If you knew something could kill you, wouldn’t you want to know about it? If you’re buying something that could sicken your children, cause birth defects, disrupt brain development, cause permanent disabilities, wouldn’t you want, at the very least, to be able to make a decision about it?

One of the harshest realities of the corporate world that has overtaken our lives is that our environment, our communities, our work places, and our homes have become flooded with things we ingest, breath in, or take in through the pores of our skin, that can make us gravely ill and even cause death.

We know this.  Studies show that the vast majority of cancers are linked to the environment.  And then there’s endocrine disruptors that effect the body’s endocrine system, and environmental links to the rise in autism, and the list goes on.

Why are we doing this to ourselves? In large part, it’s because we don’t know, and one of the reasons we don’t know is because corporations keep secrets; they often keep hidden what they themselves know about the harm their products can do – because that harm, if known, can wreak havoc on their profit margins.

Is this baby being harmed? That's the problem - who knows?

Our culture and everything we need to live, and then what we don’t need but love to consume, is now dependent on corporations. Not all of them are evil in this regard, and some businesses are attempting to counter this trend – organic farming, for example. But even our consumption of products that do no harm cannot protect us from all the other harm of the thousands of chemicals and toxins that are loading up our environment.

The reason I write about this today is because of a terrifying series of articles in the Chicago Tribune last week regarding the harm being done to us by so-called fire retardants, chemicals that are in our furniture, our babies’ and toddlers’ mattresses and sleepers, our pillows and carpets, and on and on – stuff that gets into the air, becomes part of the house and/or office dust that we breathe in or ingest every day.

Chemical companies, Big Tobacco, and the toxic products in your home
“We detect these chemicals in almost every home…”

This series shows the pact with the devil made by these companies and phony fire safety advocates to promote use of these chemicals everywhere. It shows video proving that these retardants do not actually retard fire. It shows what the power of lobbying can do to put laws at the service of these companies who – and remember, this is the important point – know how harmful these chemicals are, know that tests show they do not protect from fire, and still push them anyway.

And I offer up this series to you because this industry is sadly no exception. It is part of the big corporate culture – Big Pharma pushing powerful painkillers that have addicted millions of our fellow citizens, or the fracking industry that swears its technology is safe, or oil drilling companies that declare they can safely drill in deep waters even as the Macondo BP oil field in the Gulf of Mexico is still leaking and the seas and shores are still contaminated, or Monsanto that knows its Round-Up Ready GMO seeds are threatening our food systems around the world but spends massive amounts of money pushing the naysayers and its victims out of its way.

And all of these industries have powerful lobbyists that make sure, from the White House to Congress down to our state legislatures, that laws and regulations are passed to protect their interests.

We live in this kind of culture now, and the challenge is how in the world to get out if it and then do what we can to help bring it down – before the damage gets so bad that the earth can’t recover, our local eco-communities begin to collapse, or before more of our children become poisoned and sick.

We all have these fire retardant chemicals in our bodies now. How do we feel about this? And what does it mean to us that protection of these industries has become a priority among politicians in both political parties?

Creating a new culture in the midst of this toxic one is going to take a mighty work. It feels daunting if we think we have to take it all on, that whole big picture, directly. But we can begin to chip away at it by our refusal to participate, our decision to get out of the market as much as we can, our commitment to build resilient communities by building resilience back into our living systems, and by engaging the culture in the work of education and consciousness-raising, becoming fierce truth-tellers, prophets, sages, and more.

Let's do it for them.

We are all capable of that. We all have it within us to be a part of that. It won’t be enough any longer to stop individual consumption of toxic products. We have to stop the production of toxic products. And that will only happen through political work, a commitment to restore democracy as a form of government that represents the needs, health, and well-being of the human and eco-communities.

I mean, for the sake of the children…

 

Photo credits: Moms

[No time to read this? You can go right to the donor page!]

Right now, we are working to raise funds because we are in need of them in order to continue – but more than continue, we want to expand, to increase our outreach and program capacity, to move out in some new and exciting directions. The times are simply calling for this and we want to be able to respond effectively and with a little dose of inspiration and encouragement for the challenges ahead.

And they are many. We write before each new post, Fostering Ecological Hope. That is no small task given the tremendous stresses on the natural world that evolved us, holds us, nurtures us with such generosity. Yet despite those stresses (and no small amount of actual destruction and abuse), early in May a dozen or so of us gathered in the cool spring breezes, under the trees and the late afternoon sun in a public park, to spend a couple of hours in silent contemplation and shared reflection. It was a glorious afternoon.

What I mean is this: despite the abuse, despite the damage, there is still so much beauty, still such enchantment within this planet in which we live and move and have our being. And we don’t want to lose that. In fact, we know the human will die spiritually as well as biologically if we lose that.

We’ve been gathering once a month since the year began, forming a little core community for what we call, Centering for New Creation, a little play on the name of our sponsoring non-profit organization. It is healing and renewing for all of us, a time to quiet the craziness of our times and just – stop. The deep listening leads to some extraordinary wisdom and insight shared out of the silence.

In that space we foster ecological hope.

Or on Good Friday, speaking to 140 teenage boys, along with faculty and staff, at St. Lawrence Seminary High School in Mt. Calvary WI – their rapt attention as I presented with photos and graphs the state of our earth and made the case for scaling down our whole consumer culture in order for life as we know it to survive, their magnificent questions and thoughtful responses.

More ecological hope.

Or introducing the film, Journey of the Universe, at an Earth Week event at Edgewood College in Madison and facilitating a discussion on the new cosmology and the ecological crisis, and seeing the dedication and deep commitment of so many activists, students, teachers, and more.

One of the best parts of my work is this opportunity to engage people from so many walks of life, multi-generational gatherings, good decent people wrestling with what it means to be alive at this moment in time when most everything seems to be in transition and not always in a good way.

