The heart of the matter for us is this:

We are living in a state of ecological overshoot. We are already living beyond the biocapacity of the planet.  The earth is no longer able to absorb the damage we are doing with our economies of extraction, consumption, and waste.  This crisis is not only economic and political, it is also ’spiritual’ in the sense that it reflects certain values that shape our worldview, frameworks of meaning that fuel the dynamisms of the economic lives of humans.

We challenge those frameworks and their assumptions.  We do this in writing (like this website and my book), in various kinds of presentations and reflection days, and in working with communities to articulate a spirituality of ecological hope, new frameworks of meaning, values, ways of life, that are consistent with what we have learned about our planet and our cosmos, what we have learned about the impact and the place of the human within the story of evolution, within the biosphere and atmosphere of our precious Earth.

Part of our intention here is to create, or foster, in the greater Milwaukee area and upper Midwest a community of folks and a program that begins to articulate this ’spirituality.’ Since hope is not a pie-in-the-sky dream world, but must be based on something real, such a spirituality needs to have roots in a commitment to actually live it.  Embracing a spirituality of ‘ecological’ hope would mean making a commitment to a way of life whose values, frameworks of meaning, and deep reflection would foster the healing and regeneration of the ecology of the whole, the eco-communities in which we live, including the human communities living under great stresses from poverty, injustice, violence, and an aggressive competitive economics of growth capitalism.

(c) What hope might look like

A fundamental aspect of what we do in this project is to help us all recover a sense that we are part of the whole of our ecological reality, that when we overshoot the Earth’s limits, violate the planet’s natural organic integral processes with massively destructive policies of extraction, consumption, and waste, with modes of human development that are disrupting and destroying habitats required to nurture healthy living systems, we are in effect tearing out from under us the ground of our own being.

In the past year, I was privileged to be in many different communities helping to lead interfaith programs, speaking in parishes and at conferences, leading discussions and reflections, that focus on 2 general themes: 1) the roots of the ecological crisis created by industrial and post-industrial societies along with the economic and social values that support that way of life; then, 2) alongside this deepening awareness of crisis, our discovery of the vastness of the universe in space and time and our place within the story of its unfolding.

These two ‘awarenesses’ are at the base of a great deal of disorientation, anxiety, and fear that have become pervasive in our human community.  They describe in broad strokes the dynamics of the great transition in which we humans find ourselves.  They also invite us to delve deeper than ever into the meaning of the human, offering us a path out of the crisis by embracing the truth of this one round finite world of which we are a part and outside of which we do not exist.

Apollo 8 NASA image

These workshops, presentations, reflections are a source of inspiration and energy for this project.  They also keep on creating it, shaping its directions and content.

In 2010 we will, of course, be doing more of this.  We will also be working towards establishing in this area more of a ‘presence,’ a space where this dialogue and reflection can deepen, where the conversation can continue, where together with others here, and with folks from other communities and eco-centers in the midwest, we can challenge the values that have supported the dynamics threatening the life-giving ecosystems of the planet.

For those of you whose spiritual roots lay in the Christian world, JustFaith Ministries in Kentucky will soon release an 8-week module, a course of study and dialogue, based on my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World:’ A Spirituality of Hope, published in 2008 by Orbis Books, Maryknoll.  I will announce the release when it happens and include information on how you can obtain the materials.  This is coming very soon!

Now, needless to say, like any other non-profit, we depend for our existence on donors.  Our sponsoring organization is the Center for New Creation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.  Your donations are tax-deductible. If you are able to make a contribution to our work this year, please click on the ‘DONATE‘ page.  If you contribute by check, please make the check out to the ‘Center for New Creation.’

Spirituality and Ecological Hope is a work in progress.  It is being created in the process of creating it, with input from many, inspired by the experience and insights shared by the folks engaged in the reflection.  We look forward to articulating this ‘new creation’ further in the year ahead.

Thank you for being a part of it.

Margaret Swedish

[WE'VE JUST ADDED A 'NEWS' UPDATE. CLICK ON THE TAB ABOVE AND FIND OUT WHAT WE'RE UP TO.]

In our last post we reflected on what it means to be part of one round finite world, a beautiful globe that we share with 6.8 billion people and millions of other species, and then the habitat in which all that teeming life is embedded.

The other side of that reflection is how we all share in the planet’s deteriorating condition. Even if we don’t all want to be one, we are one, like it or not. We are one ecologically. That is a biological truth as much as it is increasingly an economic truth. Globalizing industrial society has accelerated this process of the planet’s deterioration and our bondedness in the consequences of that deterioration.

