First of all, an apology for not posting for a week to all you fans who have missed us!  I have been in a very intense family time, as we go through an enormous transition of letting go our family home 0f 61 years.  Some readers remember that my Mother died last year.

Daughter & Mother - photo by Margaret Swedish

It was an extraordinary dying.  Home hospice — I cannot recommend it highly enough.  But mostly, it was her enormous spirit that carried us through, and continues to do so.

We are dealing here with mortality.  And it has taught me a lot about what is wrong with us, why this ecological crisis just doesn’t make a real dent in our consciousness, why we don’t ‘wake up!’ from the inertia of this culture-gone-so-wrong.  This culture still has trouble accepting the reality of death, of endings, especially of our human creations (like nations, churches, civilizations, capitalism, for example).

If we cannot enter into the dying, into the reality of our mortality, our temporariness, then we can hardly enter into the reality of what it means to be a species among species on a depleted planet.  If we don’t get that we are dust and unto dust we will return, then we don’t get the reality that we do not live on top of Nature but within it, subject to all the limits of the planet and its ecosystems like any other species.

Or if our religion puts us over and above Nature, wherein this world means nothing special because of the promise of heaven for individual souls apart from the Earth from which we evolved and into which we will return, then we are not likely to hold our high allegiance to the realities of this gifted, creative, magnificent, and beautiful planet, or, in other words, our home.

Smog over Lake Michigan, Chicago - photo by Deanna

So, in front of this long holiday weekend, a national holiday sobered by the reality of crisis hovering over the nation (like another nearly half million newly unemployed in June), I want to briefly note once again the climate bill that passed the House and invite readers to work for something better.  This bill is an inadequate lowest common denominator.  Yet, if in the end this mess of a bill that rewards many of the wrong players in the struggle for a livable climate goes down in flames, this would be bad news indeed.  It is a floor beneath which we dare not go. And as this bill goes to the Senate, we must urge Senators to do better, and certainly no worse.

And, can we say this, we must urge our president to do far more than he is doing on this.  This is another example of a critical issue about which he must not be careful, passive, barely engaged.  He must fight for stronger legislation.  His work on this needs to be commensurate with the danger he is good at describing but not so good at selling on Capitol Hill or before the public.

image by Robert A Rhode, prepared for Global Warming Art

I fantasize a speech at least as eloquent and forceful as his speech on racism long months ago.  He needs to educate this public about why action on climate is urgent and necessary, and what happens if we do not take stronger action.  Heck, he could bother to stand up there with the report of his own government in hand, the recently released, Impacts of Climate Change on the U.S., authored by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.  He could do a powerpoint presentation with its graphs and charts to scare the heck out of us, to scare us out of our seats and into action.

I have below links to 3 NY Times articles of note, all from yesterday, July 1, which can help make our case:

Adding Something for Everyone, House Leaders Won Climate Bill:  this article describes very well how a more forceful piece of legislation became a hodge-podge of handouts to special interests, but why it is still important.

Climate in the Senate: this is the editorial board’s response and their challenge, laying out issues for the Senate.

Just Do It:  Thomas Friedman’s op-ed on the climate legislation.  It ends with the call to action that inspired today’s post headline.  Friedman’s call is apt and up to the urgency level of this issue:

I also hope we will hear more from President Obama. Something feels very calculating in how he has approached this bill, as if he doesn’t quite want to get his hands dirty, as if he is ready to twist arms in private, but not so much that if the bill goes down he will get tarnished. That is no way to fight this war. He is going to have to mobilize the whole country to pressure the Senate — by educating Americans, with speech after speech, about the opportunities and necessities of a serious climate/energy bill. If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.

And then there is We the People. Attention all young Americans: your climate future is being decided right now in the cloakrooms of the Capitol, where the coal lobby holds huge sway. You want to make a difference? Then get out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon. That will get the Senate’s attention. Play hardball or don’t play at all.

