So much is already destroyed.

Catching up slowly with Ken’s Burns’ documentary series on the National Parks, “America’s Best Idea.”  I’ve been to so many of them, treasures every one.

O'Shaughnessy Dam - Hetch Hetchy reservoir, Yosemite National Park

So last night I was watching the second in the series in which he tells the story of the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in California, this once-upon-a-time jewel in Yosemite National Park, for a reservoir to provide water to city dwellers.  The battle to save the valley was fought valiantly by the great John Muir, but he could not win this one.  So the dam was built, the valley flooded.

It’s what humans do to make way for the human onslaught – progress, we call it in America.

It’s that nature-hatred endemic to the spirit of Manifest Destiny — no natural place, no tribes of human beings, no animal life are more sacred than the onslaught of engineered life to pave the way for progress for a ‘chosen people.’

We see it every day.  I see it in the counties bordering Milwaukee County where wealthier folks go to live on the spaces bulldozed and paved over, dug out and powered up, in the service of their very much manifested destinies.

And so we reap destruction. So much damage already done. So much already lost – forever.  I became very depressed reading this article from yesterday’s NY Times, Ecosystem in Peru is Losing Key Ally, by Simon Romero.  It’s about how Peruvians are slowly destroying every single huarango tree, a true wonder of nature, one that has helped make life in the desert around the coastal town of Ica possible. This tree, which can live to be thousands of years old, grows among sand dunes catching the bit of moisture that blows in on the ocean winds.  Roots that reach down as much as 150 feet “tap subterranean water channels.”

They are being chopped down for charcoal. Charcoal is much cheaper than oil.  Soon they will be gone, unless something far more drastic is done to save those that remain. Thing is, climate change is melting the Peruvian glaciers, source of fresh water for tens of millions of people.  Those glaciers could be gone within a couple of decades. So the role of these trees is even greater, the cost of losing them ever higher.  We are talking about areas that could become uninhabitable in short order – like within the generation now being born.

Glacier on Nevado Quilca in Puno, Peru, has disappeared

So today I read this, from Earthweek: A Daily diary of the Planet:

A Peruvian scientist told his country’s parliamentary commission on climate change that global warming could be combated by painting highly reflective white paint over rock and ground exposed by receding glaciers.

Sigh…  Not to worry, he says the paint will be ecologically friendly.

‘White paint over the Andes Mountains’ — catchy title for a new song for a new reality.

While others consider spewing particles into the atmosphere to cool it and iron into the oceans to fertilize and create phytoplankton blooms.  Both approaches would amount to experiments on a global scale with unpredictable short and long term results.  Anyway, who gets to decide these things for 7 billion people?

Seems to me that painting the mountains to address the impacts of climate change is a bit like handing enormous profits and enormous grant funds to pharmaceutical companies, research centers, hospitals and doctors to treat our epidemic of cancers, instead of removing from our lives, our Earth, our water, our soil, our food, our air, our household products, the toxic chemicals that are giving us all this cancer.

Would lower the costs of health care as well, but also profits.  Healthier people – poorer corporations and investors.  Can’t have that, can we?

We are going to be spending a lot in lives and livelihoods as part of the cost of what is already gone. I don’t know if there is a better description of a dysfuntional species than one that destroys its own habitat, poisons its own bodies, and when it knows it is doing these things — just keeps right on doing it.

“Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”
– John Muir

How many more temples shall we ruin?

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Environmental groups are working to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley. To find out more, click here.

This year the number of hungry in our world increased to 1.02 billion – nearly one in 7 people.

Folks who have followed this blog, or who know me from my previous work (director of the Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico until 2004 – see my bio), also know that justice matters to me, the daily lives of the poor of our planet really matter to me. I have long been aware of and motivated by the gross injustices built into the global economy, as those with wealth continue to have access to wealth, and more of it, while those who do not grow poorer.

But here’s the greater insult, as I learned from Latin America – the wealth of the United States and Western Europe was largely gained over the course of 3 centuries by taking the wealth from other countries to fuel our own economic growth.  I’m not making this up; it’s history, if we care to look at it honestly. And we still do this.

Source: United Nations Food Program

Today, once again, it is hunger that concerns me. It is the emerging food crisis – a product as much of injustice as it is of a crowded planet putting more and more land under cultivation to feed its growing population. And the way we are doing this is going to lead very soon to the collapse of the food system because it is built on models of agriculture that are not sustainable, that are ruining soils, the air we breathe, the genetic resiliency of crops, biodiversity, while being a leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions that are polluting and warming our atmosphere.

