Tuesday, October 20, 2009
POPULATION and CLIMATE CHANGE
Isn’t this the elephant in the room? Secular enviros are scared to death to mention it, as are religious ecologists. Those most willing are the engineer-rationalist types, who have been warning of overshoot for decades now. It’s well past time this issue was brought into the deliberations on global ecological deterioration.
The human-earth relationship reached a critical moment when we pushed the planet past biocapacity, sometime around 1986. World population then was around 4.8 billion The latest figures, from 2006, put us at 130% of biocapacity, with the average biocapacity at 5.25 acres/person, whereas the average footprint (carbon, developed land, and food/fiber/timber) was 6.725. World population now is 6.7 billion. Population is definitely a critical component of our current, and potentially fatal, overshoot. Even at 4.8 billion, we were squeezing out other species’ habitat, and the extinction curve that is currently accelerating, now well over one hundred species a day, was already rising.
But it is absolutely critical to note the relative proportion of biocapacity used by the rich and the poor. The wealthiest 1 billion now use 100% of biocapacity (Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity)! The remaining 5.7, living marginally in cities and rural areas, use the overshoot amount. This does not mean we would reach steady-state if we simply got rid of those rich billion, which includes you and me. The desperately poor repeatedly cut down fledgling trees and sometimes eat “bushmeat” in the form of our simian cousins, simply to survive. But George Monbiot details the huge damage that the wealthy inflict upon the earth in his post, http://www.alternet.org/environment/142967/a_millionaire_with_a_super_yacht_is_a_larger_strain_on_resources_than_hundreds_of_peasant_families.
Despite global recession, wealth is increasing in some nations, along with population. The human drive for more and better has the developing world rapidly becoming just like us, or at least like the Europeans, who maintain half the carbon footprint of the US. For example, the biggest growth in car sales is in China and India. Along with the cars comes a huge growth in infrastructure as roads and parking space replacing crucial farmland. China no longer feeds itself, and though India, thanks to the Green Revolution, remains a net exporter of food, it is rapidly replacing arable land with sprawling cities and hydrodams. As for highway development, in 1968 I watched a motor rally on one of three national highways in India, spectators five-deep all along the route. It was one and a half lanes wide, heading north-south through Madhya Pradesh, across the Malwa Plain. Drivers were lucky to make it much past 40 miles/hour. Now India is building the Golden Quadrilateral, an interstate highway system reaching all the major cities. Paved roads are reaching further and further into the hinterlands, helping booming economic development. Many of those who owned cars ten years ago in places like Mumbai only had them as status symbols, because traffic density precluded actually driving them. Now vehicular embodied energy will be compounded by actually using petroleum and cement, as well as sacrificing land.
Subsistence farming, requiring additional family members to work the land, severely stresses the land, and competes too successfully for habitat needed by other species. But when one compares their modest footprint with the industrialized billion who feed at the top of the chain, the differences are huge. (See my previous post, http://ecospirit.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html). We in the US consume twice the carbon that Europeans and Japanese do, but seventeen times the amount consumed in Malawi. So having a child is a much more important decision in our culture than theirs, whose death rate has moreover doubled due to the scourge of AIDS.
We know that the principal indicator of number of offspring is the level of female education. Wherever young women have increased their level of education, the birthrate has significantly dropped. So it concerns me that highly educated and materially comfortable young couples in the US frequently have more than two children. If you inquire a bit, their usual answer is that they want to increase the pool of “good genes,” with occasional references to the rate of population growth among the underclasses, especially those of alien cultures and religions.
In a world that is already overpopulated, and the lifestyle of those with relative wealth the most significant factor in resource use, a decision to have only one biological child is much more ethical (see Bill McKibben, Maybe One, where he argues convincingly against the myth of psychic scarring from being an only child. See also the powerful graphic in New Solutions (#8, March 2006) for the huge range of resources the typical American infant will use in their lifetime: 3.3 million pounds of minerals, metals, and fuels). Having two is pushing things, since the population of the developed world is already using 100% of biocapacity. With the figure heavily dependent on lifestyle, a global population somewhere between 2 to 4 billion would allow for several of the ecosystems currently under human assault to recover, at least partially.
Parents the world over make their own decisions about having children. Even China has recently loosened its one child policy. I have discussed the option of having only one biological child with each of my sons. Jacob, the elder, thought for a long time that having one and adopting one was the way to go. But after deliberation with his wife, they decided to have two. Jesse is now also married, but still childless, and similarly speaks of one biological child. But his wife, who comes from a family with four children, always speaks in the plural.
Short of the government making rules in the matter, perhaps this choice needs to be more informed by the social group. Quaker Earthcare Witness, of which I am a member, counsels prospective parents to have a clearness committee with members of their Meeting before conceiving, to help them make the choice prayerfully after considering all the implications. It thus becomes an extension of the clearness for marriage, which is a serious matter, sometimes requiring many meetings to explore in depth. This seems like an intrusion of privacy to most people, but the social and ecological consequences of having a child in a rich country are enormous. Many thoughtful people acknowledge that the earth has too many human beings on it. If we don’t voluntarily limit our offspring, doesn’t it make sense for government to use its authority for the sake of the whole? The alternative is to leave matters to the Four Horsemen, who are already sharpening their swords.
