[I GO TO ST. LOUIS THIS WEEK FOR A COUPLE OF SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS,  SO THIS WILL BE MY ONLY POST UNTIL MONDAY. THANKS FOR VISITING.]

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  Hope we all had a little quiet time to think about those things for which we ought to be grateful — and I don’t mean our Black Friday purchases.

Can you believe this new cultural phenomenon — one that cost a couple of people their lives?  What is wrong with us?  Surely we can appreciate that this business of lining up in shopping mall parking lots right after our family dinners to go bursting into stores for Christmas “deals” is pathological at best — not only for the shoppers but for the retailers and news media who have created this annual frenzy.  How alienated can a society be?  When did we lose the meaning of being human?

Other story for the day: we are officially in recession.  Actually, the announcement means that we are allowed now to say that we are in recession, and have been for one full year.

On Sunday I drove from Omaha back to Milwaukee in this winter’s first big snow storm in the upper Midwest.  Ten hours in falling snow (took me 8 hours to get there on Wednesday).  It was beautiful and challenging.  When I hit northern Illinois and Wisconsin, I was in a real storm — wind and heavy wet snow.  Wow!

So, to what can I compare this news of the recession?  It would be a little like someone dialing me up on Sunday, as I was maneuvering around snow plows and trying to see the road, the flakes near blinding in my headlights, to tell me it was snowing.

It is snowing indeed, a world of hurt for millions of people.  We are living in a time of crisis.

Will this economic crisis — unprecedented, really, in its scope and in the combination of economic recession and the collapse of the financial system — wake us up or or scare us back into recreating the world that brought us to this moment?

Remember our ecological crisis?  Remember climate change?  Remember our debt-financed over-consumption of recent years?

How we’ve been living is what has brought us to this moment of crisis.  We cannot get out of it by attempting to reconstruct a global economy based on extraction, consumption, and waste already far beyond what the Earth can sustain, in other words, by attempting to return to business-as-usual.

Floods in Brazil - BBC photo

While the economic crisis absorbs our attention, along with the massacre in Mumbai — another indication of humans gone mad, this time with religious and ethnic hatred — hundreds of people have been killed in Brazil because of a rampage of water from the skies that seems to have no end.  Even the president of the country, Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, has been publicly praying, asking God to stop the rain.

Meanwhile, Venice has been inundated with near-record high tides that has folks walking the streets in water up to their knees.  A coastal city under threat from rising seas. Remember that story?

How ’bout this one?  In my old haunts, the state of Maryland, Northern Virginia, the area around Washington DC, oak trees produced no acorns this year.  Got that?  NO ACORNS! Folks are seeing starving squirrels scavenging trash cans.  Oak trees - no acorns.  Some think it’s global warming.

Are these disasters due to climate change?  Who knows.  As we say so often, just more extreme weather in the news.  The Australian drought.  The California drought and the wildfires. The bark beetle killing the entire pine forests of the mountain west. You know, a long list.

We are mesmerized by all the disasters.  At the same time we hardly notice them anymore.  And then millions of us are blinded by the inches worth of shopping deals that appear with our newspapers in the morning.  What matters that Brazilians are being buried in mudslides, even if caused by the global warming that we and this global economy have created, even if caused by the greenhouse gases spewed into our atmosphere from the products we buy, the shipping of those goods to the stores in your neighborhoods, and blah, blah, blah.  Why am I trying to spoil your party?

Cultural pathology.  An inability to see the danger we’re in.  Like a drug that has desensitized us, shut down our bad feelings, we cannot ‘feel’ the real nature of the crisis.

Well, I s’pect if you’re reading this, you were not in line at the big box stores before dawn on Friday.  If you are reading this, you probably already know we are living in crisis.  So my question, or challenge, for those of us gathered around this community of Ecological Hope, is:

how do we begin to take real leadership in showing our culture the way out of the behaviors, economies, fake or empty human aspirations, and loss of profundity in the meaning of the human, that have led us to the crisis — and will again, but worse, if we can’t begin to carve out a different path, inspired by the real meaning of the human within the story of Creation?

This week we give thanks for the gifts of life, the generosity of our Planet Earth, which has provided us such abundance — flowing waters, rich soils, air to breathe, diversity of life, and the experience, uniquely human, of beauty.

Thunderstorm - NASA - photo by astronauts

All of this now endangered by this one conscious species, Homo sapiens sapiens, among whom are the millions who see not beauty but “resources” to be exploited for human gain.

That is our flaw, our failing.

So this week we invite you to join us in renewing our relationship with the life story that made us possible.  We bow down to this beautiful Earth with the humility of a species coming back home, like the Prodigal Son in the New Testament story, asking forgiveness for the wild time we have had at its expense, with so little thought for the future, so little respect for the intimate relationships that surround our every moment and movement, the milieu in which we dwell — the air we breathe, in and out, part of the constant recycling of the Earth’s atmosphere, for the plant, animal, insect life that keeps the balance in which we exist, for the soils and waters once rich, abundant, and pure, but that reflect now the ill health in our own bodies and spirits.

We have been in an abusive relationship.  We come home and ask forgiveness.  We promise not to do this harm anymore.

We give thanks for the abundance.  We pledge to live simply, with a soft footprint on the planet.  We promise to go outside more, turn off the technology from time to time, take walks, feel the snow falling on our eyelashes, taste the unprocessed foods produced without abuse of the life forms we consume, to feel the Earth beneath our feet, the crisp freezing air in our noses, the touch of soil, flowers, fruit and vegetables — the touch of our children, those precious living forms for which we seek the renewal and regeneration of the abundance of the planet, so that they, too, may know its wonders.

In this time of growing scarcity, may we also increase the space of generosity and compassion in our hearts by a vast amount. May the solidarity many feel for the planet translate also into solidarity within the human community, marked as it is by such profound inequity and injustice. May we see in the suffering of the poor among us a reflection of the state of our own spirits, an indictment of our way of life, a moral challenge in regard to the decisions we make from here on out about the human project on the planet.

Rainbow over Chicago - photo by Deanna

We have many reasons for hope. But hope must be reunited now with a spirit of gratitude, of humility, simplicity, compassion, and a sense that all of us are in this together. If we can begin to live out of that, then there will be much for which to be thankful from this generation on unto the next, and then the next, and then the one after that….

A blessed Thanksgiving to you all!

——————————–

Photo credit:

Thunderstorm - Visible Earth, NASA, Earth Science and Image Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center

Online Zine of the project, Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Vol. 1, No. 1 - November 2008

Contents:

Introduction
I. Seeking a Spirituality of Ecological Hope, by Margaret Swedish
II. Abolishing Intensive Livestock Agriculture: A Global Imperative, by Dr. Richard H. Schwartz
III. Our mistakes are abundant, our responsibilities great, by Maya Rose Goldman

Introduction

We have named this first issue our of our online Zine for the book I wrote, published earlier this year by Orbis Books, Maryknoll NY: Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope. In many ways, the book provides the framework for how we approach the topic of ecological crisis and ecological hope - except for one thing. In the book, I return to my Christian roots and traditions to draw out the themes and insights that can help us begin to articulate a spirituality of ecological hope. On this website and in this project, we try to glean from many faiths and traditions to help enlighten us, to clarify the predicament in which we find ourselves and to illuminate the path that can get us out of this predicament.

