When does that happen? when does climate science denial become weighted with moral culpability? How about, right now?

Because it is one thing to deny science when science tells us that the earth revolves around the sun, or that the sun and earth are not the center of the universe. That can bring about great cultural conflicts and even burnings at the stake. And there is certainly moral weight in those things.

Sunset meets pollution over Milwaukee - photo by Margaret Swedish

But what about when this denial threatens the world with unimaginable and irreversible catastrophe? We are not just challenging meaning frameworks here, old ways of thinking, religious orthodoxies (like the supremacy of the human over nature as ordained by God), political agendas, or corporate bottom lines. If so, there might be time for prolonged debate and conversation, time for an old era shaped by a certain worldview to evolve into the next era shaped by whatever we are learning new about our world.

But what of a moment like this one, when time is critical and urgency apparent? We have time, but not much time.  The moment when we run out of time is not the best moment to decide to take action as if we could get that time back. At that point it is more about how we will live through the unfolding disaster. I’d like to make a different choice.

Then, what is the moral weight of campaigns funded by oil companies and people like the billionaire Koch brothers dismissing what they also know to be true – but don’t want us to know is true because of the impact it would have on short-term profits? What is the moral weight behind the campaign of denial waged by right-wing pundits, the Palins and Becks and Limbaughs and Inhofes, of our political culture?

Some disturbing news that shows just how much the ecological crisis is escalating: Trees, for example, that have been the hope of some carbon mitigation campaigns are proving to be under great distress and their capacity to absorb CO2 is now in a state of decline. As the headline of this article indicates, this is exceedingly bad news.

So of our oceans, another powerful carbon sink – they are becoming saturated, unable to absorb the excess we keep spewing into the atmosphere – which means more of our greenhouse gases will just sit there, in the atmosphere, trapped, being cooked by the sun. From Speigel Online, 2007:

“The decline of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean as a carbon sink may raise future CO2 levels and speed up global warming. Climate scientists have predicted this would happen. The trouble is that the changes appear to be happening some 40 years ahead of schedule.”

Again, not good news.  The source for this info is the journal, Science, not exactly fringe tree-hugging types.

Demand v. World Biocapacicy - Global Footprint Network

We are heading into vast uncharted territory here, conditions which we humans have never before faced in our own short evolutionary history. More and more people are ‘getting it,’ and one can find articles like this one which was on Huffington Post yesterday, Derek Shearer writing that, “Happy Days Are Not Here Again,” and they are not coming anytime soon.

In this project, we focus on ‘spirituality’ for a reason. In its broadest sense, spirituality is about a moral and ethical view of the world, about belief systems, attitudes, what one reverences and values. At bottom, most people operate out of these, so if one’s belief system and life experience says that God made the world for the privileged few, that some are chosen while others are not, that the most powerful ought to rule the world, or that the rights of the individual trump all other rights, then how one acts in the world will reflect that belief system.

Isn’t this what is behind so much of our cultural disarray, the angry fragmentation of the ol’ body politic? Thing about the ‘real’ world is that it goes on despite our belief systems. Whether or not one believes that the human species is devouring and contaminating the planet in ways that spell disaster, the planet will react to the devouring and contaminating in any case. The natural systems will operate according to the dynamisms of the planet, not the will of the human species. And when the human species messes with those dynamisms, those systems will also respond in ways the human cannot control but in the ways built into those dynamisms.

Put too much carbon into the atmosphere, the carbon sinks will eventually be saturated and no longer able to absorb the excess and the build-up in the atmosphere will accelerate and the climate systems of the planet will respond accordingly – ultimately humbling the human.

I want a different future for her - photo by Mom

And that’s where we’re headed – unless we want a different future than this. But the more I listen to the angry incoherence and demagoguery in the culture these days, and the more deafening the silence from religious, cultural, educational, political and other ‘leaders,’ the more I am convinced that we have to go to the heart of the matter if we are going to change this – to the values, frameworks of meaning, that are behind our inability as a society to address the crises at hand.

In the Roman Catholic world, for example, enormous energy is going into re-representing an old world view through re-writing of liturgical language  and forcing this on parishes, while forests are in decline, oil tar sands extraction is destroying the boreal forests of western Canada, global warming is changing climate patterns causing more droughts and floods, fracking for natural gas is contaminating the drinking water of communities in PA, NY, WY, OH, and on and on, and the consumption patterns of US Americans have become wholly unsustainable and destructive to the living systems of the planet.  I have a feeling about how Jesus would address this were he alive today.

