Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

NASA photo

Yesterday I went for a viewing of “Waterlife:   The Story of the Last Great Fresh Water Supply on Earth.”   It was hard to get out of my seat when it was over – 90 mins of unrelentingly bleak news about the Great Lakes, one of the world’s natural wonders.  Hard to express the privilege it is to live near the Lake Michigan shore, to be able to walk out the back door of my beat-up little flat and across the park to take in its beauty, which I do nearly every day.  Hard to take in the extent to which it is poisoned, its old biodiversty ruined forever, new threats arriving nearly every day — from industrial pollution to ocean vessels to beach developers and home-owners to the agriculture industry and more.

And because our bodies ultimately are one, what is happening to the lakes is happening to our bodies. We who rely on its waters are threatened every day by these destructive forces.  We are drinking contaminants that water systems cannot filter out — like anti-depressants, endocrine disruptors, estrogen, antibiotics and more.  We take these things into our bodies, we eliminate them, we flush them down the toilet back into the lake.

Industrial pollution around Green Bay - Photo: Michigan Sea Grant

Governments protect the polluters with lax regulation and even laxer enforcement. Global warming is leading to increased evaporation contributing to lower lake levels. Exotic invasive species have overwhelmed the original ecological community of the lake.  As the lake recedes, one shore-owning family says that at least the beaches are getting bigger, and one of their children exults, “We love beaches!”  And you can’t help but hang your head in despair.

The Great Lakes there for the pleasure of rich people who can ‘own’ –  unbelievable- — ‘own’ some of its shore.

We are just such a sick culture.  We have lost all our moral, spiritual, and biological moorings within the natural world – a world abundant and generous beyond reckoning, and we so ungenerous and grandiose that our very lifestyles amount to daily insults back to the gift-giver.

I wanted the film to cheer me up in the end, but beyond telling me that I can do something, without telling me what exactly, it gave me little in the way of hope, my biggest critique of the film –  except by way of a most inspirational image.  Throughout the movie, we see an indigenous woman whose people have lived by the lake for countless generations, whose people have watched the sacrilege that is industrial society kill off their fish, contaminate their waters, chop down the trees and living things for developments.  So she takes a bucket of lake water and some tobacco leaves and starts walking, her intent being to walk all along the shores of the lakes, to speak to the water, bless it with the leaves, to be in her intention a healing presence in the midst of the destruction.  She walks with deep purpose as if everything depends on her walking this path — and it probably does.

She is the better part of us.

Lake Michigan shore last March - Photo: Margaret Swedish

I could weep today — for my lake, for the people of the Samoas (I know this was earthquake and tsunami, I also know how much worse these events will be for communities living along the sea as oceans expand because of warming), for the 2,000,000 people of the Phillippines whose homes went under water during the recent typhoon, and another storm possibly on the way.

While these stories eventually recede from the news, the event being over for all intents and purposes as far as we are concerned, I think of what life must be like around Atlanta amidst the muck and mess and loss that followed the 20+ inches of rain the other week, and of what life will be like in Manila and the surrounding area for years to come because of the recent disaster.  Heck, even here we have lost any sense of what Cedar Rapids has been going through since it went under water last year, or how New Orleans and others in the delta area are doing since Hurricane Katrina.

For the people directly impacted, after disasters like these, life changes forever – a whole lot of misery, a whole lot of grief.

We are going to be in a world now of disaster after disaster on a planet suffering deep wounds and insults from our industrial and post-industrial way of life. I don’t know how to soften that message because that is not my job. But because of the name of this project, we are here to be a source of hope. But I can’t give that; it is not in my power.  Hope is not some fuzzy reassurance that everything will be okay. Hope is something that comes out of action and work and commitment — and I don’t mean action and work like in our workaholic culture, including the workaholism that pervades the social change culture. I mean a fundamentally different way of life.

We don’t need to mimic all that is wrong in the culture to bring about change, and therefore hope. We need to begin living a new way of life, one that starts undermining the foundations of the culture by opting out of it. Meaningful action will come out of such a commitment, not after.  Organizing as communities of love, mutual respect, simple sharing, honoring the earth community and the humans within it, being ‘forces’ of peace in the midst of violence, building communities of resilience to help us through the inevitable breakdowns that are coming, being prepared to help one another through the hard times, learning to rely for meaning on the quality of our spirits and our relationships, not on consumption and the sham of ‘individualism’  (which does not exist anywhere in the universe) — all of these things are paths out of despair into a far more meaningful life than the culture of destruction for human profit and pleasure has to offer.

So I will go down to the lake today to both mourn it and cherish it, and to promise one more time that I will do my best to do no more harm to these waters, or my planet, my precious Earth home.

Lake Michigan in winter - Photo: Margaret Swedish