What is our predicament? We are living far beyond the means of the Earth to support current levels of human consumption. Right now we need 1.4 planets to support the human project.

Is this Earth's future? National Geographic image

To support the lifestyles of U.S. Americans for all the people of the world would require 4-5 planets.

We have only one, one magnificent, precious planet, and it is in grave trouble.

We insist in the book that we are not speaking of optimism, but of hope, even hope against hope, hope in the face of evidence to the contrary. The journey through crisis to hope in ecological terms rests with how honest we are about the ‘end of the world’ that is coming, indeed the end times already begun.

We are not speaking here in religious apocalyptic terms, about ‘end times’ as many evangelical and fundamentalists believers would proclaim, of raptures and an exclusive salvation for the born-again. Rather we speak here of the end of a particular world, the world in which we all grew up, the world that shaped our expectations and identities here in U.S. America. It is a completely unsustainable illusion that our way of life, built as it is upon consumption and endless wealth generation (for the few of our world, of course), can go on forever. It is the fate of our generation that we have come upon the planet’s limits.

We are depleting the planet of all we need to live, to have abundant life now and for generations to come. We are spending down the Earth’s capital, as it were, and are in danger of pushing its vital ecosystems towards collapse - in our lifetime.

We believe this to be the defining moral and spiritual challenge of our time. How we rise to that challenge will determine the kind of future we leave to our children and our children’s children.

Three articles are included in Volume One. In the first, Seeking a Spirituality of Ecological Hope, we attempt to articulate the crisis we face and the kind of spiritual response required to address it. It is written by website editor, Margaret Swedish.

In each Zine issue, we will probe specific aspects of our way of life that are a threat to the planet.  This month we have a special focus on industrial livestock agriculture, one of the most devastating industries on Earth in terms of the damage it does to our biosphere, atmosphere, and to our bodies and spirits. Life does not come from such cruelty as is described here; it is diminished by it. And when that cruelty extends to harm to the whole planet, it is past time to change this aspect of how we live. How we eat will also determine the future of life on Earth.

Our guest writer on this topic is Dr. Richard H. Schwartz, Professor Emeritus at College of Staten Island and president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America.  After reading his article, we hope you will take time to view the film, A Sacred Duty (see below), and order a copy for your community. You can request a free DVD by clicking here.  It is disturbing and powerful. You may think twice before biting into that next hamburger or piece of fried chicken.

Next, we are pleased to introduce a very special friend, Maya Rose Goldman. Maya is 15 years old, a high school student in Manhattan, and very passionate about the Earth, about being a vegan, and about our precarious future. I have known Maya since she was one. I asked her to write something for this first issue, to tell us what’s on her mind about our planet and our way of life, and she produced a thoughtful, challenging piece. I hope this is only the first of her contributions to our Zine.

We are still new at this so let us know what you think. We invite you to share your comments, reflections, and insights with us, because it is in the community of ideas, dialogue, and shared creativity that we can search our way through and beyond the end of the world.

Margaret Swedish, editor

————————————–

I. Seeking a spirituality of ecological hope

by Margaret Swedish

We are in denial if we do not look at the crises overwhelming our world just now and appreciate that we are coming to the end of an era - the end of a world, an ‘end times.’

Over the past couple of centuries, the human species has driven the ecosystems of the planet to the brink of collapse. We have done this with our rapid population growth, voracious industrialization, economies of growth, addiction to accumulation of capital and goods, our endless seeking for more and more, and the misplaced belief that the measure of our goodness is related to whether or not the generation that comes after us is ‘better off,’ able to consume and accumulate more on a never-ending ladder of increasing affluence and comfort.

The Blue Marble - NASA photo

Our Earth is round, a Blue Marble, as they call it at NASA. Circles are finite. Circles are closed. Circles have limits. If you continue to take from the circle, or destroy within the circle, eventually there is nothing left in the circle to be had.

We are sucking from this poor damaged planet everything it had to offer us for rich and abundant life. It is running out of the means to continue offering that to us, until we are now seeing the beginning of the ‘end of the world.’ Everywhere the planet is in crisis, from its poles to its equators, from its mountains to its plains, from its oceans to its soils, from its plant life to its animal life.

And that means we’re in trouble.

We are living in a state of ecological overshoot. We have overshot the means of the planet to renew, replace, or regenerate what we take from it to support our human way of life; and we are spewing more waste from our lifestyles into its atmosphere and biosphere than it can absorb. And we are doing this at an ever-accelerating rate.

From melting glaciers to expanding drought to increasing natural disasters to depleted soils to changing climate to rising seas to diminishing fisheries to bee colony collapse to bark beetles deforesting the entire mountain west of the United States to depleted aquifers to toxic air, food, and water to rising cancer rates and asthma - the signs are clear.

When you violate Nature to the extent we have, Nature will have the last word.

We’re in trouble.

But this is more than a natural catastrophe. This is also a spiritual catastrophe, a loss of soul or spirit, a diminishment of the meaning of the human. We have lost our way. We have lost our place within the scheme of life, our place within the sacred unfolding of the Earth story within the cosmos. We have thought ourselves gods, or at least created gods that made all this possible, approved our power grab over Nature. We created gods that are outside this world, over and above our universe someplace, saving a spot for us in a disembodied heaven where this world hardly matters, because, after all, Nature embodies sin in the form of Earth, bodies, dirt, mortality. In many of our Western religious traditions, these are the products of a break with God, of disobedience and faithlessness, rather than being of the very nature of the divine itself.

In creating these forms of religiosity, we have cut ourselves off from our very being, our source of life, our sustenance, all that makes this Earth sacred - what, from the vantage point of Earth-based spiritualities, holds the divine within it.

Our power grab over Nature, our alienation from the evolutionary story from which we emerged, has not connected us with the divine but rather cut us off, ‘de-natured’ us, hidden our true identities from ourselves, our purpose and our meaning within this story.

Whirlpool galaxy - Hubble Space Telescope

If we appreciated how infused this Earth within this solar system within this galaxy within this cosmos is with the creative generative energy of the divine from the moment of the Big Bang, rather than ravage the Earth for our human wealth and consumption, we would bow down to it and treat it with the humility, dignity, and reverence it deserves, along with every creature that has its necessary place within the scheme of life.

But this alienation, or cutting-off, is proving to be a not-very-successful way of life on this planet. The evidence - not just research anymore, but experiential - is becoming clear that we are heading swiftly towards an ecological crisis unprecedented in the human experience. It is stunning to see how many people - scientists, enlightened religious leaders, environmentalists, journalists - are starting to talk about mass die-offs as part of our future. Sadly, humans will not escape this fate. It would be sad indeed if this is how we learn the lesson of our profound connections, our embeddedness, within the natural processes of the living systems of the planet.

