Thomas Friedman and eco-despair

Share your Thoughts
Posted on September 20, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized, Justice, Deep ecology, Ecological overshoot, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

These are a few thoughts for the weekend, since I will be leading a retreat in Virginia and won’t be able to post again until Monday.

And by the way, happy autumnal equinox. We’ll be marking it here in the east, as elsewhere, with a bit of a heat wave, and a continuation of our drought. I’ll be on the ocean with a small group of peace activists, and our meditation will be on this precious planet of ours and what we are called to do in the face of our ecological crisis.

Tough stuff. Earnest stuff. Hopeful stuff.

Anyway, about Thomas Friedman and despair. His column in the NY Times yesterday spoke of his visits to Doha in Qatar and Dalian in China, two cities that are emblematic of the changes going on in our world. As he describes these economically booming cities, he reflects on what it will mean for our Earth as more peoples around the world strive to become ‘American’ in terms of wealth and comfort – all those millions and millions who will be buying cars, living in luxury air-conditioned apartments and mansions, buying appliances like we have, etc.

Totally and completely unsustainable and a quick path to ecological ruin.

And yet, how dare we judge or tell them they can’t have what we have.

Read the column. It’s what many of us keep trying to say over and over again – changing our lightbulbs and buying recycled paper is fine, do it, but don’t expect these changes in our individual consumption to mean much in terms of saving the planet. These things are necessary, but they must be accompanied by a wholesale alteration in how human beings live on the Earth.

For us, who had our cake and ate it, too, over and over again, that means leading the way in downscaling our lifestyles, living with less. But it also means a fundamental revolution away from growth economies based on consumption to something else, something that is in balance with the actual life systems of the planet, that fits within its rhythms, that mimics, or reflects, the organic nature of how life actually works.

Friedman gets depressed, and so do I. I wonder if we can do this, and if we can do it in time.

As we have said many times here: The great moral challenge of our time is to do the turning away from one way of life to another in time to save the balance and equilibrium of the biosphere in which we live and move and have our being. What do you think? Can we do it?

I close with this quote from the theologian Sallie McFague, an excerpt from her book, Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for A Planet in Peril. It’s about us. It is all about us.

We do not love nature or care for two-thirds of the world’s people if we who are 20 percent of the population use more than 80 percent of the world’s energy. There is not enough energy on the planet for all people to live as we do (and increasingly, most want to) or for the planet to remain in working order if all try to live this way. We are on a path that is unjust to others and unsustainable to the planet. But most of us do not know (or acknowledge) this; we keep ourselves in denial because we like this way of life, and our economic system and government collude with us. We middle-class North Americans are addicted to the consumer lifestyle, even is it means depriving others and putting the planet in jeopardy.


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