Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Earlier today someone thanked me by way of the comment function for an essay I wrote one year ago. So I went back to look at it. I found it still so relevant that I want to revisit it here with a link:  Arriving at the End of the Infinite.

Regular readers know that we cannot possibly emphasize this enough:

we have surpassed limits within which me must live if this species is to survive on a vibrant, nurturing planet.  We must move back within those limits if we are to have the possibility of ‘good’ life to offer future generations.

As I wrote one year ago, we live on a round planet, not an infinite linear planet. This closed circle that is our Earth contains all we humans have ever known or experienced – recalling the moving words of one Carl Sagan reflecting on “The Pale Blue Dot.” The question for us really is how bad do we want conditions to get within this sphere before things get really out of hand.

Pale Blue Dot - NASA/JPL

Within this sphere, everything is interrelated. The human mind, consciousness, is not outside that dynamic, it is a ‘product’ of it, one of the emergences that occurred in a long history of evolutionary emergences.  And here we are going about destroying the conditions that made that emergence possible.

Since everything is interrelated, every diminishment of this interwoven fabric that is the dynamism of the planet’s biosphere and atmosphere impacts us not only materially but in our consciousness. Addressing individual sin or salvation, so much the focus of western religiosities, is not going to help us here. Nor is capitalistic or technological hubris that insists we can continue to grow forever, use up more of the Earth forever, and that clever human engineering will save us forever.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

There is an intellectual and spiritual failure here of great proportions. At the very time that we are discovering the wonders of evolution, the long story of the cosmos, our place within that story and within the dynamisms of the planet, we are also realizing the extent of the damage we are doing to our human prospects.

On the 16th, I had the privilege of spending the day with some 35 folks leading us in a process focused on these two threads of the human journey – discovering the extent of our ecological crisis, discovering the breadth and scope of our discoveries of what many call the ‘new creation story.’  In this dynamic we deal with dread and wonder, fear and awe, grief and hope, all at the same time.

This is part of the human condition now. There is no escaping either; both are fundamental aspects of our reality. One of the questions before us is whether we will find the courage to open ourselves to both of these ‘awarenesses,’ and how committed we are to ensuring that this evolutionary path of consciousness and discovery is something we would like to see continue on this planet through the human.  If we want this, then we must live in a way that fosters it.  Wrecking our home, our habitat, our diverse human societies, is most definitely not the path forward.