The human-earth relationship reached a critical moment when we pushed the planet past biocapacity, sometime around 1986. World population then was around 4.8 billion The latest figures, from 2006, put us at 130% of biocapacity, with the average biocapacity at 5.25 acres/person, whereas the average footprint (carbon, developed land, and food/fiber/timber) was 6.725. World population now is 6.7 billion. Population is definitely a critical component of our current, and potentially fatal, overshoot. Even at 4.8 billion, we were squeezing out other species’ habitat, and the extinction curve that is currently accelerating, now well over one hundred species a day, was already rising.
But it is absolutely critical to note the relative proportion of biocapacity used by the rich and the poor. The wealthiest 1 billion now use 100% of biocapacity (Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity)! The remaining 5.7, living marginally in cities and rural areas, use the overshoot amount. This does not mean we would reach steady-state if we simply got rid of those rich billion, which includes you and me. The desperately poor repeatedly cut down fledgling trees and sometimes eat “bushmeat” in the form of our simian cousins, simply to survive. But George Monbiot details the huge damage that the wealthy inflict upon the earth in his post, http://www.alternet.org/environment/142967/a_millionaire_with_a_super_yacht_is_a_larger_strain_on_resources_than_hundreds_of_peasant_families.
Despite global recession, wealth is increasing in some nations, along with population. The human drive for more and better has the developing world rapidly becoming just like us, or at least like the Europeans, who maintain half the carbon footprint of the US. For example, the biggest growth in car sales is in China and India. Along with the cars comes a huge growth in infrastructure as roads and parking space replacing crucial farmland. China no longer feeds itself, and though India, thanks to the Green Revolution, remains a net exporter of food, it is rapidly replacing arable land with sprawling cities and hydrodams. As for highway development, in 1968 I watched a motor rally on one of three national highways in India, spectators five-deep all along the route. It was one and a half lanes wide, heading north-south through Madhya Pradesh, across the Malwa Plain. Drivers were lucky to make it much past 40 miles/hour. Now India is building the Golden Quadrilateral, an interstate highway system reaching all the major cities. Paved roads are reaching further and further into the hinterlands, helping booming economic development. Many of those who owned cars ten years ago in places like Mumbai only had them as status symbols, because traffic density precluded actually driving them. Now vehicular embodied energy will be compounded by actually using petroleum and cement, as well as sacrificing land.
Subsistence farming, requiring additional family members to work the land, severely stresses the land, and competes too successfully for habitat needed by other species. But when one compares their modest footprint with the industrialized billion who feed at the top of the chain, the differences are huge. (See my previous post, http://ecospirit.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html). We in the US consume twice the carbon that Europeans and Japanese do, but seventeen times the amount consumed in Malawi. So having a child is a much more important decision in our culture than theirs, whose death rate has moreover doubled due to the scourge of AIDS.
We know that the principal indicator of number of offspring is the level of female education. Wherever young women have increased their level of education, the birthrate has significantly dropped. So it concerns me that highly educated and materially comfortable young couples in the US frequently have more than two children. If you inquire a bit, their usual answer is that they want to increase the pool of “good genes,” with occasional references to the rate of population growth among the underclasses, especially those of alien cultures and religions.
In a world that is already overpopulated, and the lifestyle of those with relative wealth the most significant factor in resource use, a decision to have only one biological child is much more ethical (see Bill McKibben, Maybe One, where he argues convincingly against the myth of psychic scarring from being an only child. See also the powerful graphic in New Solutions (#8, March 2006) for the huge range of resources the typical American infant will use in their lifetime: 3.3 million pounds of minerals, metals, and fuels). Having two is pushing things, since the population of the developed world is already using 100% of biocapacity. With the figure heavily dependent on lifestyle, a global population somewhere between 2 to 4 billion would allow for several of the ecosystems currently under human assault to recover, at least partially.
Parents the world over make their own decisions about having children. Even China has recently loosened its one child policy. I have discussed the option of having only one biological child with each of my sons. Jacob, the elder, thought for a long time that having one and adopting one was the way to go. But after deliberation with his wife, they decided to have two. Jesse is now also married, but still childless, and similarly speaks of one biological child. But his wife, who comes from a family with four children, always speaks in the plural.
Short of the government making rules in the matter, perhaps this choice needs to be more informed by the social group. Quaker Earthcare Witness, of which I am a member, counsels prospective parents to have a clearness committee with members of their Meeting before conceiving, to help them make the choice prayerfully after considering all the implications. It thus becomes an extension of the clearness for marriage, which is a serious matter, sometimes requiring many meetings to explore in depth. This seems like an intrusion of privacy to most people, but the social and ecological consequences of having a child in a rich country are enormous. Many thoughtful people acknowledge that the earth has too many human beings on it. If we don’t voluntarily limit our offspring, doesn’t it make sense for government to use its authority for the sake of the whole? The alternative is to leave matters to the Four Horsemen, who are already sharpening their swords.