We could feed everyone right now if the world were just.  We might just make it through this population boom that should peak at mid-century then begin to slowly decline (propelled in part by some pretty scary scenarios, unless we get sane really quickly). But every day that we allow industrial agriculture to spread across the planet, bringing with it a corporate profit motivation, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, enormous machines, genetically modified seeds, deforestation to clear more land, etc., we rip into the future possibility of feeding the hungry…

…which, from the standpoint of most of our religious traditions, including that one that claims a vast majority of our population, is supposed to matter; indeed, is supposed to separate out the true believers from the false prophets.

But, c’mon, Lord, when did we see you hungry?!?!  It wasn’t on TV and our preachers never talked about it at church!

2009 Hunger Map - World Food Programme

A couple of recent articles offer the grim news:

Food experts worry as population and hunger grow, by Neil MacFarquhar at the NY Times

Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world’s growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist…

The track record of failing to feed the hungry haunts the effort. But other important uncertainties also give pause. The effect climate change will have on weather and crops remains an open question. The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and ’70s ended the specter of mass famines then, but the environmental cost of chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation has spurred a bitter divide over the right ingredients for a second one.

In addition, the demand for biofuels may use up crop land. And as scores of food riots in 2008 showed, oil prices and other income shocks can quickly drive millions more people into hunger, sending ripples of instability around the world.

As things stand today, the world has not a prayer of halving global hunger by 2015, the target set by the 1996 World Food Summit (the target of reducing the population of hungry to no more than 420 million sounded good compared to a billion – unless you happen to be among the 420 million. Even back then, I thought, can’t we do better than that?)

“A silent tsunami of hunger…”

Millions will starve as rich nations cut food aid funding…  from The Guardian in London.

The US, by far the world’s biggest contributor to food aid, has so far pledged $800m less than in 2008…

Source: Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN

Is there a moral problem here?  I know, I know, all this stuff about deficits and we’re in a recession and blah, blah, blah… There is so much wealth in this country!  That it is concentrated among the top 1-5% of the population, and getting more and more concentrated with every passing tax year, squeezes the rest of us and makes us feel like the country is poor.  It is not.  $800 million cut for the U.N.’s food program – about 1% of last year’s bank bailout.

Time to restore sanity to our tax code, to tax this concentration of wealth heavily, and to use the funds for things like  helping to support a resurgence of local sustainable agriculture around the world. Even a lot of U.S. food aid only makes things worse – offering as charity the excess commodities of US farmers, bought with our tax dollars, then shipped off to countries with hungry people, increasing dependency on foreign aid and undermining food sovereignty.

This model DOES NOT WORK.  To understand why, read this article from the ABC News website, U.S. Food Aid Contributing to Africa’s Hunger?

Here’s the thing, friends. What we believe here is that the things we need for life itself, like food, water, clean air, and health care, ought not to be commodities from which corporate stockholders attain wealth.  They are basic human rights, and the access to things needed for life should not be in the hands of corporations, corrupt governments, or governments in a handful of rich and powerful nations. Once we have destroyed land, contaminated or overused water supplies and robbed people of their ability to feed themselves, we have also stolen from the future of the planet and the people who will live on it.

Moral issues do not get any starker than this.

Friends, the U.N. is convening a World Summit on Food Security Nov. 16-18.  This would be a great time to contact the White House, Sec. of State Clinton*, and your members of Congress to tell them that the hunger of our sisters and brothers around the world, fueled in part by unsustainable agricultural practices, matters to you.

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* Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20520

Interfaith Earth Network

On Sunday I offered a presentation for a conference organized by Milwaukee’s Interfaith Earth Network.  The title of the conference: “Faith Encounters the Energy Crisis: Transitioning to Reduced Energy Consumption.”  By now, many folks know I always come armed with a lot of grim news — but also a firm belief that if we are honest about the reality, face it directly, rather than be paralyzed by it or in denial about it, we can rise to the occasion and begin to create the necessary new way of life, even as the old collapses all around us.

My talks are often based on the ‘see-judge-act‘ model; i.e., first look at and examine the reality, then look at the reality in the light of faith or of a keen social analysis, and then take action commensurate with that reflection.  So I brought with me images of our human industrial and suburban/exurban sprawl, photos of the tragic and enormous damage that comes from production of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) and, sadly, biofuels, which many people think an alternative.  I bring graphs and images that describe our moral culpability here in the U.S. where we are still by far and away, and even in the midst of the Great Recession, the world’s biggest consumers of natural resources and the biggest emitters of waste, including CO2, into our atmosphere and biosphere, on a per capita basis.