Well, House Speaker Pelosi is working hard to get the climate legislation passed.  Though it may not be adequate, it is something, it is a first — the first time the U.S. government might actually pass legislation that addresses the threat of climate change, that begins to create an enforceable regimen to bring down the rate of CO2 emissions contributed by the U.S. into our atmosphere.  We are not big fans of cap-and-trade, and we are not happy about the auction process for pollution permits, among other things,  however…

A beginning.  A positive first step.  If it passes the House, if it can be gotten through the Senate, if it can get to the president’s desk.   Still lots of work to do.

The timing is significant because it would strengthen the credibility of the U.S. as it goes to Copenhagen for the Climate Change Conference in December, where the nations of the world will try to come up with a treaty to begin slowing CO2 emissions in time to save us from climate catastrophe.

Carbon emissions 800,000 yr record - US Global Change Research Program

However, reflecting on the persistent resistance to acknowledging the need for more drastic and immediate action to slow emissions, I ponder this: how far to we intend to push this idea that we can somehow protect industries from drastic changes, even disappearance in the case of fossil fuels, and still be able to reduce CO2 to the 350 ppm considered optimal to keep anything like the climate in which the human species evolved and in which it created civilization?  We are already at well over 386 ppm (and that only counts CO2, not other greenhouse gases like methane and nitrous oxide), so I worry about the pace of change.

But a law represents recognition by government that we have a serious problem.  Progress.

Not a bad time to be in touch with members of Congress.  If you read the linked article, you see that there is no guarantee that this legislation will pass.  There are still some fossil-fuel backed Democrats in coal states like West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. who don’t want to jeopardize future campaign contributions.

Sears Tower going green - Photo: Wikipedia Commons

Meanwhile, progress is being made in the creation of the new energy future, and I just want to note one example today - the Sears Tower in Chicago.  Its owners are going to retrofit the building, put insulation in the windows, add gardens on roofs, add wind turbines, and cut electricity consumption by 80%.  They are also planning to build a completely sustainable 50-story hotel next to the tower.  They hope to prove that it is possible to renovate even our biggest buildings towards a sustainable future.

…the task is important because buildings worldwide account for more than 50 percent of carbon emissions.

So, while we are working towards a new energy regimen in this country with one hand, the other can be lent to creating right now the new world that will make it possible to mitigate some of the worst of the catastrophes to come if we continue business as usual any longer.  We don’t have to wait for Congress or China or the international community to begin playing our part in bringing us back down to 350 ppm.  This means our personal lifestyle choices, yes; but even more it means supporting and participating in the thousands of initiatives through which communities are already creating the new sustainable future.  We don’t have to wait for the transition, we can create it right where we are.

——————————————————–

Learn more from NASA on climate change: NASA’s Eyes on the Earth

This story makes me so sad — and angry.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) just released a report indicating that 1.02 billion people are hungry in this world right now — 100 million more than last year.

The most recent increase in hunger is not the consequence of poor global harvests but is caused by the world economic crisis that has resulted in lower incomes and increased unemployment. This has reduced access to food by the poor, the UN agency said.

“A dangerous mix of the global economic slowdown combined with stubbornly high food prices in many countries has pushed some 100 million more people than last year into chronic hunger and poverty,” said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf. “The silent hunger crisis — affecting one sixth of all of humanity — poses a serious risk for world peace and security. We urgently need to forge a broad consensus on the total and rapid eradication of hunger in the world and to take the necessary actions.”

We’ve heard this kind of call to action before, and the numbers of hungry just keep growing.

I just have to say this:  it is as immoral as torture or repression that we have an economic system that favors rules of the game that encourage some people to be billionaires  and then protects their right to wealth, as more than a billion people are chronically hungry and have no practically recognized right to eat.  Oh that right is enshrined in many documents, not least of which is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but we all know which of these two rights is the one actually recognized in this world.

Photo: United Nations Development Program Sudan

In a world facing growing scarcities now because of ecological overshoot and climate change, there is nothing hopeful in these indicators, nothing.  If human beings still do not know what justice means, if a billion Christians still don’t understand that the Gospel of Luke, the beatitudes and woes, and Matthew 25 are not sweet sayings, but are to be taken literally and seriously as more fundamental to the faith than all the prayers and hierarchies in all the world, then we have a very big human disaster on our hands.

