Think, just think, about how we are living
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Posted on October 28, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Think, yes, stop and think. Think about what is going on in this natural world right now, starting right here in the US. We already live in an altered world and there is no going back now to the old normal. We are going to have to get used to the new normal, except that it is not static; it is changing, rapidly. The new normal will be all about extremes of weather and shifting habitats, and these will change life drastically in coming decades.
And there is also this, a point we have made previously: we are over-consuming the “Earth product,” we are taking more from the Earth than the Earth can replenish. I mentioned in another post that we reached the point of ‘overshoot’ on October 9 this year, and the date gets earlier with every passing year.
Now the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) has issued its new Living Planet Report 2006, and it is grim news indeed.
“The bottomline of this report could not be more clear - for twenty years we’ve lived our lives in a way that far exceeds the carrying capacity of the Earth,” said Carter S. Roberts, President and CEO of World Wildlife Fund. “The choices we make today will shape the possibilities for the generations which follow us. The fact that we live beyond our means in our use of natural resources will surely limit opportunities for future generations that follow.”
As Reuters reported the story last Tuesday:
Humans are stripping nature at an unprecedented rate and will need two planets’ worth of natural resources every year by 2050 based on current trends…
We want so much to believe that somehow we will find a way out of this predicament without having to change our lives here in the US too much. But as an American in this Reuters story notes, it would require five Earths for the people of the world to live as we do here in this country.
Only one country has a bigger per capita ecological footprint than we do in the US, the United Arab Emirates.
And while we cling to our lifestyle expectations here, and this obstinate belief that only a a ‘growth’ economy based on extraction of resources and consumption of disposable goods is a healthy economy, or can “lift all boats,” most of the world is poor and the poor have a right not to live in misery. For far too long we have clung to the belief that what we need to offer the ‘less fortunate” is the opportunity for more consumption, to live more like the privileged classes of the West.
That’s why I keep coming back to this dilemma that is both a moral and ethical one: we need to find a way for humans to begin living within the means of this planet while at the same time allowing the poor the ability to have lives of dignity, to not be poor —
depending on what one means by ‘poor.’
It may be very inconvenient to be born into the generation, the era, that is crashing into these limits, but there we are — nothing we can do about it. And that means we are the ones who have to make the choices, the very hard choices, about how to proceed. We are the ones who will change this, or begin the human die-off, sinking into greater and greater misery around the world while the Earth loses the biodiversity and stable atmosphere that made us possible. We want to lift all boats, meanwhile the Mothership is sinking fast.
Maybe ecological hope lies in getting back in touch with our bodies, our instincts as biological beings. Somewhere inside, we know we are in trouble. Other species know this as well, and many have already gone extinct or are about to, as the WWF report recounts. But we cannot get in touch with this instinct, or our capacity to rise to this challenge, unless we can shut off the noise, stop shopping, start listening to the Earth, to our spiritually impoverished lives, and take on this challenge with all the dignity and courage that lies latent in the human person.
To read the Living Planet Report, go here.
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