Deficit ecological spending by country - Global Footprint Network

Which then always leads to this last point — that if we are not willing to change here in the U.S., to scale down our lifestyles drastically, to consume drastically less, to live more simply and locally, the world has little chance to avoid catastrophe in the face of the deteriorating environments, or ecological communities, in which we live.

And in these presentations, we all suffer a little — because it is depressing, because it is hard, and because it is inescapable. I try my best to remove the guilt factor — we did not intend this to happen.  But it did.  And now we have to figure out how we are going to work our way through to that necessary new way of life.

And I always add that not only are we capable of this, but we are likely to end up with far happier, richer, more satisfying lives than the ones we have now, than the stressed out, lonely, isolated, insecure, personally draining lives created by this economy of extraction, consumption and waste in which we feel our work lives to have very little to do with the meaning of life.

And folks get this, they really do.  It rings truthfully. I venture to say, it even rings hopefully — because you cannot cure the disease until you know what it is, until you have an accurate diagnosis.

Representatives of various faith groups met on Monday morning to talk about how to implement this struggle for life within their communities.  It will be interesting to see what emerges from this.  But just the coming together helps us all feel less powerless, more energized, more empowered to get busy.

Want to end with this link to today’s column in the NY Times from Bob Herbert, Changing the World.  A shot in the arm, a boost to the spirit, a reminder of that of which we are fully capable.  It ends:

The nation’s political leaders and their corporate puppet masters have fouled this nation up to a fare-thee-well. We will not be pulled from the morass without a big effort from an active citizenry, and that means a citizenry fired with a sense of mission and the belief that their actions, in concert with others, can make a profound difference.

It can start with just a few small steps. Mrs. Parks helped transform a nation by refusing to budge from her seat. Maybe you want to speak up publicly about an important issue, or host a house party, or perhaps arrange a meeting of soon-to-be dismissed employees, or parents at a troubled school.

It’s a risk, sure. But the need is great, and that’s how you change the world.

You, me, each one of us can be a part of this.  It is, as Thomas Berry said, our ‘great work.’  Indeed, it is now our most profound human mission.

The National Academy of Sciences [NAS] just released a study showing that the environmental costs in the US as a result of the burning of fossil fuels is some $120 billion a year. The main cause is air pollution leading to premature deaths.

air pollution wafting off east coast - NASA photo

Okay, the dollar figure is impressive, but let’s get out of our heads for a moment and think about those deaths.

Deaths. Of human beings. Heart attacks, lung cancer and other pulmonary diseases, asthma, etc.

Think about these actual human beings.

Now, here’s the other thing.  This study did not take into account the costs as a result of climate change (too hard to quantify, they said), or the impacts of escalating prices of food as farms shift from growing food to growing fuel, or the emissions that come from ships, trains and planes. So one thing we know is that this study underestimates the true costs to human beings in this country and to the planet from the burning of fossil fuels.

From the Times:

Nearly 20,000 people die prematurely each year from such causes, according to the study’s authors, who valued each life at $6 million based on the dollar in 2000. Those pollutants include small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain.  (Matthew Wald, Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions).

20,000 human beings, with families, friends, colleagues — just think of the real human cost here. Think of the costs to our health systems, which we all pay in high insurance premiums.

By the way, ethanol and electric cars do not come out well in this study, so let’s make sure we don’t go there.  I know my midwestern farm states are demanding more support for ethanol production, many having hitched their futures to this ecological horror, but we must tell our legislators at all levels — do not go there.

Now one purpose of the study was to measure what are called in capitalism ‘externalities’ — costs that are not figured into the prices we pay for the product, costs not taken into consideration when companies do business.  For example, 500 Appalachian Mountains blown to bits and hundreds of streams and rivers poisoned by the practice of mountaintop removal coal-mining are ‘externalities.’ No one pays for this destruction in cash, only in a diminished planet for all.

[To learn more about MTR, visit http://www.ilovemountains.org/]

Milwaukee smog, Sept. 5 2009- Photo: Margaret Swedish

So one argument this study makes is that we should all be paying more for energy — which will probably not be the most popular argument in this time of economic disaster. But while the prices we see on our energy bills look like the prices we pay for energy, in reality we are paying exorbitantly in a thousand other ways for our energy delivery system — in health costs and death costs and loss of rich abundant ecosystems and precious habitat for living creatures, like humans, for example, and in the future of our children and their children’s children who will be living on this depleted, poisoned planet.

The NAS study is pricey to buy, but you can read it online for free here.

