Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Okay, a couple of victories for Mother Earth.  Yesterday, our new Interior Sec. Ken Salazar reversed Prez Bush’s decision to open precious wild lands in Utah to oil and gas drilling.  $6 million worth of lease sales on 77 parcels had already been handed out, but those deals are now off.

Arches National Park - National Park Service photo

The area involved included some 100,000 acres near some of our most precious national parks, including the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and the Dinosaur National Monument.  At least for now, the new federal government recognizes that nearby ecological destruction impacts the ecological wonders of these areas.

Meanwhile, last week Salazar also reversed a Bush decision to open up the entire U.S. Atlantic and Pacific coasts to off-shore drilling.

Isn’t this fun?

In neither case does this mean the battles are over.  The Utah decision involves parcels that are under legal challenge by environmental organizations who are suing to stop the drilling.  39 parcels not being challenged will be allowed to go through.  What will be important is that the Obama administration hold to this decision no matter what happens in court.

On off-shore drilling, Salazar (Obama, too) has not said that off-shore drilling will be banned, but rather that there are appropriate and inappropriate places for it and that the government must balance energy needs with environmental concerns.  While this is a breath of fresh air after the last 8 years, it still calls for vigilance.  Oil and gas industry representatives and lobbyists are going to fight fiercely on this stuff and Mother Earth needs good strong advocates to balance the political clout and money of the industry.

So we will have to keep an eye on this and see what proposals are made.  What we do know now is that we have an administration in Washington that is more responsive to environmental concerns.  Rather than quiet our voices, just the opposite should occur now.  Since we have their ears, we should keep on speaking as loudly as we can for protection of the Earth’s vital ecosystems, the ones required for us to have life at all.

It is time for a new relationship among the human and these systems within which we are completely embedded, dependent, and ‘held.’  Continuing the unraveling, as we have been doing in our industrial and post-industrial era, could lead us very soon to a point where we are no longer held, but dropped like a lead balloon — so to speak.