Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today form Margaret Swedish:

This story makes me so sad — and angry.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) just released a report indicating that 1.02 billion people are hungry in this world right now — 100 million more than last year.

The most recent increase in hunger is not the consequence of poor global harvests but is caused by the world economic crisis that has resulted in lower incomes and increased unemployment. This has reduced access to food by the poor, the UN agency said.

“A dangerous mix of the global economic slowdown combined with stubbornly high food prices in many countries has pushed some 100 million more people than last year into chronic hunger and poverty,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. “The silent hunger crisis — affecting one sixth of all of humanity — poses a serious risk for world peace and security. We urgently need to forge a broad consensus on the total and rapid eradication of hunger in the world and to take the necessary actions.”

We’ve heard this kind of call to action before, and the numbers of hungry just keep growing.

I just have to say this:  it is as immoral as torture or repression that we have an economic system that favors rules of the game that encourage some people to be billionaires  and then protects their right to wealth, as more than a billion people are chronically hungry and have no practically recognized right to eat.  Oh that right is enshrined in many documents, not least of which is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we all know which of these two rights is the one actually recognized in this world.

Photo: United Nations Development Program Sudan

In a world facing growing scarcities now because of ecological overshoot and climate change, there is nothing hopeful in these indicators, nothing.  If human beings still do not know what justice means, if a billion Christians still don’t understand that the Gospel of Luke, the beatitudes and woes, and Matthew 25 are not sweet sayings, but are to be taken literally and seriously as more fundamental to the faith than all the prayers and hierarchies in all the world, then we have a very big human disaster on our hands.

If the prophets no longer reveal the human condition to us but just make us pious and other-worldly, than we have missed their meaning and significance altogether — and I can hear the prophets, and I can hear Jesus, telling us exactly what they think of our forms of worship when there is no justice — when 1.02 billion people are hungry and we are concerned about protecting a system that not only allows these disparities but indeed is founded on them.

You know what I mean:

Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance, that a man [sic] bow his head like a reed, and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?  This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly…, setting free the oppressed…, sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless…  [Is. 58]

Oh, that!  Annoying, isn’t it, these words that haunt us so.

So, Isaiah also says, “Woe to you who add house to house and field to field until no room remains and you are left to dwell alone in the midst of the land” [5:8].  And I come across this article from The Economist reporting that food importing nations are buying up the lands of poor peoples to ensure their own food supply — literally taking the land from the hungry [Outsourcing's Third Wave].  The rich are beginning to outsource farm production.  Governments of poor nations allow rich food importers to grow crops on land leased or sold to them and then to take all the food back home.  Governments get cash; rich countries get cheaper food or access to scarce land; the poor get enrolled in the FAO’s list of the hungry.

Now if you read deep into this long article, you see there are a few things driving this.  One is higher food prices.  And part of what is behind that is the amount of land going into the production of plants for biofuels, palm oil, soy and corn being three of the most notorious and ecologically damaging, and into production of grain for livestock, not humans, as the world’s appetite for meat grows rapidly with industrialization.

Percentage population living on less than 1 dollar per day 2007-08 (Wikipedia Commons)

Another factor is the growing threat of water shortages  — from things like overuse of aquifers, desertification in many parts of the world, climate change that is altering weather patterns, etc. — and the fact that ecologically unsustainable industrial agriculture is ruining growing swaths of arable land because of extensive monocropping, overproduction, and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  Some land is ruined to the point where crops are dependent on these chemical inputs, putting costs of production out of the reach of poor farmers.  And then there’s that particularly sinister development of genetically modified crops that do not produce seeds that farmers can save for the next season, forcing them to buy new seeds each year from the big agriculture corporations (like Monsanto) — another thing the poor cannot afford.

Ecological hope is not real, is pure fantasy, if we are not committed to justice, to an equitable world where all people are able to meet their basic needs by right. There are few things more horrifying as we look to the future of a world of growing scarcities, growing population, and profound ecological stresses, then to think we will try to get through this difficult transition without addressing the reality of poverty, without committing to distributing the world’s most basic ‘resources’ — food, water, energy, housing, land — in ways that are ecologically regenerating and sustainable, and adequate for basic human dignity.

When we speak of living sustainably within bioregions, relying as much as possible on local production systems to meet basic needs, we mean this; we mean this not in some alternative counter-cultural universe on the fringes of society; we mean this in every aspect of the human community – including the corporate world, the financial world, the means of production, our entire human project.  A spirituality that tries to separate out the functioning of the economic world from the ethical and  moral demands of faith is missing the meaning of western religious traditions fundamentally.

Submitting the land and food to the rationale of the profit-driven marketplace, or to the desires and ability of the powerful to store up for the future while taking from the poor what they need to live, has no place within a moral framework or a spirituality rooted in the tradition of the prophets or the gospels.

Nor within a spirituality rooted in ecological hope