Just another reminder that the fossil fuel industry is permeated with ethical and moral issues it would like to avoid.  When they tell you it is more important to sacrifice 20,000 U.S. human beings each year so that they can fuel economic growth and industrial expansion, when we unquestioningly go along with this because we don’t want the inconvenience of shifting away from this industry as quickly as possible, with all that will mean in terms of altering our lifestyles and expectations, then we are complicit in this.

And this is just U.S. human beings. Imagine the global human cost. And then think about the contaminated soils and waters, the devastation to ecosystems, habitats for living beings, and we are talking here about some very serious moral issues.  In fact, they just don’t get any more serious than this.

But we just don’t feel it while we’re powering up our iPods and watching our plasma screens in our air conditioned houses. If we don’t feel it, it must not exist, right?

Coal-fired power plant, Cheshire OH - Photo: Public Justice

Coal — once again at the top of the list of planetary abominations.

So, what do we cherish, and what are our priorities? Uncomfortable questions.  Make all of us squirm a bit. But the industrial nightmare, the horrors of our economies of extraction, consumption, and waste, are not going away. And we will have to decide – as I wrote in the last chapter of my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World’ — what kind of human beings we are going to be in such a world. I’m rooting for us to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and start making some better decisions.

What I want to say is this: the financial system that has rapidly evolved in the past two decades, and the economic havoc it has wreaked for tens of millions of us — and that’s just in the U.S. — is one of the greatest dangers to the ecological life of the planet, a principal obstacle that will have to be overcome if the living communities of the Earth are to survive in a way that holds the promise of future health and well-being.

1 in 5 elderly are poor - Photo: Poverty in America - change.org

Folks, we need to get very clear about this.  The major financial institutions, their investors and stockholders, are no friends of the planet. They do not have in mind first and foremost the danger we are in from various imminent (or already occurring) ecological breakdowns any more than they care about near 10 percent unemployment (more like 15 percent really) or the crumbling of Detroit or inner city poverty or whether the inhabitants of impoverished neighborhoods get a decent education or the millions of homeowners who have already lost or are about to lose their incomes, homes, and life savings.

In many ways, we are being sold a bill of goods if we really believe that salvaging the giant financial institutions and their CEOs somehow saves the rest of us from even greater calamity.  As we can see now, the NY Stock Exchange could hit 10,ooo pts. yesterday amidst reports that unemployment will still rise with little hope of relief for years, that foreclosures are certain to rise, that credits cards are falling into default at a growing rate, and that small banks heavily invested in commercial real estate are going to be hit with a new wave of failures.

Abaondoned homes in Detroit - Examiner.com

But those large financial firms and their investors are making out like bandits.  You see, this world of financial wizardry has become mostly separated from workers, factories that make things, small businesses and family farmers, you know, the real tangible world in which most of us live. While the real world reels, Goldman Sachs is about to pay out a record $22 billion in compensation, while JPMorgan Chase reported $3.6 billion profits for the 3rd quarter.

So, as I have done in the past, I want to list a few things to read or view in order to explain why I write this today. Think of it as how we do our self-education, because we really, really need to understand the forces at work in our world.  If we don’t understand them, we will not be able to see what is  happening and respond appropriately or effectively.

Still on the job but at half the pay – from the NY Times:

“In recent decades, layoffs were the standard procedure for shrinking labor costs. Reducing the wages of those who remained on the job was considered demoralizing and risky: the best workers would jump to another employer. But now pay cuts, sometimes the result of downgrades in rank or shortened workweeks, are occurring more frequently than at any time since the Great Depression…the amount of money people are paid has taken a big hit; not just those who have lost their jobs, but those who are still employed.”

Rivals Pose Threat to NY Stock Exchange – also from the Times:

The NY Stock Exchange is shrinking as more and more financial might shifts to unregulated ‘dark pools’ that make investment decisions at lightning speed with massive computers using abstract mathematical formulas that amount to a lot of guessing.  These people can bring down whole economies.  Check it out. Here is one dizzying description of how this sort of thing helped bring about last year’s disaster.

Bill Moyers’ Journal Oct. 9 – interview with Rep. Marcy Kaptur and economist Simon Johnson:

Just about the best explanation yet on how the financial institutions have captured our democracy by buying our Congress.  Really, if you do not feel moral outrage after viewing this, you must be dead.  Rep. Kaptur’s righteous rage over what is happening to her constituents in Toledo who are losing their homes and falling off the economic precipice is more than infectious.

And, of course, there is always Michael Moore’s new film, Capitalism: A Love Story.  He’ll make you cry, laugh, and rage all at the same time.