A couple examples:

China air pollution - NASA photo

Pollution blown across the entire North Pacific from the smokestacks of Asia’s industrial belt is responsible for worsening air quality in the western United States, researchers say.

This story appeared in last week’s update from Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet, a favorite website here. The study was reported in the journal Nature and revealed that:

…springtime ozone levels 2 to 5 miles above the surface have risen by 29 percent as Asia’s heavy industry has expanded sharply between 1984 and 2008. Such a surge could only be accounted for by pollutants from Asia that are converted to ozone and carried to North America by strong and prevailing westerly winds…

So, you know, good luck with your pollution control policies out West.

Another example, this story from Wednesday’s NY Times, Courts emerging as battlefield for fights over climate change.

Kivalina is an Inupiat Eskimo village off the coast of Alaska that is being chewed up by the Arctic Sea. Until recent years, the Arctic’s ice blocks protected the coast. Now global warming is drastically reducing the annual ice formation allowing winter storm waves and high winds to rip chunks of coast away from the island. It has also disrupted fishing and hunting patterns that are at the heart of the villagers’ survival. [If you don't see the video, click here]:

Now the people of the village are taking an amazing step: they are suing ExxonMobil, Shell Oil and other fossil fuel corporations for causing the warming that is destroying their community and way of life. Since they are being forced to relocate at an estimated cost of $400 million, they would like those who caused this disaster to pay for it.

You see how we are all connected. After all, who are the customers of these companies? And while we can excoriate ourselves once again for driving our cars, I want to remind us that that is but one small part of our oil use. This disaster also comes from manufacture of all our plastics – our plastic bags and bottles – all that long-distance transportation of products, including food, to our stores, enormous amounts of oil used in the propagation of war, military training, and military manufacture, running factories to produce disposable goods, the pesticides and chemical fertilizers used in our enormous-scale industrial agriculture, and on and on.

Kivalina - Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library

In other words, oil companies, yes, at the service of our whole way of life, national security, empire, and more. In other words, we are all responsible for Kivalina. And while it is fine to recycle plastic bottles and bags, they should not be made in the first place. While it is fine to eat, our diets should not support industrial agriculture. While it is fine to buy a Prius (if you are rich enough to afford one), that does not exempt us from responsibility to take political action to change the very basis of an economy and way of life that is destroying Kivalina and a host of other communities all around the world.

The “we are one” mantra is not some romantic spiritual notion; it is a radical call to open our eyes to what is actually taking place all around us in this one round world, everything interconnected and working together – for good or for harm.

Galileo Earth-Moon flyby - NASA/JPL

But when I speak of political action, I do not mean to wait for political parties to do something – I mean all of us taking part in creating a radically new way of life, one that accepts responsibility for the harm that has been done, seeks to quickly reduce the amount of further damage, works to alter the whole political culture around a project based on allowing the planet’s ecosystems to begin to return to health, to regenerate (as the earth will do, you can actually trust that), and end this adolescent state of denial about our place within the fabric of the whole.

We write this over and over:

if we keep tearing away at the fabric of this planet’s eco-community, keep pulling out the threads that hold it together, it will  not  be able to carry life as we know it, and you can be sure it won’t be able to hold this human species, built as it now is upon the dead heavy weight of this industrial and post-industrial growth economy.

We see out west how we cannot be small, selfish, or national anymore. What happens in China affects the air we breathe because the planet is one round world and air flows around that one round world. And global warming impacts us all; our burning of fossil fuels is tearing apart the island community of Kivalina.

The species is in trouble. We are poisoning and destroying one another. Only a global view will help us learn how to live in the truth of the whole within the one round finite world that is our home. At the same time, only a return to life at the most local and simplest will allow that whole to remain intact.

Earlier today someone thanked me by way of the comment function for an essay I wrote one year ago. So I went back to look at it. I found it still so relevant that I want to revisit it here with a link:  Arriving at the End of the Infinite.

Regular readers know that we cannot possibly emphasize this enough:

we have surpassed limits within which me must live if this species is to survive on a vibrant, nurturing planet.  We must move back within those limits if we are to have the possibility of ‘good’ life to offer future generations.

As I wrote one year ago, we live on a round planet, not an infinite linear planet. This closed circle that is our Earth contains all we humans have ever known or experienced – recalling the moving words of one Carl Sagan reflecting on “The Pale Blue Dot.” The question for us really is how bad do we want conditions to get within this sphere before things get really out of hand.

Pale Blue Dot - NASA/JPL

Within this sphere, everything is interrelated. The human mind, consciousness, is not outside that dynamic, it is a ‘product’ of it, one of the emergences that occurred in a long history of evolutionary emergences.  And here we are going about destroying the conditions that made that emergence possible.

