Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Yet another study heralds the warning:  global warming is real and it could spell disaster for human societies.  This morning, it was the Washington Post once again, reporting the news:  Antarctic Ice Sheet is Melting Rapidly. 

It is important to appreciate what a 20-ft. rise in ocean levels means for coastal communities and low-lying countries.  It means flooding of cities like London and Manhattan, it means the disappearance of Bangladesh, it means the inundation of large portions of Florida and Louisiana.   Use your imagination to add to the list. With the destabilization of the climate will come other disasters, like floods and droughts that could make more parts of the world uninhabitable.  This is the future for our children and grandchildren if we don’t act now. 

While scientists may still be uncertain about how much of the warming is the earth’s natural cycle, and how much is human contribution, the reality is that humans are contributing, accelerating whatever other forces are at work.  Worse, the acceleration is feeding on itself.  Since liquid water absorbs more heat from the sun, while ice reflects much of it back into the atmosphere, the melting of glaciers, ice sheets, and the Arctic Ocean will cause the warming to accelerate exponentially. 

Two things are necessary: 1) curbing human carbon emissions to the point where we not only don’t add to the greenhouse effect, but begin to reverse it; 2) proactive planning for adaptation to the forces already at work.  If we don’t do the latter, the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, including the woeful lack of planning for a disaster long known to be possible and inevitable and the criminal lack of adequate response to the storm’s human and material consequences, will be harbinger of the future on a much larger scale. 

Many things will need to be re-thought, from creating clean energy sources all the way to how we do development (for instance, ending coastal development and relocating flood-threatened communities), how the global economy functions and to what end, even to reorienting human life and its meaning away from consumption and economic growth to living sustainably on this earth. 

It is getting uncomfortably late for a national dialogue on these things…