If the prophets no longer reveal the human condition to us but just make us pious and other-worldly, than we have missed their meaning and significance altogether — and I can hear the prophets, and I can hear Jesus, telling us exactly what they think of our forms of worship when there is no justice — when 1.02 billion people are hungry and we are concerned about protecting a system that not only allows these disparities but indeed is founded on them.

You know what I mean:

Is this the manner of fasting I wish, of keeping a day of penance, that a man [sic] bow his head like a reed, and lie in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?  This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly…, setting free the oppressed…, sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless…  [Is. 58]

Oh, that!  Annoying, isn’t it, these words that haunt us so.

So, Isaiah also says, “Woe to you who add house to house and field to field until no room remains and you are left to dwell alone in the midst of the land” [5:8].  And I come across this article from The Economist reporting that food importing nations are buying up the lands of poor peoples to ensure their own food supply — literally taking the land from the hungry [Outsourcing's Third Wave].  The rich are beginning to outsource farm production.  Governments of poor nations allow rich food importers to grow crops on land leased or sold to them and then to take all the food back home.  Governments get cash; rich countries get cheaper food or access to scarce land; the poor get enrolled in the FAO’s list of the hungry.

Now if you read deep into this long article, you see there are a few things driving this.  One is higher food prices.  And part of what is behind that is the amount of land going into the production of plants for biofuels, palm oil, soy and corn being three of the most notorious and ecologically damaging, and into production of grain for livestock, not humans, as the world’s appetite for meat grows rapidly with industrialization.

Percentage population living on less than 1 dollar per day 2007-08 (Wikipedia Commons)

Another factor is the growing threat of water shortages  — from things like overuse of aquifers, desertification in many parts of the world, climate change that is altering weather patterns, etc. — and the fact that ecologically unsustainable industrial agriculture is ruining growing swaths of arable land because of extensive monocropping, overproduction, and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  Some land is ruined to the point where crops are dependent on these chemical inputs, putting costs of production out of the reach of poor farmers.  And then there’s that particularly sinister development of genetically modified crops that do not produce seeds that farmers can save for the next season, forcing them to buy new seeds each year from the big agriculture corporations (like Monsanto) — another thing the poor cannot afford.

Ecological hope is not real, is pure fantasy, if we are not committed to justice, to an equitable world where all people are able to meet their basic needs by right. There are few things more horrifying as we look to the future of a world of growing scarcities, growing population, and profound ecological stresses, then to think we will try to get through this difficult transition without addressing the reality of poverty, without committing to distributing the world’s most basic ‘resources’ — food, water, energy, housing, land — in ways that are ecologically regenerating and sustainable, and adequate for basic human dignity.

When we speak of living sustainably within bioregions, relying as much as possible on local production systems to meet basic needs, we mean this; we mean this not in some alternative counter-cultural universe on the fringes of society; we mean this in every aspect of the human community – including the corporate world, the financial world, the means of production, our entire human project.  A spirituality that tries to separate out the functioning of the economic world from the ethical and  moral demands of faith is missing the meaning of western religious traditions fundamentally.

Submitting the land and food to the rationale of the profit-driven marketplace, or to the desires and ability of the powerful to store up for the future while taking from the poor what they need to live, has no place within a moral framework or a spirituality rooted in the tradition of the prophets or the gospels.

Nor within a spirituality rooted in ecological hope

If you want, and in a hurry.

If you want a liveable world, if you want your kids to grow up not in catastrophe but rather in difficulty that contains hope for a future, live differently –

–if you want, as we said in our previous post, and in a hurry, if you are listening to our scientists.

Blue Marble - NASA Earth Observatory

I just returned from the EarthSpirit Rising gathering at Xavier University in Cincinnati and it was a jolt of adrenaline.  It is comforting and invigorating to be with a couple hundred people who ’see’ the world as it is — the magnificence of creation, and the very real threat we humans pose to the manifestation of creation that is our beautiful Earth.