Bee colony collapse; Homo sapiens sapiens collapse.

This is still not necessarily our fate; but we are running out of time to prevent it. What is required of us now is a new human mission - to create a new way of human life based on values that can sustain life, ease up the devastating human footprint on the Earth’s life-giving processes, reconnect us, our bodies, to the living planet, foster reverence for the long history of evolution that gave birth to us and for the milieu of life in which we exist, and reshape the meaning of the human story.

We have in our hands not only the ability to destroy this era of life on the planet; we also have in our hands the ability to turn this whole sad story around, to work with the planet towards the regeneration of the ecosystems now so seriously degraded and compromised.

We have in our hands the ability to give this story a much more promising future.

What we need in order to do this is to begin to get serious about the nature of the changes required of us. So far, much of what is asked of us barely scratches the surface - changing a few light bulbs, buying a hybrid car, getting more energy efficient, eating home-cooked meals, recycling as much trash as our cities and towns allow (still far from what is needed). These are all crucial steps, if for no other reason than sensitizing us to the need to be less wasteful.

Demand v. world biocapacity - Global Footprint Network

But the crisis asks more of us than all these things. What is needed is a change in how we live that is commensurate with the level of crisis and urgency. If rapid population growth, rampaging industrialization, rising CO2 emissions, consumption of throw-away goods, burning of fossil fuels, over-development in areas that are water-short and ecologically fragile and magnificent, covering over wetlands for more development, fragmenting animal, bird and plant migration routes with highways, shopping malls and suburbs, overuse of water and fisheries, contamination of soils and waterways, etc., etc. - if these are the patterns of our lives that are creating the crisis, then these are the aspects of our way of life that must be reversed. We must address the crisis at its source, not around its periphery.

Don’t let anyone tell you that we can’t do this. We can.

At the same time, don’t let anyone tell you that we can do this without a lot of upheaval, turmoil, and discomfort. This will be a hard work. But it will be a whole lot easier if we begin to do this as one enormous human community, in a spirit of selflessness, sharing-of-burdens, and a sense of mutual responsibility for the human future within the fabric of life.

The challenge of justice

For those of us who live in the United States and the other wealthy industrial and post-industrial societies, we have a further challenge - the challenge of justice. The U.S., with just five percent of global population, consumes more that a quarter of all goods produced in the world and spews a similar proportion of waste into the atmosphere and biosphere. While it is true that China now spews more CO2 into the atmosphere than the U.S., at a per capita rate, it is not even close.

According to an article in the New York Times, the average U.S. American is responsible for 19.4 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. That compares with 5.1 tons for the average Chinese person, and 1.8 in India. Even Europe is significantly lower at 8.6 tons.

The onus of moral responsibility on the affluent of the U.S. could not be clearer. The moral, economic, and political responsibility of U.S. society is apparent. Life as we know it on this planet cannot survive if this society does not commit to a radically new way of life, one that ratchets down our consumption a whole lot.

The moral imperative of justice lies within this reality: over the next four decades, we will add 2-3 billion more people to a planet already in overshoot. Demographers say that the numerical population of the affluent will not change - it will hold at some 1.5 billion. That means that most of this additional population will be poor.

From a faith perspective, and if Christian a gospel perspective, the justice conundrum is this: we must lower our levels of consumption and waste to a level at which the poor of our world can rise out of poverty without depleting the planet further, without taking from the planet the resilience it needs in order to regenerate its degraded living systems. And we must do this as we add 2-3 billion more humans to the planet.

That is our stark, our most sobering challenge - to save the planet’s living systems, within which we exist and outside of which we don’t, by reducing our human footprint at the same time as we increase our population by at least 30 percent.

Right now, we require 1.4 Earths to sustain current levels of human consumption and waste. This can’t go on much longer. We cannot continue to steal from the future to support an unsupportable way of life.

What can we do? What does it mean to create a new way of life? Is it possible? How do we begin to envision this life?

If we approach it as individuals trying to figure out how to make it all by ourselves, then the task is indeed daunting and impossible. In any case, this is not how Nature works. If we study our magnificent Earth community, we find that Nature is more than anything else a community of creatures, a dynamism within and among the ecosystems in which everything is connected, communicating with one another, sharing spaces and energies, at its healthiest taking no more than is needed, moving through the cycle of life and death and life that is the hallmark of the evolutionary story.

If we can re-immerse ourselves in that story that is our own biography and geography, we can begin to relearn what it means to live within the balance of Nature without upsetting it in ways that undermine the networks and connections that keep it vibrant and alive. We can in our own social life begin to mimic this balance in how we live - how we eat, how we get energy to stay warm, how we work, what jobs we create, our economic priorities, how we live within our neighborhoods and towns, what we create and how we create, what gives meaning to our lives when we get out of bed in the morning.

We seek here an ecological spirituality, a spirituality that mimics, vivifies, enhances the life story of the planet, that informs, articulates, and envisions the meaning of the human within that story. We seek here the true spiritual meaning of the human at this point in our evolutionary story. We further believe that discovering that meaning and living into it is essential to finding our way through this crisis, to living through and beyond the ‘end of the world’ that is the defining reality of our generation.

————————————-

II. Abolishing Intensive Livestock Agriculture:

A Global Imperative

by Richard H. Schwartz

Modern livestock agriculture and animal-centered diets not only contribute to the cruel treatment of billions of animals annually and an epidemic of heart disease, cancer and many more diseases. They also have devastating consequences for the environment, and for scarce resources. Non-vegetarian diets are a major factor behind the present widespread hunger that results in an estimated 20 million people dying each year due to lack of adequate nutrition. Seventy percent of the grain grown in the United States and 40 percent of the grain grown worldwide are fed to animals destined for slaughter, while hundreds of millions of the world’s people are chronically hungry. To make matters worse, the United States is one of the world’s largest importers of meat, much of which comes from countries where there is extensive hunger.

Animal waste flows into river from Thai pig farm - photo FAO

Intensive livestock agriculture is a substantial contributor to many environmental problems. Livestock in the United States produce an incredible 86,000 pounds of manure per second, and much of it ends up in rivers, lakes, streams, and underground water sources. The amount of waste produced by 10,000 cattle in a feedlot equals that of a city of 110,000 people. In addition, huge amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides used in the production of animal feed crops end up in surface and ground waters.

Current livestock agriculture contributes greatly to all four major global warming gases: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides, and chlorofluorocarbons. Every year millions of acres of tropical forest are burned, primarily to raise livestock, releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The highly mechanized agricultural sector uses a significant amount of fossil fuel energy, and this also contributes to carbon dioxide emissions. Cattle emit methane as part of their digestive and excretory processes, as do termites who feast on the charred remains of trees. The large amounts of petrochemical fertilizers used to produce feed crops for grain-fed animals create significant amounts of nitrous oxides. Also, the increased refrigeration necessary to prevent animal products from spoiling adds chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere.

