Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of our leading experts on climate change, told an audience yesterday that we have 10 years to make the changes necessary to ward off disaster.

While many media pundits and politicians address our fossil fuel dependency from a ‘national security’ standpoint — the need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil — we have a much bigger problem here.  If we continue to use up the remaining available fossil fuels, including oil, gas, and coal, turning them from fossils in the ground to carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, we will alter our climate irrevocably, cause a new hot age to take off beyond our control, with consequences that will most likely bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Ten years.

Now this does not mean that we have 10 years before we start to get serious about dealing with our climate crisis.  It means we have ten years to have already begun making the changes necessary to stop runaway global warming.  That means it is already very, very late.

We can all start now by changing how we live, by beginning to live carbon-neutral lives as much as possible.  And more, as we make these personal or community-wide (or in the case of California, state-wide) changes, we must work like hell politically.  We need to get politicians elected to office who will make this a priority — beginninig to bring this biggest carbon emitter in the world, the US of A, to carbon neutrality.

What does it mean to become carbon-neutral?  Here are a couple of resources you can check out:  the David Suzuki Foundation;  the Natural Resources Defense Council’s web page suggesting what you can do to offset your carbon emissions with links to still other organizations.

It has to start somewhere.  How ’bout with us?