I am certain that I am not the only participant who found it unsettling to return from this gathering just in time for the release of the new multi-agency report on climate change and its impacts on the U.S. from the United States Global Change Research Program, research paid for with our tax money.  Thank you, government, for using my tax money in such a wise and responsible way.  Is this the report that will finally snap us into action?

NBC did a terrific story on this on last evening’s Nightly News and there have been a few articles in the newspapers.  But this is what I fear will happen — one more time, this alarming news will get buried, simply disappear from headlines and our national consciousness.  Recent polls in fact show that US Americans are less and less concerned about what greenhouse gases are doing to warm the atmosphere and the catastrophes that await us if we continue business as usual.  As this report shows, sadly, these changes have already begun.

See, in this project — articulating a spirituality of ecological hope, and in the spirit of our parent organization, the Center for New Creation — we are pretty certain, as the evidence of my generation indicates, that we will not act in time to prevent disruptive climate change.  After all, we were the generation that created Earth Day and wrote all those books and read all those studies about all the things that were going to unfold on this planet — overpopulation, energy crises, acid rain, toxic pollution, global warming — and then became just about the biggest consuming generation in the history of the human species.

We simply do not want to believe what is happening to this planet.  It remains abstract and seemingly distant, or too big a notion to wrap our minds around. Or worse, we don’t want it to interfere with our upscale lifestyles and expectations.   In fact, we had all the information we needed more than three decades ago to keep us from coming to this moment.

Projected 100-degrees days this century - US Global Change Research Program

So here is yet another group of scientists, some of them among our most brilliant, like John P. Holdren, Obama’s chief science advisor, and Jane Lubchenco, new administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), telling us the situation is dire, serious, the need for action immediate, urgent — and then?  Are we being called to action yet from within our political culture?  Already the coal industry is talking about how we dare not move too quickly for fear of grave economic consequences.  Are you kidding me?  We are facing ecological catastrophe!!!  Read about their lobbying efforts here.

Once again, we are being told that things are bad, but there is still time to keep the worst from happening; and once again we are being told that this requires, however, big changes right now.  When do these messages finally come together in a critical mass that wakes us from our malaise?

We are a species out of touch with the danger we are in within our own habitats.

In a presentation at EarthSpirit Rising, David Orr, Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics at Oberlin, one of the keynote speakers, said that it is “too late to avoid trauma,” but “it may or may not be too late to prevent the worst” from happening.

On my way back I stopped to visit my niece who is about to give birth to a little girl who will be my godchild.  The stakes for me are about to get a whole lot bigger.  I figure one of my most important responsibilities to this child will be to offer her every opportunity to fall in love with the natural world, and then to work like crazy to preserve it for her.

So, friends, I am embedding yesterday’s press conference below and urge you to take time to watch it (for subscribers, if the embed doesn’t work, here’s the YouTube link).  And I encourage you to look at the report paid for by us — it is very accessible, well done visually, quite readable. It has sections devoted to how climate change will face specific regions of the country, so you will find stuff all about where you live. In my case here in Wisconsin, what they describe certainly matches our experience in recent years.

Then, here again comes our call to action:

Please, please, be part of the awakening, be part of the urgency, be part of the truth-telling, be part of the ‘new creation,’ the one where we learn once more how to live on this planet — in time to keep it a beautiful planet for my godchild and all the others of her generation-to-come.

Impacts of Climate Chatge - US Global Change Research Program

[This will be my only post this week.  I will be attending Imago's EarthSpirit Rising gathering this weekend.  More on that next week.]

Look, what is being debated in Congress matters a lot — legislation about our energy future, how to tackle global warming, mind-busting deficits looming in our future, whether we unravel or strengthen our social safety net, oil and gas drilling, guns in national parks, and on and on.

Work on these things, yes, sure, work hard on these things.

