Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

[This will be my only post this week.  I will be attending Imago's EarthSpirit Rising gathering this weekend.  More on that next week.]

Look, what is being debated in Congress matters a lot — legislation about our energy future, how to tackle global warming, mind-busting deficits looming in our future, whether we unravel or strengthen our social safety net, oil and gas drilling, guns in national parks, and on and on.

Work on these things, yes, sure, work hard on these things.

Niece in the snow - by her mother

But if you want to live differently, if you want the Earth to remain beautiful, if you want your children to have something other than a terrible world to live in, if you want to live simply, more authentically — well, just do it.  We need to do it.  We need to stop thinking that we can live a truly new way of life only when certain other things fall into place — like it’s safe and secure, and everyone else is doing it, etc.   We need to begin to realize that we are the ones who right now can create the new way of life.

We need no longer, as of this moment, believe that our role in this world is to participate in the consumer society in order to keep people working and the economy functioning.  This economy cannot keep everyone working — that has been clear for a long time and corporations are now making that abundantly clear — and we need a new economy, one that serves the people, one that is at the service of human beings and the ecosystems in which we dwell.

There is more than one project involved in living a spirituality of ecological hope.  One is to dismantle the way of life that has brought us to the brink; the other is to begin to envision and create the new way of life that will emerge in the midst of the collapse of the old.

All over our world right now, thousands upon thousands of creative efforts are underway to explore new models of human existence in a world already in ecological overshoot.  We are already doing the thing that needs to be done.  If there remains a problem in this it’s that our efforts remain too fragmented, too disconnected, to create the critical mass that can tip things — a tipping point in favor of life in abundance, rather than the tipping points that are leading to disaster.

Connect, build bridges, create dialogue across boundaries, share your thoughts, ideas, experiments.  Show your families, neighbors, faith communities, municipalities, politicians that a different world is possible.  Create from this base the energy that can force our policymakers to do the right thing, not the thing demanded by those who finance their political campaigns.

spring sky over Lake Michigan - photo: Margaret Swedish

Let’s believe in ourselves and in our hopes and dreams. We dwell within a magnificent creation, this planet unique in all the observable universe, uniquely suited for life to emerge, and in that life, we humans.  We could lose that — the human part.  We have neglected our home, abused it to the point where it may collapse on itself and on us.  But it has incredible powers of regeneration and healing — if we can stop the abuse.

Essential to that is the living differently — lightly, simply, compassionately, justly, lovingly.

That is the task of the human now.