Wounded Earth - by Mary Southard

We could use many examples from many countries, cultures, and orthodoxies in which worldviews are the principal obstructions to addressing the planet’s many human-caused crises. At some point we have to start losing our fear and begin talking about these things – with respect and compassion, without judgment and argument, but with an embrace of truth and urgency. Because whatever we believe, there is a truth to how the earth works. If our belief systems contradict that very unfolding of creation as it is, as it was given (if you believe it was given), that narrative from which the human story emerged and of which it is still an integral part, then it’s the belief systems that must be challenged, not the creation.

Over and over again, the rise of human awareness and knowledge has opened for us the marvelous workings and mysteries of our evolving universe as expressed on this planet. I don’t think we evolved this way only to bring about our own destruction. I think we evolved this way so that we could become a marvelous expression in ourselves of the creative unfolding of life and consciousness.

Again, there is still time, but not much time.

Wow, the climate in the body politic is really getting ugly, isn’t it? So many disturbing signs that we do not have what we need in terms of civil discourse to even think seriously about our many crises, much less come up with ways to address them. I find this deeply worrisome.

I got my own taste of this today. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel printed a letter-to-the-editor that I wrote in response to their recent local news article in which Republican candidate for the Senate, Ron Johnson, who is running against Sen. Russ Feingold, declared that climate science was ‘lunacy’ and that global warming was caused by sunspots.

I pointed out that a businessman running for office ought not to speak with such authority on matters about which he had no expertise.

“Electing politicians who do not believe in science is not going to help us get out of the global ecological crises we are facing. The planet is warming, and our greenhouse gas emissions are a leading cause. Climate systems that create weather and impact the ecosystems of our waters and soils are all being affected… Johnson’s statements are morally dangerous, irresponsible and factually wrong.”

Temperature anamolies Jan.-July 2010 - Source: NOAA

This is true, friends. Anyone these days who denies the growing evidence of our many ecological crises, no matter what party or position or institution they represent, needs to address the moral responsibility for delaying action on them. Think Pakistan, and you get a sense for what I mean.  While I take no position on specific candidates, I do recommend that voters study their positions on things like climate change, peak oil, mountaintop removal, fracking, oil tar sands, and other forms of environmentally destructive methods of extraction, industrial agriculture, genetically modified organisms,  enforcement of the Clean Air Act and other legally binding laws protecting the environment, threats to wetlands and other precious habitats by developers, etc.

So I came home from a meeting today to a message on my answering machine from a courageous ‘private caller;’ right, no personal identification. After defending the sunspot theory rather incoherently, he called me a ‘retard’ and President Obama a ‘n#!#!r.’ The second term was the one that revealed to me yet one more time what is really at the foundation of a lot of this angry, crazy, divisive discourse. The proposed Islamic community center a couple of blocks from the former World Trade Center is another. Hatred comes out of the woodwork, stoked for political gain by hatemongers who make political or cable news or radio talk show careers out of it.

They are dangerous because they are playing with fire. We all know that this country has a certain layer within it of unresolved resentment based in historic racism. And right now when this country needs so urgently to have deliberative, calm, thoughtful conversation about things like the economic crisis which is linked to structural issues which are exacerbated by one ecological crisis after another (depleting aquifers, topsoil loss due to industrial agriculture practices, loss of wetlands and other critical habitats, species extinctions, patterns of drought and flood that are becoming common and possibly permanent, etc., accompanied by growing numbers of ‘natural’ disasters on an increasingly crowded planet) – right when it is crucial that we be able to talk to one another, our friends on the right, deeply resentful that they are out of power, are stoking the fires of division, rage, and hatred.

How will we ever have this conversation if we don’t set a new and different tone?  Because, friends, there are some things we need to talk about. When the week started, I had planned to begin this next post with a comment on an opinion piece in yesterday’s NYT by Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto, entitled, Disaster at the Top of the World. He wrote a book that had a big impact on how I think about these things, entitled: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.  I highly recommend it. I also recommend an earlier work, The Ingenuity Gap. Both of these books give a grim, challenging, but ultimately hope-inducing description of our current civilization-wide predicament.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent - National Snow and Ice Data Center

In any case, his essay yesterday was about a trip he took to the Arctic to see what was happening to the sea ice. From this vantage point, he reflects on the lack of action from global leaders on climate change, including the wholesale abdication of responsibility this year by the U.S. Congress. He describes the potential for a near-term ‘climate shock’ and laments that it will probably take a real cataclysm to force us to action. But making things much worse is that pundits and politicians alike, many of them funded by the fossil fuel industry, rightist foundations, or business groups like the U.S. Chambers of Commerce, have made this issue so polarizing that we are paralyzed, literally unable to act, to get up and walk. Homer-Dixon writes:

“Climate change has become an ideologically polarizing issue. It taps into deep personal identities and causes what Dan Kahan of Yale calls “protective cognition” — we judge things in part on whether we see ourselves as rugged individualists mastering nature or as members of interconnected societies who live in harmony with the environment. Powerful special interests like the coal and oil industries have learned how to halt movement on climate policy by exploiting the fear people feel when their identities are threatened.

