Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

If you want, and in a hurry.

If you want a liveable world, if you want your kids to grow up not in catastrophe but rather in difficulty that contains hope for a future, live differently –

–if you want, as we said in our previous post, and in a hurry, if you are listening to our scientists.

Blue Marble - NASA Earth Observatory

I just returned from the EarthSpirit Rising gathering at Xavier University in Cincinnati and it was a jolt of adrenaline.  It is comforting and invigorating to be with a couple hundred people who ’see’ the world as it is — the magnificence of creation, and the very real threat we humans pose to the manifestation of creation that is our beautiful Earth.

I am certain that I am not the only participant who found it unsettling to return from this gathering just in time for the release of the new multi-agency report on climate change and its impacts on the U.S. from the United States Global Change Research Program, research paid for with our tax money.  Thank you, government, for using my tax money in such a wise and responsible way.  Is this the report that will finally snap us into action?

NBC did a terrific story on this on last evening’s Nightly News and there have been a few articles in the newspapers.  But this is what I fear will happen — one more time, this alarming news will get buried, simply disappear from headlines and our national consciousness.  Recent polls in fact show that US Americans are less and less concerned about what greenhouse gases are doing to warm the atmosphere and the catastrophes that await us if we continue business as usual.  As this report shows, sadly, these changes have already begun.

See, in this project — articulating a spirituality of ecological hope, and in the spirit of our parent organization, the Center for New Creation — we are pretty certain, as the evidence of my generation indicates, that we will not act in time to prevent disruptive climate change.  After all, we were the generation that created Earth Day and wrote all those books and read all those studies about all the things that were going to unfold on this planet — overpopulation, energy crises, acid rain, toxic pollution, global warming — and then became just about the biggest consuming generation in the history of the human species.

We simply do not want to believe what is happening to this planet.  It remains abstract and seemingly distant, or too big a notion to wrap our minds around. Or worse, we don’t want it to interfere with our upscale lifestyles and expectations.   In fact, we had all the information we needed more than three decades ago to keep us from coming to this moment.

Projected 100-degrees days this century - US Global Change Research Program

So here is yet another group of scientists, some of them among our most brilliant, like John P. Holdren, Obama’s chief science advisor, and Jane Lubchenco, new administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), telling us the situation is dire, serious, the need for action immediate, urgent — and then?  Are we being called to action yet from within our political culture?  Already the coal industry is talking about how we dare not move too quickly for fear of grave economic consequences.  Are you kidding me?  We are facing ecological catastrophe!!!  Read about their lobbying efforts here.

Once again, we are being told that things are bad, but there is still time to keep the worst from happening; and once again we are being told that this requires, however, big changes right now.  When do these messages finally come together in a critical mass that wakes us from our malaise?

We are a species out of touch with the danger we are in within our own habitats.

In a presentation at EarthSpirit Rising, David Orr, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin, one of the keynote speakers, said that it is “too late to avoid trauma,” but “it may or may not be too late to prevent the worst” from happening.

On my way back I stopped to visit my niece who is about to give birth to a little girl who will be my godchild.  The stakes for me are about to get a whole lot bigger.  I figure one of my most important responsibilities to this child will be to offer her every opportunity to fall in love with the natural world, and then to work like crazy to preserve it for her.

So, friends, I am embedding yesterday’s press conference below and urge you to take time to watch it (for subscribers, if the embed doesn’t work, here’s the YouTube link).  And I encourage you to look at the report paid for by us — it is very accessible, well done visually, quite readable. It has sections devoted to how climate change will face specific regions of the country, so you will find stuff all about where you live. In my case here in Wisconsin, what they describe certainly matches our experience in recent years.

Then, here again comes our call to action:

Please, please, be part of the awakening, be part of the urgency, be part of the truth-telling, be part of the ‘new creation,’ the one where we learn once more how to live on this planet — in time to keep it a beautiful planet for my godchild and all the others of her generation-to-come.

Impacts of Climate Chatge - US Global Change Research Program