Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

This will be our one post for the week.  Following the Labor Day holiday, we’ll be back to our 2-3 posts per week pace.  Lots to think about, but there is nothing like a fire of historic proportions to focus the mind.

Station Fire from space - NOAA/NASA

Regular visitors know that we have written several times now about how wildfires will be part of our future (for example). The deepening drought in the west is looking more and more like permanent climate change, according to scientists, as in southern Australia which went up in flames in February. (To see how ScienceDaily predicted more of this 2 years ago, click here.)  The Station Fire in the Angeles National Forest is now being called the largest fire in L.A. county’s history. The peak of the fire season is yet to come, and God help Southern California when the annual Santa Ana winds arrive.

And then there’s the fear of fatal mudslides when rain comes to these burned out canyons, mountains, and ravines.

Meanwhile, the American Geophysical Union released a study in July, before the big fires, showing that wildfires in the western U.S. will increase dramatically between now and mid-century. Among the impacts will be more dangerous air pollution spreading across the West.

By 2055, wildfires in the western United States could scorch about 50 percent more land than they do now, causing a sharp decline in the region’s air quality, a new study predicts. This potential leap in destructiveness and pollution—mainly from an increase in wildfire frequency—is forecast by computer models calculating impacts of moderate global warming on western U.S. wildfire patterns and atmospheric chemistry. As fires and smoke increase, the health of people living in the region could suffer, the study’s authors say.

Smoke from L.A. fires blankets Las Vegas - Photo: Las Vegas Sun

Have you seen the photos of the air pollution in Las Vegas and Denver because of the California fires?  These disasters do have a way of showing us that they are not mere local events.

Just part of the new world we have made.  We will have to make friends with tumult and disaster, learn how to live with them, and most of all respect them. One aspect of our learning how to live differently will be adapting to the new conditions created by the combination of climate change and ecological overshoot. Among those things will be learning how not to live in the places where these disasters are likely to occur — changing our human patterns to the changing conditions. Real estate people, developers, and those who are used to being able to live wherever they feel like it, may not like that, but it would be one sign of a species responding appropriately to changing habitat.

Some of our habitats are changing, friends, a lot!

Before the fires, I was going to post on trash. Climate change is only one aspect of our living wrongly on the planet and other aspects would not change if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow. When we speak of ecological overshoot, we are talking about our human economies of extraction, consumption and waste, and how we are already well beyond the means of the planet to renew, absorb, heal, regenerate all that we take from it and dump into it.

So I just want to leave a couple of links here to news stories that make the waste aspect abundantly clear — and how this, too, is not a mere local problem.

China’s Incinerators Loom as Global Hazard, from the NY Times – what burns in China blows across the skies, with whatever consequences.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Photo: seacat.wordpress.com

This next one is about the enormous garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean — the size of Texas.

As you will read here, there’s another one in the Southern Hemisphere that may be four times larger. Our human detritus, poisoning the oceans far from eyesight, far from our consciousness. Thank you, researchers, for making us look at it.

I could go on with other reflections.  How ’bout our reverence for wildlife — the way we bring the wolves back from extinction only to start shooting them again?  Human hubris and arrogance, the superiority of one species with weapons of obliteration.

Guns, mountain homes, population density in deserts, trash — what is wrong with this species?

On that note, may we all spend the holiday weekend with a little outdoor joy and refreshment, becoming a bit more aware of what is at stake, how insane it is to be destroying so much that is, was, so beautiful.