One last thought before the elections

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Posted on November 6, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Ecology of war and peace

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Yes, one last thought — but not from me, rather from Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Jane Smiley.  Her article: The end of the world as we know it?

If Americans had started taking the meaning of oil dependence seriously in 1977, when Jimmy Carter asked us to, or had not ridiculed the idea of climate change in 1992, when Al Gore brought it up, we might have gotten a start by this time in reducing emissions, we might not be looking at one horrific disaster paving the way for another.

Seems to fit my previous post — we have already squandered three decades and still we take no meaningful action.  We can blame Cheney, and we can blame the political and corporate culture that put him in this position — and that culture includes us. It’s not like Cheney and Bush (Condie Rice, too, formerly of Chevron) are just stupid and if they just knew better they would change.  This is who they are, the choices they have made for their lives — and ours.  Do we have the courage to do the work, and make the changes, necessary to remove from them their power over the fate of the world? 

They feed on our fear, our longing for material possessions and comfort, our sense of entitlement about our lifestyles, our willingness to be lulled into believing that everything will be okay if we just recycle more and change our light bulbs (please do these things!!).

Taking this power from their hands rests not just in voting for somebody else, but in removing from our lives our dependency on the fossil fuels that are the sources of their wealth and power.  It means living drastically different lives, with a very different set of values, sources of joy and meaning, reasons to get out of bed in the morning.

Is this the end of the world as we know it?  Actually, it is.  But what that new world looks like depends on us and the choices we make now.

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