Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

First of all, an apology for not posting for a week to all you fans who have missed us!  I have been in a very intense family time, as we go through an enormous transition of letting go our family home 0f 61 years.  Some readers remember that my Mother died last year.

Daughter & Mother - photo by Margaret Swedish

It was an extraordinary dying.  Home hospice — I cannot recommend it highly enough.  But mostly, it was her enormous spirit that carried us through, and continues to do so.

We are dealing here with mortality.  And it has taught me a lot about what is wrong with us, why this ecological crisis just doesn’t make a real dent in our consciousness, why we don’t ‘wake up!’ from the inertia of this culture-gone-so-wrong.  This culture still has trouble accepting the reality of death, of endings, especially of our human creations (like nations, churches, civilizations, capitalism, for example).

If we cannot enter into the dying, into the reality of our mortality, our temporariness, then we can hardly enter into the reality of what it means to be a species among species on a depleted planet.  If we don’t get that we are dust and unto dust we will return, then we don’t get the reality that we do not live on top of Nature but within it, subject to all the limits of the planet and its ecosystems like any other species.

Or if our religion puts us over and above Nature, wherein this world means nothing special because of the promise of heaven for individual souls apart from the Earth from which we evolved and into which we will return, then we are not likely to hold our high allegiance to the realities of this gifted, creative, magnificent, and beautiful planet, or, in other words, our home.

Smog over Lake Michigan, Chicago - photo by Deanna

So, in front of this long holiday weekend, a national holiday sobered by the reality of crisis hovering over the nation (like another nearly half million newly unemployed in June), I want to briefly note once again the climate bill that passed the House and invite readers to work for something better.  This bill is an inadequate lowest common denominator.  Yet, if in the end this mess of a bill that rewards many of the wrong players in the struggle for a livable climate goes down in flames, this would be bad news indeed.  It is a floor beneath which we dare not go. And as this bill goes to the Senate, we must urge Senators to do better, and certainly no worse.

And, can we say this, we must urge our president to do far more than he is doing on this.  This is another example of a critical issue about which he must not be careful, passive, barely engaged.  He must fight for stronger legislation.  His work on this needs to be commensurate with the danger he is good at describing but not so good at selling on Capitol Hill or before the public.

image by Robert A Rhode, prepared for Global Warming Art

I fantasize a speech at least as eloquent and forceful as his speech on racism long months ago.  He needs to educate this public about why action on climate is urgent and necessary, and what happens if we do not take stronger action.  Heck, he could bother to stand up there with the report of his own government in hand, the recently released, Impacts of Climate Change on the U.S., authored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.  He could do a powerpoint presentation with its graphs and charts to scare the heck out of us, to scare us out of our seats and into action.

I have below links to 3 NY Times articles of note, all from yesterday, July 1, which can help make our case:

Adding Something for Everyone, House Leaders Won Climate Bill:  this article describes very well how a more forceful piece of legislation became a hodge-podge of handouts to special interests, but why it is still important.

Climate in the Senate: this is the editorial board’s response and their challenge, laying out issues for the Senate.

Just Do It:  Thomas Friedman’s op-ed on the climate legislation.  It ends with the call to action that inspired today’s post headline.  Friedman’s call is apt and up to the urgency level of this issue:

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.