Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I wish I had seen Greece before the fires. I always wanted to go there — since studying ancient Greek history in college and then Greek philosophers after that.

It has been sad to see so much of the country go up in flames, fires moving so quickly that they overran people trying to flee in their cars.

It is easy to get caught up in apocalyptic rhetoric looking around the world — raging forest fires, deluges of ‘end times’ sorts of rain, record heat waves, clouds of toxic air wafting across the Pacific Ocean from China, desertification laying waste to huge swaths of land in Asia and Africa — and on and on.

So this morning, I thought I’d make links to some articles that help give focus to our worrisome predicament. All these changes are happening so fast now, and we are not keeping up. International and national policies are not keeping up. The faith community and its leaders are not keeping up, given the changes needed, those to which they should be calling us if we are to endure climate changes and extreme weather conditions with a modicum of human decency and integrity.

We have to continually remind ourselves that we in the West, with our capitalist industrialization and post-industrial economic growth, created this situation. The onus of responsibility to ease the crisis — through steep reductions in carbon emissions starting now, and generous support for developing nations to help them adapt to changes that are irreversible while offering the technology to help them develop with as little increase in greenhouse gas emissions as possible — that onus is squarely on us.

And it must happen not just at the level of using different light bulbs and buying hydrid cars, in other words, our individual consumer habits, but also at the level of national and international policy. And this is urgent.

So, here are a few articles to ponder, just from a google search regarding the fires in Greece.

This one is not about Greece, it is about Australia. Frightening indeed. This drought has been going on for a decade. Water for irrigation was about to be shut off.

Of course, Australia joined the US in refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the first — and quite ineffective — attempt to get international agreement on carbon reductions.

This next one, Climate change threatens water supplies for millions, is about drought globally, and how:

…research suggests that by 2050, five times as much land is likely to be under “extreme” drought as now.

Said Sir John Houghton, one of Britain’s leading climate scientists:

“It’s the extremes of water which are going to provide the biggest threat to the developing world from climate change,” he said.

“Without being able to be too specific about exactly where, droughts will tend to be longer, and that’s very bad news. Extreme droughts currently cover about 2% of the world’s land area, and that is going to spread to about 10% by 2050.”

Overall, he said, climate models show a drying out of sub-Saharan Africa, while some other areas of the world will see more severe flooding.

This article is 10 months old. Nothing like a summer such as this to put an exclamation point to his research.

Then check out this article from London’s, The Independent, Extreme conditions: what’s happening to our weather? This one is about rain — deluges pouring down on England, just as the climate change models have predicted.

I was thinking of such things on Sunday when I was stuck in a monumental traffic jam crossing the state line from Illinois into Indiana on I80/94. Took 2 1/2 hours to go 7 miles because all the traffic had to be taken off the interstate onto side highways because of flooding.

A small inconvenience to add to the far larger ones to come.

Finally, from the same newspaper, The world is warming before our eyes. This is scary stuff. I wish I wasn’t terrified, but I am.

We are living wrongly on the planet. And we have little time to figure out how to live rightly. The future is looking pretty grim. We had best start getting an urgent sense of mission about this, get out of our narrow, petty view of things and our own comforts and begin to realize that all of humanity and other living creatures are truly in this together. It’s not like some little pocket of comfort will remain for the affluent. Rather, it’s really about whether or not the affluent are willing to make the necessary large, and I mean large, changes necessary to keep all of us from going off the edge of the cliff together.

All the affluent and the deniers, like the US government, can do, really, is ward off the impacts on their lives for a little while longer. But morally and ethically, how will that really feel for us as we watch people burn in fires, starve because of drought, have their homes and lives washed away by floods?

No, this is not the apocalypse, just the problem of one species that has a problem reacting to its ecological footprint, the one that is coming down hard on the planet and crushing all that we need to live.

[tags] Greece fires, Australia drought, Britain floods, Sir John Houghton, industrialization and climate change, ecological footprint[/tags]