Labels: biocapacity, clearness committee, climate change, Golden Quadrilateral, population crash, Quaker Earthcare Witness
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Waxman-Markey Bill up for House Vote
This bill, entitled the American Clean Energy and Security Act, though severely weakened in committee, is still our best hope for the U.S. to bring a serious national plan to the table in at the U.N. forum for negotiating the successor to Kyoto in Copenhagen this December. Enviros are lobbying their representatives to restore some of its original provisions for tough caps, fully auctioned carbon emission allowances, and justice for the poor who will be impacted by its provisions.
Though many of us would prefer a carbon tax to the more slippery cap and trade plan, this bill is the only game in town. Carbon taxes are not popular, as the Liberal Party of Canada learned in the last national election. If carbon could effectively be capped, without the loopholes that Kyoto allowed, then some inevitable charades in trading of emission credits might not be too damaging. But the system is going to have to be much tougher and smarter than Kyoto, which slowed, but did not reverse, the growth in the emission curves of its signatories.
Though an international framework is imperative for us to have a chance at salvaging a meaningful human presence on the planet, my fear is that, even if Copenhagen advances a new protocol, the tremendous attachment to the status quo of corporate globalism will put us closer to the runaway CO2 emission curves of BAU (business as usual) than those tracking sufficient carbon restraint to give us a chance to avoid catastrophic climate runaway. We need a new system, ASAP, one which structurally acknowledges that the global economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the global ecosphere. Many are working towards articulating a new system that integrates the human economy with its earth household, notably the economist Herman Daly. A newly released book, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy, shows promise of laying out the principles as well as a method of governance, for this long-delayed advance on Adam Smith’s assumption of an endless, “externalized” resource base. I will review the book, published under the auspices of the Quaker Institute for the Future, with whom I have worked on energy issues, in a forthcoming blogpost.
Many players in the Obama administration understand the centrality and weight of the climate crisis, especially John Holdren, the president’s science advisor, NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco, Steven Chu at Energy, and the new US climate negotiator, Todd Stern. But you have to wonder if the President really understands, deep in his heart, that we are on the verge of complete climate catastrophe, as he continues to make it clear that health care is his overriding priority. If we don’t restore the health of the planet, human survival, much less health and comfort, are hugely at risk.
We have a long way to go, and we must get there fast. Waxman-Markey will be a start, and it has a reasonable chance of passing the House in the next couple of weeks. But there are thunderclouds in the Senate, and we only have so much time to weather this storm. Unfortunately, the usual political horsetrading and its inevitable compromises is ineffective with respect to the laws of nature. The climate science for which the IPCC was rewarded the Nobel was not subject to a vote, though some of the more drastic scenarios got weeded out in the peer review vetting.
It is important to understand basic systems theory, especially the working of feedback loops. Once “positive” feedback starts moving the gargantuan mechanism of global climate towards a new equilibrium, it is too late to do anything but wait a thousand years for the new norms. If only Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and industry leaders committed to the status quo of short term profits would remember that they, too, have grandchildren, who will beget grandchildren of their own.
Now is the time to do more than install compact fluorescents and take 5-minute showers. Get to know your elected officials and their staff as a buffer against the massive tide of industry lobbyists. Repent of your over-affluence, and find novel, clever ways to engage your neighbors and communities in downsizing their material use quotient. Most importantly, we all need to be able to answer to our grandchildren when they look back to this critical juncture in human history.
Though many of us would prefer a carbon tax to the more slippery cap and trade plan, this bill is the only game in town. Carbon taxes are not popular, as the Liberal Party of Canada learned in the last national election. If carbon could effectively be capped, without the loopholes that Kyoto allowed, then some inevitable charades in trading of emission credits might not be too damaging. But the system is going to have to be much tougher and smarter than Kyoto, which slowed, but did not reverse, the growth in the emission curves of its signatories.
Though an international framework is imperative for us to have a chance at salvaging a meaningful human presence on the planet, my fear is that, even if Copenhagen advances a new protocol, the tremendous attachment to the status quo of corporate globalism will put us closer to the runaway CO2 emission curves of BAU (business as usual) than those tracking sufficient carbon restraint to give us a chance to avoid catastrophic climate runaway. We need a new system, ASAP, one which structurally acknowledges that the global economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the global ecosphere. Many are working towards articulating a new system that integrates the human economy with its earth household, notably the economist Herman Daly. A newly released book, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy, shows promise of laying out the principles as well as a method of governance, for this long-delayed advance on Adam Smith’s assumption of an endless, “externalized” resource base. I will review the book, published under the auspices of the Quaker Institute for the Future, with whom I have worked on energy issues, in a forthcoming blogpost.
