever did this to ourselves.