Why do we ask for your donations? For the work that includes:

1) ongoing research and study of our ecological challenges and the ways in which different communities are trying to meet those challenges, creating the new way of life as the old one based on the industrial growth model crumbles all around us, or crumbles our earth all around us;

2) ongoing work on presentations, workshops, and retreat days so that each one is geared towards the group that has invited me, to match my contribution to their searches, questions, and needs – I don’t have just one standard presentation given over and over again, but try to make these programs as relevant and inclusive of questions and dialogue as possible within each unique community;

3) supporting this website, including the writing of essays “On Meaning and Culture” at least once or twice a week – one of our dreams right now is to raise funds to support a revamping and enhancement of our website to make it more user-friendly, more participative, and inclusive of the larger community with which we collaborate;

4) acting as a point of gathering in the Milwaukee area among those who are inspired by and committed to a new vision for humanity within this planet inspired by the work of new cosmologists, deep ecologists, and various faith traditions, the first step being our Centering for New Creation group;

5) collaborating with other groups and networks in Milwaukee and beyond to help build the connections that are vital to the creation of the ‘new way of life,’ or, echoing the words of Thomas Berry, creating a mutually enhancing relationship between the human and the rest of creation to replace the destructive mode in which we now live.

Examples of this collaboration include: working on the program committee for the biannual conference of Sisters of Earth planned for this July at St.-Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana; collaborating each year with the Peace & International Issues Committee of the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee on their annual March lecture series, always a success; participating in a sustainability education collaborative that gave birth in Wisconsin but has participants from other parts of the country, now in the process of rethinking and re-creation into the Abundance Collaborative.

Now we do all this work with almost no staff (I work as a consultant to move the project along) and no overhead (most of the work is done out of my little flat). Our budget is small at the moment (we can do a tremendous amount of work for $60,000-$75,000 per year), which means that every contribution makes a real difference, no matter its size.

One of our dreams right now is to build our capacity for outreach. Throughout the Midwest, and the whole country for that matter, are small, vibrant eco-spirituality and eco-education projects, many of them founded by Catholic religious women, and all of them giving evidence of the new life springing up amidst the wreckage of the old ‘paradigm.’ We don’t have a center like that in Milwaukee, but the city could use one – if not a physical center, then at least a point of coordination that could connect with these other communities.

We want to be one of the spiders in those spider webs building the connections, or a weaver among weavers, part of the ecological community that is earth’s response to a time of growing peril. We hope our work can have regional resonance; but we also hope that it can have culture-wide implications and impacts around the country.

Big ambitions for a small operation, so we are inviting you to help make us less small, to help us grow our capacity to build the new community of ecological hope.

Our country is in real upheaval. The competing visions for the future of this nation could not be more stark, a sign of what is at stake as well as of the magnitude of the evolutionary changes underway. How will we do as we approach multiple tipping points – energy demands and population growth, global warming and climate change, reaching the limits of industrial growth leading to vast damage to our oceans and rivers, forests and farmlands, our ability to feed ourselves or have enough water for all the creatures that need it?

The western industrial model of growth is reaching a crisis point even as the demands of the human world are increasing dramatically, and will throughout this century. How will we live through such a time? What earth will we pass on to the next generations? Or, as some have put it so eloquently, what kind of ancestors will we be?

So we ask for your support. Know that your donations will go to enhance this one unique expression of earth’s need for solidarity from one of its most troubled species,  but still a species full of potential, a species from which the earth invites a deeper, more intimate friendship as we seek our way through the crisis to the new way of life.

So for whatever you can offer at this time,  I thank you!

Margaret Swedish

Photos credit: Margaret Swedish

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Visit the donation page to contribute by credit card or by check.

Please view this. It leaves me speechless. Little to add, except this lament, and the ever widening space within my broken heart. Friends, we can’t live like this any longer. We are underestimating our contribution to this, our collaborator role in this rape of the Earth. We all benefit, every time we put gas in our car or get in an airplane, every time we purchase something made in a factory or from industrial farms or shipped across the seas.

[Video: Oil Sands Fly Over: My Memory Forever, Jennifer Berezan]

If we aren’t willing to live differently and to advocate for the Earth to which we all belong, the moral responsibility of this vast ecological devastation of our industrial society will rest squarely in our hands. Once we know, we cannot ‘un-know.” That is a hard, harsh lesson of our times, but we must take it in fully in order to respond in a way commensurate with the scale of the crisis.

The Alberta lands being raped by the energy industry do not belong to the artificial construct called, ‘Alberta;’ they belong to all of us, as do the mountaintops of Appalachia being blown away for our electricity, as does the land of the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, or every fissure in the Earth being broken open and contaminated by the fracking industry. All of us depend for our lives on these ecosystems.

This means vast changes in how we live in this planet, vast changes in our human economies, in the shape of our societies and our communities, in our Constitution, in international law, in the values around which we orient our lives. If we are not up to that struggle, then what you see in this video is the world we will leave for future generations. This will be our legacy.

Echoing Dr. Jonas Salk, what kind of ancestors do we want to be? Because I can tell you how our children and their children’s children will view our generation from the vantage point of this vast devastation! Or they might still have a chance to look back at us and say, “Thank God they stopped this in time for us to have this rich, abundant, and beautiful world!” We need to give them that chance.

Yesterday a very impressive line of thunderstorms rolled over Wisconsin. Some places saw a major dump of water – more than 3 inches of rain – closing down many highways and causing lots of havoc, along with straight line winds and plenty of lightning.

Impressive, these forces of nature. Warm moist air and a cold front collide and blow up the atmosphere.

But right where I live, right here on the southeastern side of Milwaukee, we barely caught the edge of it. At first I was disappointed when I saw from radar where it was headed. Then I realized the blessing – I would be able to watch the whole drama unfold from the Lake Michigan shore – and what a drama it was! The world had grown dark and ominous and the wind really began to howl as I took photos of the black and slate-gray sky, as the lightning rolled across the north of the city and out over the lake, as cells of torrential downpours moved slowly across the nearby horizon. The lake, its reflection always a response to the sky, turned black and ominous in reply.

