Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

[NOTE: I'm away a few days and won't post again until next Tuesday.]

It’s that incapacity to feel any connection with our fellow creatures, with Nature, to have any integrity, any sense at all, about the significance of our relationships with the natural world, that seems so scary to me.

It’s acknowledging harm being done — and then thinking our alienated way of life so superior that we will go on as we are in any case, no matter the harm being done.

Sec. of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne , who seems to actually oppose Nature, provides this perfect example of what I mean.

Polar bears — they are in trouble. The Dept. of the Interior is literally forced to acknowledge the danger of global warming and the melting of the Arctic ice to the species of polar bears, in danger of extinction if the ice keeps melting.

So, there it is. Global warming is the problem. What will we do about it? Well, you can’t hunt them and bring their skins back to the U.S. legally. Really. Global warming threatens them with extinction, but what you can’t do anymore is hunt and skin them.

“The fact is that sea ice is receding in the Arctic,” he said. “Because polar bears are vulnerable to this loss of habitat, they are, in my judgment, likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future — in this case, 45 years.”

45 years to the extinction of polar bears — because of global warming. Despite that real world scenario, Kempthorne emphasized that he would do nothing to block coal-fired power plants that emit vast amounts of greenhouse gases, or curb plans to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic.

So, he accepts the science (against the council of VP Dick Cheney, by the way), but does not accept the policies that would be consistent with the science.

Goodness, we must do better than this, don’t you think? In fact, Kempthorne used some obscure section of the Endangered Species Act to exempt the oil and gas industry from any restrictions based on the finding that polar bears are indeed threatened with extinction because of global warming.

Is there really a big ethical jump from sacrificing human beings to the war for oil in Iraq to shrugging off the potential extinction of species from the burning of that oil?

This is the anti-regulatory ideology that reigns supreme in the Bush Administration, an ideology that is driving this country to ruin on so many fronts — economic, ecological, social, and on and on. Business must run as free of rules and regulations as possible. In this case, not even the constraints of our natural world should force them to submit to actual controls over their behavior.

So, the polar bear is given titular status as an endangered species. But the government gives itself almost no leverage to actually protect it from what endangers it.

From the NY Times:

The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit in 2005 to force a listing of the polar bear. The center, based in Arizona, has been explicit about its hopes to use this — and the earlier listing of two species of coral threatened by warming seas — as a legal cudgel to attack proposed coal-fired power plants or other new sources of carbon dioxide emissions.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

This attitude is part of what undergirds our ecological destruction. It is an ideology that is so rigid it cannot yield to the real world of Nature, how Nature functions, what Nature needs in order to support vibrant life, including us. It is an ideology that puts human manipulation of Nature for material gain, for wealth and profits, over Nature itself.

And trust me, the extinction of the polar bear heralds other great extinctions to come, including of homo sapiens sapiens if we continue to function on this Earth this way.

It is not just new leaders we need, but a whole new framework for how we live on this planet.

Meanwhile:

Pray for the people of China; pray for the people of Myanmar. Let compassion and human solidarity open our hearts wide to the cries of the suffering, the fearful, the traumatized. They, too, are us.

[tags] polar bears, endangered species act, dirk kempthorne, arctic ice melting, ecological destruction[/tags]

Photo credit:

US Geological Survey, New Polar Bear Finding