Many players in the Obama administration understand the centrality and weight of the climate crisis, especially John Holdren, the president’s science advisor, NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco, Steven Chu at Energy, and the new US climate negotiator, Todd Stern. But you have to wonder if the President really understands, deep in his heart, that we are on the verge of complete climate catastrophe, as he continues to make it clear that health care is his overriding priority. If we don’t restore the health of the planet, human survival, much less health and comfort, are hugely at risk.
We have a long way to go, and we must get there fast. Waxman-Markey will be a start, and it has a reasonable chance of passing the House in the next couple of weeks. But there are thunderclouds in the Senate, and we only have so much time to weather this storm. Unfortunately, the usual political horsetrading and its inevitable compromises is ineffective with respect to the laws of nature. The climate science for which the IPCC was rewarded the Nobel was not subject to a vote, though some of the more drastic scenarios got weeded out in the peer review vetting.
It is important to understand basic systems theory, especially the working of feedback loops. Once “positive” feedback starts moving the gargantuan mechanism of global climate towards a new equilibrium, it is too late to do anything but wait a thousand years for the new norms. If only Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, and industry leaders committed to the status quo of short term profits would remember that they, too, have grandchildren, who will beget grandchildren of their own.
Now is the time to do more than install compact fluorescents and take 5-minute showers. Get to know your elected officials and their staff as a buffer against the massive tide of industry lobbyists. Repent of your over-affluence, and find novel, clever ways to engage your neighbors and communities in downsizing their material use quotient. Most importantly, we all need to be able to answer to our grandchildren when they look back to this critical juncture in human history.
Labels: American Clean Energy and Security Act, Copenhagen, IPCC, Kyoto Protocol, Right Relationship
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie
It would go a great way to caution and direct people in their use of the world, that they were better studied in the creation of it. For how could [they]find the confidence to abuse it, while they should see the Great Creator stare them in the face, in all and every part thereof?
- William Penn, 1693
With climate change from excess burning of carbon hovering like a sword of Damocles over our heads, the way we produce electricity, and how much we use, has become critical. Since it produces CO2 previously locked away from the active carbon cycle, burning fossil fuels is the most damaging way to get our power. The power we use in NC comes chiefly from coal, and most of that coal comes from dynamiting mountaintops in neighboring states. This is a matter of grave injustice.
Though there are promising new technologies available which will gradually close the gap, we are going to still be burning coal for at least a generation, with nuclear and hydropower being the other chief sources of baseload power (available 24 hours a day). But any additional capacity built needs to be as close to carbon-neutral as possible, and building more coal- fired plants is simply suicidal. A study commissioned by the state legislature in 2006 showed that with conservation, efficiency, and a modest growth in renewable energy, we would not need any added capacity in NC for ten years. Despite this finding, Duke Energy is building a mammoth coal-fired plant at Cliffside, near Shelby. Construction at Cliffside had been temporarily halted by federal court order, citing in particular the mercury pollution it would produce, but Duke got around this by simply reclassifying this 800 megawatt plant as a “minor” source of pollution, without changing the plant design. The NC Utility Commission and Governor Perdue went along with this bald-faced lie. The truth is, there is no clean coal, and we must stop building new plants.
On April 20, I joined 350 folks in a well-organized march in Charlotte to protest the Cliffside plant, carrying a Call to Conscience which was read in front of Governor Perdue’s office and outside Duke Energy headquarters, urging Duke CEO Jim Rogers to cancel the project. Rogers has built a reputation as a “green” power executive, speaking articulately about the need to reduce CO2 in power production. Indeed, while we were reading the citizen’s injunction and Call to Conscience outside his headquarters, Rogers was on the West Coast addressing a conference on renewable energy. On many occasions he has touted the “grandchild test,” saying we must steward a world in which our grandchildren have as much chance for a healthy life as we have enjoyed. On Monday I carried a sign reading, “Jim Rogers, you flunked the grandchild test.”
I was among 42 citizens who committed trespass and were arrested at Duke headquarters last Monday. I felt it an honor to be in the Mecklenburg County Jail with grandmothers in their 80’s, students from Appalachian State missing class to be in Charlotte, environmental leaders and clergy, and most of all, victims of mountaintop removal, the most “efficient” but devastating way to mine coal. After being unsuccessful at hearings and having court injunctions circumvented by procedural lies, it’s now in the hands of citizens to proclaim the truth, even if we risk arrest and jail time in the process.
Who is this being built for? Not for us, because if we follow the recommendations of the study mandated by our legislature and the fresh thinking in the executive branch of the federal government, we don’t need Cliffside. Duke is an international corporation, not a public utility answerable to the citizens of this state, and this additional capacity is being built to sell for profit elsewhere. But the truth I went to Duke headquarters to witness was not simply to expose an external enemy. Our own behavior as consumers is the key to reducing demand. Power companies are producing a useful product; they’re just pushed to produce too much of it, and in the absence of legislation capping carbon emissions and fair public utility regulations, in the wrong ways.
