Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

[I GO TO ST. LOUIS THIS WEEK FOR A COUPLE OF SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS,  SO THIS WILL BE MY ONLY POST UNTIL MONDAY. THANKS FOR VISITING.]

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  Hope we all had a little quiet time to think about those things for which we ought to be grateful — and I don’t mean our Black Friday purchases.

Can you believe this new cultural phenomenon — one that cost a couple of people their lives?  What is wrong with us?  Surely we can appreciate that this business of lining up in shopping mall parking lots right after our family dinners to go bursting into stores for Christmas “deals” is pathological at best — not only for the shoppers but for the retailers and news media who have created this annual frenzy.  How alienated can a society be?  When did we lose the meaning of being human?

Other story for the day: we are officially in recession.  Actually, the announcement means that we are allowed now to say that we are in recession, and have been for one full year.

On Sunday I drove from Omaha back to Milwaukee in this winter’s first big snow storm in the upper Midwest.  Ten hours in falling snow (took me 8 hours to get there on Wednesday).  It was beautiful and challenging.  When I hit northern Illinois and Wisconsin, I was in a real storm — wind and heavy wet snow.  Wow!

So, to what can I compare this news of the recession?  It would be a little like someone dialing me up on Sunday, as I was maneuvering around snow plows and trying to see the road, the flakes near blinding in my headlights, to tell me it was snowing.

It is snowing indeed, a world of hurt for millions of people.  We are living in a time of crisis.

Will this economic crisis — unprecedented, really, in its scope and in the combination of economic recession and the collapse of the financial system — wake us up or or scare us back into recreating the world that brought us to this moment?

Remember our ecological crisis?  Remember climate change?  Remember our debt-financed over-consumption of recent years?

How we’ve been living is what has brought us to this moment of crisis.  We cannot get out of it by attempting to reconstruct a global economy based on extraction, consumption, and waste already far beyond what the Earth can sustain, in other words, by attempting to return to business-as-usual.

Floods in Brazil - BBC photo

While the economic crisis absorbs our attention, along with the massacre in Mumbai — another indication of humans gone mad, this time with religious and ethnic hatred — hundreds of people have been killed in Brazil because of a rampage of water from the skies that seems to have no end.  Even the president of the country, Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, has been publicly praying, asking God to stop the rain.

Meanwhile, Venice has been inundated with near-record high tides that has folks walking the streets in water up to their knees.  A coastal city under threat from rising seas. Remember that story?

How ’bout this one?  In my old haunts, the state of Maryland, Northern Virginia, the area around Washington DC, oak trees produced no acorns this year.  Got that?  NO ACORNS! Folks are seeing starving squirrels scavenging trash cans.  Oak trees - no acorns.  Some think it’s global warming.

Are these disasters due to climate change?  Who knows.  As we say so often, just more extreme weather in the news.  The Australian drought.  The California drought and the wildfires. The bark beetle killing the entire pine forests of the mountain west. You know, a long list.

We are mesmerized by all the disasters.  At the same time we hardly notice them anymore.  And then millions of us are blinded by the inches worth of shopping deals that appear with our newspapers in the morning.  What matters that Brazilians are being buried in mudslides, even if caused by the global warming that we and this global economy have created, even if caused by the greenhouse gases spewed into our atmosphere from the products we buy, the shipping of those goods to the stores in your neighborhoods, and blah, blah, blah.  Why am I trying to spoil your party?

Cultural pathology.  An inability to see the danger we’re in.  Like a drug that has desensitized us, shut down our bad feelings, we cannot ‘feel’ the real nature of the crisis.

Well, I s’pect if you’re reading this, you were not in line at the big box stores before dawn on Friday.  If you are reading this, you probably already know we are living in crisis.  So my question, or challenge, for those of us gathered around this community of Ecological Hope, is:

how do we begin to take real leadership in showing our culture the way out of the behaviors, economies, fake or empty human aspirations, and loss of profundity in the meaning of the human, that have led us to the crisis — and will again, but worse, if we can’t begin to carve out a different path, inspired by the real meaning of the human within the story of Creation?