Industrial dairy farm - Iowa State University Extension

According to a 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” animal-based agriculture emits more greenhouse gases (in carbon dioxide equivalents) than all the cars, planes, ships and other means of transportation combined (18 percent versus 13.5 percent). Making the situation still worse, the UN report projects that the number of farmed animals will double in the next 50 years. If that increase occurs, the resulting increase in greenhouse gas emissions would negate reductions from increased efficiencies and reductions in other areas, making avoiding the most serious effects of global warming very difficult. Since we are already seeing many examples of droughts, heat waves, major storms, widespread wildfires, the rapid melting of glaciers and polar icecaps, while some climate scientists are warning that global warming may soon reach a tipping point and spin out of control if major changes do not soon occur, a shift toward plant-based diets is essential.

Causes of deforestation in the Amazon 2000-2005 - Mongabay.com

Cattle ranching is a major cause of deforestation in Latin America. Since 1970, more than 25 percent of Central American forests have been destroyed in order to create pasture land for cattle. The production of just one imported quarter-pound hamburger requires the clearing of up to 55 square feet of rain forest.

Livestock overgrazing causes erosion and the creation of deserts throughout the world. Cattle production is a prime component of the causes that lead to desertification: overcultivation of the land, improper irrigation techniques, and deforestation. According to the Worldwatch Institute, each pound of feedlot steak “costs” about 35 pounds of eroded American topsoil.

U.S. cattle production has resulted in significant bio-diversity losses. According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, more plant species in the United States have been threatened or eliminated by livestock agriculture than by any other cause. The number of wild animals on the American range has dropped sharply, largely due to their inability to compete with cattle for food. Many species of plants and animals are disappearing annually because of the rapid destruction of rain forests.

Animal-based agriculture is also extremely wasteful of resources. A meat- and dairy-centered diet requires about 17 times as much land, 14 times as much water, and more than ten times as much energy as a completely plant-based diet. More than half the water consumed in the United States is used to raise livestock, primarily to irrigate land growing livestock feed. While a typical meat-eater’s diet requires 4,200 gallons of water daily, a pure vegetarian’s diet only uses 300 gallons. In California, the production of just one edible pound of beef uses up to 5,000 gallons of water, while only 23 gallons are needed to produce a pound of tomatoes. It takes about a hundred times more water to produce a pound a meat than it does to produce a pound of grain. Another important resource issue today is energy, and livestock agriculture requires far more of it than does the production of vegetarian foods. The production of one pound of steak (500 calories of food energy) uses 20,000 calories of fossil fuels, most of which is used to produce feed crops. The annual beef consumption of a typical American family of four requires more than 260 gallons of fuel, as much as the average car uses in six months.

When one considers the above facts, as well as the soaring health care costs associated with degenerative diseases caused by animal-based diets, it becomes increasingly clear that vegetarianism is not only an important individual choice, but also an imperative for national solvency and global survival. It is critical that people become aware of the far-reaching consequences of animal agriculture in order to shift away from a diet that is bankrupting the United States and the world, crippling and killing 1.5 million Americans annually with chronic diseases, threatening the world’s ecosystems, wasting scarce resources, contributing to world hunger, and cruelly exploiting animals.

You can contribute to a more humane, peaceful, and healthy planet by further educating yourself on this issue. Such books as Diet for a New America by John Robbins (Stillpoint), Beyond Beef by Jeremy Rifkin (Dutton), and Vegetarian Sourcebook by Keith Akers (G P Putnam’s) are excellent places to start. Enlighten others through personal conversations, meetings with opinion leaders in your community, letters and op-ed articles to newspapers and other publications, and calls to radio talk shows. There is a world to be saved, but global recovery is largely dependent on the demise of intensive animal agriculture. Within an individual’s daily choice of diet lies the power to create a better world.

Richard H. Schwartz is Professor Emeritus, College of Staten Island, author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, Judaism and Global Survival, and Mathematics and Global Survivaland. He is also president of Jewish Vegetarians of North America, and associate producer of A SACRED DUTY. Contact him at: president@JewishVeg.com

To view the film, A SACRED DUTY, click here.

III. Our mistakes are abundant, our responsibilities great

By Maya Rose Goldman

When I was in seventh grade, my science class focused a lot on health and pollution. We analyzed the pros and cons of the fossil fuels (coal, petroleum oil, natural gas) versus the renewable resources (water, wood, wind). Such renewable resources, however, can only replenish themselves if they are not consumed at a higher rate than they are produced. The United States currently consumes the largest amount of fossil fuels, all of which will be exhausted within the next two centuries.

One day during class, my science teacher showed us an instrument that measured the quality of the air in our lungs. This was done in percentages, out of one hundred, and most who used the machine before I did were getting ninety-eights and ninety-nines. I had just moved to New York City from a small town in Maryland, so I was expecting a percentage higher than everyone else’s. After all, wasn’t the air in New York dirty, while Maryland air was clean? When it was my turn to use the machine, I stepped up and breathed into its tube. My percentage was ninety-seven. Lower. I didn’t understand how that could be possible. Everything in Maryland was so green and quiet; how could the air in my lungs be dirtier than the air in these New Yorkers’ lungs?

Sligo Creek Parkway near Maya's old home in Maryland

The reality is this: pollution is everywhere, and it is our collective responsibility to do what we can to improve our planet’s current situation. Each of our individual actions affects more than just our immediate living spaces. Our entire earth is being exhausted; no matter where you live, regardless of how small and isolated of a town it may seem, something is being done to damage our planet, and many things can be done to reduce the actions that cause this damage.

Our mistakes have been abundant, and as a result, our responsibilities are great, as well. Our country - and world - finds itself dependent on fossil fuels for energy during a time when windmills and solar panels are so well-developed that they can and should be installed wherever possible. Switching to a more dominant use of renewable resources will not only save us money in the long-run, but we will also be preparing ourselves for the eventual - and quickly approaching - loss of our planet’s coal, oil, and natural gas. Despite our severe need for windmills, however, many are strongly opposed to them. Their reason? They find the structures ugly. Apparently, a “pristine” environment with a shorter lifespan is more highly valued than a self-supporting world without disaster in sight.

The world’s environmental - and energy - crisis is much like the recent economic disaster that is enveloping so many countries. The cause for the economic situation is often attributed to greed and misguided use of money. Likewise, the decline of our environment is mostly due to human neglect for and apathy toward our natural surroundings. We have become so concerned with convenience and ease that we have reached a state in which we essentially depend on machines and unnatural creations to do our work for us. Furthermore, these machines tend to be used in excess to merely produce a greater human pleasure.

To put it bluntly, the human race as a whole has transformed into a superficial, selfish species that cannot seem to remember that we are animals, equal to bears, equal to ants, and we have no right to be lazy and rely on electricity for personal gain. As the saying goes, “Money can’t buy happiness;” dependence on manufactured energy may bring temporary contentment, but it also brings a short-lived natural habitat. If our habitat cannot thrive, neither can we.