They tell us that capitalism has something to do with freedom to choose — things like jobs, where you want to live, objects you would like to possess — but this is the bill of goods we’ve been sold.  Because it is not our choice. Freedom of choice has been taken from the airline pilot because that is what the financial sector needs to do right now in order to make profits. And if your job is no longer needed, it will never come back.  You have the right to these things if that is how to grow their financial wealth. You do not have those rights if your ability to do these things conflicts with the interests of private capital represented by these big opaque financial giants.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

If right now it is in their interest to slash jobs, wages, and benefits to increase profit margins, or to salvage the institutions that represent investors and stockholders, then so be it. They shed the excess, the debt, the bad investments suppressing their profits, subsidized by, well, us.  They do what they must do in the interests of their stockholders. If this is a permanent adjustment (and I think it is), than many of us will never again find our place within that system.  Good luck to us all!

And so this must be one of our starting points for how we approach the political culture from here on out. This is where capitalism has led us. The Earth – its waters, soils, the air we breathe, its natural wonders — and human beings — suffer the consequences of this abstraction and concentration of wealth generation. It’s why I sometimes tell people that one of the most important things we can do if we want to change things is to work urgently for campaign finance reform, to take our Congress back from the financial institutions that now own it.

For the Earth, for our sisters and brothers around the world, we must do this.

Please forgive the silence.  Last week was very busy and I didn’t get a chance to do a thoughtful post — and I don’t like to post if it is not thoughtful.

Really hurting… yes, we are.

Our neighbors in the Philippines - Photo: EPA/Francis R. Malasig

The Philippines, American Samoa, Indonesia…  there in those places are our brothers and sisters.  They share the planet with us.

Some disasters are purely natural, the Earth doing what it does to be alive, to recycle nutrients, to keep on creating itself — like the massive earthquakes, including the one that caused the tsunami.

Others are natural with unnatural contributions — like storms that come every year but now seem to include more deadly torrents very possibly because of the warming of the atmosphere caused by our greenhouse gas emissions (warmer air holds more energy, more moisture, more ‘punch’, as it were).

And our planet is getting crowded, more densely populated, which means disasters like these often leave an enormous human toll.  In addition, poverty leaves many communities  in some of our most naturally volatile regions of the world incredibly vulnerable to disasters — and not just to the event itself, but to the trauma and damage that follows, the lack of resources to recover some semblance of dignified life and healing.

It’s one thing for an upper middle class neighborhood of well-insured home-owners in the Atlanta area to be flooded by 20 inches of rain; it is another for a mobile home park in the same area, or the northern provinces of the Philippines.

In my book, Living Beyond the ‘End of the World’: A Spirituality of Hope, I ask, must 9 billion people be my neighbor (the number we will reach by mid-century) and must I really love them as myself?  No question gets more basic than this one, or has deeper roots in the religious traditions of the Old and New Testaments.

Which means the question is going to be pretty basic to the integrity of these faith traditions as we confront this changing, reeling world.

How will we share the gifts of this planet among the communities of this planet — the human communities and the communities of all living beings? This matters because if we do not figure out how to sustain all the ecosystems in which biodiversity has flourished, we risk our human future in any case.

Not only must 9 billion people be my neighbors, but billions of other creatures, along with the waters, air, soils, without which we cannot live.

We are hurting now for many reasons — and one of them is that we have lost our sense of rootedness in our own biology, and the interrelationships of living ’systems’ (communities, more accurately) within which we are embedded.

What happens across the oceans is part of us now.  It always has been so, but now we feel it keenly because of how close we have become to one another — because of the growing density of populations, and then by these disasters, the impacts and causes of which we share.  There is nowhere to go to get away from it, neither the moon nor Mars looking particularly appealing.

We are also bonded in our spirits, in the rising consciousness of our trouble, our crisis, as well as in the rising consiousness of our place within creation, the fabric of life.  That, of course, is where ecological hope is deeply embedded.

NASA photo

Yesterday I went for a viewing of “Waterlife:   The Story of the Last Great Fresh Water Supply on Earth.”   It was hard to get out of my seat when it was over – 90 mins of unrelentingly bleak news about the Great Lakes, one of the world’s natural wonders.  Hard to express the privilege it is to live near the Lake Michigan shore, to be able to walk out the back door of my beat-up little flat and across the park to take in its beauty, which I do nearly every day.  Hard to take in the extent to which it is poisoned, its old biodiversty ruined forever, new threats arriving nearly every day — from industrial pollution to ocean vessels to beach developers and home-owners to the agriculture industry and more.