This is a justice issue, justice for the poorest among us who are already most impacted by global climate change, and justice for the rest of creation, which we put at risk by our arrogance and foolishness. It is a stewardship issue, not just of Creation put into our care by a loving Creator, but stewardship of our own species. For if we don’t’ radically dampen the accelerating CO2 curve, we are virtually assuring our own extinction, along with countless other species . As far as we know, we are the only beings in the universe where the creature can look within and find the Creator staring back. This is a sacred trust indeed.
So let’s continue to pressure Duke to stop Cliffside and other new coal plants. Urge your congressfolk to support strong legislation to cap carbon emissions. And become aware of your own habits around power use. We could immediately reduce demand by a third simply by conservation and installing more efficient appliances and compact fluorescents. I’m not the only one on trial here.
Robert McGahey, South Toe
(Editorial for Yancey Common Times April 29)
- William Penn, 1693
With climate change from excess burning of carbon hovering like a sword of Damocles over our heads, the way we produce electricity, and how much we use, has become critical. Since it produces CO2 previously locked away from the active carbon cycle, burning fossil fuels is the most damaging way to get our power. The power we use in NC comes chiefly from coal, and most of that coal comes from dynamiting mountaintops in neighboring states. This is a matter of grave injustice.
Though there are promising new technologies available which will gradually close the gap, we are going to still be burning coal for at least a generation, with nuclear and hydropower being the other chief sources of baseload power (available 24 hours a day). But any additional capacity built needs to be as close to carbon-neutral as possible, and building more coal- fired plants is simply suicidal. A study commissioned by the state legislature in 2006 showed that with conservation, efficiency, and a modest growth in renewable energy, we would not need any added capacity in NC for ten years. Despite this finding, Duke Energy is building a mammoth coal-fired plant at Cliffside, near Shelby. Construction at Cliffside had been temporarily halted by federal court order, citing in particular the mercury pollution it would produce, but Duke got around this by simply reclassifying this 800 megawatt plant as a “minor” source of pollution, without changing the plant design. The NC Utility Commission and Governor Perdue went along with this bald-faced lie. The truth is, there is no clean coal, and we must stop building new plants.
On April 20, I joined 350 folks in a well-organized march in Charlotte to protest the Cliffside plant, carrying a Call to Conscience which was read in front of Governor Perdue’s office and outside Duke Energy headquarters, urging Duke CEO Jim Rogers to cancel the project. Rogers has built a reputation as a “green” power executive, speaking articulately about the need to reduce CO2 in power production. Indeed, while we were reading the citizen’s injunction and Call to Conscience outside his headquarters, Rogers was on the West Coast addressing a conference on renewable energy. On many occasions he has touted the “grandchild test,” saying we must steward a world in which our grandchildren have as much chance for a healthy life as we have enjoyed. On Monday I carried a sign reading, “Jim Rogers, you flunked the grandchild test.”
I was among 42 citizens who committed trespass and were arrested at Duke headquarters last Monday. I felt it an honor to be in the Mecklenburg County Jail with grandmothers in their 80’s, students from Appalachian State missing class to be in Charlotte, environmental leaders and clergy, and most of all, victims of mountaintop removal, the most “efficient” but devastating way to mine coal. After being unsuccessful at hearings and having court injunctions circumvented by procedural lies, it’s now in the hands of citizens to proclaim the truth, even if we risk arrest and jail time in the process.
Who is this being built for? Not for us, because if we follow the recommendations of the study mandated by our legislature and the fresh thinking in the executive branch of the federal government, we don’t need Cliffside. Duke is an international corporation, not a public utility answerable to the citizens of this state, and this additional capacity is being built to sell for profit elsewhere. But the truth I went to Duke headquarters to witness was not simply to expose an external enemy. Our own behavior as consumers is the key to reducing demand. Power companies are producing a useful product; they’re just pushed to produce too much of it, and in the absence of legislation capping carbon emissions and fair public utility regulations, in the wrong ways.
This is a justice issue, justice for the poorest among us who are already most impacted by global climate change, and justice for the rest of creation, which we put at risk by our arrogance and foolishness. It is a stewardship issue, not just of Creation put into our care by a loving Creator, but stewardship of our own species. For if we don’t’ radically dampen the accelerating CO2 curve, we are virtually assuring our own extinction, along with countless other species . As far as we know, we are the only beings in the universe where the creature can look within and find the Creator staring back. This is a sacred trust indeed.
So let’s continue to pressure Duke to stop Cliffside and other new coal plants. Urge your congressfolk to support strong legislation to cap carbon emissions. And become aware of your own habits around power use. We could immediately reduce demand by a third simply by conservation and installing more efficient appliances and compact fluorescents. I’m not the only one on trial here.
Robert McGahey, South Toe
(Editorial for Yancey Common Times April 29)
Labels: Cliffside coal plant, Jim Rogers, mountaintop removal
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Remnants: Piecing a Just, Sustainable Society from the Detritus of Empire
Come to our conference! Link to website justremnants.org March 9 for more details.
