Spirituality and Ecological Hope

[Breaking News 4-17: E.P.A. to clear way for regulation of greenhouse gases.]

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

When people ask me, but where is your hope?  or, more challengingly, do you have hope?  I often find myself drawing a breath, asking if I am certain of my answer.  I have written (in Living Beyond the End of the World, A Spirituality of Hope) that nothing can save us from a very hard time.  We have wasted the planet, have lived way beyond its capacity to support us, and have created a wholly unsustainable way of life with our economies of growth and our massive global industrialization.  Add to this our resistance to accepting the gravity of the situation and the enormity of the changes required of us, and we find ourselves in a very difficult situation.

Milwaukee smog, photo by Margaret Swedish

We have overshot water supplies all across the planet, are depleting irreplaceable aquifers, have obstructed habitats and migration patterns forcing millions of creatures towards extinction, have altered the chemical makeup of the atmosphere bringing about warming and rapid climate changes, have contaminated soils and waters everywhere, and on and on — so that to think we will come up with solutions to our ecological crises that will allow us to get comfortable in an affluent culture again is more than wishful thinking, it is a road to a terrible future.

Now I am only reporting all that.  I am not making it up, nor am I taking a position along the political spectrum by saying these things.  It is not a matter of opinion.  This is what is happening; ecosystems are unraveling, and we have to decide what we are going to do to keep things from unraveling to the point of very big collapses and incalculable losses.

This does not mean, this does not mean, this does not mean that it is too late, or that there is nothing we can do.  But we do have to decide how we are going to live through the crisis time, and, as in my chapter nine, “decide what kind of human beings we are going to be as we go through the crisis.”

Brett Anderson's experiment

That part is still up to us.  Now, by way of example, I want to link here to an article from this morning’s NY Times about the problem of ‘black soot:’ By Degrees: Soot From Third-World Stoves Is New Target in Climate Fight.  Now this soot, which fills the air with dangerous particulate matter and floats all around the globe, is also a potent contributor to the greenhouse gas effect because the soot draws in more warmth from the sun.  As it settles on glaciers, for example, that extra heat exacerbates the melting that is already causing glaciers, a vital fresh water source for hundreds of millions of people, to disappear.  [To view a simple experiment of this principle by meteorologist Brett Anderson at AccuWeather, click here.]

Central America Solar Energy Project

We can replace these stoves.  We have simple technologies for this.  Just one example are solar ovens.  I had a colleague back in the days when I worked on Central America issues who began a solar oven project in the region.  I was an early board member to help get it started.  You can read about it here.  Again, this is but one example.

But it is not easy — for reasons of poverty and culture.  It is crucial that projects like these emerge from the communities where they are being introduced, be sustainable, have good follow through, financial support, and all the rest (the Central America Solar Energy Project is a good example of this process).  Now that means we who are well off need to stop grousing when the international community wants to raise money to support these types of programs.  Part of our new ecological ethics involves taking moral collective responsibility for saving the planet from disaster without grousing about whether or not our taxes are going to go up. No tea parties, please, when it comes to the planet.

At the same time, this does not mean that we expect the poor of our world to be the ones to make all the changes, even with financial support from the international community.  We must make the changes, too, the big ones, the changes in consumption patterns and material expectations and what we consider our comfort levels (because for much of US culture they are way out of whack in terms of what is really needed for a good life).  We must scale down everything about how we live, and support policies that allow more resources to stay right where they are rather than be extracted and produced and exported far away so that we can have endless goods brought to our stores for our US consumption.

You see, hope depends on us.  It depends on us being willing to live differently, more simply and closer to home.  It has been wrong for a long time to take the resources of other peoples to enrich ourselves and increase our comfort; now it is completely unsustainable.

The path to hope is not one I can lay out for you; it is one we make together.  My hope depends on you, as yours does on me.  If I am out here by myself, there is no hope.  But I am not out here by myself; I’m out here in an ever-growing throng of committed people, and as long as that throng keeps growing, then there is hope.  And the more of us who join together to create this sustainable and holy (wholly) new way of life, the more hope there will be.  Each of us an injection of hope as we enter into this “great work” of our time.