Some are willing to go further than others to preserve what still remains of our planet. Although there is a difference between remembering to turn off lights, unplugging chargers when they are not being used, not leaving the water running when brushing your teeth, and recycling and composting whenever possible; and living in a home where there are few to no electronics, buying - or producing - only organic goods, and making sure those around you are doing what they can to slow the attack on the environment; a step is a step, regardless of size, and that is what is important. When a situation goes poorly, we tend to tell ourselves, “Things will get better.” In our minds, an eventual positive outcome is inevitable, even if eventual is past our lifetime.

The predicament we are in now, however, cannot just “get better.” No, we cannot return the earth to a state of prosperity; it is too late for that. We can, however, stop ourselves from plummeting so quickly. We need to remember what our surroundings were like when we were young. Already, our environment was deteriorating; it is much worse now. Humans cannot seem to learn from history; the mistakes are continuous, and the effort to make amends is surprisingly weak. Is this what we are leaving for the next generation? Are we satisfied with not doing our part, while criticizing President Bush for leaving a massive bundle of unresolved crises for President-Elect Obama?

I am a vegan. I have been told that although my beliefs may be on-track, my practices are too extreme. I completely disagree. My actions are not geared toward ensuring the comfort of those around me; I am concerned about the horrifying treatment and enslavement of the non-human animals of this planet and the disregard for their well-being and equal place in our shared environment.

photo-Colorado State Unversity - Integrated Livestock Management

As humans, we are no better than any other animal on this earth. It is not our place to determine the fates and living conditions of the creatures we mercilessly torture and slaughter. I am disgusted by the way factory farms artificially impregnate cows every ten months, confiscate their milk, whisk away their offspring for veal (though some males live a few years to be later killed for beef) and once she can no longer produce young, she, too, is slaughtered - all of this solely for the purpose of human consumption. Have morals completely disappeared?

Although I initially cut out all animal products from my diet because of my care for other creatures, I afterward realized that not supporting the actions of factory farms also had a way of benefitting the environment. Factory farms cause a great amount of pollution in air, land, and water: animal waste goes untreated, leaving it filled with chemicals and disease. This then becomes a part of the soil, and run-off rain brings it into bodies of water, poisoning them and thus killing creatures living there. According to goveg.com, “eating one pound of meat emits the same amount of greenhouse gasses as driving an SUV 40 miles.”

My intent is not to attack the human race as a whole. While it is true that I am both disappointed and slightly surprised by the ways in which we have been treating this planet for so many centuries, playing the blame-game will get us nowhere. We do, however, need to identify the problems in order to find ways to attempt reversing our damage. I am embarrassed by and afraid of passing our current circumstances down to the next generation; I do not want them to come into the world knowing only barren, destroyed habitats. I want them to know nature as I knew it when I couldn’t see past my backyard in my small hometown in Maryland. I want them to see the world as a beautiful place that does not need to be “improved” by machines. I want them to think of the end of everything as being when the Sun burns out billions of years from now, not as being only a few centuries into the future.

[LOOK FOR THE FIRST EDITION OF OUR ONLINE ZINE EARLY NEXT WEEK!]

Many people are talking about how the new administration coming to Washington in January presents a real opportunity to gets some things done. Yesterday saw a real positive sign in the ousting of Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) from the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, replaced by a fairly strong environmentalist, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA).  Dingell has been perhaps the single greatest obstacle in all of Congress to moving this country away from its CO2-emitting transportation habits, an opponent of nearly every effort to shift our auto industry towards a green, climate-saving direction.

Per capita carbon emimssions - 2002 - Kevin Gurney & Vulcan Proj. Purdue Univ.

It’s one of those signs that the new Congress, with a new president, would actually like to get some business done on climate change.   One of Waxman’s arguments in his favor was that President-elect Obama is committed to new cleaner energy policies, to a new generation of hybrid and plug-in cars and renewable fuels, along with more mass transit, and the House doesn’t want this old obstacle sitting there in the way.

But I just want to remind us all that the big changes necessary to stanch the spewing of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from U.S. industry and private vehicles will not happen if we do not stay engaged.  For instance, Obama is a big supporter of corn ethanol, a very bad idea. You can type the term into our search engine to find many posts on why corn ethanol is not a clean or green alternative for our fuel tanks (one example).  While we are as thrilled as anyone that we have achieved such an inspirational moment in U.S. politics, we remind ourselves that Mr. Obama is a slightly left-of-center, pro-business Democrat.  And he scares us a bit when he talks about the war in Afghanistan.

We need all our voices joined together to steer the coming policy debates in the right direction.

Meanwhile, as we move into the Thanksgiving week and the other holidays to come, I want to make a little plea here that we use this moment of ecological and economic crisis to reflect deeply on our lives, how we live here, what is wrong with the way we have conducted business on this planet for the last couple of centuries, and why it matters utterly for our future that we not try to come out of this crisis by trying to reconstruct those old and destructive ways.

Air pollution off eastern U.S. coast - NASA

Because many of us will not be doing much shopping this year, maybe we could use some of our family and community time to reflect on our planet, the gifts it has given us, the wonder of this fabric of life that holds us — now becoming so frayed and fragile — and ponder what we might do as individuals, families, communities, congregations, neighborhoods, towns and villages to help heal what is broken, ease the human footprint, and allow the Earth to begin to regenerate and renew its rich and diverse ecosystems.

We have often said that recycling, changing light bulbs, and buying hydrid cars (still too expensive for most of us) is important, but far from enough. What we also need to do is look at the patterns and habits of our lives and see how we can really ratchet down our demands on the Earth’s compromised resilience. As many biologists and ecologists will tell us, when the Earth begins to lose its resilience, it loses its ability to bounce back from the abuse we inflict. When that resilience is gone, we are in big trouble.

Suggestions for things to talk about and to do:

* No more purchasing of bottled water. If you are worried about your tap water, buy a filter, then get involved in local efforts to measure the health of your drinking water supply and do advocacy to ensure its safety. But water is not the only thing put in energy-wasting, toxic contaminated plastic bottles. So is soda. Stop drinking soda; it’s not good for you. Find drinks that are in biodegradable containers. Think about what you put in your bodies and in your trash and recycling bins in terms of the planet and your health.

* Buy local. Broccoli does not grow where I am in the winter, so the broccoli in the supermarket here has traveled a long, CO2-emitting distance to get to the store, and is probably deficient in the nutrients of fresh local broccoli anyway. Wait until summer. Buy local winter vegetables instead.

Industrial poultry farm - Photo by Larry Rana - US Dept. of Agriculture

* Stop eating meat and poultry that come from industrial livestock farming. If you eat these animal products, make sure they are locally produced, are free of hormones and antibiotics, are free range and/or grass fed. As you will see in our Zine next week, industrial livestock production is a major source of climate changing greenhouse gases and toxic contaminants in our food and water. It is extremely bad for our health and engages practices that are mind-numbingly cruel to these living creatures.  Better to eat organic tofu this Thanksgiving than a turkey raised on an industrial farm!

* Consolidate your grocery-shopping and other errands. Do them together with neighbors and friends. It’s more fun, and it’s how we learn to live more gently on the planet — by living in community, rather than as isolated individuals.