“Given this reality, we’ll almost certainly need some kind of devastating climate shock to get effective climate policy. That’s the key lesson of the recent financial crisis: when powerful special interests have convinced much of the public that what they’re doing isn’t dangerous, only a disaster that discredits those interests will provide an opportunity for comprehensive policy change…”

Maybe that’s exactly what I was hearing on my answering machine, a rugged individualist who thinks we can master nature and that certainly nature will never betray us by setting limits on anybody’s rugged individualism, especially his. And if the president attempting to address these issues happens to be an African-American with a funny name, the resentment is amplified. It feels like powerlessness.

But what I know is that climate change over recent decades is changing the way weather works, is putting more heat and water vapor into the atmosphere creating bigger and bigger rain and storm events, is shifting jet streams and ocean gulf streams that affect local weather, is warming and acidifying the ocean, is warming the Great Lakes (Lake Superior is 15 degrees above normal), has given Milwaukee  a near record-breaking summer of rain, and the globe thus far the warmest year ever recorded, according to NOAA.

"Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth," according to NASA studies. "We see this as a bit of a surprise..."

Climate shocks are coming. We are having trouble talking about these things calmly before the shocks; imagine when they come and we are not prepared, as Homer-Dixon warns.

And thus, friends, my point for this day -

We have to be the ones who learn how to talk about these things without fanning the flames of fear, with compassion and non-judgment, toning down the rhetoric, meeting angry resistance without more angry resistance. We have to continue to appeal to the best in people, rather than the worst, which is what the current political culture is all too good at doing.

We have to be the very best we can be as we move deeper into a world reeling with change.

In a culture hypnotized by the myth of economic growth – that there will always be more forever and our standard of living will always increase for all eternity – it is hard to come crashing into the wall of limits.

This is our most fundamental theme – not global warming and climate change, not peak oil, not pollution and contamination of everything we need to live. It is all of these, but more. Our most fundamental theme is that we live on a round, finite planet.  And we are using up all it has to support the beings that live on it.

Ecological Overshoot gauge 2008 - Human Footprint Network

We write often here of ecological overshoot, or, putting it another way, living beyond our means, living beyond the means of the planet to support us. Because beyond global warming and oil spills, THIS is the real limit of our planetary life, THIS the limit beyond which we cannot go – and the continued race to do so spells disaster in the not-too-distant future.

So, friends, we passed a big marker this weekend, one that took me by surprise, I admit. On August 21, we reached Ecological Overshoot Day.  What is that? That’s the day that we reach our annual biocapacity limit.

“Earth Overshoot Day… marks the day when demand on ecological services begins to exceed the renewable supply.”

In other words, this is the day after which, for the rest of the year, we begin to extract more from the earth than it can replenish, the day when we have put more waste into the earth than it can absorb.

When I was writing my book, Living Beyond the End of the World: A Spirituality of Hope, back in 2006-2007, I cited the 2006 ecological overshoot day, which that year was October 9. By 2008, the year the book was published, we reached overshoot day on September 23.  This was shocking.  The pace at which we were using up more than the earth had to give was clearly accelerating.

But this, my friends, is stunning – that 2 years later we reached that date on August 21.  August 21.  Yup, it happened over the weekend.

Ecological Overshoot Gauge 2010 - Human Footprint Network

You see, friends, no matter what else we do, no matter how many wind turbines we build or plug-in hybrids, no matter how much we bemoan the fact that we have shipped so much production off-shore, no matter how much we wish we could start buying houses again, or invent, develop, and consume more hi-tech gadgets, the reality is…

we are running out out of, overshooting, everything we need for life – water, good soil, wetlands, air to breathe, minerals and metals, energy – EVERYTHING – because we continue to believe that the earth is some endless source of what we need for our creature comforts, for our expectations of increasing standards of living, our human expansions, our economics of growth and profits, and that we can keep what we have while billions around the world aspire to the same levels of consumption.

Ecological Overshoot Day compels our attention to this fact, that, um, well, no, folks, this is actually not possible. This is the day that tells us we are headed towards some critical juncture, a point of no return, a cataclysm, unless we figure out another way to live on this planet.

So I leave the images of these two graphs, one from 2008 and the other from 2010, for us to ponder in the coming days. This is the reality that forces our attention to this business of creating a new way of life on the planet, not in the distant future, not as a plan for some next generation, but right now – because the crisis is right now.