And because our bodies ultimately are one, what is happening to the lakes is happening to our bodies. We who rely on its waters are threatened every day by these destructive forces.  We are drinking contaminants that water systems cannot filter out — like anti-depressants, endocrine disruptors, estrogen, antibiotics and more.  We take these things into our bodies, we eliminate them, we flush them down the toilet back into the lake.

Industrial pollution around Green Bay - Photo: Michigan Sea Grant

Governments protect the polluters with lax regulation and even laxer enforcement. Global warming is leading to increased evaporation contributing to lower lake levels. Exotic invasive species have overwhelmed the original ecological community of the lake.  As the lake recedes, one shore-owning family says that at least the beaches are getting bigger, and one of their children exults, “We love beaches!”  And you can’t help but hang your head in despair.

The Great Lakes there for the pleasure of rich people who can ‘own’ –  unbelievable- — ‘own’ some of its shore.

We are just such a sick culture.  We have lost all our moral, spiritual, and biological moorings within the natural world – a world abundant and generous beyond reckoning, and we so ungenerous and grandiose that our very lifestyles amount to daily insults back to the gift-giver.

I wanted the film to cheer me up in the end, but beyond telling me that I can do something, without telling me what exactly, it gave me little in the way of hope, my biggest critique of the film –  except by way of a most inspirational image.  Throughout the movie, we see an indigenous woman whose people have lived by the lake for countless generations, whose people have watched the sacrilege that is industrial society kill off their fish, contaminate their waters, chop down the trees and living things for developments.  So she takes a bucket of lake water and some tobacco leaves and starts walking, her intent being to walk all along the shores of the lakes, to speak to the water, bless it with the leaves, to be in her intention a healing presence in the midst of the destruction.  She walks with deep purpose as if everything depends on her walking this path — and it probably does.

She is the better part of us.

Lake Michigan shore last March - Photo: Margaret Swedish

I could weep today — for my lake, for the people of the Samoas (I know this was earthquake and tsunami, I also know how much worse these events will be for communities living along the sea as oceans expand because of warming), for the 2,000,000 people of the Phillippines whose homes went under water during the recent typhoon, and another storm possibly on the way.

While these stories eventually recede from the news, the event being over for all intents and purposes as far as we are concerned, I think of what life must be like around Atlanta amidst the muck and mess and loss that followed the 20+ inches of rain the other week, and of what life will be like in Manila and the surrounding area for years to come because of the recent disaster.  Heck, even here we have lost any sense of what Cedar Rapids has been going through since it went under water last year, or how New Orleans and others in the delta area are doing since Hurricane Katrina.

For the people directly impacted, after disasters like these, life changes forever – a whole lot of misery, a whole lot of grief.

We are going to be in a world now of disaster after disaster on a planet suffering deep wounds and insults from our industrial and post-industrial way of life. I don’t know how to soften that message because that is not my job. But because of the name of this project, we are here to be a source of hope. But I can’t give that; it is not in my power.  Hope is not some fuzzy reassurance that everything will be okay. Hope is something that comes out of action and work and commitment — and I don’t mean action and work like in our workaholic culture, including the workaholism that pervades the social change culture. I mean a fundamentally different way of life.

We don’t need to mimic all that is wrong in the culture to bring about change, and therefore hope. We need to begin living a new way of life, one that starts undermining the foundations of the culture by opting out of it. Meaningful action will come out of such a commitment, not after.  Organizing as communities of love, mutual respect, simple sharing, honoring the earth community and the humans within it, being ‘forces’ of peace in the midst of violence, building communities of resilience to help us through the inevitable breakdowns that are coming, being prepared to help one another through the hard times, learning to rely for meaning on the quality of our spirits and our relationships, not on consumption and the sham of ‘individualism’  (which does not exist anywhere in the universe) — all of these things are paths out of despair into a far more meaningful life than the culture of destruction for human profit and pleasure has to offer.

So I will go down to the lake today to both mourn it and cherish it, and to promise one more time that I will do my best to do no more harm to these waters, or my planet, my precious Earth home.

Lake Michigan in winter - Photo: Margaret Swedish

Well, friends, this is the happy day we come to each year when we have taken from the Earth, and spewed into it in the form of waste, as much as the Earth can handle, as much as it has to offer the human species.  From here on out, everything we take, consume, throw out, spew into the atmosphere, forests, soils, rivers and oceans is beyond the capacity of the planet’s generative and regenerative capacity.

Everything we take, consume, use up, throw out from this point on we are stealing from future generations of humans and other life forms, from the atmosphere and biosphere.

