Take a break from oil, lower your footprint, spend time with family and friends
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Posted on September 14, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Global warming/Climate change, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecologicl Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Yesterday, oil prices broke a threshold, ending the day above $80 per barrel, a record. Markets were reacting to the surprise hurricane that hit Texas and some of the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Humberto indeed raised eyebrows among scientists. The storm went from a tropical depression to a hurricane in record time, a matter of hours, really, as it drew energy from the very warm waters of the gulf. A much-above-normal summer, the 6th warmest on record, helped heat the water which undoubtedly helped provide energy for the storm, though the exact reason for this quick intensification still eludes hurricane experts.
Today, prices are back down below $80 per barrel, but that could change again quickly and for any number of reasons, including a new tropical storm Ingrid which is brewing out over the Atlantic. September is the peak hurricane month, and things have been pretty busy out there.
Meanwhile, the global economy continues to be battered by the subprime mortgage crisis. For years, our economy has been supported on the false foundation of the real estate market — shyster loans and refinancing schemes based on escalating real estate values — all this bound to crack eventually. The cracking now is getting to be pretty widespread across the global economy.
Why are we doing this? Why do we keep borrowing money, get more into debt, so that we can buy stuff that by any measure is only filling our lives with more stress and that every poll shows is not making us happy?
Are we fools before the oil and gas industries, the corporations who can only survive on our debt, our overstretched credit cards, our buying stuff we don’t need?
Here’s a thought for the weekend. Just stop all this. Our planet is heating up, bringing about any number of unnatural natural disasters as we have been seeing all summer long. Our debts feel like fun when we sign the loan or put down the credit card, but they keep coming due, with interest added on — profit for whom? Just more money out of the pockets of your families.
Meanwhile, getting off oil is not just about getting out of our cars. It’s also about not buying stuff shipped from all over the world in factories powered with coal — contaminated toys from China, lettuce from Mexico (bet folks can grow lettuce where you live), wood from the rainforests of the Amazon, and on and on.
So this is what I’m suggesting. That we begin from the bottom up, in our families, our faith communities, our schools and neighborhoods to change this destructive lifestyle. It is completely unsustainable and the Earth and the human community within it is suffering grievously as a result. If we want the way in which the world conducts business to change, then we have to change our end of things.
And then we have to get active, engaged, in changing the politics and the culture of this economy so that we can begin to construct a new way of life on the planet.
It will make us happier. We will be less stressed. We will have more time for friends and families. And it will engage us in the most meaningful and important work of our generation. Not bad, all that.
So how about taking some time this weekend to talk about this at home, in your churches, with your friends and neighbors. To get courage, we need each other. Let’s start building the communities of hope we need to get us through the change from one world to another — a life-giving and sustaining one, rather than the pathological one in which we now live.
Technorati Tags: record oil prices, hurricane humberto, tropical storm ingrid, change lifestyle
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2 Responses to “Take a break from oil, lower your footprint, spend time with family and friends”
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A little effort from everyone will result in a big change for our planet and may-be the whole universe.
I keep seeing one small, but simple thing that corporations could do, but are not doing to help lower our footprint. A friend of mine gets a new car from her company every 60,000 miles. They give her a blank check for $35,000 to go get anything she wants. Then they give her a gas card so she doesn’t have to pay for gas either. And they pay the insurance on it. So what did she get? A Yukon. If you want a big, gas-guzzling truck, and you don’t have to pay for it or for the gas, why not, right? Wouldn’t it be easy for a company like hers to offer some incentive for her to get a hybrid? Perhaps they could cut a deal on them if they buy a certain number of them per year. Maybe employees could get a few extra paid days off each year if they get a hybrid? But no. There is absolutely no incentive for her to get a fuel-efficient vehicle. It could be so easy for corporations to do.
(And yes, she is well aware of how much I hate her new car.)