So Sen. Russ Feingold is in a supposedly tight race. I’m not able to take sides in elections in the context of this project, but I do think it important to educate on what candidates are saying.  Feingold believes we must act now to address climate change.  His opponent, Ron Johnson, is quite clear: climate science is ‘crazy’ and ‘lunacy,’ he ‘absolutely’ does ‘not believe in the science of man-caused climate change,’ and says global warming is caused by sunspots.

Really, this is what he says.  Read it for yourself.  These people scare me. Imagine if these are the people into whose hands we entrust the future of policy related to climate change and other ecological crises.

Temperature anomalies July 2010 - NOAA

I hardly know what to make of this because it is echoed by other politicians, like Sen. Inhofe. Do they actually believe this? Or are they doing something more diabolical – they know we are warming the planet but are ready to throw away the planet’s future in exchange for keeping in place as long as possible this fossil fueled, growth-based economy, the  one from which they and their family and friends have benefited so lavishly?

Isn’t there a moral content to this?

Meanwhile, the ice sheets and glaciers of Greenland are breaking apart and sea levels are rising, a massive unprecedented coral die-off is occurring off the coast of Indonesia thanks to water temps that are 7 degrees above normal, one-fifth of Pakistan is now affected by the greatest floods in historical memory or records, Russia has lost a quarter of its wheat crop from unprecedented heat, drought, and raging fires, heavy rains in China have caused mudslides that have buried villages and killed more than 1,200 people – and I could go on and on and on and…

This video (if it doesn’t appear, click here) reminds us once again that a calamity like the drought and flames in Russia is not a Russian calamity but a calamity for the whole world. We cannot contain within national borders the ecological wreckage caused by the ways in which we have impacted the atmosphere and biosphere. This is a HUMAN dilemma, a crisis for the whole blessed globe.

We could mention again the floods in Milwaukee after 7-10 inches of rain, the flooding of Ames IA after 11 inches of rain, the heat waves across the US this summer, the prolonged drought in the US Southwest considered by more and more scientists to be permanent climate change, etc.

Those sunspots; they’re making a mess of things. Or maybe THIS is making a mess of things; maybe THIS is the integrally related story to which we must, MUST, pay attention:

Coal Power Industry: Biggest US Expansion in Two Decades…

There is it. That’s it. Right there is the source of our problem. We are not even close, we are nowhere near yet, to making the shift that could begin to reduce significantly the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.  The fossil fuel industry has a stranglehold on this economy and way of life. It is betting that you would rather wreck the planet than turn down your a.c. or stop buying all those plasma screens and hi-tech gadgets.

So, the challenge is clear – we must prove them wrong.

The other option is to let them build these plants, become more and more dependent on coal, the dirtiest, most destructive source of energy, and then get all upset when weather disasters and ecological wreckage turn our world up-side-down.

Are we ready yet to say no to coal, to move away from fossil fuels, and to embrace the disruption to our way of life that this ‘no’ will entail? How we answer that question (and I would do it before the babies and children in our lives) will determine just how bad the ecological crisis is going to be as this century unfolds. Or, to put it another way, it will determine just how well we will move through the crisis to a new, healing, regenerating, hope-filled way of life before this decisive century comes to a close.

There is so much disturbing news that I could write a very long essay just trying to sum it all up. Scientists have found a direct relation between the Moscow heatwave and drought and the Pakistan floods.  Ames IA is under water, worst flooding in the city’s history, and access to tap water has been shut down because it is contaminated, and this isn’t even on the news. On and on, the catastrophes of this raging summer.

What I want to post about today is again this theme: corporations are taking over every aspect of our lives, commodifying everything – water, food and access to food, patented life forms, and all the other things we need or don’t need, the stuff we consume. In recent years, more U.S. citizens have discovered this little known fact with a long history – corporations are recognized under our Constitution as having the same rights as persons.

Unfortunately, the federal government, both political parties, are basically there to defend those rights, the rights of their corporate donors. Unless we can wrest government, the public sector (like public universities that have become dependent on corporations to build their buildings and sports facilities, to fund their research programs, etc.), we have no hope of removing the threats to our ecosystems posed by this very same corporate culture.

It continues to amaze me that so many people in this political culture rant and rave about the supposed reach of the federal government and its supposed control over their lives, but shrug their shoulders at the power of corporations to really and truly control their lives – not for the benefit of the common good or the welfare of our communities, but for the profits of their investors and stockholders.

So, to remind us of this grave threat, and of just how fundamental a shift we require in our U.S. political and economic culture if we are to address the grave ecological crises of our time, I offer Monsanto as an example. The video below (here’s the link) is a perfect example of what is at stake as this one corporation tries to use patented genetically modified seeds to get control of agriculture here and around the world.  Along with the video is this link to a recent interview with the filmmaker, Marie-Monique Robin.

