Spirituality of integrity, and also honesty
Share your Thoughts
Posted on April 19, 2008
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Still full of yesterday’s thoughts, I want to add this post for our weekend reflection. Earth Day approaches, a good time to ponder the true nature of our relationship with our planet.
Spirituality encompasses many things. It is an orientation to life, an inner attitude that determines our values, lifestyles, moral choices. It is how we approach reality and then what we do within it. And this requires integrity, as we said yesterday. It also requires honesty — honesty about reality, honesty, most of all, about ourselves.
From there, we engage the world — for good or ill. Right now, this society must become honest about itself, and who we are in the midst of the reality of a deteriorating world, a world where our life choices are having huge impacts on the lives of other humans, other creatures that we need for life, with whom we share this planet, and on the natural wonders/gifts/resources upon which we depend for our existence.
If we don’t do this, we are doomed to a terrible future.
So, at 4:30 this morning, unable to sleep, I picked up the issue of The New Yorker on the floor next to my bed, the Feb. 25 issue, with an article by the excellent journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert. In the article was this factoid from the 2007 statistics of the Bureau of Economic Analysis:
…Americans had collectively amassed ten trillion one hundred and eighty-four billion dollars in disposable income and spent nearly all of it — ten trillion one hundred and thirty-two billion dollars.
Just let that sink in for a second. Let’s put it in numbers: we amassed $10,184,000,000,000 and of that spent $10,132,000,000,000. That’s money after taxes and bills have been paid. That’s the money that drives our consumer culture.
Let’s put this in context. The U.S. population is some 303,000,000, so this averages out to about $33,621 per person in disposable income. Now since millions of households in the country do not even make that much money in a year, have no money after mortgage payments or rent, food, taxes, etc. somebody is spending a whole lot of money.
As a point of reflection, lets go back to those photos from the NY Times website of Haitians at the dump scavanging for food. Most Haitian live on less than $2 per day, or $730 per year. Actually, by this estimate, they did a bit better in 2008 since it’s a leap year - $732.
Now, in this context, let’s ponder our global ecological crisis: increased hunger in poor countries, escalating energy prices, a warming world, climate craziness, population growth that will peak out at an additional 2-3 billion by 2050 — where do you think the onus should be for reducing the human footprint on the planet? Whom should be made to bear the responsibility for getting our world through a couple of generations of severe resource constraints amidst a deteriorating planet?
Wealth generation for the few continues to be a major driver in our planetary crisis. And this reflects a spiritual crisis as much as anything else. Once again, as we wrote yesterday, if you come from the Jewish and Christian traditions, we have scriptures that tell us something about what we are supposed to do — like proclaiming the Jubilee year, like seeing poverty as an offense against the divine, a symptom of something gone horribly wrong, like seeing god’s passionate and compassionate preference for the poor.
Blessed are you poor, woe to you rich — what meaning do these words have in the world we have made?
Now, it is urgent that our political culture catch up with the level of crisis. It is urgent that we work for the social, economic, political changes required to save the Earth from catastrophe and collapse.
In one way, U.S. Americans are beginning to get it, thanks to people like Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and others of us who are writing about these things (see info on my new book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ a Spirituality of Hope, on the home page). A new study conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that nearly 60% of us think that climate change and the energy problem ought to be “top priorities” for Congress and the White House. Commenting on this in the context of the recent Democratic debates in which it didn’t come up is Charles M. Blow in today’s NY Times, All Atmospherics, No Climate.
Americans have awakened to some simple and frightening realities. The earth is getting hotter. The world’s ice is melting. The sea level is rising, and will continue to do so. How much? That’s the question. The answer may largely depend on the course America takes, since we have been the most egregious at treating the air like a sewer for carbon emissions.
So, one more thing, and then I will stop for the weekend. In this context, there is Bush’s new speech on the need to curb carbon emissions. It is hardly worth a mention on a blog that is about meaningful dialogue and change. Bush proposes a new carbon reduction target for the U.S. - to stop growth in carbon emissions by 2025.
Get what he is saying here — not that we will move towards carbon neutrality by then, only a curb on the growth of emissions. Presumably our emissions will continue to grow until then and then plateau at that point. And this modest proposal, which guarantees that the U.S. will continue to make its inordinate contribution towards global warming, has attached to it not single regulation or mandatory measure. It is all on a wing and a prayer.
You get a sense of the high esteem in which Bush’s speech was held over in Paris where 17 nations have been engaged in climate talks — “too little, too late,” they said. Even better, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel dubbed it Bush’s “Neanderthal speech,” and said it reflected “Losership, not leadership.” Not exactly diplomatic language, that. You get the sense that Europe is pretty tired of all this Bush baloney.
Now Europe is not exactly innocent in all this, but they are more responsive. 
European countries moved hugely towards biofuels, despite enormous controversy around the environmental impact, especially in Indonesia where European demand is a major driver in the destruction of forests, which are being replaced by palm plantations for palm oil. But faced with the dual reality — that this production is actually increasing carbon emissions and is a major factor behind the high food prices leading to chronic food shortages, Europe is backing down. You can read about the change in policy in this article from The Guardian, EU set to scrap biofuels target amid fears of food crisis
You see, even with great reluctance, some world leaders are able to change policy in the face of reality.
I want to share one more link with you. It’s today’s NY Times Op-Ed column from Gail Collins, The Fat Bush Theory. Collins uses a great metaphor to expose the fallacy of Bush’s approach, highly entertaining.
Okay, this is what I mean about honesty. Because we must become more honest about what is going on in the world and the role we as individuals and as a society have in it. We need this honesty in order to make the right choices, and very soon, that can save us from the worst sorts of calamities, calamities that could define the context of our children’s lives on to the next generation and the next.
We must alter attitudes, values, a whole orientation towards the world. This begins within but must move quickly to the world all around us. Spirituality is not a private matter – it certainly wasn’t in the Hebrew or Christian traditions. What god called us to in all those stories was an engagement with the world, and the sides we take in that engagement are also as obvious as can be — starting with Isaiah, or the liberation stories, or Matthew 25, or the Beatitudes and Woes, or the story of the rich young man, or Acts 4.
Technorati Tags: Elizabeth Kolbert, bureau of economic statistics, U.S. disposable income, hunger in Haiti, planetary crisis, wealth concentration, jubilee year, neanderthal speech, bush climate change policy, food crisis
Photo credits:
AP photo by Daniel Morel, Haitian girl carrying water, found it here
Indonesia deforestation, mongabay.com
Comments
Leave a Reply