Since everything is interrelated, every diminishment of this interwoven fabric that is the dynamism of the planet’s biosphere and atmosphere impacts us not only materially but in our consciousness. Addressing individual sin or salvation, so much the focus of western religiosities, is not going to help us here. Nor is capitalistic or technological hubris that insists we can continue to grow forever, use up more of the Earth forever, and that clever human engineering will save us forever.

Photo: Margaret Swedish

There is an intellectual and spiritual failure here of great proportions. At the very time that we are discovering the wonders of evolution, the long story of the cosmos, our place within that story and within the dynamisms of the planet, we are also realizing the extent of the damage we are doing to our human prospects.

On the 16th, I had the privilege of spending the day with some 35 folks leading us in a process focused on these two threads of the human journey – discovering the extent of our ecological crisis, discovering the breadth and scope of our discoveries of what many call the ‘new creation story.’  In this dynamic we deal with dread and wonder, fear and awe, grief and hope, all at the same time.

This is part of the human condition now. There is no escaping either; both are fundamental aspects of our reality. One of the questions before us is whether we will find the courage to open ourselves to both of these ‘awarenesses,’ and how committed we are to ensuring that this evolutionary path of consciousness and discovery is something we would like to see continue on this planet through the human.  If we want this, then we must live in a way that fosters it.  Wrecking our home, our habitat, our diverse human societies, is most definitely not the path forward.

I asked my  niece what I should write about today. The choices were: more Haiti, Asian Carp DNA in Lake Michigan (thanks Army Corps of Engineers and the State of Illinois), kids altering the functioning of their brains by being wired and online an average 7-8 hours a day, or…

Photo: City of Largo FL

Therapists reporting that families are beginning to suffer tensions over how green to be, how much their lives will be impacted by efforts to conserve, reduce consumption, make serious efforts to ’save’ the planet.

The latter issue caught her attention, so here is what caught my attention in the NY Times on Monday:

Preserving the Planet, Straining the Relationship

In the actual newspaper, the subheading under that title read: “Therapists report seeing an increase in household disputes over just how green to go.”

Call me crazy, but I think this good news.  Not the fights themselves, of course, but what this indicates. I had no idea that our new planetary consciousness — that there are limits and we have surpassed them, that the planet is magnificent and we are bringing about its diminishment – that this consciousness was becoming so mainstream and widespread that it was causing family feuds.

You see, I don’t think we know real change is happening until these tensions begin to manifest themselves. Imagine whites in the south when it was clear that the era of segregation laws was coming to an end. We know how that went – and then segregation ended in any case (a contributing factor being those southern whites who embraced the civil rights struggle, those ready for the change to occur).

In the years of my work in the Central America solidarity movement (see my bio), I saw something similar. One family member would go down to the war zones and refugee camps and have a life-changing experience. They would come back altered, come back into their own more affluent life and see it and the whole US culture of comfort and excess with a new lens, from a new vantage point. I know some marriages that were severely strained by such things.

(c) Why I do this work

On the other hand, you can hardly imagine what it would mean for a family to work through something like this and how it could create unbelievable new bonds now strengthened by a commitment to live differently in the world. Some of these relationships became more profound than before. Whole families went through changes like these.

I was thinking of this, too, while watching CNN interview two 8-yr-old boys, best friends, whose parents sat them down to tell them about what was going on in Haiti, and how they responded by setting up a sidewalk stand to sell hot chocolate. They raised some $1,300 that day, and I’m going to bet that those little guys will be forever marked by that experience.

So, families, partners in life, friends, communities — struggle away with this.  Discuss the lifestyle issues vigorously. Vent feelings (as long as you can do this in a respectful and safe personal environment), express fears, sadness, frustrations, changed expectations about your life.  If you are a family with children, include them, please. I meet kids all the time who are scared to death about the future. Reassure them by showing them the possibilities of change – first in your own lives – so that they can have hope that all hell will not break lose in their lifetime.

Now, there is a relatively new field called Ecopsychology from which I have learned a great deal. For way too long, we have treated the human psyche as if it were detached from its ecology, from the eco-community in which it is embedded. We have a relationship with nature, and it is profound and intimate. Restoring our experience of that relationship is key to learning to live differently on the planet and to becoming fully human.

Here’s a site where you can explore some of this thinking:  International Community for Ecopsychology.  And if you ever want to work on this stuff with your loved ones, be sure you find a ‘therapist’ (don’t like the word much) with a sensitivity to these things.  It could make a huge difference in how you come to terms with these necessary lifestyle issues.