Friends, this really is about what kind of world we want – and what we need to do in order to have that world.

To view more of this documentary, go here.

We are facing some painful and prolonged difficulties here in the U.S. as the true nature of the economic downfall begins to sink in. We have written before – this is not just a cyclical recession, but rather capitalism is going through a major restructuring, a new phase.  It is shedding workers because it doesn’t need them anymore.  It is shedding various means of production – factories and such – because it doesn’t need them anymore.  In fact, these very things have become a drain on profit-making.

So much of that capacity of production and labor was at the service of the consumer economy, including real estate and those credit cards, which was fueled in the years before the 2008 collapse with massive debt.  Now that that bubble has burst, now that consumers and home owners have necessarily pulled back – because of things like unemployment – we see nothing that can recreate what was a fake economy to begin with.

What kind of future will we create for her? - photo by mom

We also see the evidence of the restructuring in the fact that the financial sector has recovered fairly well and that weak economic growth is happening – but no recovery of jobs or production.

Friends, those that tell you we can recover by getting that economy back in gear, by getting investors to start putting money back into production so that companies will start hiring again and replace those millions upon millions of lost jobs, are either deceiving you or else not understanding the nature of the crisis.

I want to write more about this later in the week, but for now will leave three links that shed some light on what is going on. They’re all from the NY Times.

First, Jobless and Staying that Way, by Nelson Schwartz. You can hear the struggle in understanding the dynamics of ‘The Great Recession’ among economic policy people over this question of whether or not we are dealing here with a cyclical problem or with what many are calling the ‘new norm,’ a permanent or prolonged period of unemployment (officially at 9.5%, but the real figure something around 16%).

Then, Home Economics, by Judith Warner. She dismisses pretty thoroughly any romantic notion that the Great Recession will somehow recalibrate our values back to the simple, to family life, etc. Comparing that false nostalgia to the Great Depression, she reminds us that, in reality, impoverishment brings about suffering and enormous stresses on families, and that the depression was not overcome by a return to individual down-sizing and simpler lifestyles but by social policy at the government level.  In other words, government has to intervene in this new era of high unemployment and savage financial capitalism if the society is to hold together.

We are not holding together right now.

Finally, this column from Ron Lieber, A Class War Over Public Pensions. He describes here a dynamic few people want to talk about out loud – that as most folks are losing jobs and security, public sector workers with generous pension packages that must, by law, be paid out over their lifetime – which can mean up to 20-30 years past retirement – are expecting the taxpayer to fund those payouts – and the money does not exist. So governments at various levels will have to figure out how to wrest money from the larger society to keep these pensions funded, and you can see the great class division developing here. By law we must pay, in reality we cannot, and the attempt to do so will increase the terrible tensions among classes already dividing us like nothing since pre-WWII.

Interesting times.  How well do you think we’ll do?  I am not optimistic about our society holding together as we think through the big shifts in our models of economy in a time of severe ecological limits. The overall social and political discourse remains divisive, fragmented, and inciting of class and ethnic animosities. We, you and me, our faith communities, educators, cultural workers, have got to start figuring out how to overcome that ugly discourse with something more rational, hopeful, and inspiring.

Your thoughts are extremely welcome.

For my best replenishing, I head north. That direction has always been healing and sacred to me. As a kid, my family used to go ‘Up North’ (a term that is part of our Wisconsin and Upper Michigan culture) every other year to be near a lake in the northern woods. And still today, the sky is deep blue, the air clearer, the smell of the forest something familiar, delicious, and even dizzying at first.

Big Donahue Lake and wetlands near Conserve School - photo: Margaret Swedish

I spent most of a week as a participant in the gathering of the Midwest Regional Collaborative on Sustainability Education (I know, I know, we are encouraging a new name), which brought together some 60 or so folks on the campus of the Conserve School near Land O’ Lakes WI, right on the border with MI. Rather than explain what MRCSE is trying to do, I encourage you to click on the link and give the website a long view. Part of this effort is to build community among folks in the region who are committed in one way or another to education regarding our ecological challenges.  We had poets, dancers, artists, and we had farmers and school teachers and academics – a great mix of folks, vantage points, and experience.

From there, I headed due north to Houghton County and the Keweenaw Peninsula. This is the land of one line of my ancestors, my father’s Croatian family. Calumet was the end of their immigration journey to the U.S. and it is a story that will be included in my next big writing project. This is, was, copper country, vast veins of the stuff, and was the nation’s biggest source for many years.

I have been there before, but this time, visiting the copper country archives at the J. R. Van Pelt Library at Michigan Technological University, was able to find my relatives, their addresses and even my grandfather’s Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. work card.