Niece in the snow - by her mother

But if you want to live differently, if you want the Earth to remain beautiful, if you want your children to have something other than a terrible world to live in, if you want to live simply, more authentically — well, just do it.  We need to do it.  We need to stop thinking that we can live a truly new way of life only when certain other things fall into place — like it’s safe and secure, and everyone else is doing it, etc.   We need to begin to realize that we are the ones who right now can create the new way of life.

We need no longer, as of this moment, believe that our role in this world is to participate in the consumer society in order to keep people working and the economy functioning.  This economy cannot keep everyone working — that has been clear for a long time and corporations are now making that abundantly clear — and we need a new economy, one that serves the people, one that is at the service of human beings and the ecosystems in which we dwell.

There is more than one project involved in living a spirituality of ecological hope.  One is to dismantle the way of life that has brought us to the brink; the other is to begin to envision and create the new way of life that will emerge in the midst of the collapse of the old.

All over our world right now, thousands upon thousands of creative efforts are underway to explore new models of human existence in a world already in ecological overshoot.  We are already doing the thing that needs to be done.  If there remains a problem in this it’s that our efforts remain too fragmented, too disconnected, to create the critical mass that can tip things — a tipping point in favor of life in abundance, rather than the tipping points that are leading to disaster.

Connect, build bridges, create dialogue across boundaries, share your thoughts, ideas, experiments.  Show your families, neighbors, faith communities, municipalities, politicians that a different world is possible.  Create from this base the energy that can force our policymakers to do the right thing, not the thing demanded by those who finance their political campaigns.

spring sky over Lake Michigan - photo: Margaret Swedish

Let’s believe in ourselves and in our hopes and dreams. We dwell within a magnificent creation, this planet unique in all the observable universe, uniquely suited for life to emerge, and in that life, we humans.  We could lose that — the human part.  We have neglected our home, abused it to the point where it may collapse on itself and on us.  But it has incredible powers of regeneration and healing — if we can stop the abuse.

Essential to that is the living differently — lightly, simply, compassionately, justly, lovingly.

That is the task of the human now.

[I will be away from my computer for a few days.  Next post: June 11.]

Just what I needed this week.  After viewing ABC’s special, Earth 2100, I badly needed a jolt of hope.  It’s not that I don’t agree with the bleak portrayal of life in this century of looming ecological and human breakdowns, it’s just that I still don’t accept that as the only possibility.  Oh, we have a hard time ahead of us for sure.  Because there will be trouble - but there will be, there is also, possibility.

So, the perfect antidote was to attend last’s night premier here in Milwaukee of a new film by ana Sophia joanes entitled, Fresh, with the attending phrase, New thinking on what we’re eating.  The film is produced by Ripple Effect Productions.  Milwaukee was one of the premier sites because the film features our own Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power, one of the world’s movement leaders when it comes to recreating the food production system, what we eat and how we eat.  We blogged about Growing Power and Allen the other day.

The film offers stark contrast between industrial agriculture, which is contributing its lion’s share to the destruction of the planet, and organic, family, or community farming, which holds the potential of not only helping the planet heal and regenerate, but offering the possibility of actual real food, as in food with actual real nutrition, produced in a locally based sustainable way, for local populations across the world.

So we have country farmers, and we have urban farmers portrayed here.  It is from one of the featured farmers in this film that the phrase “respect for the design of nature” comes.  It is from nature itself, how it actually works, that this farmer designed his farming methods, and you will be so inspired by him, like a shot of adrenaline.

Okay, so then I pick up my papers this morning and on the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is this article: Rooftop gardens all about growth.  You can start imagining the future — gardens everywhere, backyards, rooftops, city parks, corporate headquarters (this is actually happening here, too, thanks to Allen), suburban open areas — as the industrial farming industry begins to collapse due to overuse and contamination of soils, and collapse of aquifers and irrigation systems because of overuse and climate change.  This is a vision for how we survive that gross error that became industrial farming.