Finally, a plug for one of the other topics on today’s list – the extent to which our kids are wired into technology, online, constant stimulation, texting, disembodied communication at breakneck speed – 7-8 hours per day on average. If you haven’t heard of this study yet, here’s a link to the NY Times article.  And this AP article from 2008 should be required reading for every parent: Technology May Be Altering How Brains Work.

altering our kids' brains?

So, while you’re having these family conversations, invite your kids to turn off the gadgets, go offline for a little while, and get acquainted with the natural world and how their bodies are involved in that world. Otherwise, I fear that we will create a generation that does not have a clue how to save itself from pending ecological disasters, will not have the most basic tools (including having a long thought or a long in-person conversation) to get through the upheavals that will certainly be a part of their generation.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said one teenager about all the media to which he is endlessly hooked up.  Oh goodness, please, open your eyes to your world, the real one out here.  Do you know how beautiful it is?  Do you know what’s happening to it? If you don’t know, how will you know how to save yourself and your generation from the consequences of its degradation? How will you know what it means to be human in time to reclaim, heal, and renew the space in which the human became possible?

Pacific Coast Highway - Photo: Margaret Swedish

[Late addition: Since we wrote this post on Jan. 15, the Obama administration announced that it would cease deportation of Haitians in the US and offer them Temporary Departure Status (TPS) for at least 18 months.  This will allow them to work legally in the US and presumably send money back home to their families.  As you will read in this linked article from the Christian Science Monitor, we are disappointed that this comes with a warning to Haitians in Haiti to not even think about leaving their devasated land to come here, no matter how bad things are.  But we'll take what we can get.  It is good that those Haitians among us will be able to remain.]

I want to insist on this point, because it is crucial:

Unless we address poverty in this world, and unless we address the gap — no, way too nice a word — the enormous chasm between the small minority of affluent people who can assume their basic needs, and then much more, and the couple of billion people who are poor, whose insecurity includes not ever being able to assume that those needs will be met from day to day — unless we address this reality of our world, we will not be able to withstand the shocks that will come from a changing planet.

Source: CBS News

Think of any one of the ecological challenges we address here — toxic contamination of our environment; rising demand for water, food, energy, land amidst a population still on the rise; global warming altering the planet’s climate systems; a global economy that needs fewer and fewer workers to produce the goods for affluent consumers; growing concentration of wealth and control of resources among giant corporations and rich countries; and on and on and on — think of any of these in the context of a country like Haiti, a national entity pretty much destroyed by the earthquake.

Here are some numbers: Haiti is ranked 181 among nations in life expectancy at birth (60.78 years); unemployment is 70%; 78% live on less than $2 per day; 60% have no access to clean water or health care; 50% of children are enrolled in school; nearly a quarter million children work as unpaid domestics, or slaves, as UNICEF describes these conditions.

Haiti has inherited these conditions from two centuries of exploitation, corruption, and dictatorship from old French colonists, a succession of US governments, multinational corporations, and the internal dynamics set in motion by this kind of history. It is saddled with suffocating international debt, because the world powers assist Haiti with loans, not with the moral sense that old powers actually owe this country what it needs to build a viable self-sustaining society based on principles of human rights, democracy, and a just local economy.

UN worker assists injured Haitian - Photo: REUTERS-UN-Logan Abassi-Handout

A country with these kinds of conditions faces some of the biggest threats of our changing planet.  It has been ecologically wrecked by the old sugar barons and by the poverty that forced people to cut more and more forest for fuel. So how will it withstand the tropical rains that wash away the topsoil into the sea? In a heating world, hurricanes will come with more punch – no fewer than four striking the island in 2008.  How do shantytown communities, especially those on hills and mountainsides, withstand the force of these storms?

With it soil ruined, Haiti cannot grow its own food. Its crisis of hunger worsened when food prices escalated a couple of years ago.  How will Haiti’s poor grow their own food to end their dependency on the global market, which prices are set by multinational corporations and big governments that provide subsidies and other tax support to their large industrial agribusinesses  — how will they find the resources to do that, resources for programs to replenish soils and begin farming again, when they are this desperately poor?

You could repeat this story all around the globe, in Northern Africa, in large areas of Asia and Southern Europe already in the process of desertification.

The planet is changing, and unless we begin to figure this out together — and to take the power of the decisions we must make away from large corporations and financial institutions — and unless we work to figure this out based on some common principles of respect for human rights, the integrity of eco-communities, a sense of common purpose based on the principle of sharing in a way that ensures everyone’s basic needs can be met (which may mean giving up some of our plasma screens, vacation homes and multiple airplane trips), we will continue to be met with shock after shock.  Each time we will say again how awful it all is.  One almost gets tired of the ritual.