Most of us U.S. Americans have stories like this. As one immigrant rights slogan goes, “we are all immigrants” or at least descendants of immigrants – and not so long ago.

Centennial #6 mine shaft, Calumet MI - photo: Margaret Swedish

From an ecological point of view, the destruction from mining is vast. The area surrounding Calumet was utterly deforested. Magnificent old growth trees line the tunnels deep underground in the now-abandoned mines. In the Land O’ Lakes area, we are moved by the beauty of the thick forests, but look again and realize that this is all new forest. A hundred years ago, the entire region had been clear-cut for timber.

Shows two things: how destructive humans have been in our industrialization – to nature and the human beings who worked these mines; and how resilient is nature, for after the destruction, when humans leave it alone, it starts regenerating once again.

I come from immigrant labor stock. These are some of my deep roots. On my mother’s side, the family can trace back to early German immigration to Milwaukee when there was not yet Wisconsin, when this was the old Northwest Territories. My ancestors, one a carpenter who helped build the original plank roads, helped create this city.

From the vantage point of my story, I ask how we have come to this crisis we now face. Russia’s record heat wave and deadly wildfires, the incomprehensible flooding in Pakistan, the breaking off of a 3-sq.-mile chunk of the Jakobshavn ice sheet in Greenland a couple weeks ago, the summer-long U.S. heat wave breaking records all over the place, the July deluges and floods here in Milwaukee, the temperature of Lake Superior 15 degrees above the norm – all of these extreme events point to something going on in our world, signs of deeper disturbances created by our enormous human footprint on the planet.

Grave marker of a young miner, Evergreen Cemetery, Eagle River MI - photo: Margaret Swedish

All that extraction and all that waste that supports that footprint is wreaking havoc on the natural systems of the planet, those conditions that favored the emergence of the human, those conditions we now seem determined to destroy. What will it mean for us?  There are so many of us now and every disaster takes an enormous human toll.

Yet, again, the resilience of nature is profound – if we could just stop the wreckage, if we could let it begin to heal itself, to reestablish life-giving ecosystems.

There in copper country, so much destruction.  And yet, now, so much beauty, so much renewal. In communities devastated by timber and mining industries, now people come to the shores of Lake Superior to watch sunsets, to see how the rich diverse forests come right up to the edge of the shore.

So in my first post back, I want to celebrate that beauty. And I want to urge us once again to favor it over the economics of growth, to favor it so much, to love it so much, that we create from that love a drastic change in our social and cultural priorities.

Lake Superior sunset - photo: Margaret Swedish

My last night up north, I went to the shore to watch the sunset. That would have been enough blessing. But what made it such an injection of hope for me was that I was not alone.  Folks kept arriving, sometimes whole families.  They just sat quietly on the beach and watched the show. And I thought, we can do this; we humans can do this. We can choose beauty and wonder, and then find deep within ourselves the courage to do what we need to do to ensure that there will always be pristine shores, magnificent forests and prairies, deserts and raging rivers, from which to stare in awe at the creation of which we are all a part.

Yesterday the Milwaukee area received 5-8 inches of rain in one afternoon and evening.  I don’t even know how to talk about rain like that!  If you watch CNN, you have seen some of the mess, but the reports of damage continue to mount tonight.

Menomonee River in Wauwatosa - really shouldn't be anywhere near the road: photo by Margaret Swedish

It’s hot.  It’s humid.  It’s oppressive.  It is a summer that will be talked about for years to come – 12 days so far above 90 degrees in NYC this month.

These downpours are becoming all too common in parts of the country (like south central Wisconsin), while in other parts, like the desert southwest, drought conditions deepen. Permanent climate change? Many scientists think so.

Well, friends, this insane month has also involved some conferences, gatherings, events that limit my ability to post.  For the next 11 days, I may or may not be able to.  I hope you don’t forget about us during that time.  We know how short the U.S. American attention span can be!

Kidding aside, I will be at a gathering in northern Wisconsin for the next week called together by the Midwest Regional Collaborative for Sustainability Education (MRCSE).  My attention and energy will be very engaged in the conversation, dialogue, story-sharing that we will be doing together.

I am so encouraged by the fact that so many people are starting to talk about this essential thing – how we are actually going to live through the ecological crisis.  I will write about some of these insights in the weeks to come.

So hang in there.  Love the planet.  Love one another.  Be strong.  Be open to profound change. Be open to the possibilities of what can be birthed through us right in the midst of crisis if we can hear what it is telling us about the true meaning of the human.

