Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Everything we need to live seems to be under siege these days. Water — too much of it (central Midwest), too little of it (the West and Southeast); oil prices in the stratosphere; food prices rising inexorably — because of too much water and the high cost of oil. It’s all connected, deeply connected.

“There are going to be some trying times coming up in the near future,” said Brian Fagan, mayor pro tem of Cedar Rapids where flood waters are finally receding, leaving a monumental mess.

But the water is still on the move and I can’t imagine what it must be like to be waiting down river. Many Mississippi River communities are just holding their breath knowing it will be bad.

You have already heard, no doubt, what this will mean for the price of food. Iowa was the number one corn state in the country. The broad swath of farmland across Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana that flooded over the past couple of weeks have ruined millions of acres of crops — corn, soybeans, hay, and more — fields already under stress from a late spring. Food prices will rise — grains, meat and poultry, dairy products — all will be impacted.

And food prices were already rising because of the skyrocketing oil prices.

By the way, Milwaukee is about three tenths of an inch of rain shy of the June all-time record. Two weeks to go.

What will we do in the face of these immediate challenges? How about the government subsidies for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel? Make sense right now? Before the floods, a third of U.S. corn production was slated for ethanol. If turning grains into energy was already having an impact on global food prices, and the availability of food in poor countries, what now? The US is the world’s leading corn exporter, a major source of food aid.

What now?

Oil. The pressure being felt by escalating costs of gasoline has become a prime opportunity for the oil industry to press lawmakers to overturn the ban on off-shore drilling and to open the Alaska wilderness for oil and gas drilling. It has also become a prime opportunity for nuclear energy enthusiasts to make the biggest push in decades for the construction of new nuclear power plants.

Meanwhile, President Bush has already opened the way for even more mountaintopping — blowing up our beautiful Appalachian Mountains to get to coal seams.

This is all such destructive behavior. It is all about trying to find ways to keep business-as-usual in a world where business-as-usual is the problem.

We need a new way of life. We need a whole new approach to how humans live on the planet, how we organize our lives, our life goals, our frameworks of meaning.

I have such fear that we will make decisions in a frenzy of desperation and fear, rather than taking these moments of crisis to take a deep breath and really reflect on what we are doing.

There are going to be some trying times coming in the near future — indeed. Not just for Cedar Rapids.

We are looking through a whole series of remarkable events — ‘natural’ and otherwise — that mark a change in our times — really major change. Look around the world right now — China, Myanmar, tornado alley, the midwest (I could make a very long list here) — look at what is happening to energy realities, population growth, changing landscapes, ecosystem breakdowns, melting ice sheets and arctic seas — markers of a major change in the very era in which we live.

We are moving from one era to another with precious little thought about what we are going to do, how we will live through this period of upheaval with as much ease as possible, with the least amount of suffering and catastrophe, until we can find some new balance among humans and the rest of Nature.

Because there are ways to do this. We can reinvent our lives in a way that can ease the crisis and make it a profoundly meaningful life mission to change how we live on the planet.

I think we must create grassroots communities around this mission. There are places where this is happening in incipient and prophetic forms. That is a sign of great hope.

Let us use this fearful time to move this reflection forward. Let’s do it for all those suffering now from these weather extremes, those who have lost homes and livelihoods. And let’s do it for our children who will inherit from us whatever it is we now choose to leave them.

[tags] midwest floods, Mississippi River, high oil prices, food prices rise, nuclear energy industry, corn ethanol, soy biodiesel, weather extremes, reinvent human presence on the earth[/tags]

Photo credits:

Flooded Iowa River near Oakville, IA - Scott Olson, Getty Images - found in NY Times

Kayford mountaintop removal, www.ilovemountains.org