But something is happening right now in the face of this new tragedy that is bringing the reality of this level of impoverishment into our hearts and consciences.  What is needed is something sustained now, sustained attention to the context in which a tragedy like this takes places.

Unless we humans build the resilience it will take for us to live in this crowded manner on a living earth, one whose ecosystems are being profoundly altered by the impact of our species, we will face greater and greater disaster.  More, we will face greater and greater failure of the unique gift of the human — the ability to actually think about what we are doing, to have a moral framework for it, to create meaning and purpose, to live as if we know we are part of something greater than the self-seeking individual trying to get theirs while they have their short time on the planet.

We are made for something other than what we have allowed to happen in places like Haiti.  We can create a different kind of world.  That choice is getting clearer and starker by the day.

What can you do to help?  Amidst all the intense fundraising, there are a couple of demands that can make a big difference in the longer term, after the immediate crises begin to pass:

*  ask the Obama administration to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Haitians living in the US.  Their remittances will become a life-line for their families and communities in the aftermath of the disaster, and Haiti can ill-afford to receive them back into their ruined land;

*  demand that Haiti’s international debt be forgiven.

For more info from an organization of which we think highly here, visit: Jubilee  USA Network

I’m sorry for not posting for several days.  It has been a very busy time.

But I must post today.  I must.  Like the tsunami that struck Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka several years ago, some natural disasters stun the brain, shatter the heart.  They are some of the most devastating reminders that we are part of a living planet – a planet that still seethes, churns, explodes, and rattles, often with violent force, as it continues to create itself.

Photo: Maryknoll Father & Brothers

Poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti. That means a country with little structural or institutional resilience to withstand such a blow.  Haiti is poor for a reason – a history of wretched exploitation, dictatorship long supported by the US government, a source of cheap labor for multinational corporations, a nation environmentally wrecked, deforested, its soils lost to erosion.

And yet, despite that history, as many of us have experienced all around the Americas, a people of immense spiritual riches, strength, and courage.

We are part of one world.  We are all in this together.  We are a species on a planet of interconnected beings interconnected with the living systems of the planet.

A crowded planet, now.  Once upon a time, disasters like these didn’t result in death tolls like this (is the 100,000-500,000 estimate possibly correct?) because we were simply fewer in number.  As we have added 4 billion humans to the planet in the past half century, and as the forces of global capitalism have forced more people off the land and into dense urban areas in poor countries around the world, the potential for this kind of human disaster has grown.

Some 250,000 dead from the 2004 tsunami. 85,000 killed in an earthquake in Northern Pakistan in 2005.  26,000 killed in an earthquake in Bam, Iran, in 2003. 9,000 people washed away after Hurricane Mitch dumped several feet of rain over the Central American region back in 1998. And, of course, 1,300 dead in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005.

We reflect here on all sorts of ecological issues, some quite urgent, having to do with what humans are doing to the living systems and communities of the planet. Then there’s the issue of whether or not we know how to live appropriately on a living planet, now so much more crowded with us,  in a way that promotes human solidarity and resilience.

Source: BBC News

The growing gap between rich and poor, taking the wealth of poor nations to enrich the already-affluent, whether corporations or nations, does not build solidarity or resilience. It leaves nations like Haiti utterly unable to cope with such a tragedy. But even before this, it leaves nations like Haiti unable to construct communities in a way that can withstand such disasters, like building codes in California.  That takes resources, and those resources do not exist for them.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes (Haiti endured 4 hurricanes in 2008 that brought it to the brink of famine for a time) are not a source of injustice, but the depth of resilience, the availability of institutions, infrastructure and financial resources prepared to address the threats before and after they happen – these reflect global injustice indeed.  They reflect something back to us about who we are and how we are that is not particularly attractive.

But each of these disasters is an invitation to change.

We are already living beyond the earth’s biocapacity. We already require more then one earth to sustain human levels of extraction, consumption and waste. If we do not learn how to share – radically share – the gifts of this planet in a way that truly honors the dignity of all persons along with the ecological communities that are required to sustain them, then we best brace ourselves for a very painful future.

Haiti has been a stain on our conscience for generations now, a stain on our self-image of US generosity, justice, and respect for human rights. But Haiti has been something else.  A deep and long-standing solidarity has grown up in recent decades nourished by delegations to support human rights and pro-democracy groups, sister communities that work together to promote popular health clinics, locally sustainable agriculture, schools,  loans for micro-enterprises, and progressive justice-based mission work that supports local self-sustaining communities.  Haitians are our sisters and brothers now.  This was always true, but now we are beginning to understand what this really means.