NOAA has reported that, globally, the first 6 months of this year were the hottest Jan.-June period ever recorded. Arizonans are dealing with a deadly combination of high temps and high humidity (triple digit temps, dew points around 60), the mid-Atlantic is sweltering, many areas are dry as a bone, while in other places, like Kentucky over this past weekend, torrential downpours and huge storms are wreaking havoc. In the Milwaukee suburb in which I grew up, one night last week saw 4 1/2 inches of rain fall in barely an hour. My brother said he had never seen water like that fall from the sky.

Temp anomalies June 2010 - NOAA

It’s a global phenomenon. Moscow is melting and Northern Europe is getting Mediterranean-type summer weather. Earlier this summer, hundreds of people perished in India during a record heat wave that sent temps as high as 122F.

In many parts of the world, crops are withering, and rain patterns have shifted.

In this country the heat wave is big news, but you would have a hard time finding any info about the larger context for this year’s tumultuous weather.

What does the record warmth have to do with a nearly 3 sq.mile piece of Greenland’s Jakobshavn Isbrae glacier breaking off into the sea this past month?

Projected 100 degree days in US this century - US Global Change Research Program

Oh, right, global warming. Oh that again! that supposedly controversial thing that is talked about as some dire planetary future, something we can think about another day when it is more convenient and by then we’ll have the technology to save us – except here it is now, unfolding all around us as we attempt to go on about our business-as-usual, yet knowing inside, if we listen to our anxieties, that, like any biological being, we sense, we know, that our habitat is changing – fast.

And we do not have what we need to save ourselves, especially the will and commitment to adapt quickly to this changing environment in which we are embedded – natural beings as dependent on certain patterns of biosphere and atmosphere as any other creatures. We have been brilliant in using our brains to adapt to things like heat and cold, to develop tools to be more productive, etc.  We have been less-than-brilliant, even woefully unwise and ignorant, in realizing the limits of technological adaptation when it confronts those far larger forces at work in our world – like how too much heat trapped in the atmosphere will cause the planet to cook beyond anything we can control.

So here’s what’s coming for the U.S. this week and into the next – get ready, southeast and mid-Atlantic, things are about to get worse. From Accuweather.

And this, from Earthweek, A Diary of the Planet:

The sweltering heat waves that have baked several parts of the Northern Hemisphere over the past two weeks will become commonplace within the lifetimes of most of the world’s current inhabitants, according to a new report.

Not the future I had hoped for my old age.

See, some folks tell me I’m too dark, but I’m just reporting the news. I welcome anyone who can tell me how we can stop these now well-developed drivers in time to keep things from getting worse. Tell me how you shift this culture to a downscale, unselfish, generous body politic prepared to take power out of the hands of corporations and to change the politics of the nation to focus on the well-being of the planetary systems in which we live and move and have our being.

Noah Diffenbaugh says he and his team also found that the longest heat waves on record that occurred between 1951 and 1999 will likely become five times as frequent between 2020 and 2029.

Writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers caution that the 2030s are likely to become even hotter.

Okay? That’s not the future to be prevented, that’s the future to which we must adapt. And we must act urgently to do the other half of the equation, mitigation.  We must act now and urgently to keep this trend from continuing beyond the 2030s.

To do this with a modicum of human dignity and compassion, traits that ought to mark the uniqueness of the evolution of the human, means shifting our national political and cultural priorities. We cannot have everything we want according to the desires created for us by Corporate America.  We have to change what we want, what we cherish.

What kind of life do we want for our children? - photo by Mom

I look at my one-year-old Godchild and what I want for her is not the right to own a handgun or to have an iPad or at least 4 or 5 hi-tech gadgets for constant online connection, if these things will bring about the destruction of her world, or at the very least, a world of more hurt and suffering. What I want for her is health and a life in which she can express her creativity in heart and thought and spirit. I want for her joy and happiness in being alive. I want for her love and connection with other beings and real community and friendship.  I want for her an ‘outside’ that is not a threat to be feared, but rich in beauty and abundance, clean air to breathe, non-toxic food to eat, uncontaminated water to drink – none of these things controlled by corporations with a profit to make.

And that is what is in jeopardy with the world we have made.

We have written before that the natural El Nino effect makes for warm summers. We have also shared the science that these events, like rainstorms, blizzards (ask D.C. about that – 3 last winter and now record heat), drought, and hurricanes, will become more severe as the driver of a warmer atmosphere makes our weather crazier.

We have to dream a future right now. We have to look our kids in the eye and see the world we want for them. And then we have to go out and create that world, and we have to begin – right now.

Back to posting for a while, and here we are with the big news still focused on the Gulf of Mexico. If you view the live BP stream on the Home page, you see this startling thing – no oil gushing, that steady eruption that has become iconic over the past 89 days. It is some sort of enormous psycho-spiritual relief not to see that oil pouring into the precious waters off our southern coast.