I don’t know how to describe the exhilaration. Every cell of my body was stirring from the electric energy, the cold wind pouring down from the tops of the storms, some of them reaching 45,000 feet, the thrill of sudden lightning strikes out over the water, and the rolling, roiling, angry clouds letting us know exactly who or what is in charge.

We go through our busy days forgetting what we are a part of, and then we get a powerful reminder.

And this wonderful passage from Ohiyesa in the book, The Wisdom of the Native Americans:

There are no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being children of nature we are intensely poetical. We would deem it sacrilege to build a house for The One who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and the vast jeweled vault of the night sky! A God who is enrobed in filmy veils of cloud, there on the rim of the visible world where our Great-Grandfather Sun kindles his evening campfire; who rides upon the rigorous wind of the north, or breathes forth spirit upon the fragrant southern airs, whose war canoe is launched upon majestic rivers and inland seas – such a God needs no lesser cathedral.

As Western industrial civilization has trampled over so much of our natural world, this kind of experience of raw nature is becoming increasingly inaccessible to more and more of us. This is beyond tragic; it shuts down the most important portal we humans have to the sacred. But there are still these forces of nature that can crash through our numbed, blind, arrogant disconnect from the stuff of our own beings. Not many people can do what I was able to do yesterday – stop everything to walk out into this stormy cathedral. But we ought to make a world where that is not only possible, but where we cannot imagine anything else – cannot possibly imagine missing this moment of stunning, vivid, fecund new creation.

Text and photos by Margaret Swedish

“…the meaning we give to our emotional responses is of central importance. The perception of radical interconnectedness found in both Buddhism and systems thinking supports a reframing of our distress about world conditions. It helps us recognize how healthy a reaction this distress is and how necessary for our survival. A central principle of the Work that Reconnects is that ‘pain for the world,’ a phrase that covers a range of feelings, including outrage, alarm, grief, guilt, dread, and despair, is a normal, healthy response to a world in trauma.”

Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone, Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy

In a culture like this one, it is very hard to come to terms with this, even to find meaningful company in which to share these things with any depth. We would rather take a drug to numb these feelings, rather keep hooked up to technology with its constant distraction and messaging, rather keep the noise levels up just enough to hold the attention, rather find others to blame for our misery, or look outside ourselves and our existence to a God who might save us…

…or simply pretend that it’s just not true, nothing is radically wrong, everything will be okay.

Credit: Margaret Swedish

These times call for deep listening, for radical quiet, for some serious solitude, for depth of intimacy with others, in order to let these responses arise from within us so that we can pay attention to them. When we don’t let them arise, when we don’t face them, they don’t go away, they just become new forms of pathology unleashed on the world.

Denial of reality has never done humans much good.

But there are signs that US people are beginning to wake up at least about global warming. Experience is being our teacher, because experience has become extreme enough to shout louder than the cultural background noise – thousands of tornadoes in recent years, F4s and F5s becoming ordinary instead of rare, wicked heat waves, long-term entrenched droughts, water shortages, snowless winters, or Wisconsin’s one-day long maple sugar season because the day the sap rose back in early March, the next day it was in the mid-80s.

We are biological beings. Unfortunately, we are also clever beings able to create technologies that have numbed our inner and outer sensations of that biology, the signals that tell us when we are endangered and need to retreat, need to address imminent threats to our existence. Not Al Qaeda, but our whole industrial growth economy.

Some terrorists out there can kill a small number of us (small in the scheme of things), but our biological and ecological blindness could bring about the collapse of human societies all around the world and the living systems of the planet that support the biological diversity that made us possible.

I love Macy’s work because she does not shy away from these difficult emotional traumas that we are now experiencing every day because of our ‘way of life.’ And she does something else very important – directs us right towards the trauma so that we can remove the element of fear and dread that comes from not facing it, from leaving it as a deep feeling of anxiety and discomfort that follows us through our waking days, our sleepless nights, or our dream world full of fears and ominous signs of destruction.

This past weekend I was with a large group of nuns who spent the day with input from one of the pioneers of our eco-spirituality work, Miriam Therese MacGillis, O.P., director of Genesis Farm in NJ. While the Vatican tries to rein in this incredible energy, this searching after meaning and effort and vocation in the midst of both cosmological wonder and ecological crisis, this gathering was one of those spaces where one could find the company of other listeners, a depth of intimacy in the courage to simply face what is now in transition (everything), and what is now required of us if we are going to find a new way to live in this planet before things really get out of hand.

Nuns do a lot of deep listening by means of their call to religious life. Opening contemplative spaces is not new to them. It is no wonder that they have so often been at the forefront in the process of transformation made necessary and urgent by how we humans have lived here – from social justice to human rights to human dignity to care of creation to a deep ecology, so many have just continued to move forward, open more, despite the many challenges, often from their own institutions.

Do we think we are not also called to deep listening? Here is a standing invitation from the earth itself to start joining with Catholic nuns, Engaged Buddhists, deep ecologists, poets and artists, cosmologists and climate scientists, permaculture activists and naturalists, and more, in this great adventure set before us – to meet this unprecedented crisis for which none of our old paradigms, modes of thought, institutional structures, or belief frameworks are at all adequate (and indeed, many of which helped bring about the crisis) with a fierce commitment to the act of new creation, even when it is not clear to us exactly what that means.

Except we do know this – it means right now, this moment, to live differently, to remove our cooperation from the systems and ways of thinking that are destroying the fabric of life. It means right now making a fierce commitment to a much-expanded sense of our intimate community, the community of all sentient and non-sentient beings that cooperated over millions of years to bring about self-aware consciousness, a wonder of creation that we have made into a tool for its destruction.

This is work I am committed to more and more – to help reconnect our biological sensibilities, our spiritual aspirations, our sense of meaning, to the creation that holds us with such generosity, despite the abuse we have inflicted.

