Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Exceedingly bad news from the Arctic this week.  From the Washington Post yesterday, Report says Arctic temperatures at record highs:

“Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record levels, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts, and reindeer herds appear to be declining…”

Temperatures this autumn are averaging 9 degrees above normal.  And I gotta tell you, less salty water is not good news.  The cool salty water is denser than fresh and as ocean currents move north, the denser water sinks, a key driver in running those currents which have climate impacts all across the planet.

For a very good explanation of how the Arctic affects everything else, visit, The Arctic: Losing Its Cool, from the Environmental Defense Fund.

And, as we have noted many times on this site, ice reflects sunlight back into space, while open water absorbs it. 

Daily Arctic sea ice extent for September 23, 2008, was 4.59 million square kilometers (1.77 million square miles). The orange line shows the 1979 to 2000 average extent for that day. (NSIDC)

The impact of a more liquid ocean includes an acceleration of global warming, a feedback loop which may already be past a tipping point.  To add to worries, the land is also melting, and as the permafrost thaws, the carbon dioxide stored in it will be released, along with methane, another greenhouse gas, adding to the warming of the atmosphere.

I reported some days ago that scientists are alarmed to find that carbon emissions are increasing at an accelerated rate  right now, despite all the world’s concerns about global climate change, and that we appear to be headed towards 11 degrees Fahrenheit of warming this century, a figure firmly in the catastrophic range, according the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Once again, this new study was not done by some left wing conspiracy but by sound mainstream science.   One of the study’s authors is from our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Others are mentioned at the end of this NOAA article.

So while our global economy is headed towards meltdown, so is our planet.  Now, which priorities will we choose — those related to fixing the economy and getting it functioning again — that very economy built upon the wasting of the planet, the one that drives our maladapted way of life — or will we choose to see the connections and take this opportunity to recreate our way of life to something that might slow down this process?

What’s going on in Europe right now is indicative of the problem, as the financial crisis is causing some countries to back away from their commitments to curb emissions because of the cost.

It’s a classic human conumdrum — focus on fixing the crisis of the moment, or focus on saving life on the planet in the longer term (not so long term now, and getting shorter by the day).  If we trade these two off and go for the first, the children in our midst have a terrible future ahead of them.

But that does not mean not attending to the needs of the moment — which means that as we focus on the future challenges, we must do this with compassion and with justice.  The onus of the transition must be on the wealthy, the affluent, those with excess, so that the poor, the marginal, the oppressed among us are not made to suffer and die while we hold on to what we have.

There is no escaping this moral challenge, and the choices get more and more stark the longer we avoid them.

Arctic Ice melt graphic: National Ice and Snow Data Center