Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Articulating a spirituality for the ‘great turning’

September 2008

…you cannot describe the possibilities for [the] future unless the problem is accurately defined.

 Paul Hawken

An introduction to our new zine

by Margaret Swedish

In his book, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken describes what he calls the largest mass movement in human history - the movement of communities, non-governmental organizations, small non-profit groups, indigenous peoples, and individuals who have taken upon themselves the challenge of saving the planet, or, more humbly, those ecosystems of the planet within which we all exist.

The other side of that coin, of course, is that, if those systems collapse, we will no longer exist.

This is no longer hyperbole but the threat we actually face. We are living far beyond the means of the planet to regenerate what we take from it or destroy, and to absorb the waste we put back in as the byproduct of our lifestyles and economies.

Right now, to meet the demands of human consumption, we require 1.4 Earths.

We don’t have 1.4 Earths.

So the first challenge is clear: we must ratchet down the entire human enterprise, scale down the human project to the limits of the one planet we actually have.

 

But there is an even greater challenge in the context of centuries of inequalities, of record gaps between rich and poor, of the fact that the poor of our world - which means most of our world - will be impacted far more than the affluent as the breakdowns begin: and that is the moral imperative of justice.

Yet our notion of justice must also change. We have tended in our progressive communities to think of justice in human-to-human terms. The poor have a right to all that we have in the way of comfort and security. What we know now is that if we use U.S. society as the standard for a dignified, fulfilled life, and if we strive to offer this to everyone, we will kill life as we know it on this planet quite rapidly.

We have also learned, or relearned something crucially important - that humans are not over and above nature, able to manipulate it for its own ends as if it was clay in our hands to mold as we wish. This is the philosophy behind much of our economic development schemes and forms a foundational ideology that is ruining ecosystems everywhere.

The Earth can hardly stand much more of it. Whether it is our waste product from burning fossil fuels, soil erosion and contamination because of agricultural practices, runoff of chemical waste and soil that is ruining our waterways, piles of toxic waste overtopping our landfills, vital wetlands paved over for development of malls and exurban communities, and our endless consumption and throw-away goods - goods, that is, that are intended to be thrown away and replaced constantly - overuse of precious aquifers, rivers, and reservoirs, the toxins we eat and drink that are poisoning our bodies, and on and on, our precious planet has reached a turning point in which ecosystem breakdowns are beginning to happen everywhere we look.

So what we are addressing here is not only human-to-human justice, but justice within a whole Earth community, a community of other living creatures, living systems, that are all part of what some call, Gaia - the Earth as one whole organism, everything interrelated, everything part of a whole process that is constantly in flux, changing and evolving as the Earth and cosmos always have and always will.

The question facing us now is what role we humans want to have in this evolutionary story. Sadly, the predominant story unfolding right now is one in which one day in the not-too-distant future humans may have no role at all.

The other possibility is that we rise to this moment in the story of conscious evolution when we are becoming aware of the danger and what we have done wrong, when we begin to respond to what we are coming to understand about our universe, our place within it on this small planet revolving around an ordinary star in one gigantic arm of the galaxy we call the Milky Way, our cosmic home.

The challenge of our U.S vantage point

We address this challenge on this website from our vantage point here in the United States, still the world’s biggest consumer, still the world’s biggest producer of waste, especially the greenhouse gases that are changing our atmosphere. The moral challenge facing us is huge. It is the one I describe in my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, published in spring 2008 by Orbis Books. It is this:

“…human beings must drastically lower, overall, our levels of consumption and waste to live within the means of the Earth’s carrying capacity. That means we must cut consumption and waste by that 40 percent of capacity beyond which we are living right now, and we must do this as we add two to three billion more humans to the planet.

“Now, justice demands that we who have so much more than we need do this to the amount, to levels, that allow five billion people who are and will be living in abject poverty to no longer live in abject poverty. They must be allowed, as it were, to increase their consumption and waste to levels that allow that to happen without continuing to steal more from the future of the planet.”

And I add that this is “the inescapable moral challenge of our time,” the inescapable moral challenge for those of us who have far more than we need, sometimes far more than we can even enjoy or keep up with.