Because this is the thing: that creation remains generous. And if we would begin to live gently within it, to commit to the process of healing and regeneration, to partner with creation, rather than use it as resource for our grandiosity and pleasure, it would respond immediately.

Every permaculturalist knows this. Every eco-psychologist and deep ecologist knows this.

We have done an incredible amount of wreckage, but it is not all wrecked. Regeneration is still possible, with the cooperation of the species most responsible for the unraveling.

But the time is urgent. I leave you this day with one short piece of new research that shows once again that we are in peril, that some tipping points are already passed, that the world we knew even a few decades ago is already over: New Greenhouse Gas Threat Possibly Emerging. Can we pay attention to this, and to how our bodies and spirits respond to this news, rather than move to the next distraction?

Redbud in bloom in the Allegheny Mountains. Photo: Margaret Swedish

Regeneration no longer means return to old norms of the past 10,000 years. It means learning to live in a different planet, humbled, respectful, chastened, prepared to live through some pretty serious disruption, chaos, and, yes, suffering, as we partner with life and what supports life so that a new era, an ecological era, can emerge.

Really, there is no greater challenge right now. This is the one, the big one, the one into which all our other crises fit or have their place. We will work for, with, in sync with the whole, or we will continue to tear it apart. This doesn’t mean taking on the whole of the crisis; it means becoming fiercely attentive to where you are, and to the interconnections that bind you with that place, and then, from there, to the whole.

The fabric must be held together right where you are. We learn to live differently in the planet within the network of our relationships in which we are embedded. Our sense of family, of intimacy, must expand beyond our traditional notions of family and community, old notions which have tended to worsen the fragmentation of life, and embrace the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, what we plant in the ground, what we tear up from the ground – these relationships must be tended to carefully and lovingly now.

I mean, really, when you think about it, wow, what a time to be alive!! Could you imagine a life of greater significance than the one we are invited to live in this very moment?

 by Margaret Swedish

Among the many growing divides within the human community is this one: those who see the trouble we’re in and those who don’t, or who sort of know but choose denial.

I spent last evening at Edgewood College in Madison WI introducing the wonderful new film, Journey of the Universe, and facilitating a discussion afterwards. The people who attended were definitely on the first end of that divide. I can always feel it when I’m with a group – that air of grief, sorrow, anxiety that permeates the atmosphere in the room, the concern, the compassion, the commitment and desire to stay engaged in the necessary work, what Thomas Berry called ‘the Great Work,’ of our generation: to alter the relationship of the human with the rest of creation…before things really get out of hand.

It’s an inspirational film that presents beautifully, in the narrative of cosmologist Brian Swimme, the miracle of the flaring forth of the universe, of which we are one aspect and expression, the slim chance that this one enormous explosion of energy could result in this thing we call ‘life’ on this one small sphere among the trillions of spheres tumbling across the eons of space-time, the place, as Swimme says, that we call ‘home.’

Trigger Happy Star Formation - Chandra X-Ray Observatory, NASA

It puts our struggles in context. But while that enormous context inspires awe, this overwhelming sense that there is  a pulse and conscious direction in the universe that we can trust, no matter what happens here, the film doesn’t offer us relief from our responsibility. That magnificent complexity and diversity of life on this one small globe, evolved over the millions of years of this most recent planetary era, is being destroyed by the most consciously aware of all the creatures to which it gave birth.

We who have evolved to the point where we can make films about the wondrous story of creation could snuff ourselves out by way of our pernicious, self-absorbed, narcissistic mode of living.

You could feel the weight of that understanding in the room last night.

Part of my reflection was to share what to me has become abundantly clear – that our biggest error, the most enormous mistake ever made by the human, was to misunderstand who we are here, that we mistook the experience of self-aware consciousness as something that placed us outside nature, over and above, rather than, like everything else in creation, utterly and totally within it. There is simply no part of us, including our brains, our intellects, our egos, our every thought and breath, that is not ‘inside,’ nothing that separates us out from nature.

And certainly not a history of salvation (or reincarnation, for that matter) that believes souls enter into bodies from ‘outside’ and then leave our bodies when they die to again go outside to somewhere else. And wherever in the world is ‘outside’ anyway?

When one enters into that experience fully, it can be both enervating and awe-striking, filling one with both dread and wonder, anxiety and sheer giddiness. The enormity of it can bring this combination of being both ‘found’ and disoriented at the very same time. The old belief systems of the Axial Age religions begin crumbling, as do centuries of Western thought that believes humans to be masters of the universe, or that the earth is here for our use or our salvation, that “Man” [sic] is the purpose of all creation and it’s ultimate purpose, or that a human being is the ultimate image of God or God’s singular incarnation (embodiment).

The ramifications are pretty intense.

The film does not leave us in wonder. It leaves us with a very sobering look at what our mistake has wrought on this planet, the vast destruction of the web of life that holds us, that gave us life with such generosity, to the point where we are becoming responsible for mass extinctions of our fellow creatures, altering the landscapes of the planet, contaminating everything we need for life, including our own bodies, and jeopardizing our own survival.

That’s pretty big stuff, a lot to take in. Sometimes I think, or I know, that one of the reasons I enjoy so much going out to offer workshops and presentations, to lead or facilitate conversations like this one, is because I, too, need the company.

I love Joanna Macy’s work, but I ordered her new book, written with Chris Johnston, as soon as I heard the title: Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy. Thank you, yes, I need this message. Tell me how to do that. Tell us. Let us, more of us, get together to talk about that – and then live into it.

“A shift in consciousness is taking place, as we move into a larger landscape of what we are.”  Yes, and yes.

“This dimension of the Great Turning arises from shifts taking place in our hearts, our minds, and our views of reality. It involves insights and practices that resonate with venerable spiritual traditions, while in alignment with revolutionary new understandings from science.