From the press release of one of my favorite organizations, the one that started this form of ecological measurement, the Global Footprint Network:

…on Sept. 25th, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year, according to data from Global Footprint Network, a research organization that measures how much nature we have, how much we use, and who uses what. From now until the end of the year, we will meet our ecological demand by depleting resource stocks and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Congratulations.  We did it again.  I don’t know about you, but this has me looking all around my immediate world right now and feeling pretty sober.  It has me thinking about my 11-week old godchild, and feeling pretty frightened — and very, very responsible.

Just stare at that image for a while as it flashed forward to this day.  Think about what it really means.

Now look at this graph below and if you are a U.S. American, again, think about what this really means.

Deficit ecological spending comparison - Global Footprint Network

I can wax eloquent on and on about the spiritual and moral meaning of these things, the challenges this data poses for U.S. society; but I cannot possibly be more eloquent or sobering or bleaker or challenging to the moral and ethical dimensions of this culture, to its spiritual frameworks of meaning, than what this graph portrays.

Nor can I make a better, more urgent argument for why we need to change how we live, drastically, urgently, if future generations are to have, as Jesus might say, “life, life in all its fullness, life in abundance.”

How dare we steal that from our children, from their future, from the hopes of future generations on this planet!

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I highly recommend a visit to the Global Footprint Network website at the link above.  It is loaded with resources and information you can use to educate yourself and others.

Oh, we love our high tech gadgets, don’t we?  Plasma TV screens, iPods, video game consoles, all those batteries plugged in for recharge, and on and on. We have little lights shining all through our houses, along the baseboards, on our power strips, on our appliances, our sound systems, our computers, modems and wireless boxes.  We don’t have just one flat screen TV, we have a bunch in every household now (if you’re rich enough or have enough of a credit line on your credit card).

Contributing to doomsday?

Turns out these toys use up so much electricity that they are becoming a leading source of increased energy demand all around the world.  Check this out from yesterday’s NY Times front page: A Plugged-In World, With a Hunger for Electricity:

Electricity use from power-hungry gadgets is rising fast all over the world. The fancy new flat-panel televisions everyone has been buying in recent years have turned out to be bigger power hogs than some refrigerators.

The proliferation of personal computers, iPods, cellphones, game consoles and all the rest amounts to the fastest-growing source of power demand in the world. Americans now have about 25 consumer electronic products in every household, compared with just three in 1980.

Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming.

To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants, or 230 nuclear plants, according to the agency.

Friends, we are building coal-fired power plants – plants that are the greatest single source of greenhouse gas emissions, electric power from which comes by way of blowing up Appalachian Mountains, destroying streams and valleys, and contaminating Appalachian communities — so that we can have bigger, brighter, sharper TV screens!

I recommend reading this entire article, not just this excerpt.  But the excerpt sounds the alarm — we have found a new way to drive up our energy usage exponentially, contradicting any efforts now being made towards energy efficiency, renewable and regenerative energy sources, scaled down consumption — you know, those things necessary to pull ourselves back from the brink of ecological catastrophe.

Now I’ve gotta ask all my readers to give me hope here because this poses a pretty big question to the culture — would you, we, U.S. Americans, Japanese and Europeans, or emerging affluent people in other cultures, scale back our purchases and use of these toys, despite the pleasure they give us, or how cool they make us feel (or uncool if we don’t have them), indeed, would we give them up altogether in order to give our children a shot at a decent, enriching, fulfilling life on this planet?

Now I was prepared to write more about that, but I will stop here — except for this one reflection.  I know these personal technology toys are addicting — I mean that sincerely, they actually are.  I also know that we have a hard time believing that this little toy in my hand with the qwerty keypad could threaten the survival of life on the planet as we have known it in this age of hominids.  So, given that this culture has never given up consumer symbols of affluence, coolness, and personal pleasure willingly, even when faced with dire consequences, will our behavior be impacted at all by this information?

And, if not, what does this say about our chances for restoring ecological wholeness, for curing ourselves of this disease of living wrongly on the planet by taking what we want from it for the pleasure and economies of humans no matter its impact on ecosystems now, much less the future?

What does this say about ecological hope?

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To see what California is prepared to do about this, check out: California may pull plug on big TVs that guzzle energy.

So what do climate change, rising risk of heart disease, and Jimmy Carter’s concerns about racism embedded in the attacks on Prez Obama all have in common?

Yesterday’s front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel had these two headlines:  Warming in Wisconsin: A rise in average annual temperatures by 2055 could make state’s climate more like Missouri’s, study finds, and, Fewer in U.S. at low risk for heart disease.  I was struck by the juxtaposition and what it says about our difficulty responding appropriately to the danger we are in.

We in this society seem to have lost our ability to adapt to changing conditions. We seem to have lost our ability to alter course, whether in our personal or societal behavior, even when we are in increasingly dire circumstances.

