Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

The effects of climate change due to global warming (due to human activity) are most often spoken of as a future threat.  But that’s only if you have blinders on.  From buckling Alaskan communities to the threat of rising waters to island nations to the drowning of New Orleans to the floods in Washington State to the drought in the US southwest to the drought in the Amazon to the heat of European summers — climate change is already happening.

If you are in a more affluent nation like the US, you may still live in the dream that it is not happening, that it is off in the future and someone will eventually take care of it. 

If you are a poor person in Africa, it is a different story.

But Africa — poor people far away.  Who cares?  The world hasn’t stopped the Sudan genocide, why would we change our lives for poor farmers and rural villagers who can no longer survive?

Here’s the story that brought my rant to mind this morning.

There is only one process occurring in the biosphere that is making all these things happen, one process that binds us as one humanity and one Earth community.  The progress of our humanity will be evidenced (or not) by whether or not we can make the leap to experiencing this connectedness as an essential aspect of who we are — at the core of our identity as human beings with brains that can think, change behavior, alter values, come up with solutions aimed at the common good of our biosphere and us within it.

Then the people of Africa become our brothers and sisters, united by this common threat, this common crisis.  And when they become our brothers and sisters, we can begin to address our climate crisis, the reality of ‘overshoot‘ (living way beyond the means of the Earth to sustain life), the coming energy crisis, in a spirit of cooperation rather than competition, in a way that redeems life and the potential for life, rather than destroying it.