Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

It is time to care deeply about what we eat, where it comes from, the human and ecological costs of every bite.  Food production and shipping is a major contributor to resource depletion, earth degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, and more.

Well, we need to eat, right?  Yes, but how we get our food, and what we eat (low or high on the food chain) needs to be a major focus of the transition to a more earth-friendly way of life.

We are part of earth’s ecology, so the exploitation of the human being is as fundamental to the crisis we face as is the exploitation of non-human life and all natural resources.

What brings this to mind is Bob Herbert’s op-ed in today’s NY Times.  His focus is the inhuman exploitation of workers at the Smithfield meat-packing plant in Tar Heel, South Carolina, where hogs become slaughtered pork (32,000 hogs slaughtered every day) that gets packaged and sent off to our barbecues and dinner tables.

Here is how one worker describes conditions in this plant:

“’It was depressing inside there,’ said Edward Morrison, who spent hour after hour flipping bloody hog carcasses on the kill floor, until he was injured last fall… ‘You have to work fast because that machine is shooting those hogs out at you constantly.  You can end up with all this blood dripping down on you, all these feces and stuff hanging off of you.  It’s a terrible environment.’”

Indeed.

Herbert goes on:

“Workers are cut by the flashing, slashing knives that slice the meat from the bones.  They are hurt sliding and falling on floors and stairs that are slick with blood, guts and a variety of fluids… The processing line on the kill floor moves hogs past the workers at the dizzying rate of one every 3 or 4 seconds.”

This is so, so wrong on so many levels – from the degradation of the human being forced by poverty to do this work (at $8 per hour, this is a high wage for the area), to our attitude towards animals, how they are raised and treated, and then to our alienation from all of this as we happily buy our packaged pork in the grocery store.

It reflects a profound disrespect for life at all levels, a consequence of how we have organized our existence around profit, consumption, efficiency, competition, economic growth, as if these were our true gods.  But god, too, has become alien, outside, over and above, and this god is reflected in this way of life.

If we had an integral spirituality deeply rooted in the earth and cosmos of which we are a part, we could not treat the human, nor any other aspect of nature, with such brutal irreverence.

Ecological Hope is a project of the Center for New Creation.  Tax deductible donations can be sent to the address on this blog.