So this is a time to stretch the meaning of our human identity.  This is a time to stretch our sense of who we are as a species on this planet.  This is a time that begs us to change – not just to offer charity or solidarity in the wake of disaster, but to alter the structures and values of our world that leave a country like Haiti without the resources to build resilience to withstand disasters, or the resources to deal with them when they happen, much less the resources to rebuild a nation after such a devastating loss. We are part of one another, and it’s time we started sharing this world as if that was true.

Okay, holidays over, back to work.  I know so many people reluctant to go back to their jobs and stresses, and that already says something about our world, right?

It’s tough out there.

I always hate being the purveyor of bad news, but I was really struck by a long article in the NY Times yesterday reporting that some 6 million people in the US are living off food stamps as their sole source of income – as in, no cash of any kind.  Food stamps. That’s it. 1.5 million of these people are children.

Inflation adjusted percentage increase in mean after-tax household income between 1979 and 2005.

In a country where an athlete like Alex Rodriguez can make $25 million per year playing baseball and CEOs of financial institutions rake in tens of millions after bringing our financial system to the brink of collapse – leaving millions of people with foreclosed homes, without jobs, or going off to war on their behalf.

There is something so wrong with us.  Republican member of Congress John Linder of Georgia is quoted in the NYT article saying: “We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.”

Is this guy serious?  Oh, we have some pretty terrible heart problems in this country, an overdose of callousness.

Okay, to balance this, I will provide this link to another NY Times article which reports on a very encouraging trend – that many people are giving up excessive consumption and returning to ‘doing’ things, especially with their families – like reading books, camping, walks in the woods, etc.  Best of all, it looks like this trend is not only related to the economic crisis, but rather to a growing disgust with the consumer culture and what it has done to us, to our children, families, communities, friendships.  This is good news and we ought to do everything we can to encourage this trend.

Carbon dioxide historical record - Source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Now, on Monday my local paper always has the weekly report from the website Earthweek, A Diary of the Planet. Today they had a look back at 2009 and a couple of the major stories of the year.  These are tough ones, indeed. Included among them, a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) from a year ago indicating that even if we stopped all greenhouse gas emissions today, the atmosphere will continue to warm until the year 3,000. The problem is that the oceans are warming and will be releasing heat back into the atmosphere until they reach a new equilibrium. In other words, climate change is already irreversible, no going back to an old, familiar normal.

NOAA senior scientist Susan Solomon said:  “Our study convinced us that current choices regarding carbon dioxide emissions will have legacies that will irreversibly change the planet.” [see also this Washington Post article from January 2009]

Someone ought to be better preparing for this future – like maybe human beings. And it might behoove us to act pretty quickly to reverse the upward trend in GHG emissions, to do a sharp and rapid transition to a new economy, to keep this crisis from getting any worse.  No, instead, polls indicate a declining belief in this country that humans are causing global warming or that we need to change our lives in any way besides buying hybrid cars and recycling.

Crossing dangerous thresholds - Source: Nature and Grist

Then they also highlight the story from the journal Nature back in January 2009 – a new scientific study indicating that humans may already have passed some ‘biophysical boundaries’ that have allowed the Earth to ’self-regulate.’ The report described these boundaries as limits within which the Earth must remain in order for these self-regulating systems (biodiversity, climate, etc.) to function, in order for the planet to have “a safe operating space for humanity.” Of the nine they define, we have already crossed three. In other words, we are already committed to a new planetary reality.

“Humanity may soon be approaching the boundaries for global freshwater use, change in land use, ocean acidification and interference with the global phosphorous cycle. Our analysis suggests that three of the Earth-system processes — climate change, rate of biodiversity loss and interference with the nitrogen cycle — have already transgressed their boundaries.”

What a great experiment this will be in human capacity for adaptation! Even among most environmental groups, I don’t see near the level of alarm that such news ought to inspire, do you?

So I need regular doses of hope. For that purpose, I am embedding here a wonderful 6-minute video, a must-see, a shout-out from the generation growing up into this rapidly changing world to all the adults that created this crisis and whose collective response continues to be insufficient to say the least.

If there are more people like this young women, Severn Suzuki, coming into our world, then bring ‘em on! More than that, LISTEN to them, embrace them – give them as much reason for hope as they give us. This is a moral obligation.

The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes…

We’re not posting much over the holidays, but I wanted to send a little reflection as we mark this artificial measure of time – end of a year, end of a decade.

Crashing into our world view

…a decade with some pretty terrible horrors within it. I remember like yesterday my train ride to Manhattan just 10 days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. I was still reeling from the impacts of them, including in DC where I worked. I went to be with my sister, a 3-decade resident of the Upper West Side. We got within a couple blocks of the WTC site – the fires still burning, the streets and buildings of Lower Manhattan coated in a dull gray-pink paste, result of the dust and then the rains, the snaking lines of rescuers on the molten piles of steel and concrete, the burning and taste in one’s throat and lungs from the toxic smoke, funeral pyre for some 2,000 human beings.