We are warming, our climate and weather patterns are changing, we are eating ourselves to death — and we just go on, the numbers get worse, we hope some new technology or new pharma drug will keep our world intact while we continue down the same road.  I can keep on spewing carbon, I can keep on eating MacDonald’s french fries, and something magical will come along to save me. I won’t die, the climate won’t warm, nothing really bad will happen.

Global Temp Record - Climate Research Unit, Univ. of East Anglia

As a matter of fact, the completely insane rabble-rousing around health care reform, manipulated by corporate interests — even though, once again, we are in urgent need of drastic change, our health system endangers most of us and helps keep us sick and stressed out — shows just how unable we are to change and adapt, to respond appropriately to our actual situation, the concrete contexts of our lives.  We are frozen in a lethargy that has deep cultural roots in our American mythology — that go-it-alone, leave-me-alone, let-me-have-what-I-want, get-out-of-my-face, I-am-not-responsible-for-my-neighbor, individualism that rears its angry, ugly head every time we face the necessity of real and sweeping change.

Necessity.  We don’t face change right now simply because it would be a good thing; we face change because we are in terrible trouble. We are hanging suspended in completely unsustainable systems that are unraveling all around us.  Increasing millions of us are falling between these frayed threads. What has held us is letting us go, discharging more of us as excess weight and in large numbers — not just here, but around the world.  The systems that have held us for 2-3 generations now, beefed up with manipulation of our belief systems, are not able to hold us any longer, cannot keep our climate stable, cannot keep us from dying of heart disease and diabetes while we support this fake economy by eating bad food — in great excess — supporting corporations that make profits off corn syrup and food additives and CO2 emissions and denying us health coverage if we are sick, etc., etc.

Yet millions of us also believe that the problem is not in the systems, not in the profit-making sectors that want to hold onto the unsustainable systems as long as they can because they profit so lavishly from them.

No, it is easier to blame the ‘black man’ in the White House.

Here’s what Jimmy Carter had to say about that on NBC’s Nightly News:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032619/#32867107

What constitutes civil discourse at Tea Party rally - Photo: PoliTex

Can we see the connections?  Our difficulties right now facing ecological crisis are not about ‘issues’ and ‘policies’ and mere disagreements across the political spectrum.  They are deeper-seated than that, deep roots in the national and cultural psyche.  They go to our cultural self-identities. An African American in the White House, however moderate, pro-business and centrist his politics (to the dismay of many of us), is an image, a reality, that clashes mightily with the deep cultural roots of racism and white privilege, and, in the case of people like Joe Wilson, perhaps wondering who you will be superior to if those you feel superior to become commander-in-chief (by a wide margin of the popular vote), attorney general, Supreme Court Justice, ambassador to the UN…

But get ready, because the fossil fuel industry is preparing to repeat the tactics of the health insurance and pharma industries as Congress crafts legislation to battle CO2 emissions and climate change. See also, Fossil fuel industry outspending clean energy by nearly 7-1.

We at this project have been convinced for some time that the greatest challenges we will face in terms of pulling ourselves back from our ecological cliffs are cultural, rooted in frameworks of meaning that no longer work, cultural identities that we are loath to give up.  Our greatest challenges are spiritual because a spirituality rooted in individualism (which does not actually exist anywhere in the universe), a sense that I have a separate identity cut off from impacts on other lives and realities and therefore I can do what I want, pursue what I want, have what I want — in many cases fortified by religions based on private personal salvation (which I cannot find in the gospels) irregardless of the fate of the Earth — that kind of spirituality keeps us on course, keeps us frozen in place.

From that vantage point, so much of what we need to do feels like personal threat to identities. But that vantage point keeps us obese, stressed, breathing dirty air, taking chemicals and manufactured food into our precious bodies, fuels social divisions and tensions, makes us feel threatened by the world rather than a part of it.

A mere 7.5% of us in the U.S. between 25-74 are at low risk for heart disease. 7.5% of us. And we think our health care costs are high now!

Cost of obesity in America - Get America Fit Foundation

I don’t know what holds us to this unhealthy and unhappy way of life. I don’t know why this is preferred as opposed to renewing our lives within the context of new meaning frameworks, the kind that would bring us back into creation and renew a sense that the human aspect of creation is far too precious to pollute, to hate, to abuse, to damage, to continue on as we are.

The renewal of creation on this planet is something we need to take into ourselves as essential to our reality. It’s not something outside of us that is in crisis, but we are in crisis; it is we-embedded-in-the-whole that is in crisis.