* Instead of purchasing throw-away stuff for Christmas, give meaning. I can remember giving my Godson Aidan a ticket to an indoor soccer game here in Milwaukee as a Christmas present in 2006. He loves soccer! Still, I could see that little bit of disappointment at not getting a ‘thing’ instead, or in addition. He made some comment about it. But the two of us had an absolute blast, and I imagine that he will remember that time together a whole lot longer than any ‘thing’ I could have given him that year.

* Stop flying all over the place. Of course, most of us can’t afford to now anyway. Airplanes are tremendously polluting. Stay home more. Spend more time with intimate others, families and friends.  That goes for businesses and non-governmental groups as well!  The planet can’t handle all your travel habits.  We must find other ways to meet (teleconferencing, for example) and reduce air travel to a minimum.

* Don’t stop there.  We must reinvent the way we do business, the priorities of our economy, the kinds of jobs we create, the kind of meaning and values reflected in our economic choices.  Right now, our economy needs to be reorganized around the project of recreating the human presence on the planet.  Our educational systems, transportation and communications systems, our energy systems, how we define ‘development,’ how we live within our local bioregions — these need to be the core issues of our economic life, not profit-margins, concentration of wealth for the few, not corporate power or self-interest.  Get involved with groups working to protect the Earth right where you are, and with those working for economic and Earth justice.

Well, we could make a long list. What I am trying to say is this:

we must, we MUST, reinvent the human project on this planet if we are to survive as a species, if our beautiful blue and green planet is to remain beautiful.

We are living in crisis now, a crisis created by how we have lived, by our striving for inappropriate, unsustainable affluence and comfort. In getting used to that way of life, in our assumptions that there is no other way to live, we have found ourselves on the brink of catastrophe.

We can use crisis to get freaked out and to attempt to put those old pieces back together. Or we can use this opportunity to ponder what brought us to the brink, to determine not to continue in that direction, and to begin to reinvent the human project towards just and sustainable modes of being.

But with this caveat: I don’t much like the word sustainable anymore. We are already living beyond sustainability. What we must do is ease our ecological footprint enough that the Earth can regenerate and replenish its ecosystems back towards sustainability. And we must learn how to live again within that balance of life.

Add those steps above to the light bulbs and recycling and push for hybrids and renewable fuels, and we are at a starting point for where we need to go.

What better time, as we prepare to give thanks for the bounty and goodness of the Earth.

——————————————————–

Photo credits:

Per capita carbon emissions map, Vulcan Project, Purdue University, from Wiredscience
Air pollution off U.S. eastern coast, see NASA Earth Observatory
Industrial poultry farm, Environment News Service
Earth from Apollo 8, NASA

Can you say the headline with an Aussie accent?  The quote comes from Michael (??? couldn’t make out the last name), one of many people being interviewed this week on the Today Show’s week-long series, Ends of the Earth.  Michael is a lawyer in Australia who has taken up the work of “sustainability coach.”  It’s a job with a future.

The Blue Hole - Belize Coast

The Today Show has put all this week’s segments on video and you can view them at this link.

Melting glaciers of Mt. Kilimanjaro

Not the usual cheery Today Show fare.  Not fluffly news over breakfast.

Of course, the week is not over and it will be interesting to see if these reporters can take this dire news and suggest the kinds of changes that are commensurate with the seriousness of our planetary crisis.  Because these stories suggest the obvious — a wholesale change in how we live our lives.

Standing on a boat off the incredible Blue Hole, part of the coral reef system off the Belize coast, Fabian Cousteau, grandson of the great oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, said this to Lauer:

“We depend on our oceans, and on water in general for food, for water, and for health, and for air as well.  Things that happen here end up on our dinner plate, and if we don’t become proper stewards to our planet, and specifically to our oceans, which seem so far away, we’re not going to have any of those things.”

Yikes!  Not food? not water? not health? not air?  And people think I’m doom-and-gloom!

Lauer responds by talking about how beautiful and pristine the ocean appears.  Yet, in one episode, following a big storm that hit the coast, he shows what washed up on the beach — human detritus — plastic bottles, plastic bags, and other trash dumped by, well, you know, us.  As Cousteau notes, that contamination will eventually “come back to us and pollute our bodies.”  You see, we are all part of one planet, one organic system where everything is connected.  We trash the planet, we use up its resources, we trash ourselves and end up with no resources, nothing on which to live anymore.  That’s the course we are on.  That’s the future just a couple of generations ahead of us.

Before we reach that future, as Curry points out, there is this “story of increasing human suffering.”

In another segment, (see embedded video) Cousteau notes that less than 1 percent of our planet is protected in conservation areas like the one off the Belize coast. “The rest of it is in danger of becoming a real barren wasteland.”

You see? Some folks are a bit overwhelmed by the bleak scenario that I describe in my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, but I have plenty of good science, lots of folks in intimate relationship with the natural wonders of our planet, to back me up. And now we have even our mainstream morning news fluff presenting this dire scenario to us. I guess the message is becoming increasingly inescapable.

We are living in profound ecological overshoot while at the same time wasting the planet, spewing toxins into every part of its environment, from our atmosphere to our biosphere, from our oceans to our mountains, our soils and our bodies. We are rapidly changing its climate, and one result is a continuing long line of mega-disasters (like the wildfires in Southern California, a region suffering severe drought, overpopulation, serious ecological overshoot, completely misplaced development, growing population and agriculture in a land that is actually desert), with more to come.

Now here is something so refreshing to hear in the mainstream media, so unusual, that I found it striking — Lauer speaking about the notion of interconnectivity, an idea that is finally “beginning to register with us, how every little thing that everybody does around the globe, eventually ends up right in the same place.” Cousteau: “Everything’s connected. It’s one big circle, and our oceans…are the biggest part of it…everything that happens in the ocean will affect us.”

Yes, and everything that is happening to the glaciers will affect us. And everything that is happening to the climate will affect us. And what we are talking about here is whether or not we will have food, water, health, and air.

Which is why we focus here on this question of how we are going to live through this period of ecological crisis, an era begun already as we can see and feel all around us, an era that will go one of two directions. We continue as we are, maybe with a few superficial changes in our lifestyles (turning the heat down a bit, replacing light bulbs, buying a hydrid car), and end up extinct, or with a remnant of humans living on a depleted planet struggling for survival. Or, we chart the new course, a radically new way of life that ratchets down the whole human project, allowing the Earth the space and time it needs to regenerate its ecosystems, living with radical simplicity, a new hierarchy of values that emerge from the planet itself — and we do this with justice, with a commitment to ensure that the poor of our planet are not the ones forced to bear the greatest burdens of the mess we have made — because they did not make the mess.

This is the most important moral, ethical and spiritual challenge of our age. It is also inescapable — because we all need food, water, health, and air. Just no way around that one.

—————————————————

Photo Credit:
The Blue Hole
Mt. Kilimanjaro, melting glaciers

Spirituality and Ecological Hope was created to provide a forum, a space, for a growing community to reflect on what kind of human beings we will be as we go through the ecological crises that face us in this century.

