Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

I just get so discouraged by the political culture.  It’s not like I find my hope in politics; but what I know is that we have to move politics to get done the things we need to get done.  And to do that, we have to bring a new culture to politics.

It would help if folks would just stop lying.  It would help if we could remove deception from the national discourse.  It would help if we could educate the public to be ‘wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ (Matthew 10:16) so as not to be fooled by the deceivers.

You know, we’re talking about spirituality here and how that is connected to ecological hope.  What do we mean by ecological hope?   Even the conservative Pope Benedict XVI gets this and is not afraid to say some pretty straightforward stuff about it (please forgive the regrettable male pronouns):

Earth from Galileo - NASA JPL

Today, we all see that man can destroy the foundations of his existence, his earth, hence, that we can no longer simply do what we like or what seems useful and promising at the time with this earth of ours, with the reality entrusted to us. On the contrary, we must respect the inner laws of creation, of this earth, we must learn these laws and obey these laws if we wish to survive. Consequently, this obedience to the voice of the earth, of being, is more important for our future happiness than the voices of the moment, the desires of the moment. In short, this is a first criterion to learn: that being itself, our earth, speaks to us and we must listen if we want to survive and to decipher this message of the Earth. http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=4697&page=1]

Wow, that’s strong — we must submit to the laws of creation, of the Earth, if we are to survive; we must listen to the Earth if we are to survive.  Too bad most Catholics never hear this stuff at church on Sunday.

So what lies am I talking about?  Well, for example the lies motivating grassroots rage about health care reform (they will kill our elderly! they will tell your doctor not to do your heart surgery! or as the inimitable Rush Limbaugh said, Obama’s plan, and even his health care reform logo, looks a lot like — can you believe this people?!  — Nazi Germany).

Oh, we really are over the edge here.  And we wonder why we can’t get things done.  I mean, it’s one thing to be angry about real things, but about things that are not true?

Coal fired power plant Cheshire OH - photo: Public Justice

Another example: the oxymoronically named American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity hired a lobbying firm, Bonnor & Associates, which hired a lobbying firm, the Hawthorn Group (you see how they cover their tracks here?),  which sent out fake letters to members of Congress, ostensibly from non-profit groups, like a local chapter of the NAACP, opposing proposed legislation to address climate change.  Of course, a ‘bad employee’ is responsible and has now been fired.  Wink, wink.

We have said before that those who would try to prevent this country from dealing with carbon dioxide emissions, the leading cause of global warming leading to climate disruption, are in the kind of moral territory in which the tobacco industry resided for decades as it hid from us the evidence that smoking caused cancer and other lung diseases.

Folks, we just have to get smarter, and perhaps more morally indignant.  It is so discouraging to see a culture in which so many people are knee-jerk responders to fearmongering from people who have vested interests in preserving the status quo for corporate profits — or their political careers — and then to see cable (supposedly) news stations covering this craziness and giving it legitimacy.

Lying and deception are not just annoying aspects of a democratic system of government.  The Bill of Rights may protect speech of all sorts, even abhorrent speech, but that does not mean that what is said and the harm these words can do are not chock full of moral content.

I really believe that we have to start putting far more moral, ethical, and, if you will, spiritual content into these discourses.  It is so easy to relegate these issues to political processes of give-and-take and bipartisan accord.  But the stakes are way too high for business-as-usual.  We ought to expect some real leadership now in moving us out of this suicidal dynamic of ecological destruction.

On the home page, I recently embedded a very edited version of an interview with E.O. Wilson conducted in front of an audience by environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert.  It’s under 10 mins. and worth viewing in terms of those stakes.

Again, we call here upon the religious and cultural leaders of this society, educators and political leaders, to stop equivocating about the crises we face.  Be real teachers and leaders for this nation, now in a great deal of pain because of the pathological course we have been on in the past 2-3 decades — extraction and consumption, debt and credit-fueled consumption, all in a state of collapse now.  This is not time to try to revive a system that is leading us to the brink of disaster.  This is time to create the new way of life that the times require.

To do that, we need to build movements based on truth, facts, and authentic moral and spiritual values.