Now this reflection here begins at a moment in which the financial underpinnings of our economy are in the greatest crisis - ever. What has happened in recent years is so telling of the moral crisis that is the basis of this collapse - an acceleration of unsustainable consumerism, supported by secretive and little understood schemes and mechanisms among financial institutions, that headed straight towards a brick wall with dizzying speed.

We are all responsible for this insofar as we believe in forever rising standards of living, accumulating right now what we cannot afford, insofar as we bought into a consumer society in which even the meaning of Christmas for Christians has to do with how well retail does during the holiday shopping season.

As I said, the Earth cannot stand much more of this.

And this: what is our moral obligation to our children and our children’s children? Every time I am with the children I care so much about, I find myself fearing for their future, for the world we are leaving them. The work we must do now, this ‘great turning‘ towards a new way of living on the planet, must be a cross-generational project. We certainly hope to have some of those voices heard on this website as we move along. It is incumbent upon us to look these young ones square in the eye and think about what we are doing to them and to their own future generations by how we are living here.

 

 

The roots of ecological hope

There is another side to this beyond the nearly mind-numbing nature of the challenges we face, and this is the side in which the roots of our ecological hope lie deeply buried. For in our time, something else has been going on, the awakening of our biological memory as science and the story of evolution have revealed to us the long process that gave birth to conscious beings on this planet - the only one we know of so far where this has happened.

In our time, we have also learned something about our place in the cosmos and the story of our universe, this magnificent act of creation that still goes on in and through and beyond us. It has stricken awe in the hearts of hundreds of millions of people around our world, reenergized old creation stories and myths, reordered our sense of what is important in this human journey and what isn’t.

One of the most heartening moments for me in recent years was the popular outcry when President Bush was prepared to let the Hubble Space Telescope  die. I had no idea that Hubble had such an enormous fan base. It was one of those moments when you suddenly realize how large a community we are, this community of ecological wonder and hope.

What will it be like to live on a deteriorated planet? As we ponder what to do to salvage the ecosystems that sustain and nurture us, I like to recall my experience driving and hiking through Yellowstone National Park in 2005. You remember that vast swaths of the forest there had been destroyed in 1988 by a massive fire. Two things happened after that. The Park Service began clearing out a lot of the burned wood because it was unsightly for the tourists. However, scientists and environmentalists convinced the park to leave some of it to regenerate naturally.

You can guess the result - the parts left to nature were regenerating at a far greater rate than those that were ‘managed.’

Or check out the completely dead, ash-covered areas around Mt. St. Helens in the years following the 1980 volcanic eruption - new life everywhere.

But for this to happen globally, we must lessen the human footprint and allow the Earth to do what it knows how to do. And we must learn to live within the natural systems of the planet in a way that does not do further damage.

What will this take? I believe it will take more than mere human ingenuity, engineering, and a master-over-nature approach. It will take an entire reevaluation of our moral framework, our frameworks of meaning, our spiritual and religious traditions. It will take a profound turn in how we view and value the human project within the evolutionary story.

It will take a new spirituality commensurate with the challenges we face.

The collapse of the financial sector is a harbinger of more collapses to come if we continue on this deleterious course. Many collapses are inevitable now because we have not acted, or awakened quickly enough. We will have to learn how to face difficult circumstances with a spirit of compassion, generosity, unselfishness, patience, and love for our world and one another.

But each of these collapses is also a call, and could be, if we pay attention, a cry of hope. It is not too late to create a different story - not without upheaval and turbulence, but out of those very things.

This reflection will provide the substance and direction of our new ‘zine.’ We intend to publish quarterly, so look for a first issue in November, a way to welcome in the holidays.

As we go along, we invite your input, thoughts, reflections. We hope to ignite plenty of reflection, debate, animated dialogue, and lots of insights and wisdom because of it.

The act of creation is a turbulent thing. Look out at the stars at night, check out the Hubble website and take a look at all the creation and destruction that gave birth to us. When we view these photos, we are not seeing what is there now, but what was, really and truly, the creative process from which our galaxy, sun and planet emerged.

We are part of that. And becoming part of that consciously is what this project is all about.