Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

It’s an interesting question. Climate change caused by global warming is likely to increase certain kinds of tensions that lead to international conflict. Among them, land degradation and desertification, water scarcity in areas where drought is expected to spread, permanent flooding of some coastal communities and island nations as ocean levels rise.

One result will be mass migrations as populations leave areas no longer habitable, along with increasing conflict over water, land, and energy sources.

Yesterday, we mentioned that Great Britain has determined climate change to be a security threat and therefore a topic for the United Nations Security Council. Turns out most countries disagree.

One reason, and a serious one, is that many developing nations see the Council as an exclusive club of 15 nations within an organization of 192 member countries. For the majority of these nations, the proper fora for these concerns are the General Assembly, where all member nations are represented, and the UN’s Economic and Social Council.

The UN’s new Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has made global climate change a priority and has proposed the creation of a UN Environmental Organization to coordinate international efforts to address the unfolding crisis.

Meanwhile, the US, at least as currently led by the Bush Administration, doesn’t like any of this, as was made clear once again by US Ambassador Alejandro D. Wolff. The NY Times reports that Wolff reiterated the US position that climate change “must be dealt with in a way that does not effect economic growth and development” — which unfortunately means the continuing rise of greenhouse gas emissions, more climate change, and therefore the inevitable trajectory towards greater international tensions.

The US continues to oppose mandatory carbon reductions and will not participate in international efforts to impose restrictions. China won’t do it if we don’t do it, and on and on to impasse on this most critical issue.

Said Ban:

Projected changes in the earth’s climate are…not only an environmental concern. And, as the Council points up today, issues of energy and climate change have implications for peace and security [as quoted in NYT].

Japan’s ambassador, Kenzo Oshima, seems to concur:

It is clear that climate change can pose threats to national security. In the foreseeable future climate change may well create conditions or induce circumstances that could precipitate or aggravate international conflicts.

But while these security threats loom, it is crucial that international efforts to address global climate change be approached with the broadest participation, especially from those countries and grassroots communities that will be most effected.

It is hard to avoid the most glaring injustice that looms before those efforts, one this country would very much like to avoid — that we wealthy nations in the process of our industrialization and exponential growth in consumption have caused this crisis, and poor nations do not want to have to bear the price of mitigating or correcting the damage we have done — especially with more poverty, death, displacement, the destruction of communities.

The US ambassador expressed perfectly the exact mindset that must be turned around — growth is the problem, not the answer. It is past time when we must learn to live within the real limits of the Earth’s biosphere, that atmopshere in which we live, that made us possible, and which we are recklessly disrupting. Because one day, if we continue the course we are on, climate change will indeed be an international security issue, and then some.

[tags] climate change and international security, United Nations Security Council, global warming, greenhouse gas reductions, Ban Ki-moon, Alejandro D. Wolff, Kenzo Oshima[/tags]