The world is changing all around us
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Posted on November 28, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
“We are seeing a transfer of wealth of historic dimensions.”
That’s one change. It has been coming for some time now, riding the wave of escalating oil prices. Those petrodollars have to go somewhere, after all. Excess wealth must be invested somewhere. When wealth shifts, so does power.
The shift is away from oil importers — like us — to the oil exporters, like Persian Gulf sheikdoms. To help one understand this world, the direction it’s going, and why some predict the end of US global hegemony very soon, I recommend this article from today’s Ny Times, Oil Producers See the World and Buy It Up.
It’s one of the little factoids we can’t get around. US oil sources are depleted or depleting. We import two-thirds of the oil we use and cannot live without it — at least for decades to come because we waited too long to begin a transition away from oil, a transition still not begun in any but token fashion. So we will depend upon those who have it, and that means our economy depends upon those who have it.
But what this article talks about is even more than this. With these billions upon billions of petrodollars, oil producers are also buying up larger and larger chunks of the world economy, investing in US and European corporations, and in markets all around the world (see also as an example, Dubai’s bold bid to take on the City). China is doing this too with all that money they earn from the exports we buy at Wal-Mart.
Meanwhile, guess who holds a growing chunk of our mortgage and credit card debt? I found this factoid surfing around the Internet: from 1988 to 2006, foreign holdings of U.S. debt increased from 13% to 27.5% (Source: U.S.Treasury Foreign Holdings of U.S. Portfolio Securities). Of that, China holds about 10%, Japan some 20%. And this on another website US Economy on About.com: “The Bureau of International Settlements suspects that much of the holdings by Belguim, Cayman Islands and Luxembourg (21%) are fronts for various oil-exporting countries that do not wish to be identified. (Source: U.S. Treasury report ”Petrodollars and Global Imbalances”, February 2006 .)” Pity those who still believe the US can close the borders around itself and maintain that old sense of nationalistic identity.
Like those anti-immigration people who think they can will away the tens of millions of newly arrived immigrants, many undocumented, who live among us, who will remain among us, who are now a vital part of the functioning of our economy.
To read more about how we got into this debt/creditor mess, brought to you by Republican presidents (also: click here) and the formerly Republican-controlled Congress (aided and abetted by many Democrats), check out this opinion piece by David Ignatius in the Washingon Post going on two years ago: Taste of the future. To read about the foreign hold of our debt, check out this article from the New Yorker, now two years old. As you know, the value of the dollar has been plummeting in recent months, which could portend some deep economic problems ahead.
Another example from across the ocean: the resurgence of violence among immigrant neighborhoods in the suburbs of Paris and beyond. Another article from the Times that should be read in order to understand our world right now, In French suburbs, same rage, new tactics. No matter how hard France tries, no matter the commitment of law-and-order prime minister Sarkozy, France is no longer only for the French, or the Netherlands for the Dutch, or London for the Brits.
Just as there is no longer a US economy just for US Americans, no British economy just for the British, no China economy just for the Chinese.
We are going through earth-shaking changes. Many factors are involved. Among them: a global economy that has uprooted workers, farmers, and poor people all over the world; global warming and climate change that is undermining the capacity of parts of our planet to support burgeoning populations; population growth that will add 2-3 billion more people to the planet by 2050 (another 200,000,000 here in the US); ecological overshoot, living beyond the means of the Earth to support us; ecosystem destruction that is depleting forests, topsoils for agriculture, fish populations, and bringing about the extinction of millions of species along the fabric of life; historical discrimination by the mostly white Western economic powers.
Those are just some of the drivers bringing about drastic changes in our world. This is the real world we live in now, and there is no going back. The wide sweep of our interdependence in a world reaching limits in fossil fuels, ecological damage, and carrying capacity means we are headed for some real turbulence as we try to adjust and adapt to such a world.
How resilient are we going to be? How will our spiritual values, whatever our traditions and belief systems, address these changes? 
How our future unfolds, and whether it is a future of horrific violence and upheaval, desperation and suffering on a global scale, or a future of hope, the birth of a new planetary identity rooted in compassion and a sense of a common destiny — well, it is this generation that is charged with beginning to make that crucial choice.
And this, my friends, is the most important conversation that human beings should be having right now — at our family dinner tables, on our neighborhood porches, at our workplaces, in our churches, synagogues and community centers, with political leaders at all levels, with cultural leaders — educators, writers, artists.
Fear is best overcome by facing it directly, instead of letting it hover as a growing and darkening shadow ready to swallow us up. We can take the air out of that fear bubble by looking at it squarely and honestly in the company of others — friends, community, groups and organizations dedicated to the work of the ‘great turning.’ (Visit also: the website of Joanna Macy)
Join the conversation. Hook up with the community. It is everywhere.
Technorati Tags: petrodollars, oil producers, Persian Gulf shiekdoms, mortgage and credit card debt, global economy, immigrants, great turning
Photo credits:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli (land surface, shallow water, clouds). Enhancements by Robert Simmon
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