A Southern Appalachian conference working to fabricate a remnant quilt of community in the tradition of Isaiah's "just remnant," justice to the human community and crucially, the bioregion. At the end of the warm, stable, Holocene period, we are entering the "long emergency," an era of global warming, with accelerating species extinction and potentially rapid climate change. We trust deeply that our collective piece-work will inspire hope and action in these trying times. We will work together as a human community and earth citizens, but anchoring more deeply, listening for the divine source which alone can sustain us, and what emerges from us, through this interval of unknown duration and destination.
Where: Arthur Morgan School, Celo, NC
When: July 16-19, 2009
Cost: $175 ($135 for early birds), plus housing.
Scholarships and work-trades available.
Early bird registration deadline June 1, 2009
The purpose of the conference is to gather, energize and encourage networking among community leaders in the Southern Appalachians, encouraging bold thinking and courage to build a sustainable regional society in advance of the inevitable ravages of climate change and systemic economic downturn.
We invite you to join us in creating a remnant “quilt” of just, sustainable, hopeful practices to preserve and sustain the Katuah bioregion. The conference will feature presentations, experiential exercises, roundtable with representatives from a broad range of bioregional organizations, and field trips. These will all be anchored and woven together by small home groups, where participants will create a remnant epistle quilt at conference end. Poetry reading and contradance Saturday night with local musicians. Food will be local, mostly vegetarian and organic, and fabulous.
The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss spoke of human cultural activity as bricolage, the bricoleur being a scavenger, tinker, jack-of-all-trades, making his living by collecting society’s remnants. Our work of bricolage will include
ECOJUSTICE
the land ethic, wildlife corridors, buffers, healing forests
VIABLE, DURABLE SMALL TOWNS AND RURAL PLACES
sustainable agriculture, cooperative enterprises and small business development, distributed energy, community justice
PLACE-BASED CULTURES
Cherokee keepers of traditions
Appalachian farmers and crafters
PRESENTERS
*have already agreed to participate
*Thomas Rain Crowe, yeoman, poet/essayist/activist, bookstore owner, Jackson County
*Paulus Berensohn, artist/teacher working at interface of Deep Ecology and the craft arts, Penland, NC.
*Thomas Peterson, climate scientist, NOAA, Nobel laureate (IPCC), AVL. *Stuart Rosenthal- international consultant in cooperative business Chapel Hill
*Rob Messick – Researcher, regional old growth forests Rutherford County (field trip)
Jim Veteto - Heirloom vegetables. PhD candidate in Ethnobotany, Celo Community (field trip)
*Kevin Welsh - Cherokee native plants and stories. Bog Cove Community *Lee Barnes, history of Katuah, our bioregion
*Brent Martin, history of Katuah. Regional director, Wilderness Society, former president, Little Tennessee Land Trust, Franklin.
*Forrest Westall – North Carolina Environmental Management Commission, hydro engineer, author of Outstanding Resource Waters bill(NC), Celo. South Toe River was first to receive this designation, and remains the purest water in the state.
Joe Hollis - Yeoman, Paradise Gardening, Chinese herbalist, Celo (field
trip)
Patryk Battle/*Gaelen Corozine/Scott Paquin. CSA’s of South Toe Valley (field trip)
Yancey farm family (field trip)
PANEL connecting spirituality and ecojustice:
*Jill Rios, Director, NC Interfaith Power and Light, writer. Asheville
*Evan Richardson, past clerk, Asheville Friends Meeting.
*Nancy Hastings - Baptist Peacemaker, Circle of Mercy. Peace and justice activist, prison chaplain. Asheville
Representatives of DISTRIBUTED ENERGY (solar and wind), mostly local.
A Southern Appalachian conference working to fabricate a remnant quilt of community in the tradition of Isaiah's "just remnant," justice to the human community and crucially, the bioregion. At the end of the warm, stable, Holocene period, we are entering the "long emergency," an era of global warming, with accelerating species extinction and potentially rapid climate change. We trust deeply that our collective piece-work will inspire hope and action in these trying times. We will work together as a human community and earth citizens, but anchoring more deeply, listening for the divine source which alone can sustain us, and what emerges from us, through this interval of unknown duration and destination.
Where: Arthur Morgan School, Celo, NC
When: July 16-19, 2009
Cost: $175 ($135 for early birds), plus housing.
Scholarships and work-trades available.
Early bird registration deadline June 1, 2009
The purpose of the conference is to gather, energize and encourage networking among community leaders in the Southern Appalachians, encouraging bold thinking and courage to build a sustainable regional society in advance of the inevitable ravages of climate change and systemic economic downturn.
We invite you to join us in creating a remnant “quilt” of just, sustainable, hopeful practices to preserve and sustain the Katuah bioregion. The conference will feature presentations, experiential exercises, roundtable with representatives from a broad range of bioregional organizations, and field trips. These will all be anchored and woven together by small home groups, where participants will create a remnant epistle quilt at conference end. Poetry reading and contradance Saturday night with local musicians. Food will be local, mostly vegetarian and organic, and fabulous.
