Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

How’s that title for a little alliteration?  Try to say it ten times real fast.

Okay, but seriously: sometimes it feels like my main job here is to grab up pieces of the picture, fragments that come from this source and that, and then put them together into a frame that highlights our situation.  Climate change-wise, it’s not looking so good.

air pollution off eastern US coast - NASA Visible Earth

So here are three of those puzzle pieces, and then we just sit with them a moment and realize what they are telling us.  A little reality quietly sinks in.  We are not acting fast enough on greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. We are not prepared for what’s coming, even what’s already happening.  We are headed towards disaster if we don’t wake up right now and get moving.  We had better dig deep into our faith traditions and spiritualities for the strength and compassion we will need to address the looming human crisis.  We had better enlarge our capacity for compassion — a vastly expanded spirituality of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) — and in a hurry.

Here are the three pieces that bring me to write this:

From AP:  Scientists warn of ‘irreversible’ climate shifts.  This story stems from a follow-up meeting to the 2007 climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change.  It involved 2,000 ‘climate researchers.’  They are preparing for the United Nations-sponsored international meeting scheduled for Copenhagen in December where governments will again attempt to hammer out an effective treaty on emission cuts — or not.  And they are feeling urgent.

“Hundreds of leading scientists warned Thursday that global warming is accelerating beyond the worst predictions and threatening to trigger ‘irreversible’ climate shifts on the planet.”

Refugees of desertificaiton in Horn of Africa

Then we add this piece from Oxfam America, a report they released in April: Number of people affected by climate disaster up by 54 percent by 2015: Oxfam calls for urgent action; increase could overwhelm current response system.  To view a 6-page summary, go to this link:  The Right to Survive: the Humanitarian Challenge for the 21st Century.

And the third puzzle piece, which I think you will appreciate for where and how it fits into the picture, is this, from the Energy Information Agency, an arm of our Department of Energy:  World Energy Use Projected to Grow 44 Percent Between 2006 and 2030.

Gavin Power Plant, Cheshire OH

You see what I mean.  You almost hesitate to put this puzzle together.

If you watched the news yesterday, you heard the alarming tale that folks living in our U.S. hurricane zones are largely unprepared for the season about to begin — even in our world-after-Katrina.  “It won’t happen to me; it won’t happen to me; it won’t happen to me!”  That seems to be our approach to all sorts of disaster possibilities.

I am not making this up.  This is most of us:

Poll reveals coastal residents not prepared for hurricane season

“The Mason-Dixon poll released Thursday found 83 percent of respondents have made no structural improvements to their homes since last year, 66 percent did not have a survival kit and 62 percent did not have a disaster plan.”

So I ask you, if as a culture the majority of us are not prepared to deal with disasters with which we already have experience, and which could be intensified by the energies unleashed in a warming climate, how in the world will we prepare ourselves to deal with the reality presented by the conjunction of those three articles above?

This worries me a lot.  2015.  The humanitarian crisis described by Oxfam America unfolds over the next 6 years.

On this beautiful spring day in Wisconsin, I urge all of you readers and visiters to become part of the energy that must shift this culture and its values in a hurry.  This is an essential work, and it takes place in churches, synagogues, community halls, schools, neighborhoods, book groups, etc. all across the country.  We must change our people, from within.  We must prepare to live in the real world; not the one we would like to wish away, but the one we actually live in.  That is the venue for any life of faith and meaning.