Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Give credit where due:  Sir Nicholas Stern has certainly stirred up the conversation on global warming and climate change.  The world’s economic elites don’t pay much attention to the environmentalists or the ecological doomsayers, but they will listen to one of their own.

So when doom becomes not just something about the future ecological collapse of the Earth’s biosphere, but the imminent collapse of the profit-making bottom line, more of the West’s leaders take notice.

Stern responded to some of the criticisms of his report in an editorial for The Financial Times.

The bottom line is that the less weight you attach to the future simply because it is the future, the less you will value investments in a stable climate. If you consider that the needs of future generations should be represented in decision-making, the case for strong mitigation is overwhelming.

Oh, those annoying future generations.  What a problem they present to our complacency and economic growth assumptions! 

In this linked article , we see that much discussion centers on how to ‘green’ economic growth, as Stern’s clarion call brings attention to the fact that the way we do business now will lead to major economic disasters quite soon.  One of the proposals, an important one, is to begin assigning the real cost of production on the goods we extract and consume by including the environmental costs.  That would make people take notice for sure!

The article also speaks of how some of the more resistant and conservative economists are beginning to realize we are already in deep, well, you know what, and sinking fast.  As they say, the time for action is very short.

But what is significant for me in this article is that it addresses a problem as essential, or even moreso, than the urgent need to begin reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the rapid heating of the planet and some of the chaotic and destructive climate changes we are already experiencing around the globe.  It speaks also of the completely unsustainble levels of human consumption – levels that already would require more than one Earth to sustain, and two Earth’s by the middle of the century.

We are approaching one of those ‘critical mass’ moments when forces coming from many directions are bringing to birth a new consciousness about our predicament, the need to save the biosphere in which we live and breathe and have our being - so that we can continue to do those three things.  We need to keep pushing this process forward, talking about it, gathering people together to watch films, have discussions, to get our churches and community groups talking this up, reaching out to the new Congress, to local and state politicians, and the local media, and then getting ourselves organized.

The gathering consensus is that we are running out of time and must take action now.  As we have written before, this will take more than new exotic fuels for our cars and scams like ‘clean coal’ that try to convince us that there are easy transitions that will just keep us going as we are.  This will take courage and the committment to the long protracted effort of re-inventing how we live on this planet.

The adventure of a lifetime, a project worthy of the human being.