Industrial farm

Keep in mind that most industrial farming produces not food, but feed for cruel, inhumane, and unhealthy livestock production, and for the non-foods that are killing us by diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity — things like corn syrups and sugars, GMO soybean and other seed oils, etc.

Last night we had the good energy of the presence of Allen, joanes, Growing Power board members, and a local chef who uses Allen’s food, to add a full measure of inspiration.  The beauty of growing food in community systems like this is that anyone who wants can do it, or find a way to be part of it — from getting one’s hands in the soil to actual cooking of incredibly delicious food.

Looks good enough to eat, doesn't it?

So I recommend the film and hope it draws more people into a movement that can really change the future of the planet.  Besides its damage to land and water, industrial agriculture is a major source of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gas emissions, a propellant of deforestation all around the globe, a threat to biodiversity and the genetics of nature because of the expanding use of genetically modified organisms and the practice of monocropping, and a major threat to our health because of the GMOs, antibiotics, and hormones that we receive on our plate and take into our bodies every time we eat industrially produced food.

Really, the film will cheer you up — and make you feel like you want to be a part of this.

Speth’s latest book, published last year, adds another volume to the long list of books predicting imminent ecological disaster if we do not act fast.  His message is urgent.  He realizes we are running out of time.

It’s the messenger as much as the message that matters.  Speth has a long history more in the mainstream of economics and environmentalism.  He is a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and later served in President Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality.  He was president of the World Resources Institute in the 1980s and then an advisor to President Bill Clinton.  From 1993-99, he served as administrator to the United Nations Development Program and then went on to become dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

So this is a voice with a background.  And he writes this:

“How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world to our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.  Just continue to release greenhouse gases at the current rates, just continue to impoverish ecosystems and release toxic chemicals at current rates, and the world in the latter part of the century won’t be fit to live in.  But, of course, human activities are not holding at current levels — they are accelerating, dramatically. It took all of history to build the seven-trillion-dollar world economy of 1950; today economic activity grows by that amount every decade.  At current rates of growth, the world economy will double in size in fourteen years.  We are thus facing the possibility of an enormous increase in environmental deterioration, just when we need to move strongly in the opposite direction.

Speth is a convert not to ‘environmentalism’ but to urgency.  And he is a convert to the view that industrial capitalism and economies of growth not only cannot save us, but must be transitioned, and quickly, into economies that move us toward sustainability.  And in that context, given the state of the planet, Speth helps to redefine the meaning of human well-being — a meaning that finally detaches from mere consumption of goods and becomes instead heathy communities living within a healthy planet.  Instead of identities defined by lifestyle and acquisition of wealth and material goods, we begin to find our identities by participating in the life of the human  community within the greater whole.

In his critique of growth economics and industrial wasting of the planet, Speth joins his voice to many others who have pronounced that the era forged by these paradigms is coming to end — either by forethought and conscious transition, or else by disaster.  In addition, he brings to environmentalists the challenge to address injustice, the inequities and growing gaps between rich and poor.  The poor will suffer first and worst from the collapse of ecosystems, and the moral obligation confronting western societies that helped propel us to “the edge of the world” is inescapable.

When you read this book, go first to the two pages of graphs that follow the acknowledgements pages, entitled, “The Great Collision.”  Just sit with these visuals for a moment and take in what you see there, what it tells us about how and why we have arrived at this moment of crisis.  I think you will see there what drives the urgency that so many of us are feeling right now, why there is no time to waste.

“…if the challenge is so absolute, the possibilities are equally comprehensive.  We have identified the difficulties but also the opportunities of what is before us.  A comprehensive change of consciousness is coming over the human community, especially in the industrial nations of the world.  For the first time since the industrial age began we have a profound critique of its devastation, a certain withdrawal in dismay at what is happening, along with an enticing view of the possibilities before us.”

Thomas Berry, from The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future

Thomas Berry

Always that mix of incisive description of our condition and yet, hope; honesty about our predicament and faith that we still have what we need to get out of it.

Thomas Berry died early this morning, June 1.  It would be hard to overstate the impact he has had on faith communities around the country, and even the world, in shaping the language and dynamism of an ecological spirituality.