“We live at a time when a new view of reality is emerging, where spiritual insight and scientific discovery both contribute to our understanding of ourselves as intimately interwoven with our world.” 

I could read this stuff all day.

But then we still have to figure out what it says about how we shall live in this world we are damaging with every passing day, how to live in a world where nature is forever altered in a way that may no longer support the abundance and diversity of our most recent evolutionary era, while the humans doing the damage go on about their ways. That’s the part we still need to figure out.

And that will require a whole lot more than simplifying our lifestyles and ramping down individual consumption. It requires a wholesale change in how we live our lives, what community really means, what those communities will look like, act like, live like, how we understand the most basic things in regard to how we conceive of family (which once used to mean village and tribe, not just that small nuclear family unit) and relationships of all kinds, how we do rituals, the kind that bind communities of meaning and hope, and still more.

What would life look like if we really took no more from the earth than we give back to it, if we put no more waste into it than it could readily absorb, dissipate, and heal? It would be better to reflect and act on these challenges while we have time to consider them, rather than in crisis when everything is falling apart. That is beginning to happen in many places around the world. We need to nurture those hopes and dreams and become part of making them real.

The point is simply this: getting cancer and getting treated increases the nation’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Preventing it does not.

And there is the logic of this capitalist economy when it comes to our health. When you subject our health to market forces, this is what you get – more and more cancer, more and more treatment options, and higher profits for those who do the treating, provide the services, and make the stuff used in the treatments. Because all of that is economic activity, whereas not getting sick, being healthy, is not.

We know much more now about the various chemicals in our industrial society that cause cancer. Every now and then, some one of them gets banned, or at least controlled to some extent. But most of the chemicals in our air, water, and food have not even been tested, and there are thousands of them.

See:   Most cancers are caused by what’s in your food and environment
Cancer and your environment

But if you stop making them, you reduce GDP. That’s how it works. We introduce synthetic chemicals into our systems without first testing their impact on human health, they begin to make us sick, researchers go to work making better cancer treatments, we go to for-profit hospitals and then use medications and treatments from for-profit pharmaceutical companies – and the GDP rises.

If you don’t make those chemicals, or if you stop making them as soon as it becomes obvious that they are bringing about illness and death, that would stop that economic activity.

And if you focused a health system on prevention, you would save a gazillions dollars and a whole lot of lives. And millions more would not have to go through the horrors of chemotherapy, painful biopsies, and surgeries, some of them permanently disfiguring.

Which would mean a decrease in GDP in the health sector and the economic indicators would not look as good as they do now.

You get what I’m saying here? There is serious economic motive in a culture of cancer; there is not so much in a culture where prevention rules.

I have been with a nurse recently who does chemotherapy infusions at a prominent cancer center. She said she would like to move towards a world in which she would lose her job, find another line of work. After pumping so many people full of toxic chemicals to try to save their lives (and often doing so), this is her goal.

She is human. The ones who keep making the cancer-causing stuff and then fighting any effort to ban or limit them, they are not, or at least have lost something essential to one’s humanity – like the ability to identify with the suffering ones, or a moral compass essential to our survival.

I long to live in a world in which, the moment some new chemical is known to cause harm, the ones making it, being human after all, would say, “Oh my gosh, we need to stop making this because it is making people sick and killing them.” Instead these corporations hire lobbyists to work diligently to remove as many environmental protections as possible. The tobacco industry remains the poster child in this regard, having kept secret the research that showed how smoking causes cancer and emphysema, until the scandal broke open in the late 1970s. It still took years and years to get laws and regulations to limit smoking.  How many deaths resulted as their profits rose; how many billions and billions of dollars spent on sick people; how much suffering can be laid at the doors of these corporations? And why are so many consciences un-bothered by that?

And that is how insane, and perhaps inhuman, we have become. We would rather have our cell phones to our heads than worry about brain tumors. We would rather buy a new car every year without thinking about that chemical smell coming off the vinyl and other material that we will breath every day in commuter traffic for months and months before it dissipates. We would rather eat lots of cheap beef, all those summer barbecues, then pay more to have the livestock agriculture industry cleaned up to get the carcinogens out of the soils, the feed, the animals, and our bodies.

We would rather acquiesce to industry pressures on the EPA to relax air pollution standards because “they are hurting the economy and job growth” despite the agency’s success in cleaning up some of our most toxic air.

And that’s how we have watched our industrial world become insane. We no longer have the ability to hear our own biological sensitivities telling us that what we are consuming, breathing, drinking is making us sick and that we actually don’t want to get sick anymore.

Half a million people die in the US every year from cancer. Childhood leukemia rates are rising. Cancers related to our digestive systems are rising. So, good for us, we are contributing to job growth and GDP growth with our illnesses and deaths.

It’s like any addiction to something that will kill you. Some people are finally strong enough to get off the stuff, to become recovering addicts and recover their health and well-being, while others are not. The pleasure of the substance of the addiction is just too great, in this case, our whole consumer way of life and the corporate world happy to be our suppliers.

We need an economic version of AA. We need to create and strengthen the kinds of communities and movements that can recover from the addictions, become bubbles of healthy living, a path out of this toxic industrial world.

I should know this by now. Whenever I get really down about our future, I should go talk to high school kids. I seem to always walk away moved and inspired. We made a mess of things, I tell them, and we’re leaving you a difficult future. So we need to partner with you in creating a different future from the one that seems most likely, given our current trajectory and  cultural denial of the seriousness of our predicament.

The Blue Planet - Earth Observatory: NASA

I show them our beautiful planet floating out there in the blackness of space. I show them the results of population growth just in my lifetime (2.5 billion to the current 7 billion in just six decades – after it took 12,000 years to go from 300 million to 2.5 billion). I show them the grievous wounds to the earth from energy extraction (mountaintop removal coal mining, oil tars sands production, fracking, etc.). I show them pollution from industrial farms, chemical factories, and our mountains of trash and floating plastic waste islands out in the ocean. I talk about greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

I watch their faces and sometimes adjust the presentation to what I see and feel from them – is it too much? Am I presenting in a way that communicates challenge, not despair? Am I challenging (hopefully) cultural expectations for a what a ‘good life’ means on a stressed and severely damaged planet? Am I getting their hearts, not just their heads?

