Signs of an unhealthy society
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Posted on December 15, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
If we are going to be able to address our ecological crisis, we are going to have to make ourselves well — because we are not a healthy society.
I had to smile at this Letter to the Editor in today’s NY Times, responding to an earlier article about the lack of snow for skiing this year, and the economic problems for the owners of ski resorts. As resort owners lament the lack of snow, due in large part to warmer winters because of global warming, they turn to snow-making machines.
The letter-writer, Jeanne Bergman, points out:
Their solution: Fire up the snow-makers that spew tons of greenhouse gases every day, speeding up climate change and hastening the demise of their own industry.
You see how crazy we are?
This same day, the Times had an article about some of the interesting statistics to emerge from the Census Bureau’s 2007 Abstract of the US, “the annual feast for number crunchers that is being served up by the federal government today.”
These statistics are just raw numbers, so one has to be careful about reading things into them. However, they do show that we are fatter than ever, and spending more time isolated and alone while being entertained by our TVs, video games, computers, and all our other high tech toys, or as one Harvard professor notes, “technology has privatized our leisure.”
The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone,” [said Prof. Robert Putnam]. That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should.
I think ecological hope depends upon us sharing information, values, and an outlook about our predicament and what to do about it.
This didn’t enourage me either.
In 1970, 79 percent [of college freshman] said their goal was developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2005, 75 percent said their primary objectives was to be financially well off.
You can see why some of us who were young in the days of the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggles, when we were in the streets and teargas wafted through our cities, sometimes get nostalgic about those times. We were really struggling for something important that was not about our individual gain. How come we have failed to pass this on to the next generation? This may be the singular failure of our baby-boomer generation.
…and one we best do something about, and soon. Aspiring to be financially well off in a world facing severe limits, already living beyond the capacity of the Earth to replenish what we consume, and where the damage we have done, and continue to do, to the atmosphere, the soil and waters that we need to live — well, this behavior bears the hallmarks of a collective insanity rooted in deep denial.
We have lost our moral and ethical bearing. We will spew more CO2 into the atmosphere in the hopeless effort to maintain an economy that cannot be sustained in the long term, because economies of extraction and consumption are leading us down the path to real disaster.
We are overweight, diabetic, spending more and more hours in front of our high tech distractions, spewing more toxins into our air, water, and earth, and worrying about our stock portfolios.
Doesn’t sound like a culture ready to save the planet. That culture will require things like selflessness, a deep sense of the common good, a strong connection to the earth community, among and beyond the human, a profound search for meaning, for “a meaningful philosophy of life” that can prepare us for the challenges we face in this and the next generation.
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we should switch from gas and oil and burning carbon based fuel to using mineral based fuel suchas uranium, nuclear power is the only way we are going to stop gloabl warming.