The great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss spoke of human cultural activity as bricolage, the bricoleur being a scavenger, tinker, jack-of-all-trades, making his living by collecting society’s remnants. Our work of bricolage will include
ECOJUSTICE
the land ethic, wildlife corridors, buffers, healing forests
VIABLE, DURABLE SMALL TOWNS AND RURAL PLACES
sustainable agriculture, cooperative enterprises and small business development, distributed energy, community justice
PLACE-BASED CULTURES
Cherokee keepers of traditions
Appalachian farmers and crafters
PRESENTERS
*have already agreed to participate
*Thomas Rain Crowe, yeoman, poet/essayist/activist, bookstore owner, Jackson County
*Paulus Berensohn, artist/teacher working at interface of Deep Ecology and the craft arts, Penland, NC.
*Thomas Peterson, climate scientist, NOAA, Nobel laureate (IPCC), AVL. *Stuart Rosenthal- international consultant in cooperative business Chapel Hill
*Rob Messick – Researcher, regional old growth forests Rutherford County (field trip)
Jim Veteto - Heirloom vegetables. PhD candidate in Ethnobotany, Celo Community (field trip)
*Kevin Welsh - Cherokee native plants and stories. Bog Cove Community *Lee Barnes, history of Katuah, our bioregion
*Brent Martin, history of Katuah. Regional director, Wilderness Society, former president, Little Tennessee Land Trust, Franklin.
*Forrest Westall – North Carolina Environmental Management Commission, hydro engineer, author of Outstanding Resource Waters bill(NC), Celo. South Toe River was first to receive this designation, and remains the purest water in the state.
Joe Hollis - Yeoman, Paradise Gardening, Chinese herbalist, Celo (field
trip)
Patryk Battle/*Gaelen Corozine/Scott Paquin. CSA’s of South Toe Valley (field trip)
Yancey farm family (field trip)
PANEL connecting spirituality and ecojustice:
*Jill Rios, Director, NC Interfaith Power and Light, writer. Asheville
*Evan Richardson, past clerk, Asheville Friends Meeting.
*Nancy Hastings - Baptist Peacemaker, Circle of Mercy. Peace and justice activist, prison chaplain. Asheville
Representatives of DISTRIBUTED ENERGY (solar and wind), mostly local.
Labels: bricoleur, climate change, ecojustice, IPCC, just remnant, Katuah, Long Emergency, NOAA, Paulus Berensohn, Thomas Rain Crowe
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Remnant III: the meek shall inherit the earth
I have long considered this beatitude to refer not so much to the human community as to the most probable heirs of earthly life: insects and bacteria. Hebrew scholars point out that the first meaning of the word meek in Jesus’ time was those who had been forced off their land. Modern scholarship reminds us that Jesus was not just the inconvenient itinerant rabbi to the righteous burgher and farmer, but a revolutionary Jewish peasant. Like most revolutionaries in societies with radical imbalances in wealth and property, Jesus addressed land reform, and the most basic means for this was to reinstate land to those who had lost it, often unfairly. Thus, the meek shall inherit the earth meant the disinherited would get their land back
One of the most devastating consequences of the industrialization of farming and the consequent vastly expanded global trade in agricultural products is the loss of the ability of the small farmer to feed his family. The process started about a hundred years ago, but quickened after World War II, vastly accelerating in the last twenty years. Uniting the Jeffersonian and the Isaiahan, a wise farm policy would not only restore farms to farmers, but reclaim the core of subsistence farmers upon whose genius any remnant of humanity must depend for survival in a vastly changed global ecostructure. The alternative is indeed my hardcore sense of “meek” - insects and other humble creatures whom no man knows (John Rutter).
In our time of critical need, we require all variety of remnants. Those who quietly do what is just, not what is expedient (Isaiah) ; those who speak and act to serve the truth with a wise view of the long term welfare of both civilization and the earth which enfolds it (Plato); and, crucially, those who reinherit arable land to form the basis for sustainable agriculture (Jesus’s meek). These include all those who have lost their land to landlords, banks, and corporate conglomerates. Along with the revolution in energy use and unrestrained consumerism that is required of us, we need a revolution in farm credit and markets (a fair and equitable carbon tax would be a good start) to restore the possibility of subsistence farming and trade in agricultural commodities that makes bioregional sense, not global profits at huge carbon cost.
While visiting sites awarded funds by Right Sharing of World Resources, I visited an organic farmer in Tamil Nadu, South India. On a small plot of land he fed his family most of what they needed, and traded with other farmers for his cash needs. He said he had previously practiced conventional western farming with large inputs of patented seed and fertilizer, which forced him into an untenable burden of debt. After three years of organic farming, he was out of debt, and his fellow farmers were coming to him to learn how he had achieved this. He held a modest hope that the tide might turn in his local area.