Yet it comes with the caution that this is all so very precarious, that the increased pressure back inside the well with the capping and closing of vents could create leaks elsewhere below the sea floor, that something catastrophic could still occur, that the pressure could cause more eruptions and even the collapse of the sea floor.

If that happens, nothing will stop the oil…

So the news comes with all these words of caution, and with word that BP doesn’t intend to stop the flow even if the cap holds against the pressure of the stopped gusher, that it intends to get the flow going again with tankers that can siphon it all to the surface.   I assume that would be better in terms of the potential pressure issue. I assume also that BP wants as much oil from this reserve as it can get, that being the point – for BP.  I assume someone knows which approach is better for the Gulf waters, the sea life, the coastal communities, the planet.  I don’t assume that future decisions will be made accordingly.

NASA image July 12

But if we learned one thing in this whole mess it’s that we best be careful what news we trust here.

Because what I also know is that the oil industry and the countries who burn it are in no mood to move quickly to end the oil economy just because it is causing irreparable ecological wreckage to the Gulf, to Nigeria, to the Niger Delta, to the boreal forests of Alberta, to ruined and contaminated areas of Ecuador, to the pristine beauty of Alaska, to parts of Mexico…

What I also know is that this disaster is only one of multiple signs that the human attempt to wrest the harder-to-get crude from the Earth, because the easy-to-get oil is pretty much gone, is a pact already made with the Devil of Capitalism – to wrest all you can from whatever – the Earth, human labor, tax subsidies, war, etc. – while there is still a profit to be made, and to purchase the government agencies, decision-makers, communications media and more so that people are never able to see or know what is being done and to make decisions about whether or not they agree with this suicidal agenda.  And the future be damned if worrying about it affects stockholders.

We are being told that we cannot live without oil, that we want oil, that we love what it has brought us.  Yes.  And if 30-40 years ago the studies had been as consistently on the front pages and TV news as this disaster has been, if there had been a steady and earnest attempt to share the information of scientists, geologists, engineers, ecologists, demographers and others that we were headed towards a world where this sort of thing could happen – not once, but over and over again – and that this would be happening because we were reaching oil’s peak – do you really think we would have continued on this course?

People love what oil brings them once they have what oil brings them. You can’t become addicted to something you don’t know or that was never invented.

Would that have collapsed the economy, as some say, or brought about a new one? Unfortunately we lost the opportunity to make that decision. Now a new economy will be made by disaster, like it or not. If we agreed to a new radical agenda of change in the energy base of our lives, in how we live and consume, and did that now, we could ease the disruption and destruction. But that is not yet on the national or international political agenda except in the most limited, half-hearted ways. There is as yet no effort to come up with something nearly approaching the scale of either our economy’s energy demands or the assumptions of standards of living to which we are now quite addicted, much less the scale of the ecological threat.

It will take great persistence and creativity on the part of groups and movements to ratchet up the noise so that the conversation cannot go on without us anymore. It’s happening; it’s growing up all around us.  But we have to find the discourse that connects with and impacts the lives of suffering, struggling people whiplashed by deep recession, unemployment, foreclosures, mountaintop removal coal-mining, and on and on, because without them we cannot make this change.  There is so much fear in this country right now, and we must learn how to address that fear – not yell at it or judge it, but understand its roots and even identify with it.  There is much to fear; the question is, how do we get beyond it?

I want to share a few articles that I have found, well, to the point:

from NPR: Hope and Disbelief as Oil Gusher Holds Steady

from George Lakoff on Huffington Post, something a bit more biting: Conservatism’s Death Gusher

from the NY Times in June, something that should really raise eyebrows, especially if anyone thinks BP is a company into whose hands we want to put the fate of this planet: to avoid the prohibition on off-shore oil in Alaska, BP has built islands for drilling, then called it on-shore drilling.  Hey, why not? Then, to make matters worse, the drilling itself may be riskier than what they were doing in the Gulf.  Read about it here.

then, because I revere her writing, think she articulates our crisis so eloquently, both spiritually and ecologically, this beautiful essay from Terry Tempest Williams.  “Bearing witness…” Yes. And what she calls for, what she commits to,  is a bearing witness of a fierce kind, full of passion and grief and loss and love – riding always on a sea of compassion, what we insist over and over again here must become the bread we eat, the air we breathe, the bottomless well from which we drink and draw our sustenance.

Not a passive bearing witness, but rather one that goes straight to the heart of the matter, disturbs the truth out of the dust from which it has been buried, bothers us with the inescapable urgency of our predicament.

Because the oil disaster is not only in the Gulf; it is everywhere oil exists and where more and more invasive and destructive technology is being developed to wrest it from the planet for our use. That is the real oil disaster, and that’s the one that we must bring to an end.