Living in right relationship with the Earth
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Posted on April 4, 2007
Filed Under Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
One of the things I try to point out to the groups I speak to, or in the writing I do, is that ecological hope, meaning our ability to pass through, to survive, this period of ecological crisis, depends most of all on whether or not we are prepared to live within the limits of the Earth’s biosphere, whether or not this one voracious, rapacious species is prepared to restore the balance of its life within the balance of all life within the ‘Earth community.’
This came to mind while reading this front page story from today’s New York Times on the growing water scarcity crisis in the west. A persistent drought, now entering its 8th year, which could be cyclical, 
but which many scientists believe is related to global warming and climate change, is altering the water calculations out West.
It would be bad enough to be dealing with dwindling water supplies because of reduced mountain snow melt, draining of aquifers because of overdevelopment, and rivers drying up as agriculture, for which 90 percent of water out West is assigned, and fast-growing urban areas vie for this dwindling supply.
But even worse — along with irrational and down right insane — is that no one wants to do one of the most obvious and necessary things — stop the population growth, stop the growth that is draining the West dry of water.
Because all these folks want their desert or mountain home now. Way too many folks want to live in that lovely desert climate, even though as climate changes this will become one of the least desirable human habitats in the country.
So, as you will see from this article, the energy, political and otherwise, is not around issues of living in a way that this part of the Earth can actually support, but rather on enormous and expensive projects to get water, through pipelines and whatever else they can think of, to these growing desert populations.
This is not a right relationship with the Earth, and the price we will pay in the not-too-distant future should sober us all — but especially the folks who live, and want to live, out there.
Once again, we will try to engineer our way into an unsustainable way of life. Once again, we will try to force nature to submit to our will. And we will do this, still, as we address similar or worse population strains and stresses all over the world.
We have to make some difficult choices. We cannot just simply have what we want because we want it. And if economic health depends upon growth, always growth, then we are headed for cascading crises that will have us all reeling, along with our children’s generation and the ones to follow.
Remember the fires out West last year? Did you see the photos of the raging fire over the Hollywood sign in LA last week? California and Florida are dealing right now with the impacts of getting a mere fraction of their normal rainful over the past few months and both are at the point of mandatory water restrictions. South Florida is in severe drought right now. And still population growth booms.
Are we nuts? Do we still have any connection to our own biology to know that we are now maladapted and need, quickly, to get this species back into balance with the Earth’s life-nurturing but very real limits?
In our religious traditions, we have tended to think of right relationships as only concerning human beings and the issue of social justice. It is time, and past time, to enlarge that notion to right relationships among all the living and non-living systems of the Earth — for the sake of the survival of this species, along with thousands of others with whom we share this planet.
Photo credit: http://www.webshots.com/explains/outdoors/lake-powell.html
Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change, drought, water scarcity, right relationships, earth community
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2 Responses to “Living in right relationship with the Earth”
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Amen!
I’m preaching the same message at my blog. You want to trade blogroll links?
Does the US citizen want to live within the means of the planet? Does the average person know that there are limits to Earth’s carrying capacity? Does s/he WANT to know? Are we so myopic and self-absorbed that we can see only our immediate lifestyle and preferences? How do we wean ourselves from such an arrogant mindset? Or will Earth herself become the teacher? Hildegard of Bingen many centuries ago wrote, “The high, the low, all of creation God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s justice permits creation to punish humanity.”