Terror as a weapon of vengeance had come to this country, as it has to so many other lands in our shrinking, increasingly crowded world.

The decade ends with an aborted attempt to blow up an airplane over the outskirts of Detroit.

We know our hands are not clean here.  It is easy to be the victim; it is harder to accept one’s role in the seething tensions and mounting grievances on a planet whose living beings are under deepening and widening strains and stresses.

Our human population is like a volcano where the heat is building and the hot gases need venting. But the explosion resolves nothing and the volcano remains.  Active.

Self-reflection: a mirror

Warmest decade on record. Ecosystems in various stages of collapse. An epidemic of cancer caused by industrial and technological society. Each year, new synthetic chemicals created that the Earth has never seen before that end up in our water, soils, food, altering the chemical make-up of the planet – vast experiments with outcomes no one can predict.

Though something about those escalating cancer rates, and asthma in children, and autism, and Alzheimers, etc.

And nature under stress, habitats lost.  Beautiful nature, our source of art, culture and religion. Nature under threat, therefore art, culture and religion in turmoil.

Where is the hope?

In you and me.  In my 6-month old Godchild. In the local worlds that are being reclaimed, allowed to heal and regenerate. In the new land trusts and organic farms. In the new food systems eschewing industrial agriculture and hopefully contributing to its demise. In the courage of those who allow our new understanding of our place in the cosmos, our place within creation, our place within the living planet to challenge old orthodoxies and belief systems.

In those who are brave enough to walk step-by-step into a future we do not yet know or understand through the passage of a collapsing world view and set of values on which Western philosophical and religious thought were based. Brave enough to know that science and technology may be tools that will destroy our world, rather than evidence of Man’s [sic] enlightenment – that they must be made again into humble tools at the service of life, not ends in themselves in the pursuit of profit, pleasure, power, and privilege.

We have lived wrongly on the planet. At the end of the 2000s’ first decade, nothing could be more clear.  Now it is time to live rightly within it.

Lake Michigan shore - Photo: Margaret Swedish

Evidence that this new creation has begun is everywhere. Evidence that this creation is coming with increasing energy and determination is everywhere, burgeoning and breaking through the destructive dynamics of a world that humans thought they could subdue and then dominate. We are reaping the whirlwind of that egregious mistake. Now comes the time of our humbling — and if we accept that and do it right, we can help make this new creation a work of truth and beauty — and even joy.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

If we have learned anything by dint of our ecological crisis, surely it is the title of this post.  If any mirrors can honestly reflect the human predicament, they are those that hold up before us the images of this damaged planet.

Logo: Interfaith Earth Network

For as we have damaged the planet, so have we damaged ourselves. The pollution and destruction, the harm to our fellow species and intricate ecosystems, reflect back to us our wars and greed, our competition and lack of solidarity, the hurt and hunger of our fellow human beings.

So as we come to this holiday, and however we celebrate it from our different traditions and heritages, one of the most essential things we hold in common is this need for healing, for regeneration, for learning how to live again within the vibrant life of this planet.

We can’t go back to a planet before the industrial age; but we can begin to lay down the presumptions and violence of that age, to step back from its logic, to recover a sense of ourselves as part of an earth community that wants to live as an integral whole, to see what might yet unfold in the story of creation, of evolution.

We can’t go back to a planet before the industrial age, but we can ensure that the story does not come to an abrupt end, that it continues to reveal itself in and through us and future generations.

So we wish you much peace. And we wish us all hope – not just any hope, but the ‘radical hope’ described in Jonathan Lear’s important book: Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation:

I would like to consider hope as it might arise at one of the limits of human existence…What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts to understand it.

What hope might look like - (c) used with permission

It is hard to see what hope will mean given the world we have made, what it will look like, what the other side of the ‘cultural devasation’ will look like, what it will mean to survive, and even flourish. That is what makes our hope ‘radical.’

…as sure as the sun will emerge from the darkness and once again spread its warmth across the northern hemisphere.

However you celebrate these days – and I hope you do celebrate or honor them in some way – may you be filled, washed, refreshed, renewed by this indefatigable human trait, this unwillingness to surrender hope.

Remember that business about light in the darkness. Without darkness, we cannot see the light.

