Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

During my 25 years with the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico, I learned a lot about the economic interconnections that bound us with the reality of our sisters and brothers in the region.  We saw this in the way our tax money supported military dictatorship in Central America and then one brutal repressive side in the long civil wars in the region.  Later, we saw it in the way financial powers used debt to make themselves wealthy and keep poor people poor.  And we saw it in the intimate ties between the cheap goods we enjoy and the cheap labor exploited by the corporations that make those goods.

In our ecological crisis, we face the same responsibility.  How we consume is related directly to the harm, perhaps irreversible, that is being done to this planet.

The Arts section in the Sunday NY Times  had an article about the new film, ‘Blood Diamond,’ which exposes the dirty little secrets about the diamond industry in Sierra Leone.  It describes how some of the entertainers who wear ‘bling,’ who love their diamonds, are beginning to take some responsibility for the suffering of those exploited by companies selling the rocks.

There was a quote at the end from director Edward Zwick, and I thought it a great one-sentence description of the economic responsibility of the consumer.  We could apply this not only to the consumption of goods, but also the checks we write for our electricity usage each month — do we know how that power came to our house?  Were mountains blown to bits and rivers and streams polluted with toxins?  How are the products we consume produced?  What damage is being done all along the way until we put down the credit card?

We may not like the inconvenience of bringing conscience to our purchase of goods and services, but there is another way of looking at this.  We also have a lot of power here, a lot of power to change things, to insist that neither the Earth nor the humans living here be harmed, sickened, exploited, destroyed by our purchase.

Said Zwick:

“Every time you put down your credit card, you are endorsing the way a corporation deals with the way its gets a resource from somewhere else.”

Yes, exactly right.  That is our challenge, our moral dilemma, a path to think our way through to another way of living on this planet.