Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

It’s raining like the dickens here in Maryland, waves of rain — which we needed, but really, let’s not overdo it, weather gods, okay?

Anyway, because of a phone call, I missed the last 15 minutes of Thomas Friedman’s “Addicted to Oil” program on Discovery last night.  However, I thought he did a pretty good job of making very grim news entertaining – and grim.

A couple of quotes I wrote down — the scientist from NCAR in Boulder CO saying, “We’re running an uncontrolled experiment on the only home that we know,” which would be earth, of course.  Sobering, isn’t it?  And we actually don’t know how bad it’s going to get, or whether or not we will survive the experiment.  That’s a pretty high price to pay in order to continue our consumer-based lifestyles.

And this factoid — that we have slapped a 100% duty on ethanol from Brazil, but 0%, that would be — 0% — on oil imports.  Says a lot about the real priorities of the US government, despite the rhetoric about our need to wean ourselves from oil.  You can imagine how upset the Bush family friends in the monarchy in Saudi Arabia would be if we started talking about slapping a duty on oil imports, then raising the gas tax here at home as a way to reduce consumption, fight carbon emissions, get people out of their cars, raise money for mass transit and alternative renewable energies, etc.

Want to recommend this article from the front page of today’s NY Times, if you have not yet seen it.  I think it’s important that this mainstream media source is actually covering some of the issues which many of us in the deep ecology movement are trying to raise — that corn-based ethanol could end up a big scam of agribusiness, gobbling up more and more agricultural land, doing more destructive large-scale mono-crop production, threatening food supply, driving up the costs of food, and in the end, the energy to produce ethanol and the carbon emitted in the process may actually exceed the carbon reductions at the other end where we burn it in our automobiles.

What one person quoted here calls “yellow gold” could end up being a major bust in the longer term, after all these obscene profits are made, but in the process, more terrible damage could be done to our land resources, our farm economy, and our domestic food supply.

The big corporations are looking for any opportunity to control the process by which we develop resources to replace oil.  The motive here is not green, folks, it is about the bottom line for the few powerful corporations that have a stranglehold on the political process where policies are made.

Be sure to check the sources of funds, the big donors, for the candidates running for office where you are.  This is public information.  If “dirty” corporations are funding them, chances are they will not be friends of the earth when they get into office.  ADM is a big donor to PBS now — and have you noticed any hard-hitting news stories about the controversies regarding ethanol on PBS lately?

I’ve got other posts on this ethanol debate.  Just put the word in the search box and you’ll find them, with links to other sources.