Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

So much is already destroyed.

Catching up slowly with Ken’s Burns’ documentary series on the National Parks, “America’s Best Idea.”  I’ve been to so many of them, treasures every one.

So last night I was watching the second in the series in which he tells the story of the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California, this once-upon-a-time jewel in Yosemite National Park, for a reservoir to provide water to city dwellers.  The battle to save the valley was fought valiantly by the great John Muir, but he could not win this one.  So the dam was built, the valley flooded.

It’s what humans do to make way for the human onslaught – progress, we call it in America.

It’s that nature-hatred endemic to the spirit of Manifest Destiny — no natural place, no tribes of human beings, no animal life are more sacred than the onslaught of engineered life to pave the way for progress for a ‘chosen people.’

We see it every day.  I see it in the counties bordering Milwaukee County where wealthier folks go to live on the spaces bulldozed and paved over, dug out and powered up, in the service of their very much manifested destinies.

And so we reap destruction. So much damage already done. So much already lost – forever.  I became very depressed reading this article from yesterday’s NY Times, Ecosystem in Peru is Losing Key Ally, by Simon Romero.  It’s about how Peruvians are slowly destroying every single huarango tree, a true wonder of nature, one that has helped make life in the desert around the coastal town of Ica possible. This tree, which can live to be thousands of years old, grows among sand dunes catching the bit of moisture that blows in on the ocean winds.  Roots that reach down as much as 150 feet “tap subterranean water channels.”

They are being chopped down for charcoal. Charcoal is much cheaper than oil.  Soon they will be gone, unless something far more drastic is done to save those that remain. Thing is, climate change is melting the Peruvian glaciers, source of fresh water for tens of millions of people.  Those glaciers could be gone within a couple of decades. So the role of these trees is even greater, the cost of losing them ever higher.  We are talking about areas that could become uninhabitable in short order – like within the generation now being born.

So today I read this, from Earthweek: A Daily diary of the Planet:

A Peruvian scientist told his country’s parliamentary commission on climate change that global warming could be combated by painting highly reflective white paint over rock and ground exposed by receding glaciers.

Sigh…  Not to worry, he says the paint will be ecologically friendly.

‘White paint over the Andes Mountains’ — catchy title for a new song for a new reality.

While others consider spewing particles into the atmosphere to cool it and iron into the oceans to fertilize and create phytoplankton blooms.  Both approaches would amount to experiments on a global scale with unpredictable short and long term results.  Anyway, who gets to decide these things for 7 billion people?

Seems to me that painting the mountains to address the impacts of climate change is a bit like handing enormous profits and enormous grant funds to pharmaceutical companies, research centers, hospitals and doctors to treat our epidemic of cancers, instead of removing from our lives, our Earth, our water, our soil, our food, our air, our household products, the toxic chemicals that are giving us all this cancer.

Would lower the costs of health care as well, but also profits.  Healthier people – poorer corporations and investors.  Can’t have that, can we?

We are going to be spending a lot in lives and livelihoods as part of the cost of what is already gone. I don’t know if there is a better description of a dysfuntional species than one that destroys its own habitat, poisons its own bodies, and when it knows it is doing these things — just keeps right on doing it.

“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”
– John Muir

How many more temples shall we ruin?

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Environmental groups are working to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley. To find out more, click here.