Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

They are eating mud cookies in Haiti.

Haiti has been poor, desperately poor, for a very long time. Last week, the desperation reached a boiling point as the price of food rises across the globe. Haiti has always been a unique example of all that can go wrong in a country — years of U.S. supported dictatorship, political corruption, disenfranchisement of the majority of the population, high rates of illiteracy — and such exploitation of the natural resources of the island that it is an environmental wreck, its forests gone, its topsoil washed away, a small nation unable to support its own population, dependent on food imports to feed its hungry population.

Add to that the insult of rising prices for food staples. Why the rise? Because of us and our economies. Because of rising prices for fuel, the switch from agriculture for food production to agriculture for energy production, the looming peak oil and gas crisis, the growing economies in countries with huge populations (China, India, Brazil) who have a growing appetite for beef from the cows that eat enormous amounts of grain.

Then add global warming and climate change which are combining to ruin local economies by altering weather patterns, creating droughts and floods and a whole lot of uncertainty.

As the New York Times points out in an April 10 editorial, the poor have little margin for absorbing these changes — none, really.

Most Americans take food for granted. Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. They are in trouble.

So are the poor in our own country. Food pantries are running low as demand rises in the U.S. (Note: put ‘food pantries in crisis’ in your search engine and see the long list that comes up). Poverty is on the rise here, too, and if you are poor, rising food prices are beginning to really hurt. It all depends on the proportion of your income that goes for food, and we in this country boast some of the most glaring gaps between rich and poor anywhere in the world.

Friends, we are running headlong into one of the worst catastrophes predicted by ecologists looking at the conjunction of trends at work for decades now — climate change, energy shortages, population growth, environmentally destructive ways of doing business, industrial agriculture, and profound inequities in the global economy that are threatening poor states with the potential for collapse — food shortages, growing hunger, starvation, on a scale that humans have never experienced before.

Here’s the screaming headline about this from yesterday’s CBS website: Food Shortages Herald “New Era Of Hunger”.

A New Era of Hunger. This is the world we have made.

food prices have risen 40 percent globally since mid-2007.

Haiti, the poorest country in the northern hemisphere, has been hit especially hard because it imports nearly all of its food, and most people live on less than two U.S. dollars a day.

Unique to Haiti? Not hardly, Noting that the food crisis has become “A Growing Worldwide Problem,” CBS reports:

Haiti’s food problems are, sadly, not isolated to the Caribbean nation.

There have been riots in Bangladesh, Egypt, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal. Rising prices have hit poor countries like Peru (and even developed countries like Italy and the United States).

How widespread is the crisis?

As of December, 37 countries faced food crises, and 20 had imposed some sort of food-price controls. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it’s facing a $500 million shortfall in funding this year to feed 89 million needy people.

Now, people of faith, readers of this blog, here we are, like it or not, here we are in this most affluent country of the most affluent West, faced with one of the most profound moral and ethical challenges ever faced by humans. How we live here has helped create this situation, and how we live from here on out will determine how this era of hunger plays itself out. There is no more escaping this moral quandary, when even the likes of the NY Times, CBS News, the United Nations World Food Program (which is begging for help from member nations), and even the International Monetary Fund note the moral crisis.

What are we going to do? How are we going to live? We live so wastefully here, we not only take food for granted, as the Times says, we over-consume, over-purchase, eat out like crazy, ruin it in our fast food restaurants and packaged, processed groceries, and throw huge amounts of the unused stuff into our landfills and compost. We also insist on getting whatever food we want whenever we want, in season or out, so that many poor countries export food for cash while their people go hungry.

And now we insist on mixing grain oils into our gasoline so that we can continue to drive as we please, be as mobile as we please.

I am haunted by those words preached so often in our churches that they may have lost their meaning — we will be judged by whether or not we fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, clothed the naked, visited the sick and imprisoned, set the oppressed free.

I am haunted by the beatitudes and woes — blessed are the poor and woe to you rich – which have taken on new and urgent meaning in the world in which we now live.

And I am comforted by a spirituality that can inspire a way out, a spirituality of sharing in the midst of scarcity and finding abundance, enough for all – the loaves and the fishes, and Acts 4, the story of how the followers of Jesus laid their possessions at the feet of the disciples to be distributed in a way that ensured no one was without.

These are foundational elements of the early Christian inspiration. How will we live them in this world? And perhaps before that thought, do we even take them seriously?

[tags] world hunger, food shortages, food riots in Haiti, new era of hunger, gap between rich and poor, United Nations World Food Program, loaves and fishes, beatitudes and woes and world hunger[/tags]