Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

The National Academy of Sciences [NAS] just released a study showing that the environmental costs in the US as a result of the burning of fossil fuels is some $120 billion a year. The main cause is air pollution leading to premature deaths.

air pollution wafting off east coast - NASA photo

Okay, the dollar figure is impressive, but let’s get out of our heads for a moment and think about those deaths.

Deaths. Of human beings. Heart attacks, lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases, asthma, etc.

Think about these actual human beings.

Now, here’s the other thing.  This study did not take into account the costs as a result of climate change (too hard to quantify, they said), or the impacts of escalating prices of food as farms shift from growing food to growing fuel, or the emissions that come from ships, trains and planes. So one thing we know is that this study underestimates the true costs to human beings in this country and to the planet from the burning of fossil fuels.

From the Times:

Nearly 20,000 people die prematurely each year from such causes, according to the study’s authors, who valued each life at $6 million based on the dollar in 2000. Those pollutants include small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.  (Matthew Wald, Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions).

20,000 human beings, with families, friends, colleagues — just think of the real human cost here. Think of the costs to our health systems, which we all pay in high insurance premiums.

By the way, ethanol and electric cars do not come out well in this study, so let’s make sure we don’t go there.  I know my midwestern farm states are demanding more support for ethanol production, many having hitched their futures to this ecological horror, but we must tell our legislators at all levels — do not go there.

Now one purpose of the study was to measure what are called in capitalism ‘externalities’ — costs that are not figured into the prices we pay for the product, costs not taken into consideration when companies do business.  For example, 500 Appalachian Mountains blown to bits and hundreds of streams and rivers poisoned by the practice of mountaintop removal coal-mining are ‘externalities.’ No one pays for this destruction in cash, only in a diminished planet for all.

[To learn more about MTR, visit http://www.ilovemountains.org/]

Milwaukee smog, Sept. 5 2009- Photo: Margaret Swedish

So one argument this study makes is that we should all be paying more for energy — which will probably not be the most popular argument in this time of economic disaster. But while the prices we see on our energy bills look like the prices we pay for energy, in reality we are paying exorbitantly in a thousand other ways for our energy delivery system — in health costs and death costs and loss of rich abundant ecosystems and precious habitat for living creatures, like humans, for example, and in the future of our children and their children’s children who will be living on this depleted, poisoned planet.

The NAS study is pricey to buy, but you can read it online for free here.

Just another reminder that the fossil fuel industry is permeated with ethical and moral issues it would like to avoid.  When they tell you it is more important to sacrifice 20,000 U.S. human beings each year so that they can fuel economic growth and industrial expansion, when we unquestioningly go along with this because we don’t want the inconvenience of shifting away from this industry as quickly as possible, with all that will mean in terms of altering our lifestyles and expectations, then we are complicit in this.

And this is just U.S. human beings. Imagine the global human cost. And then think about the contaminated soils and waters, the devastation to ecosystems, habitats for living beings, and we are talking here about some very serious moral issues.  In fact, they just don’t get any more serious than this.

But we just don’t feel it while we’re powering up our iPods and watching our plasma screens in our air conditioned houses. If we don’t feel it, it must not exist, right?

Coal-fired power plant, Cheshire OH - Photo: Public Justice

Coal — once again at the top of the list of planetary abominations.

So, what do we cherish, and what are our priorities? Uncomfortable questions.  Make all of us squirm a bit. But the industrial nightmare, the horrors of our economies of extraction, consumption, and waste, are not going away. And we will have to decide – as I wrote in the last chapter of my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World’ — what kind of human beings we are going to be in such a world. I’m rooting for us to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and start making some better decisions.