This time, on Good Friday morning, it was a presentation at St. Lawrence Seminary High School in Mt. Calvary WI, a small town in a rural farming area about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. It’s an all-male student body, and I presented to them and to the faculty and staff, just before their Good Friday liturgy and then their release to spring break. I wondered if I would have their attention at all. The school is run by Capuchin Friars, who obviously have something special going on there.

The kids were great, attentive, taking it all in. Towards the end, I asked them if they were scared, and many said, “Yes!” And so I told them it was possible to get through this, to live in a way that the earth can support us as we move into a new way of life – if we can give up some of our expectations as consumers and begin living within the planet’s biocapacity. I always end with favorite photos of the earth’s beauty, of how that beauty still remains, and that we can work with that to learn how to live once more.

The faint little dot just above the left edge of the bright rings - that's us. Photo: Cassini Solstice Mission, JPL, NASA

And then I show them a series of photos of the earth from space – from the space station, from the moon, from the Galileo mission on its way to Jupiter, and farther out from Cassini orbiting Saturn, all the way to the Pale Blue Dot photographed, thanks to Carl Sagan, from the very edges of our solar system by Voyager I.

The Pale Blue Dot. The tiny smudge in the middle of the reddish sun ray - that's us! Photo: Visible Earth/NASA

That last series never fails to inspire. It still inspires me and I have done this dozens of times – to see that tiny speck of light that, as Sagan recounts, holds all of human history, everything we know and love. It remains incredibly unlikely, this planet with all its teeming life, so wouldn’t it be a good idea to take batter care of it?

Okay, that said, here are some stories I want to mention this morning:

* The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reports that that oil and gas fracking is causing the multitude of earthquakes across a wide swath of the country’s mid-section experienced in the past couple of years, probably from the injection of huge amounts of waste water deep into the earth. We are really messing with Mother Earth here. She did not intend this, and we are managing to shift dynamic energies that are beginning to literally shake things up. The fracking industry continues its rapid rise all across the country.

* Think the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is over? Think again. It was never really cleaned up, and it is still leaking, fish and other creatures are still dying or being contaminated, dead zones still exist and are growing, while BP has put lots of money into TV ads claiming all is well and tourists should return.  This is a must-read from The Progressive to appreciate how a corporate giant like BP can get away with ecocide.

* Here’s another story, hard to share because it hurts so much. This is from Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet (see sidebar for more from this wonderful site), Sonar May Have Killed Thousands of Dolphin Off Peru. Fact is, we have seen so many beached dolphins and whales in recent years, and Navy sonar has been blamed for some off our US coasts. Of course, the Navy does denial very well. But for oil and gas drilling? Could there be a clearer example of our disdain for our fellow creatures for the sake of our wanton human ways than this one? Now, as you take in this story, think about the research that shows us that dolphins have conscious self-awareness, strong communities, and rudimentary language. It kind of puts this suffering and death in a whole different light, doesn’t it?

Will we stop drilling over this mass murder? Doesn’t look like it, does it? Obama is striving for ‘energy security,’ and Latin nations are very eager to exploit every source of fossil fuel they have on or off their shores to take advantage of the booming energy market made possible by this kind of technology.

Then I think of those boys, those young men, and their earnest expressions. They asked me some of the best questions I have ever received in response to a presentation – thoughtful, informed, impassioned. Local politics asserted themselves, and I could tell that some questioners came from households that doubt the science. But they asked, and we had exchanges, and a couple of the young men came to me afterwards because they wanted to talk more, even though they were supposed to go to chapel and then home.

I hope I left a little resonance to go with them. When they asked what they could do, I suggested starting right where they are – when you go home, talk about these things with families and friends and in your parishes. When you come back, learn your bioregion, start school discussions and projects. There is so much to learn, and so much more to learn when we do it together.

Our little treehugger

My two-and-a-half year old godchild is a treehugger – literally. When she plays outside in the yard, she will stop now and then and approach these two grand old trees. She balances her feet walking up one of the roots to the tree, puts her arms around it, and rests her face against the trunk. It is precious beyond belief. If more parents gave the gift of this kind of love to their kids, exposed them to this kind of love, I know we would have a different future. We will try to protect and defend what we love.

And then I also wonder – she is giving love to the tree, just imagine what that tree is passing on into her?

Today we remain on a rare, even unprecedented statewide fire watch because of the lack of snow this winter, dry conditions, and that crazy March heat wave (temps in the mid-80s, still hard to believe that happened). Farmers worry because blossoms opened early, before bees were out to pollinate them, and now are facing nighttime freezes. While the scientific studies continue, and scientists remain reluctant to consign any weather event to climate change, weather ‘weirding’ has become part of our reality on the planet now. We are in a grand experiment with our atmosphere, and we are ourselves the subjects of that experiment. Do we really want to continue to play this game?

Still, still – we go on as if none of this means anything to our way of life. We are creating earthquakes, killing off fellow creatures, creating dead zones, and altering the world’s climate – and today people got up and went back to their lives as if none of this was happening.

Our youth need us to partner with them. This is their future we are creating, or the conditions of their future. This culture best do some serious soul-searching, and fast.

As for me, I’m sticking with the treehugging toddlers and high school kids over the naysayers, deniers, politicians, and corporations. They simply do a better job of knowing and telling the truth.

by Margaret Swedish

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Last week’s essay on the latest setback regarding mountaintop removal coal mining,  ‘Unbearable Grief’, haunted me for days. Still does now that I call it up again. I think I am horrified not just by the blowing up of entire mountains, laying waste to natural beauty, to what the earth took millions of years to create; I am even more horrified that human beings actually plan these things, deliberate, think them through, and then do them. Some even salivate at the thought – really – can’t wait to place the blasts just so, can’t wait to sit in the bulldozers and crush whole forests. Makes you feel very powerful, I imagine.

