Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Had to go to NYC for a funeral on Friday and Saturday so I missed a few days with my blog.  Now it is time to catch up.  I want to post today about the woeful state of our government under this Bush administration, or lack-of-administration, basically the give-away of our vital government functions to the private sector and why this does not bode well for ecological hope.

But want to mention this first.  I attended a wonderful presentation on the ‘Gaia Theory: Model and Metaphor for the 21st Century,’ the title for the conference last October which I blogged about here.  It was offered by Martin Ogle, naturalist at the Potomac Overlook Regional Park in Arlington, Virginia — a lovely setting for this event.  The 50 reserved places at the Nature Center were filled quickly, encouraging Martin to do another in January.  An encouraging sign — that there are many people who are looking more profoundly at their relationship with the Earth within which we live and breathe and have our being. 

This is a reminder of something lost to our western consciousness — that we are of nature, not over and above it.  It is not ours to control, but ours to live within.  Gaia theory postulates that the planet is a self-regulating organic ’system’, carefully balancing its complex elements and chemical processes to create the conditions to foster and sustain life — a living planet rather than a dead planet.

We are destroying that balance with our toxins, our wastes, our utterly unsustainable way of life, and are creating the potential to break down the biosphere in which, well, as I wrote, we live and breathe and have our being.

Okay, background for the point of this post — we need better government.  With our ecological crisis becoming grave, we are faced not only with incompetent government, but with government being sold off to the private for-profit sector, mostly to contractors from companies that donate to the Republican Party.

Here’s the article from the NY Times that raised my ire a wee bit a couple of days ago.  It is a story about how the Bush administration’s woefully mistitled Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is changing the procedure for approving standards for toxic air pollutants.  Rather than giving first review to scientists within and without the agency, the first shot will go to political appointees.

Now here’s a surprise — the changes were supported and vigorously lobbied for by the American Petroleum Institute.  Here we go again with this energy industry-dominated White House.  Once again, makes you wonder how policy was set in the early days of the Bush presidency at those secret meetings on energy policy led by Halliburton’s man, Dick Cheney.

The Times seems to find this appalling and gave the issue an editorial today.

It follows a pattern.  Paul Krugman writes about this in his Op-Ed today, calling Bush ‘Outsourcer in Chief.’  As the White House has contracted out things like war-making, defense contracts, reconstruction projects in Iraq, and disaster relief and reconstruction at home, services get worse, projects are not getting done, corruption and incompetence are rampant, and tens of billions of our tax dollars are being wasted.

Tax dollars that we could use for things like developing alternative energy technologies, planning proactively for the impacts of global warming and climate change, national programs to reduce energy consumption, tax breaks for people to buy solar panels, hybrids and electric cars, and programs to build clean mass transit to get people out of their cars — just a few examples.

I encourage all of us to expose ourselves to more programs like the one I experienced in Arlington yesterday — for two reasons.  One is to learn.  We simply must, and we must spread what we know to our children, friends, neighborhoods, churches, etc.  The other is to be moved, to be inspired, as our ancestors were — to be awed by this sacred Earth that is our home, unique in all the cosmos that we know to this point.

Do we really want to be responsible for destroying the ‘living’ part of this living planet?

It’s time we make government accountable to we humans and to this precious Earth of which we are a part.  It is time to take a drastically new direction in how we approach the way we live on this precious planet.