Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Prof. John P. Holdren - photo by Tom Fitzsimmons

In one of the more promising moves from Pres-elect Obama on the climate crisis, tomorrow he will announce that Prof. John P. Holdren is to become the presidential science advisor.  Holdren, whom we much admire here, is a physicist and Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.   He is one of our foremost scientists on climate change, or as he prefers to call it, ‘global climate disruption,’ result of the warming of the atmosphere due to human activity since the beginning of industrialization two centuries ago.

Holdren was one of the sources I used for my chapter on climate change in my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World,’ A Spirituality of Hope.  He is one of those inconvenient voices articulating very inconvenient truths about the urgent nature of the climate crisis we face not soon, but right now.  He is one of those inconvenient voices offering the inconvenient truth that we have to start changing our human patterns around energy and land use, and that these changes must be rapid and begin now, yesterday, immediately in order to avoid — not suffering and disruption, which can no longer be avoided – but catastrophe.

As he has said, we must “put on the brakes before [we] go over the cliff.”

And this guy will be sitting at the side of our new president as he determines climate change policy for the U.S.

So I want to say this:  having Holdren at the White House does not guarantee the quick action and policy flips that the urgent nature of the crisis demands.  Other forces in play will be the lobbying of powerful corporate interests, especially the fossil fuel industry, Congress, which has been incredibly resistant to meaningful action, and our public, which will not easily embrace the changes to our lifestyles and expectations that fast action will require of us.

We must work to change the political culture to one that embraces our planetary crisis as its framework for policy.  We must work to change the ethical and spiritual culture to one that embraces our planetary crisis as its framework of meaning, the stage on which we live out our spiritual and moral lives.  We must work to change our religious culture to one that sees the human relationship with and within Nature as part of the essence of the ground of being within which the divine and sacred manifests its Presence — raising to a grave level the moral consequences of trashing and destroying that ground of being for the sake of our human pleasure and comfort.

I want to introduce you to the work of Dr. Holdren, and therefore leave this link to a lecture which he delivered on Nov. 6, 2007 (go to the page and click on the archive file.  It requires RealPlayer).  It is 69 minutes long, riveting, scary, alarming, excellent, compelling.  He presents three options in addressing our crisis: mitigation, adapation, and suffering.

He says that how we do the first two will determine how much there will be of the third.  Adapatation, as some conservatives, business people, and climate change deniers would like us to believe, will not be enough because the nature of the crisis is such that adaptation alone will become increasingly harder and impossible as the climate disruptions become more severe.  At the same time, mitigation requires beginning now to alter our entire way of doing business on this planet because trying to do that when the severity is already upon us will be entirely too late.

So, friends, let’s work with this moment.  Become acquainted with Dr. Holdren’s work and then work to support him, his science, his efforts to begin the process of transforming the U.S. culture towards an ecological, planet-saving, way of being, or, as Thomas Berry and we in his name have said so often, re-inventing the human presence on the planet.

Global warming is a misnomer. It implies something gradual, uniform, and benign. What we’re experiencing is none of these.  We are already experiencing ˜dangerous anthropogenic interference’ with the climate system.  The question we have now is whether we can avoid catastrophic interference.

Prof. John Holdren

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Temperature graph can be found at the Wikimedia Commons