Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Dealing with a deadline for a project, so I haven’t had time to post yet this week.  While I work through that, however, I still follow the significant news regarding our ecological predicament.  So I just want to cite some articles that, gathered together, remind us of the fact that the ecological crisis is not future; rather, we are already in it.  Things are already changing all around us.  Already, familiar patterns of Nature and life are beginning to break down or be altered in ways that will affect our lives.

This is why we insist here that our work is not just an activist, change the world, prevent bad things from happening sort of project.  It is really about learning how to live in the new reality, it is about ‘new creation’ in the midst of the collapse of an old way of being.

A few articles that reflect a changing planet:

Droughts Drain Northern Lakes, by Lee Bergquist.  This is about my part of the world, and very sad.  Our northern lakes are among Wisconsin’s great natural treasures.  Some research suggests a frightening cause: climate change.

Pickerel Pond, The Ridges, Door County WI - photo by E.J. Judziewicz

Lake levels run in cycles, and scientists think the current decline is longer than in cycles of the past.

State Climatologist John Young also speculated that the weather system of the Dakotas that produces drier air might be pushing eastward.

A 2003 study of climate change in the Upper Midwest by the Union of Concerned Scientists raised the possibility of falling lake levels 100 years from now.

Using computer modeling, it predicted one scenario of higher temperatures, lower precipitation and greater evaporation that could cause water levels to drop.

So, this could be the beginning of a permanent change in Wisconsin’s ecosystems and geography.

Here’s another:

Sea’s Rise May Prove the Greater in Northeast, by Cornelia Dean.  I guess Logan and JFK airports have a limited future, along with Wall Street and the coastal communities of eastern Canada.

Another, and here I would make this recommendation: don’t move to the West.

West is Told to Expect Water Shortfalls, by Henry Fountain.  About the Colorado River, which is source of water for seven states:

…under various forecasts of the effects of warming temperatures on runoff into the Colorado, scheduled future water deliveries to the seven states are not sustainable.

Lake Mead in April 09, former water level is visible - photo: Juhn Gurzinski

Not sustainable.  Sounds so tame until you realize what is being said here.  I await word that the western states have halted further development, created severe disincentives for more human migration, and are planning for this very dry future. That would be the sane response, of course.

More:

As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising, by Cornelia Dean.  Wow, this is an astonishingly rapid change in a region’s geography.

How about this:

Rising Calls to Regulate California Groundwater, by Felicity Barringer.  Why? Because farmers in the San Joaquin Basin are draining the aquifer dry in a fool’s project to keep growing crops that probably don’t belong there, to preserve a way of life that has no future.  The aquifer under this part of California is being overused precisely for the above reason — climate change means less water flowing from the Sierra Nevadas.

And here is also revealed what is wrong with us, the unsupportable, unrealistic, hubristic human attitude towards it all:

If he lived in almost any other state in the arid Southwest, Mr. Watte could be required to report his withdrawals of groundwater or even reduce them. But to California’s farmers and developers, that is anathema. “I don’t want the government to come in and dictate to us, ‘This is all the water you can use on your own land,’ ” said Mr. Watte, 57. “We would resist that to our dying day.”

Well, Mr. Watte, that dying day is coming — faster than you think.  We cannot make rain fall out of the sky; we cannot bring the normal snowpack back to the mountains; we cannot make the climate suddenly shift back to the old norm.  This is the new norm, and if we insist on living under the delusion that we are not subject to the limits of the planet, and a planet undergoing rapid change, then we will continue on this path towards disaster.

I will not change.  I will not change. I will not change…

We will change.  One way or another, we are going to change.  The challenge is, how do we want to go through that change? Or as the last chapter of my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World’ proclaims, “what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis?”