Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

The headline on the front page of yesterday's NY Times was certainly dramatic, A Sea of Sand is Threatening China's Heart.   The article tells the story of the waves of sand that are rapidly claiming huge swaths of central China, blowing east, threatening the city of Beijing.  Two deserts are blowing into one.  Sandstorms have become a major health threat, and many towns and villages are dying.

As I read about this, and its causes (climate change due to global warming combined with human activity), I could not help but compare this with what I have been writing about the Army Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi River and New Orleans — when we try to master nature, nature always comes back to bite us.

In this case, the Chinese government thought it a brilliant idea to open land between two huge deserts to cultivation.  So, trees were cut down and rivers drained for irrigation.  A huge reservoir was built diverting river flow and mountain runoff.  The deserts moved in.

The disaster is enormous, its human toll huge.  It's not just the capitalist west that thought human might and ingenuity could outsmart nature, that nature was just some machine that we could make operate according to our grandiose plans.

Think of the water and irrigation required to make the desert of Southern California an agricultural heartland.  Now with so much development in the west, and everyone moving out there expecting to have water flowing out of their faucets — well, these people and golf courses and businesses are like straws, slurping up water from the deserts and semi-arid climes as if it is not possible, really, to run out. But water is getting scarcer and more precious, and states and communities are battling over water supply.  You can hear that slurping from the bottom of the riverbeds as we try to suck out those last drops.

Along the Rio Grande, because of over-use, the river at times doesn't quite make it all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  Meanwhile, drought is claming even more of the river.  This is an ecological catastrophe in the making.

As I've written before, ecological hope will require a good dose of humility.  It will require us recovering that innate sense we have somewhere within us (numbed by the consumer culture) that we are part of nature, not over and above it.  This awareness holds far more promise for the future of rich diverse life on this earth than our human grandiosity.

And here is more on the death of rivers around the world.  For more on the problem of desertification worldwide, check out this page from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

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