In Alberta, the oil companies first literally scrape off the whole top of the earth – forests, all living things, the top layer of soil, to get to the tar sands that produce oil we burn in our cars and factories, or ship off to China and India for their private profit.

You have to wonder about the human psyche that is capable of doing this, that is so detached from nature and eco-systems, feels so little for other sentient and non-sentient beings, that it can do these things.

It’s why for all I preach about ecological hope, I am so filled with ecological grief – and fear. Because it seems to me more and more that unless we rediscover these connections and interrelationships – and do that with urgency, immediately – we face a grim future not in some distant time, but right ahead of us.

I know I was a bit of a naysayer, refusing to celebrate a victory, when Obama stopped the Keystone pipeline because of environmental concerns regarding the High Plains Aquifer, which provides water to 8 states, and the precious Nebraska Sand Hills, but it has been clear to me that he is not a big environmentalist and is very committed to domestic and North Am. energy production to fuel ‘economic growth.’ I know he actually supports tar sands oil production, that he and Sec. of State Hillary Clinton support the Alberta industry and see it as an issue of our ‘national security,’ and that ultimately he would find ways to get it done.

So when he came out in favor of expediting the building of the southern portion of the pipeline I was not surprised or even disappointed. It’s consistent with his policies to use every means of energy production available to advance our economy, with a few environmental protections thrown in (like regulations on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, or protecting the Sand Hills). True friends of the earth, those who would limit economic interests in favor of ecological health and survival, don’t get elected to the White House. Meanwhile, the Alberta industry is just finding other ways to get their oil to the Gulf of Mexico for refining and shipping over to China. Can’t go this way? We’ll go another.

Read this from Bloomberg about how they are doing it:

Enbridge’s system, once completed, “will allow Canadian oil-sands barrels to flow all the way to the Gulf Coast,” Jackie Forrest, senior director of global oil for IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an industry consultant, said.

You see in this film what the logic is. Really, I can hardly watch this film for the overwhelming grief – like that of blowing up several hundred Appalachian Mountains so that those car dealerships can have blazing lights across their vast lots all night long. But here is the logic – economic growth, energy security, jobs. That’s a mantra that gets you elected, not one that says, “Limit your consumption, ramp down your lifestyle, for the sake of the planet!”

How vast is our destruction of nature? For one thing, it goes back thousands of years, long before capitalism. What capitalism and socialist states and the global economy have done over the past 200 years is simply find the means to ramp up the destruction, the exploitation of ‘natural resources’ for the promotion of ‘Man,’ exponentially to scales that numb minds and hearts, that shock to the core of our beings if we bother to take a look. Our technological advances allowed population growth to take off and now we are trying to fit 7 billion people, with 2 billion more to come over the next 30-40 years, into this model of industrial growth, of environmental devastation so we can have more suburban developments and plasma screen TVs.

Here, take a look. See how the Age of Man will be remembered by future creatures on this planet:

Age of Man: from National Geographic

I’m depressing us again. Well, in the Christian world, it’s Holy Week, so we may as well focus on real passion and death these days, the martyrdom of the planet for the sake of the human ego, for the sake of what I think is the most grievous and dangerous flaw in the species Homo sapiens sapiens – our hubris, our belief that we stand alone at the pinnacle of creation, that the earth and its gifts are here for us to exploit for the glory of our human grandiosity.

Maybe the grief, maybe the shock and horror, can awaken us again to our place within nature, to experiencing again in our skin and blood and lungs all our interrelations with all our fellow creatures and the very air, food, soil, water, plants, and animals that we are contaminating and/or destroying.

Don't want to live like this anymore. Photo: Margaret Swedish

Last comment in the week we call holy because of salvific death and martyrdom at the hands of those with power and authority in the political and religious institutions of that time – the killing of God by political and religious institutions because God, it turns out, was a real threat. The headlines lasted about a day…

Climate Change Report: time to start preparing for the worst

But researchers have indicated that even if countries slammed the brakes on emissions today, the climate would continue to warm because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries. The gradual-but-relentless build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution is an indication that humans are pumping it into the air faster than natural processes can remove the excess.

My local newspaper had an A.P. story on this on page 2 last Thursday. Nothing since. I don’t know, call me crazy, but this story seems worthy of some ongoing reporting and reflection, don’t you think? Is the primary here in Wisconsin really more important than this? Only if the human species is way off its center would that be the case.

Here’s how the Washington Post reported this story:

Scientists are increasingly confident that the uptick in heat waves and heavier rainfall is linked to human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, posing a heightened risk to the world’s population, according to two reports issued in the past week.

So there it is – a big story with no impact here within this culture. Our politics, media, much of our evangelical religiosity, and la la la la land approach to life will simply not allow it.

So how do we live with our ecological grief, despair, depression, hopelessness – especially from a project proclaiming ecological hope? Well, one thing is that we need to be completely honest about our predicament. If we do not fully embrace what is happening, our responses will continue to come up short. If we continue to hold back the essence of this reality, as if by protecting people from their fears and discomforts we can somehow get them to commit to saving the planet, our discourse and actions will not be commensurate with the scale of the crisis – and will continue to come up short.

In her important book, World as Lover, World as Self, Buddhist and deep ecologist Joanna Macy uses a quote at the beginning of her chapter, ‘Despair Work:’

The moon knows that if you deny the dark,
you make a mockery of the light.  ~  Marilyn Krysl

In this chapter, she makes the argument for why it is essential to go fully into the despair, the grief, the fear we feel over the future of our world:

Pain for the world is not only natural, it is a necessary component of our healing. As in all organisms, pain has a purpose; it is a warning signal, designed to trigger remedial action. It is not to be banished by injections of optimism or sermons on ‘positive thinking.’ It is to be named and validated as a healthy, normal human response to the situation we find ourselves in. Faced and experienced, its power can be used. As the frozen defenses of the psyche thaw, new energies and intelligence are released.

