Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

What I want to talk about today is how we are going to live in a world like the one we have made and keep our integrity.

I feel completely overwhelmed by the week’s news on rising global hunger, the energy supply crisis that is driving up the price of fuel, the new alarms on global climate change, the impacts of our wrecking of the Earth all across this precious planet.

How can it all be happening so fast? But it’s not as if we have not been warned, right?

And then there are our various faith traditions. If you are rooted in the traditions of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, you are well aware of the demands made on the faithful in regard to justice, in the centrality of the suffering of the poor among god’s priorities and our obligation to not only ease it, but get rid of its causes (phrases like, you know, free the oppressed, or, when you do that, or when you feed the hungry, well, that’s Me — and when you don’t do that, well, that’s Me, too).

So, what I want to do today is just share some samples of what I have been reading this week. If you have time, I hope you will click on these articles and give them a read. Let them paint for you a realistic picture of our world, and then let’s have a moment’s reflection.

As a curiosity, let me link a series of articles from the NY Times in the order in which they arrived at my door:

Finance Ministers Emphasize Food Crisis Over Credit Crisis — reporter Steven Weisman writes of how concerns about food shortages trumped concerns about the credit crisis among the world’s economic ministers — “a potentially greater threat to economic and political instability than the turmoil in the capital markets.”

Said Robert Zoelick, World Bank president and former trade representative for the US under this highly conservative Bush administration, “We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It is as stark as that.”

Next: Fuel Choices, Food Crises and Finger-Pointing, by Andrew Martin. The article focuses on the growing awareness that:

our demand in the West for biofuels, like corn ethanol and soy biodiesel, “are driving up food prices and starving poor people.”

No, you cannot get much more stark, or much clearer, about the moral choices we are making right now.

This was a very long article that started smack in the middle of the front page on Tuesday.

Next: On Wednesday, U.N. Panel Urges Changes to Feed Poor While Saving Environment, by Steven Erlanger. It begins:

“Major agricultural countries must urgently change their policies to avoid a social explosion from rising food prices, a panel of United Nations experts warned Tuesday…”

The story is about a new report from the U.N. conducted by over 400 experts over three years. It is entitled, International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, which doesn’t exactly role off the tongue. But crucial reading it is! Here is the link to the actual thing.

One of the experts quoted in this article, Salvatore Arico, says:

“Modern agriculture will have to change radically if the international community wants to cope with growing populations and climate change, while avoiding social fragmentation and irreversible deterioration of the environment.”

A moral challenge if ever I heard one, if Isaiah and the Gospel of Luke mean anything to you.

Let’s go on. Next, from Thursday: The Food Chain - A Drought in Australia, a Global Shortage of Rice , by Keith Bradsher. Now this article really made me depressed, because this one points to an area of the world where climate change is leading to permanent drought impacting the price and availability of grain throughout the world. Thus are the domino effects that will begin to create shortages, chaos, and suffering, starting, as always, with the poor.

You would think our Christian conscience would finally catch up with what this means about how we are living our lives.

And this, friends, comes from today: Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger , by Marc Lacey. Dear readers, look at the photo with this article of the people on the garbage dump. View the slide show. They are scavenging for food! If this has anything to do with our biofuel industry, and with filling up our gas tanks with gasoline mixed with ethanol, what does our faith tell us we ought to be doing instead, what choices we ought to be making?

These are the same people whom I mentioned a few days ago that are reduced to eating mud cakes. This article includes the recipe: “patties made of mud, oil and sugar.” It adds that these are eaten “typically…by the most destitute.” Ya’ think!?!?!

I’m not done. I know this is long, but think of it as a web page with lots of links. That’s what it is. Come back to the page, download the articles, take your time, read these things and share them others. Get out your scriptures and read the prophets and the gospels with these things in mind.

Remember the Stern Report in England, that dire prediction of the economic costs of climate change if nothing is done? Turns out that Lord Nicholas realizes he underestimated what needs to be done by a long shot. Emissions are rising faster than predicted, the capacity of the earth to absorb carbon dioxide is diminishing faster than anticipated, climate change is accelerating beyond recent predictions.

“Lord Stern said that “to minimize the risks of dangerous climate change, the original target for global emissions would have to be doubled to a 50 percent cut by 2050.” What would this mean for the U.S., the world’s biggest CO2 emitter? This would “require the U.S. to cut its emissions by up to 90 percent by then.”

Yikes!! Heard anybody with reasonable plans for that? Heard a groundswell of support for people to alter their lives to make this possible?

You know what else climate change will do? It will create food production problems and shortages that will make the current crisis pale by comparison, if we don’t make some radical changes in how it is produced and distributed.

For instance: Melting Mountains Called a Water “Time Bomb”, from Reuters. Or, Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India, from the Earth Policy Institute (whose website is a gold mine of good info). Or, Colorado River to Drop to 500-Year Low as World Warms, from Bloomberg.

I could go on. You get the point. You see why I worry.

Here’s the moral challenge I can’t get out of my mind, the one that lies at the base of the question — what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis (chapter 9 of my new book - see home page):

Like it or not, the most basic activities of our life, including what we eat and how we eat it, how we travel, what we do for our livelihoods, what we to do relax and enjoy ourselves, how we raise our kids, where we live, how we spend our money, have become loaded with moral weight and gravity. It literally pulls on us with a force we cannot escape. Avoiding it is also a choice about who we are –

— and what we believe in.

I apologize for the length of this and the dense text. But this project aims at articulating a spirituality of hope right in the midst of this crisis. I need your help in that task because this is way too heavy for anyone to carry alone. It requires community and shared vision and shared values. It requires a kind of conversion adequate to the nature of the challenges and the choices that must be made if we are to keep our spiritual integrity in a world of growing hunger and a depleted planet and stresses that threaten the very future of life that emerged from this era of evolution.

Let us hear from you.

[tags] world hunger and rising fuel prices, corn ethanal, biofuels, food shortages, Lord Nicholas Stern, Earth Policy Institute, melting glaciers, water shortages, hunger in Haiti[/tags]

Photo credits:

Woman and child in Haiti, Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti
Austrlia drought, National Geographic News, Photograph by William West/AFP/Getty Images