This can be a grim reflection.  Very little about our lives, how we live here in the U.S. right now, will not be affected in sometimes harsh, very profound and fundamental ways.  Whether this is a bleak scenario or a hope-filled one depends on one’s point of view.

We are one small point of reflection in this large, global movement of peoples.

What are we doing right now?

Well, this website is one answer to that question.  Have a look around.  The site is still new and we are adding to it constantly.  Featured posts appear 2-3 times per week.  Our online Zine will be published quarterly.  Look for the first issue before Thanksgiving!

The live chat room up will be up and running soon, so watch for it.  Our conversation will focus on the central question of this project — a dialogue and reflection on the new way of life, the underlying spirituality, values, frameworks of meaning, that can help shape the answer to that question: what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the ecological crises of this and the next couple of generations?

Other activities:

*  “And God Said It Was Good: Weaving together Science and Spirituality,” a conference at Marquette University, Oct. 17-18.  Our event, organized by an ambitious book-sharing group here in Milwaukee, was very successful, with more than 350 people participating.  The keynote speaker was Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution.  Several workshop leaders added challenging content to the program, bringing a range of orientations to the weekend’s reflection on the implications of evolutionary science and the new cosmology for our western faith traditions.

Spirituality and Ecological Hope was a proud co-sponsor of the conference.

In the future, we will download video and audio from the conference to this site, so stay tuned.

* Meanwhile, the book I wrote, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, has a growing resonance.  Examining the major trends that are catapulting us towards crises, the book pulls from Western Christian traditions the hope and framework of meaning for a way of life that can take us through the crisis to a new, more enriching and sustaining life.

The book has created opportunities for workshops and presentations, and ignited a number of conversations, book discussions, and study in many communities around the country.   I have done several talks here in the Milwaukee area recently, and will be traveling to St. Louis in early December to give at least two presentations there.

* Coming soon: on our “Resources/Workshop” page, we will have materials, outlines, recommended resources that you can use for workshops and faith reflections in your own community.  Look for this beginning in January. Meanwhile, click on the “Resource” tab to find book lists and reviews, and links to other groups and resources of note.

Our program begins modestly, but with great hope of fostering communities of ecological hope, bound together by this Great Work of reinventing how we humans live on this planet, and, in particular, we affluent U.S. Americans (and other affluent societies).  With this project, we are planting yet another seed of hope for our broken, stressed, and distressed planet.  This is a remarkable, precious, even sacred place.  We show our respect for this magnificent creation by seeking to live within its life-nurturing ecosystems with tenderness, humility, unselfishness, an appreciation of our true place within it, and more than anything else, with ecological love.

Stay tuned.

Margaret Swedish

We are in an amazing time. Many of our problems are quite grave. In the midst of that, this resurgence of hope.  Check out the one-minute YouTube video on our home page.  It will make you feel really good — a welcome from the world to Obama.  It’s from a group that one of my regular visitors pointed me to — Avaaz.org, The World in Action.  It is one of several websites I have discovered in recent days that has a global network focused on the issues we all care so much about.  Put them all together and we are talking about millions of people and thousands of organizations — grassroots, civic, non-governmental — all bound by similar ethics, aspirations, and hopes.

Save the Blue Marble - NASA photo

Things are changing.  The Great Turning has begun.  This is not about Barack Obama — he is symptom, manifestation, more than cause.  He remains a politician — a brilliant and caring one, no doubt.  But whether or not he can rise to the occasion still depends entirely on us and our willingness to get deeply involved in pushing him, encouraging him, towards the Great Turning.

I have two links for the Great Turning because they are both great websites.

Where does one begin?  Because now the task is to bring our urgent concerns to that step-by-step process of addressing them.   One of the new trends that emphasizes the change in consciousness is the nature of the debates we are having now.  Everywhere you turn, folks are talking about global climate change, energy issues, ’sustainability’ (not a word I am particularly fond of since we are already beyond sustainabiliby and need to start talking about pulling back and about regeneration), how the ecological crises will impact the poor, land issues, species extinctions, disappearance of habitat, development issues, even the survival of the human.

It’s a full plate; it’s a plate overflowing.

Here in Wisconsin, for example, we have a full blown debate going on around the coal industry.  We have major air pollution problems, especially in the southeast part of the state, and we have growing consciousness about climate change, impacted by things like the unprecedented massive floods in the midwest last spring, the 100 inches of snow last winter in the southern part of the state (something like twice the average), and the receding of the three northern Great Lakes, combination of global warming and appalling intervention by the Army Corps of Engineers in the dredging of the St. Clair River.

Great Lakes from space - NASA photo

The Corps’ project, begun in the 1960s, has hastened the flow of water out of Lakes Huron, Superior and Michigan and into the river, causing more erosion of the river banks, increasing the flow, and on and on.

Recently, the success of the Great Lakes Basin Compact has ensured that this great fresh water resource will stay where it is, not be piped off to the thirsty, over- and mal-developed southwest.  In addition, our new president hails from a Lake Michigan state and has already made a public commitment to protect and restore the Great Lakes.

National Geographic, photo by Peter Essick

Back to the debate on coal, our local utility company, WE Energies, is an example of the bind we are in.  On the one hand, it is committed to big wind farms (against some local opposition) in order to meet a state mandate on renewable energy sources (an average of 10 percent of its electricity to come from renewable energy by 2015), while also pushing for new coal-fired power plants to meet growing demand for electricity.  In the southwest part of the state, a proposal for a power plant that would use both coal and biofuels has further blurred the lines in the debate.  One wonders if we will be caught in more such conundrums — energy companies trying to get us to support more coal use by adding these biofuels here and there.

We are against coal. While we obviously cannot stop burning it tomorrow, like oil, we need to start transitioning away from this Earth-trashing way of turning on our lights.  The primary way to do this immediately is not to produce more power to meet rising demand, but to decrease demand — through energy conservation and efficiency. All of us need to do our part in this, including large institutions, energy companies, cities and rural communities, educators, government at all levels, and everybody who uses electricity for anything.  This should be a national project, one we all get excited about, one that gets families and communities all working on this great crusade — led, let us hope, by the next President of the United States.

Lots on our plate.  But it doesn’t feel so lonely anymore, does it?  It’s not just because of the election results; it is a combination of how the energy and hope ignited by the election has made us more visible to one another, along with a far greater general awareness of the seriousness of our predicament.

Those two realities are the basis for a real movement to take shape focused on the necessary recreating of the human mode of presence on the planet.  But it needs all of us!  Join in this great movement in whatever way you can, as individuals, families, communities.  We need to grab this moment because, as we know from the last many years, they don’t come around all that often — and the next moment could well be too late.

We bask in a new political moment here in the U.S.  We bask in a new moment — for a moment.

The New First Family

Because we know how difficult the days ahead will be.

President-Elect Barack Obama, to our relief, did not take a triumphant tone in his victory speech.  The tone was sober, even somber at times, using language we don’t always like to hear in this culture — “sacrifice,” “responsibility,” the sense that we are all in this together, which means we must all take part in finding our way through the multiple crises falling upon this society and our world.

