Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

War is the great Anti-Hope.  And we have more than enough of that in the world. Did we need more, or bigger? Will that finally gives us the illusion of security in a very volatile world?

Source: Foreign Policy Association - Children's Blog

Because illusion is all it will give us — like the death penalty, or bigger more secure prisons, or giving everyone the right to carry concealed weapons, or torturing foreign detainees.

Does this resolve the BIG fear — that life is out of our control, that tumultuous things can happen any time and upset our world — or not — and that we cannot make ourselves exempt from this reality of our creation?

Or are we waging war to try to assert a point of view about the world, to prove a point about ourselves?

Meanwhile, another quick review of some of the troubling context in which this decision to wage more and bigger war is made:

Mankind Using Earth’s Resources at Alarming Rate – please, if you read none of the other links, read this one.

…if humankind continues to use natural resources and produce waste at the current rate, “we will require the resources of two planets to meet our demands by the early 2030s,” a gluttonous level of ecological spending that may cause major ecosystem collapse…”

Is there something else we could be doing with $35-$50 billion per year? And that’s just for one of our wars!

How many planets do we need to continue to live like this? - Source: InfoGrafik

Biodiversity Loss Is Earth’s ‘Immense and Hidden’ Tragedy, Darwin’s ‘Natural Heir’ Warns – mindboggling and accelerating extinction rates.

At the start of the Neolithic period – about 9500BC – scientists estimate that species were becoming extinct at a rate of 20-30 per year. Since the population explosion of modern humans, that is estimated to have increased to 20,000-30,000. Most have never been documented by scientists. And in a couple of decades, Wilson reckons this will have increased to 200,000-300,000.

And this from same article:

“We don’t hear as much public concern, protestation and plans by political leaders to save the living environment. It doesn’t get anything like the attention the physical environment has,” he said.

No kidding – but lots about war, national security and how we dare not tackle these ecological threats until the economy turns around – you know, the very same economy that is wrecking the planet.

Soil and Peak Food – this is important and seldom shows up in even the progressive journals and websites:

“Many factors may contribute to ending a civilization, but an adequate supply of fertile soil is necessary to sustain one. Using up the soil and moving on to new land will not be a viable option for future generations. As odd as it may sound, civilization’s survival depends on treating soil as an investment, as a valuable inheritance rather than a commodity – as something other than dirt.”

Right, but for some it is much more than dirt, it is future profits in an increasingly hungry world.  To wit:

Land grab: Will Africa’s farmland become a ‘resource curse’? – This is really not the direction we want to be going in if we care about feeding a burgeoning population.  But empires have always used food as a coercive force.  So who will buy up the world’s arable land? Who do we want controlling production and prices?  Because as food scarcity grows, whoever controls agricultural production will have a great deal of power.  We need to think about that – a lot.

But do read to the bottom of this Grist article.  While some are trying to steal the food the world will need for their own profit or ‘food security,’ others are trying to return the right to food sovereignty to poor countries, communities, and farmers, for example, Will Allen and Growing Power, a favorite of this website.

2009 Hunger Map - World Food Program

Finally, here’s a link to an editorial in Nature magazine, Costing the Earth, about biodiversity loss, how it is rooted in a deeply flawed economic model, making reference to ecologist Garrett Hardin who once said, “individuals who consume a shared resource according to their own self-interest are bound to destroy it.”

If the economic model is flawed, is based on this sort of individual consumption of what we and other species need to live, then something we have revered in this culture as a birthright, an entitlement, is coming to an end, or must be brought to an end.  We must fundamentally alter the model of economies based on the individual consumption of the commons we share (water, soils, air, habitats) and start thinking about models based on sharing in a way that allows for constant renewal and regeneration of what we need to live — and put to rest once and for all the expectations that go along with that old model – including how we measure the meaning of a human life.

Would that this was subject of a national discourse!  Because, in the end, nothing else will matter if we fail in this.

Maybe this is how we can begin to counter the great Anti-Hope.

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How much of our planet holds arable land?  Check out this webpage with a clever flash presentation of exactly that, and an emphasis on the US, from American Farmland Trust:  http://www.farmland.org/Flash/appleEarth.html