Cultural historian and Passionist priest, Berry offered a blistering critique of industrial society and our Western alienation from the Earth, from the living systems in which we are embedded.  With eloquence, he described how the human might help bring about the transition from the Cenozoic era and the devastation of the industrial age to a new era he called the ‘Ecozoic,’ a period when humans begin to play a ‘mutually enhancing’ role within the Earth community.  He was 94 years old.

[To hear Berry describe the 'great work,' click here .]

Berry wrote many books and essays, and, if you are not familiar with his work, I encourage you to explore his  writings to find out why so many people, even those of us who never met him, think of him as a mentor and guide into the new era of ecological wholeness, healing, and renewal of the meaning of the human.

Today, among the many emails I received about his death, came this poem, written by Diane Pendola.  I asked if I could post it here, and she graciously gave permission.

How’s that title for a little alliteration?  Try to say it ten times real fast.

Okay, but seriously: sometimes it feels like my main job here is to grab up pieces of the picture, fragments that come from this source and that, and then put them together into a frame that highlights our situation.  Climate change-wise, it’s not looking so good.

air pollution off eastern US coast - NASA Visible Earth

So here are three of those puzzle pieces, and then we just sit with them a moment and realize what they are telling us.  A little reality quietly sinks in.  We are not acting fast enough on greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. We are not prepared for what’s coming, even what’s already happening.  We are headed towards disaster if we don’t wake up right now and get moving.  We had better dig deep into our faith traditions and spiritualities for the strength and compassion we will need to address the looming human crisis.  We had better enlarge our capacity for compassion — a vastly expanded spirituality of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) — and in a hurry.

Here are the three pieces that bring me to write this:

From AP:  Scientists warn of ‘irreversible’ climate shifts.  This story stems from a follow-up meeting to the 2007 climate report of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change.  It involved 2,000 ‘climate researchers.’  They are preparing for the United Nations-sponsored international meeting scheduled for Copenhagen in December where governments will again attempt to hammer out an effective treaty on emission cuts — or not.  And they are feeling urgent.

“Hundreds of leading scientists warned Thursday that global warming is accelerating beyond the worst predictions and threatening to trigger ‘irreversible’ climate shifts on the planet.”

Refugees of desertificaiton in Horn of Africa

Then we add this piece from Oxfam America, a report they released in April: Number of people affected by climate disaster up by 54 percent by 2015: Oxfam calls for urgent action; increase could overwhelm current response system.  To view a 6-page summary, go to this link:  The Right to Survive: the Humanitarian Challenge for the 21st Century.

And the third puzzle piece, which I think you will appreciate for where and how it fits into the picture, is this, from the Energy Information Agency, an arm of our Department of Energy:  World Energy Use Projected to Grow 44 Percent Between 2006 and 2030.

Gavin Power Plant, Cheshire OH

You see what I mean.  You almost hesitate to put this puzzle together.

If you watched the news yesterday, you heard the alarming tale that folks living in our U.S. hurricane zones are largely unprepared for the season about to begin — even in our world-after-Katrina.  “It won’t happen to me; it won’t happen to me; it won’t happen to me!”  That seems to be our approach to all sorts of disaster possibilities.

I am not making this up.  This is most of us:

Poll reveals coastal residents not prepared for hurricane season

“The Mason-Dixon poll released Thursday found 83 percent of respondents have made no structural improvements to their homes since last year, 66 percent did not have a survival kit and 62 percent did not have a disaster plan.”

So I ask you, if as a culture the majority of us are not prepared to deal with disasters with which we already have experience, and which could be intensified by the energies unleashed in a warming climate, how in the world will we prepare ourselves to deal with the reality presented by the conjunction of those three articles above?

This worries me a lot.  2015.  The humanitarian crisis described by Oxfam America unfolds over the next 6 years.