The country voted for change.  And while I know that for many this means getting back to old levels of comfort and affluence, threatened now by the combined financial and economic crises, I get the sense from many folks rejoicing in the election results this week that they know it is about something far more profound than that.

My great nephew Elliot

Indeed, the way we have done affluence for the minority in recent decades is over.  The sooner we accept that, instead of trying to resist it, the more space there will be in the political culture to make more than fix-it, patch-it-up, reformist measures; because what we really need is to alter how we live on the planet so that its life may live — so that its life may live — for Malia and Sasha — and my godson Aidan Romero, and Elliot and Francesca, and the next one to come…

There’s another phrase Mr. Obama used in his speech which certainly got my attention.  In his short list of the crises we face, he mentioned, “a planet in peril.”

A planet in peril?  Really?  You are aware of this?  Even that is a light years advance from the administration soon to depart Washington DC.

Most important for those of us who are aware of the gravity of the peril, the immediacy of the threats of ecosystem breakdown and ecological overshoot, we must make sure early on that Mr. Obama does not, as so many do, restrict the nature of the threat he describes to global warming.  I hope I am not overestimating the significance of his choice of words — not global warming, but planet in peril.  Because if he means it, if he gets the difference, he will do more than concentrate on reducing fossil fuel emissions through cap and trade schemes.  He will get deeper to the heart of the matter: that we must scale down the entire human project if our world is to survive.

Harder yet will be convincing the country with the greatest amount of down-scaling to do to move quickly in this direction.  Change we can believe in means beginning to make this shift or else the changes to come will not be the kind one wants to believe in at all.

My back yard - South Shore Park - Milwaukee

My polling place is a half block behind my little flat in South Shore Park on Lake Michigan.  It was a magnificent day in Milwaukee — a bit like mid-September.  After voting mid-morning, distracted by the stir in the air, I took my work back to the park in the afternoon to be around the energy of the day, the neighborhood, this civic exercise so full of hope.  As people went in to vote, families with children played on the playground.  Kids were on their bikes and skateboards, older folks strolled by the lake, and runners were out in their shorts and tank tops.  I sat on a bench in a t-shirt and sandals, the lake before me, the good spirits all around me.  It was 73 degrees.

On November 4 in Wisconsin!

It was in many ways utterly surreal.  And while we could say that the sun was shining down on the elections that day, we were in the midst of another phenomenon — the first time in the history of record keeping that Milwaukee had a 3-day spell of temperatures above 70 in the month of November.

Just a quirk in the weather, or another in the long list of evidence that something has gone wacky with the climate?

Ecological Overshoot Gauge - Global Footprint Network

I am aware that we are in severe overshoot.  We are near the point of requiring 1.4 planets to sustain current levels of human consumption and waste.  In his speech, Mr. Obama shared the story of the 106-yr.-old woman who pressed her finger on the screen to vote, using that span of her life to reflect on all the changes over a century.  Then he said, if my kids are lucky to live so long — the changes they will see!

And I shuddered.  How many humans will be living on the planet on 2107, 99 years from now, when Sasha would be 106?  How severe the collapses, how many coastal cities and island nations innundated?  What wars and other violence over lack of water and food will they witness?

Or, he could take the phrase with utter seriousness, look out at the choice of futures for his beautiful little daughters on this planet, and help lead a crusade to get the planet out of peril.

In the beginning is the time our voices are most likely to be heard.  We have a reconfigured Congress, new members in the House and Senate, incumbents, some of whom have been there way too long and have become way too complacent.

Wake them up! Show them there is a movement out here prepared to take seriously the word ’sacrifice,’ a movement of peoples especially willing to sacrifice a great deal for our planet in peril.

Change we can believe in is our job, our mission.  It must come from us.  We must make Obama brave, innovative, creative, a leader. He won’t come by those qualities all by himself; we must hold his feet to the fire, convince him that many of us will stand by him if he is willing to take the political risks necessary to save life on the planet.  That spirit, the spirit of movements, comes from the roots.  It comes from the hearts and commitment of people like you and me.

We voted.  Now we need to get to work!

———————————————

Photo credits:
South Shore Park, Lake Michigan, Milwaukee: Carrie Trousil, About.com
Ecological Overshoot Gauge, Global Footprint Network

I just want to put things in perspective. It’s easy to focus on the bad news and lose the sense of the greater beauty and magnificence of which we are a part.  Many cosmologists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, etc. will tell you that our essential role in evolution is to be the universe becoming conscious of itself.  While we cannot pretend to know what is going on way ‘out there,’ at least what we know as of now is that we are the only beings able to do this –

Hubble Space Telescope - October 2008

to be aware, to know, to be able to say to one another that there is a universe — and that it is beautiful!

Our role is to gaze out on that universe and say, Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!  We are meant to be stricken with beauty.  We are intended for the experience of awe.

I was gleeful today to hear that the malfunction that caused the Hubble Space Telescope to cease sending pictures for weeks has been temporarily resolved.  And so this photo, placed, I imagine, with no small amount of glee on the Hubble website.

If we could only understand how precious this gift of consciousness, of awareness.  If we could only begin to appreciate how we have cheapened that gift with the banality of that to which we give our attention, the emptiness, the pettiness of so much of our lives.

So tonight, with great joy and a consciousness trembling with delight and awe, I share this photo.

——————————————-

Photo from Hubble Space Telescope website.

The books that matter most to me are those that do not diminish or attempt to downplay the extent of the crises we face, but offer hope in the face of them.

Hawken’s book is a good jolt of hope, which is why this website loves this book.  What he describes is a movement that spans the planet, responding to the exigencies of human rights and justice, and to the ecological crises manifesting all around us.  The movement has arisen almost spontaneously, thousands of groups, local, national and international, grassroots and NGOs, with no central authority, leadership, or plan.  Yet it is coming together around this moment of crisis.

Hawken compares this phenomenon to biology, and with this we heartily agree.  In many ways it is a response of human biology and spirit to the sense of danger.  It is an organic, planetwide call for renewal at the very roots of human existence.

“Evolution arises from the bottom up — so, too, does hope.”

Hawken sees three aspects of this movement coming together in a way that could reshape the human spirit and how we address our crises: the environmental movement, the social justice movement, and the indigenous movements all around the globe.  As they come together, they present the potential for a profound renewal.

“…a worldwide gathering of ordinary and extraordinary people are reconstituting the notion of what it means to be a human being.”

And he says of this movement that it is “relentless and unafraid… [it] is the breathing sentient testament of the living world.”

His description of what this means, who we are, what we are a part of, is exhilarating.   “In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us.”

Hope in the midst of the disintegration.  Hope because of the disintegration.

“…cooperation must be on the planet’s terms.” And that is the conversion required of us — to alter the way we do business in every part of our lives so that we are in sync with the needs, processes, realities of the living planet of which we are a part and separate from which we are, well, not at all.

After you read this book, if you haven’t done it already, you will want to join this movement — with a leap of faith and even joy.