Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

[LONG POST AGAIN.  I promise to shorten them from here on out!]

Okay, we get going again now in the new year.  And, friends, we face some pretty stark choices, choices that need to be made immediately if we are going to reverse the course we are on — you know, the one that leads to disaster within this generation.

An urgent geophysical fact has become clear. Burning all the fossil fuels will destroy the planet we know, Creation, the planet of stable climate in which civilization developed.

So says noted climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).  He wrote this in a rather urgent letter to prez-elect Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.

…continued construction of coal-fired power plants will raise atmospheric carbon dioxide to a level at least approaching 500 ppm (parts per million). At that level, a conservative estimate for the number of species that would be exterminated (committed to extinction) is one million.

NOAA CO2 data graph

Some of you may recall that many scientists say that 325-350 ppm is the threshold we should stay below if we are to maintain the balance of the Earth’s atmosphere that made the Holocene era possible, the one in which human civilization emerged and flourished.  We are already at 385 ppm — and that’s just carbon dioxide.  If we add in other potent greenhouse gases, like methane and nitrous oxide, we are in trouble indeed.

The other day, I watched the program, Earth 2100: Wild Weather Ahead, which was shown on Discovery’s Science cable channel starting a year or so ago.  Unfortunately, I cannot find anyway to purchase or view it, or another scheduled broadcast.  So it sits in my DVR.  Why is a show this crucial to our survival not available for mass viewing?

What it describes is what the likely scenarios are for our planet this century if we continue on our fossil-fuel-driven energy course that has created our American way of life and global economy of recent decades.  Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be fascinated by the stories we tell them about a world that will no longer exist.  Extreme deadly heat waves, spreading deserts in the U.S. southwest and huge areas of Europe, Africa and Asia will define a different reality for the next generations.  Australia — prospects are not so good.  Coastal cities will be increasingly inundated and since we did not plan ahead for the retreat from the coasts, the disasters will be something like Katrina, but on a far larger scale.  The Amazon River Basin will be dry Savannah and much of the western pine forests dead or burned because of beetles and wildfire.  Water shortages will grow acute.  Agricultural land will be depleted and food production will be in a downward spiral.

I am not making any of this up.  It’s what the computer models show when current trends are fed into them.  Which is why we best change current trends — in a hurry.

We have choices to make right now that will determine the accuracy of this scenario. One of those choices is to put an end to the way of life that created this crisis. As many have noted — you cannot resolve a crisis by doing the same things that created it.

These are a few of the info pieces sitting here on my desk as I write this:

* Last evening on ABC World News, they offered a report on Glacier National Park that indicates that this natural wonder will have not a single glacier left by 2020.  Does that year sound futuristic?  Eleven years from now.  The story: National Treasures, Melting Away. To view it, go here, click on World News in the top menu, go to “Recently on World News,” or Sunday’s show, then scroll down to the story.

* How about this one?  Early last year a team of scientists concluded that we are moving out of our current evolutionary era, the Holocene, into a new one, the Anthropocene.  The Earth will be marked forever by the footprint — and damage — done by the human.  The Earth is already altered forever.  Now we must figure out how to live in this new Gaia reality — to continue the destruction, or withdraw our footprint so that the Earth might regenerate in a new balance, one that might even include the human.

* Or this, from an article entitled, Climate code red – the case for emergency action, which I found at Science Alert: Australia and New Zealand:

They say a 2 degree increase is likely to initiate feedbacks in the oceans and ice sheets that could take us past critical tipping points, including the loss of Greenland and the West Antarctic. Other effects include the possible extinction of 15“40 per cent of plant and animal species, dangerous ocean acidification, widespread drought in Australia and other continents and the failure of agricultural crops in many countries.

But 3 degrees would be worse. It would likely see the loss of the Himalayan ice sheet, exposing billions of people in Asia to severe food and water shortages, within decades. The Amazon could collapse and burn and large areas of Earth’s land surface could be rendered uninhabitable by drought and heat. Drought intensity in Australia could triple.

Clearly, none of us would want either of these scenarios, yet it’s what we may get if we base our targets on what is economically bearable.

What is economically bearable…  In other words, if our noble leaders try to bring down dangerous levels of CO2 without making decisions that are economically unbearable, we will be on a fast track to catastrophe.  Try to sell that economic program!!

* One more, and then to those choices we must make in 2009.  Determined to destroy as much of our planet as possible to make way for development, the Bush people are using the US Forest Service as a tool to open millions of acres of mountain forest in Montana to developers.

I get heartsick thinking about it.  Have you been to Montana?  You see, up there in the north of the state is one of the most beautiful places on the continent, the now mis-named Glacier National Park.  And now the state is slated to greatly accelerate the housing and commercial development that is a large part of our ecological crisis.

So, what to do?  This year, we will enhance our focus on articulating the new way of life required to get us and our beloved planet through this crisis time.  But here are a few things that must happen if we are to do that:

I.  We must cease the use of coal as quickly as possible as a source of fuel.  This will mean great disruptions in our way of life and we must learn to welcome that disruption as part of the great human adventure.

II.  We must stop the destruction of wilderness, migratory paths for birds, animals, butterflies, and more.  We must pass stringent laws to stop the US Forest Service from land grabs by developers and corporations.  We must be willing to change our whole approach to the concept of private property and replace it with a concept of the global commons, the spaces the Earth needs free of humans in order to keep our life-sustaining ecosystems flourishing.  Time to take back the right of developers to despoil our precious natural resources!

III.  We must stop traveling so much!  We must be willing to pay taxes on our fossil fuel usage.  We must be willing to spend public money on alternative clean transit systems.  Let’s start by supporting a carbon tax! Let’s make it very expensive to keep driving our gas-guzzling cars, to fly in airplanes, to spew greenhouse gases into our atmosphere.

IV.  We must sharply curtail defense spending and stop using war as a tool of foreign policy.  The waste in fossil fuel, greenhouse gas emissions, and environmental wreckage is beyond imagining.

V.  We must scale down our lifestyles in the U.S., do everything we can to keep our policymakers from using consumption as a way to get us out of our economic crisis.  We must reinvent our global economy, replace economies of growth with ecological economies with an emphasis on ensuring that the most basic human needs are met without depleting the planet for future generations.  We can start by revamping the agriculture industry, ending subsidies for industrial agriculture, and building bioregional food systems.

VI.  It is critical that we slow population growth.  Few ways of doing this are more effective than education and empowerment of women mixed with the availability of reproductive services.  These priorites should be essential elements of domestic and foreign population programs.

You know, we could make a long list.  But let’s start here and see what we can do to get the conversation going where we live, in our local communities, families, neighborhoods, and places of worship.  Get folks fired up.  This is for the future of our children and grandchildren.

I promise future posts will be must shorter.  We have lots of work to do.  It begins with us!

**  For more reading: Tell Barack Obama the Truth – The Whole Truth