On this beautiful spring day in Wisconsin, I urge all of you readers and visiters to become part of the energy that must shift this culture and its values in a hurry.  This is an essential work, and it takes place in churches, synagogues, community halls, schools, neighborhoods, book groups, etc. all across the country.  We must change our people, from within.  We must prepare to live in the real world; not the one we would like to wish away, but the one we actually live in.  That is the venue for any life of faith and meaning.

Dealing with a deadline for a project, so I haven’t had time to post yet this week.  While I work through that, however, I still follow the significant news regarding our ecological predicament.  So I just want to cite some articles that, gathered together, remind us of the fact that the ecological crisis is not future; rather, we are already in it.  Things are already changing all around us.  Already, familiar patterns of Nature and life are beginning to break down or be altered in ways that will affect our lives.

This is why we insist here that our work is not just an activist, change the world, prevent bad things from happening sort of project.  It is really about learning how to live in the new reality, it is about ‘new creation’ in the midst of the collapse of an old way of being.

A few articles that reflect a changing planet:

Droughts Drain Northern Lakes, by Lee Bergquist.  This is about my part of the world, and very sad.  Our northern lakes are among Wisconsin’s great natural treasures.  Some research suggests a frightening cause: climate change.

Pickerel Pond, The Ridges, Door County WI - photo by E.J. Judziewicz

Lake levels run in cycles, and scientists think the current decline is longer than in cycles of the past.

State Climatologist John Young also speculated that the weather system of the Dakotas that produces drier air might be pushing eastward.

A 2003 study of climate change in the Upper Midwest by the Union of Concerned Scientists raised the possibility of falling lake levels 100 years from now.

Using computer modeling, it predicted one scenario of higher temperatures, lower precipitation and greater evaporation that could cause water levels to drop.

So, this could be the beginning of a permanent change in Wisconsin’s ecosystems and geography.

Here’s another:

Sea’s Rise May Prove the Greater in Northeast, by Cornelia Dean.  I guess Logan and JFK airports have a limited future, along with Wall Street and the coastal communities of eastern Canada.

Another, and here I would make this recommendation: don’t move to the West.

West is Told to Expect Water Shortfalls, by Henry Fountain.  About the Colorado River, which is source of water for seven states:

…under various forecasts of the effects of warming temperatures on runoff into the Colorado, scheduled future water deliveries to the seven states are not sustainable.

Lake Mead in April 09, former water level is visible - photo: Juhn Gurzinski

Not sustainable.  Sounds so tame until you realize what is being said here.  I await word that the western states have halted further development, created severe disincentives for more human migration, and are planning for this very dry future. That would be the sane response, of course.

More:

As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising, by Cornelia Dean.  Wow, this is an astonishingly rapid change in a region’s geography.

How about this:

Rising Calls to Regulate California Groundwater, by Felicity Barringer.  Why? Because farmers in the San Joaquin Basin are draining the aquifer dry in a fool’s project to keep growing crops that probably don’t belong there, to preserve a way of life that has no future.  The aquifer under this part of California is being overused precisely for the above reason — climate change means less water flowing from the Sierra Nevadas.

And here is also revealed what is wrong with us, the unsupportable, unrealistic, hubristic human attitude towards it all:

If he lived in almost any other state in the arid Southwest, Mr. Watte could be required to report his withdrawals of groundwater or even reduce them. But to California’s farmers and developers, that is anathema. “I don’t want the government to come in and dictate to us, ‘This is all the water you can use on your own land,’ ” said Mr. Watte, 57. “We would resist that to our dying day.”

Well, Mr. Watte, that dying day is coming — faster than you think.  We cannot make rain fall out of the sky; we cannot bring the normal snowpack back to the mountains; we cannot make the climate suddenly shift back to the old norm.  This is the new norm, and if we insist on living under the delusion that we are not subject to the limits of the planet, and a planet undergoing rapid change, then we will continue on this path towards disaster.

I will not change.  I will not change. I will not change…

We will change.  One way or another, we are going to change.  The challenge is, how do we want to go through that change? Or as the last chapter of my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World’ proclaims, “what kind of human beings will we be as we go through the crisis?”