Hate the trees
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Posted on March 9, 2008
Filed Under Justice, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Right? It’s hard not to describe what developers often do to trees as a form of hatred, utter disregard, a complete detachment from any relationship with nature — just a quick track to the bottom line, the quick buck, the profit margin.
So my heart sank as I read this article from the morning’s Washington Post, Treeless Towns Leave Residents Exposed. It’s just stunning. In Northern Virginia, in stark constrast to neighboring Maryland communities, developers just go in and strip the land of trees to make it easier for the houses to go up.
An excerpt from the article:
Losing a big tree means losing a valuable sponge for storm water, a root system that prevents erosion, and a filter that removes carbon dioxide and the precursors of smog.
“You get dirty water, and polluted everything,” said Gary Moll of the conservation group American Forests. In a 2002 study, his group found that the Washington region’s trees contained enough carbon to offset the annual emissions from more than 2,900 cars.
Part of what is so pathetic about the way we humans rip and carve our way across the planet’s landscape is how little regard we have for the life forms all around us. It’s not just about loving trees, it is about recognizing how essential they are for any quality of life on this Earth. Having lived in the DC area for 27 years, I hate to think what summers would be like in a suburban area stripped of trees.
Here in the Milwaukee area, we have a long-running battle going on over the future of transportation. The same developers and suburbanites that have buried southeastern Wisconsin in housing developments are demanding that we pave even more land over with roads for their gazzillion vehicles, rather than be taxed a bit to build mass transit systems.
Where do folks think this is going?
Meanwhile, while some folks still have money for such things, the World of Hurt that we spoke of the other day just gets worse by the day. We will write of this more in our next post, but there is no question that quality of life is diminishing everywhere, and not just because of economic woes. We have overstressed this planet and we are in for some very hard times.
The front page of the NY Times this morning had this aricle, A Global Need for Grain that Farmers Can’t Fill. This is scary stuff. We wrote about this in the book due out next month, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World,’ A Spirituality of Hope,” by blog author and project director, yours truly. We are already living beyond the means of the Earth to support us in the basic needs of life, and that problem is about to explode across the globe and into our lives in ways still hard to imagine.
Our concern is echoed in this article. The Earth’s human population is 6.5 billion and will grow by another 2-3 billion over the next four decades. Almost all of that growth will be in poor countries. In addition, many of the most populated poor countries are also growing economically in leaps and bounds, most notably perhaps China and India.
Now we love our ‘American way of life,’ and so do lots of other folks. Unfortunately, whether or not this is even good for them, they want to eat like us — beef, pork, wheat, corn, soy, etc. Folks want more protein, and there is nothing that devours the natural resources of the Earth quite like animal protein — grains, water, land, and more. Incredible amounts of energy are used and waste produced.
We have harped on the theme of ‘ecological overshoot’ on this blog many times. Here’s what one agricultural consultant says in this Times article:
“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”
Read this article, please, because it is very important to know this stuff. It needs to guide the policy decisions we make from here on out.
Remember that all those people and animals that eat grain are now competing with our SUVs and other vehicles as we plant grains for fuel. Remember that as the price of oil continues to climb, with the added stress of the falling dollar, the price of everything in the grocery store is also escalating.
The Feds, mainstream economists, and politicians want us to believe that our problems, like the global warming skeptics, are cyclical and will go away one day. They are wrong. These problems are structural, and they are also about the growing demands on an overstressed planet.
Some of us have got to start talking honestly about this stuff, and the need, urgently, to create a new, scaled-down, simpler way of life. To witness to the world that everyone can strive to live like us is a lie. To witness to the world that we have a right to hold onto our excess as scarcity spreads across the world is immoral.
As our own economy, our own world of hurt, gets deeper into trouble, we are presented with a critical moment to rethink our values, our faiths, our lifestyles, our ‘way of life.’ There is a way to live through this crisis time that is coming — but not by continuing as we have been, not by clinging to old presumptions about how to live, what success means, what we think our needs are, as opposed to what we really need.
We have to alter old presumptions about how economics work, most of all the end of growth as its rationale, and make way for the emergence of new economics based upon the way in which this planet and its ecosystems actually work.
We still have time to do the future differently, but not much time. And that should get us all rethinking the basic values of our lives.
Technorati Tags: treeless suburban development, hatred of trees, living beyond the end of the world, orbis books, ecological economics, scarcity, american way of life
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We live in a strange world. Ordinary people seem to get it more than those with the most wealth and power, I suppose because the latter profit from preserving the status quo instead of the earth. I don’t understand how they sleep at night.