And about this culture she has this to say: “For Americans to get in touch with their pain for the world, a dark night of the soul may be hard to avoid.” Seems we’d rather do just about anything than face that dark night.

But we must, and one of the reasons is exactly what she writes in this book – because the energy that would be freed up when we release our defenses, go fully into the pain, grief, and despair, is precisely the energy we need if we are to find a way to live through this most difficult era we are entering, and, in living through it, rediscover our basic humanity embedded within nature. From there we can begin the from-the-bottom-up healing process that is no longer a nice thing to do, but necessary for our survival.

I want to live on THIS planet. Big Sur coast. Photo: Margaret Swedish

Thomas Berry called this ‘the Great Work.’ Joanna Macy calls this ‘the Great Turning.’ What I find is a lot of people resonating with the message, saying ‘YES!’ to it, reading more, doing more advocacy – but what is needed is something much more profound: a wholesale change in the way we live our lives, a new culture of ecological non-harming and healing. We will know the great turning has begun, and the great work has been engaged, when we see this happening throughout the fabric of our diverse human cultures.

There, only there, do I see the cure for ecological grief and despair – and a future for the human.

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Read this before the next time you turn on your lights…

I’ve been quiet on this site for the past couple of weeks. I’m working on my new book, trying to get a couple of projects anchored here in Milwaukee, and dealing with some illnesses in my family. They are all reminders of how finite we are. I actually can’t do everything (neither can you), and lately even what I do has another requirement – that it serve to help me/us go deeper within, to silence the background noise of this entire culture so that I can hear what is churning, disturbing, trying to emerge.

And then there’s a kind of avoidance going on, I know. I feel so deeply wounded and grief-stricken by recent news about our nation’s corporate assault on nature that I had to put a couple stories aside because I could not bear to look at them.

And you know me by now – that is exactly what I want to share with you here. So this morning I looked at them.

The worst, the one that has become nearly unbearable, is this: a federal judge has ruled that the E.P.A. overstepped its authority in revoking a permit for the company Arch Coal to begin the largest mountaintop removal (MTR) coalmining project ever in the Appalachian Mountains.

The EPA, led by Obama appointee Lisa Jackson, had revoked the water pollution permit issued by the US Army Corps of Engineers, one of the most environmentally destructive agencies in the nation, for the proposed 2,300-acre Spruce No. 1 mine in Logan County. Read here for more info – please.

Spruce Valley, and Pigeon Roost Hollow in Logan County, slated for destruction by Arch Coal Spruce No. 1 mine. Photo: Vivian Stockman, OHVEC

You see, the laws of the nation favor the corporations’ rights to use and abuse the land, and this is especially true right now for the energy industry. As Pres. Obama keeps saying, we’re going to exploit all the sources, dirty and clean, to keep the economy churning along, to keep all those factories and computers and batteries for cell phones and iPads powered up. Heck, we are even moving to plug-in electric cars, so we will need even more coal to burn in our power plants.

This is what I invite you to do – show your friends, families, communities, work colleagues, churches and other faith communities what this is. Show them this. We need to know what is on the other end of our light switches and smart phone chargers and air conditioning systems. We need some deep, deep reflection on the extent to which we want to be implicated in these crimes against nature and against the actual living and breathing human beings, most of them on the bottom end of the economic ladder, whose lives are being upended by this practice of mountaintop removal.

There are other ways to create energy, but none as cheaply as this. This nation is addicted to cheap energy because it makes for cheaper consumer goods. We love this! We expect it at Christmas time at the shopping malls. We expect it when we go to Amazon to buy cheaper goods. My computer is being powered right now by majority coal-powered electricity, with a bit of wind thrown into the mix.

What these sites look like after coal companies take over. Hobet MTR site, Lincoln County WV. Photo: Vivian Stockman

Sadly, the country is also lacking any sense of solidarity with the Appalachian communities suffering this corporate violence.

Now listen to what West Virginia’s Guv had to say about the judge’s ruling:

“This is a huge victory for West Virginia and our coal miners,” said Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin… “Issue our permits so that we can put our people back to work and provide the resources that will power America,” he said.

You see? It’s for the workers! And it’s for you and me, to keep us powered up.

Actually, MTR came along as a method to replace coal miners, who used to tunnel down into the mountains to get the coal, with machines that simply blast the mountains away, and bulldozers that push the toxic stuff into valleys and streams. The machines don’t need wages to feed a family, and they don’t require things like health insurance. Tomblin’s comments are cynical in the extreme. I imagine coal companies contributed generously to his campaign.

So you see, my silence these past days has been reflection of a deepening grief that often feels unbearable in light of the destruction of our sacred earth, our magnificent mountains and streams, and the mountain communities that go back many generations. This is not the only place in the world where human beings are creating industrial nightmares for the sake of the global economy. Nature is being permanently destroyed in many places and the wounds are multiplying.

When does it stop?

For more information, please visit these websites:

Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (ohvec)

Move Not These Bones: Coal Mining in Appalachia Destroys More Than Mountains

As the Mountaintops Fall, a Coal Town Vanishes

But the coal that helped to create Lindytown also destroyed it. Here was the church; here was its steeple; now it’s all gone, along with its people. Gone, too, are the surrounding mountaintops. To mine the soft rock that we burn to help power our light bulbs, our laptops, our way of life, heavy equipment has stripped away the trees, the soil, the rock — what coal companies call the “overburden.”

Now, the faint, mechanical beeps and grinds from above are all that disturb the Lindytown quiet, save for the occasional, seam-splintering blast.

Egregious sins against the earth. We should be in mourning. Help stop this killing. Educate, change consumer habits, live low on the energy scales, take action. Visit the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition for more info on what you can do.