Finally, this verse from one of my favorite poets, Alicia Ostriker:

today the grey-lit overnight snow
makes everything peaceful, even ourselves.*

Photo: Margaret Swedish

————————————————————————————

*From ‘How can we speak,’ The Book of Seventy, Alicia Ostriker, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press

Well, friends, thousands and thousands of folks are preparing themselves for “The Great Disappointment” in Copenhagen. In the end, world leaders may make some substantive pledges, and we emphasize the word pledges, to begin, that is, begin, making reductions in CO2 emissions — not much to start with, but more serious as we approach mid-century.

CO2 emissions 800,000 yr record - US Global Change Research Program

Obama’s initial offering was uninspiring – 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. We’re already headed in that direction by virtue of our perfectly awful economy, according to Bloomberg.  We can do better. Sadly, this is a decision to play our part in climate catastrophes already unfolding in our world.

Then there’s the money fight – who should pay so-called ‘developing’ countries  to salvage forests, develop clean energy technologies, etc. [woeful term, developing countries - must they be like us in order to be 'developed?' But this is not only  ecologically impossible, it is also tragic to think they would follow our example of wastefulness or trivializing of human meaning]. We don’t want to pay for the damage our western economies have done. Just think about how hard it is to get corporations to clean up their toxic waste right here at home, or to get the feds to enforce our own environmental laws in that regard. Clean up the mess we’ve created in Latin America?  Africa? Our lifestyles are ours by right of our superiority and we have no responsibility towards those harmed in their creation.

Oh, how we need a different world!

Here’s something of the truth of what’s really going on in Copenhagen. A leaked UN document shows that current commitments would bring CO2 emissions to levels that would commit our poor planet to 3C of warming. Reports the Guardian of London:

A rise of 3C would mean up to 170 million more people suffering severe coastal floods and 550 million more at risk of hunger, according to the Stern economic review of climate change for the UK government – as well as leaving up to 50% of species facing extinction. Even a rise of 2C would lead to a sharp decline in tropical crop yields, more flooding and droughts.

One must hope that the conference comes up with something more substantial as it comes to its merciful end. But don’t count on it. And if it gets better commitments, don’t count on that either. We don’t have much encouraging precedent here, not when world leaders worry about uprisings from their corporate sponsors or populations if told that we must completely revamp human economies in order to salvage the atmosphere for humans.

Which is what is really required.

I shouldn’t even say this, but we do need to remember that CO2 is only one of our greenhouse gases. Nothing here addresses the sharp rises in methane (from things like industrial livestock agriculture and melting permafrost) and nitrous oxide (largely from coal), which aren’t being considered at all.

Remember those global warming skeptics? We are about to close out the warmest decade ever recorded.

Andes Mountains glacier melt - A Vicious Cycle - source: Climate Progress

How too late are we? In Bolivia and Peru, folks are watching their only fresh water source swiftly disappear – the glaciers of the Andes Mountains. Some 100 million people could be without this source within a decade or so.  Guess what? They have contributed a minute amount of GHGs compared to us.  Now what?

What is wrong with us? A local psychotherapist here, Philip Chard, attempted to provide an answer to this, and probably hit a few nails on their proverbial heads. He asks, why do people think they know more than the experts? He gives 3 reasons:

Three factors make this possible: (1) lack of social proximity, (2) diminished scientific literacy and (3) direct personal experience.

I’ll let you read the rest. But I do think there is another factor – some changes are so huge, of such monumental significance, so alter our sense of reality, that we cannot get them to fit into our world view, our frameworks of meaning, the way we construct our realities, without also altering those. They are simply too disorienting. So we insist on our ‘reality’ rather than the change whirling all around us.

Okay, back to the title of this post. If you were looking for adequate change to come out of Copenhagen, remember who is there and what power bases and constituencies they represent.

Where does change really happen? I think, given the urgency, we need to move quickly towards movements of non-participation in the global economy, in this western ‘way of life,’ in this faith in technology that has replaced faith in human wisdom and our sensitivity to our own biology and the nature of which we are a part.

Change will not come from within the systems and dynamisms which have brought the crisis about.  Something much more fundamental is called for. Non-participation, and then building communities of resilience and simplicity, local systems organically and ecologically connected, communities of reliance on one another, relearning of basic skills of farming and singing and fixing things and not-needing-very-much.

Pleaides - (c) 2006 Dave Miller - courtesy of SkyChasers.net

This for me is not only becoming the change we seek, but it is learning how to enjoy life again, life in itself - friends having long conversations together, sharing thoughts and books and poetry and music, long walks in the woods with the kids, getting our feet wet in the lakes and rivers and ocean shores, rediscovering the night sky, being able to see our home galaxy again so that we can be reminded of our true home.

I would like to have this life. Best of all, I don’t even need to wait to have it. I can begin right now.

I think this is also what will get us through the long work of trying to bring about change at the top – by removing its supports from below.