Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

I mentioned yesterday that I attended a conference this past weekend, Gaia Theory: Model and Metaphor for the 21st Century.  The last speaker was Dr. Donald Aitken, Principal of Donald Aitken Associates, founder of the Department of Environmental Studies at San Jose University, former staff research physicist and astrophysicist at Stanford, and an expert on renewable energies.

Aitken believes that if we start now to really conserve and lower our carbon emissions, to make energy efficiency the priority, then combine that with the use of all the technologies now in hand — solar, wind, hydrology, geothermal, biomass, and the nuclear we already have (he does not favor more nuclear, but also says we need it to keep supplying its percentage of power to the grid during the transition) — we could actually reduce carbon emissions by the necessary 60-80% by 2050 and meet human needs, thus buying time to develop the new forms of energy and the new way of human life post-the-fossil-fuel age.

This will take tremendous political, social, cultural, and economic will, so whether or not this gets done depends upon all of us working at every level of our lives.  The private sector cannot do this alone, he insists.  It will take government commitment, real policy changes, to work with the private sector to achieve this goal.

Aitken said this of our current predicament:

The fossil fuel age is transitory and inherently unstable.  Out of an earth history of billions of years and a human history of more then 300,000 years, it comprises a mere two centuries — a blip in geological time, yet in that small blip we have begun to destabilize the Earth’s atmosphere.

He said, “It’s not that we are running out of fuel, WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF ATMOSPHERE.”  He noted that for every gallon of gasoline we put in our cars, some 3 gallons worth of weight comes out the other end, as oxygen and other chemicals are added in the combustion process.

He demonstrated how the Earth’s atmosphere had a very precise energy balance to and from the Earth.  If we change that balance, he said, “the Earth must change in response” — which is exactly what is happening.  If the energy flows change, he explained, the climate must change.  Climate is how the Earth distributes energy.

“Gaia (the Earth’s self-regulating system that supports life) is now responding by destabilizing the system.”  Worse, it is changing “more rapidly than we expected.”  Earth is doing “what it needs to do to rebalance,” which is bad news for humans.

I mentioned some of those changes in yesterday’s post.  Among those I did not mention:  scientists are seeing a decline in half the ocean’s phytoplankton product, the very bottom of our food chain.

And this: if carbon dioxide (CO2) levels increase four times, it would mean the “end of food production” in the US and much of the world.

At the same time, this is the guy who demonstrated that we actually do have the technologies we need to change this soon enough to keep the worst from happening — the mix of renewables and a heavy dose of emission reductions and energy efficiency, as I explained in yesterday’s post.

Aitken said that since humans are the ones who are causing the crisis, we are the ones who must act to allow the Earth to restabilize.  “Humans must be agents of the Gaia process to return stability to Earth’s climate.”

Sound like a great human project?  Sound like something you would like to be a part of?  Yes and yes — the mission of the human journey of our time.

To do this, says Aitken, three things are required:

1) understand how the ‘rules’ of the Earth work, its atmosphere and climate systems;

2) adapt human activity to those rules;

3) define sustainability in agreement with this behavior.

He means to throw out all the traditional definitions of sustainability which are meaningless and unworkable.  He posits the points above as the real definition of sustainability.

Sorry for the length of this, but this is the vehicle I have to share this information.    The basis for ecological hope lies in our loyalty to Gaia, to the atmosphere in which we live and breathe.  Love her, then work with the one you love.  She will work with you, really she will.  And I can also guarantee you that if we work against her, she will spew us off this planet.