The subsistence farmer, now rare and precious, is among the most meek human beings. But between him and the humble creatures that we may never know if we continue destroying rainforests before scientists can document their uncatalogued denizens, is an even rarer remnant, the first peoples adapted to life in the few remaining wild places. They live in the rainforest of Brazil and West Africa, the Kalahari Desert, and herd reindeer in the tundra. These too are critical to the survival of the human remnant after the immanent collapse of civilization brought on by the ravages of global capitalism, overpopulation and consequent climate change. The remnant will need to know how to subsist not only in the remaining lands with adequate soil and moisture, but also in extreme climates, getting along with few of the homogenized amenities of global trade. Let us embrace them in advance of the climate emergency, which has already begun to arrive in many quarters.
One of the most devastating consequences of the industrialization of farming and the consequent vastly expanded global trade in agricultural products is the loss of the ability of the small farmer to feed his family. The process started about a hundred years ago, but quickened after World War II, vastly accelerating in the last twenty years. Uniting the Jeffersonian and the Isaiahan, a wise farm policy would not only restore farms to farmers, but reclaim the core of subsistence farmers upon whose genius any remnant of humanity must depend for survival in a vastly changed global ecostructure. The alternative is indeed my hardcore sense of “meek” - insects and other humble creatures whom no man knows (John Rutter).
In our time of critical need, we require all variety of remnants. Those who quietly do what is just, not what is expedient (Isaiah) ; those who speak and act to serve the truth with a wise view of the long term welfare of both civilization and the earth which enfolds it (Plato); and, crucially, those who reinherit arable land to form the basis for sustainable agriculture (Jesus’s meek). These include all those who have lost their land to landlords, banks, and corporate conglomerates. Along with the revolution in energy use and unrestrained consumerism that is required of us, we need a revolution in farm credit and markets (a fair and equitable carbon tax would be a good start) to restore the possibility of subsistence farming and trade in agricultural commodities that makes bioregional sense, not global profits at huge carbon cost.
While visiting sites awarded funds by Right Sharing of World Resources, I visited an organic farmer in Tamil Nadu, South India. On a small plot of land he fed his family most of what they needed, and traded with other farmers for his cash needs. He said he had previously practiced conventional western farming with large inputs of patented seed and fertilizer, which forced him into an untenable burden of debt. After three years of organic farming, he was out of debt, and his fellow farmers were coming to him to learn how he had achieved this. He held a modest hope that the tide might turn in his local area.
The subsistence farmer, now rare and precious, is among the most meek human beings. But between him and the humble creatures that we may never know if we continue destroying rainforests before scientists can document their uncatalogued denizens, is an even rarer remnant, the first peoples adapted to life in the few remaining wild places. They live in the rainforest of Brazil and West Africa, the Kalahari Desert, and herd reindeer in the tundra. These too are critical to the survival of the human remnant after the immanent collapse of civilization brought on by the ravages of global capitalism, overpopulation and consequent climate change. The remnant will need to know how to subsist not only in the remaining lands with adequate soil and moisture, but also in extreme climates, getting along with few of the homogenized amenities of global trade. Let us embrace them in advance of the climate emergency, which has already begun to arrive in many quarters.
Labels: beatitude, first people, just remnant, Right Sharing of World Resources, subsistence farmer
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Plato's Remnant: the Way to Tackle Climate Change?
Neither city nor polity nor man will ever be perfected until some chance compels this uncorrupted remnant of true philosophers, who now bear the stigma of uselessness, to take charge of the state whether they wish it or not, and constrains the citizens to obey them. (Republic, Book 6, 499)
Plato argues in his great dialogue against democracy, which ensures governance by the uncritical, uneducated, easily fooled mass of mankind, and for an oligarchy of philosopher-kings. This is his uncorrupted remnant, not the humble but just remnant of the Old Testament, but a highly trained elite. He describes this remnant as hearken[ing]to fair and free discussions whose sole endeavor is to search out the truth at any cost for knowledge’s sake... Considering that the world teeters on the brink of catastrophic climate change, and that voluntary restraint has not made a dent in rapidly accelerating CO2 emissions, it may be time to embrace Plato’s oligarchy. And we might be forgiven for substituting a fearless, uncorrupted search for a rational basis upon which to govern energy usage for Plato’s original search for pure knowledge.
The time is ripe, and whether it is divine will or Tyche, the goddess chance, at cause, we have but a few years for significantly shifting our ways of consuming energy. The give-and-take, the deals, the compromises of normal democratic legislative processes would be hard-pressed to deliver the enormous reduction levels, now approaching 100% by 2050, with immediate (by the next election) sizable cuts, required for the survival of civilization and perhaps higher life-forms on earth.
The philosopher-king and his cadre of knowledgeable advisors needs to rise up in one of the leading world powers, producers of the greatest carbon emissions, but also having the greatest potential influence on the behavior of other nations. The likely candidates are the US and China, though there are other outside possibilities: Japan, India, or a major country in the Eurozone - UK, Germany, France. Both Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy continue to show strong leadership on climate mitigation, but Angela Merkel, heretofore a leader as well, waffled at the recent talks in Poland, citing economic constraints.
Since China is an autocratic state, once the leadership decides to act, it can move directly to effect that action, constraining its citizens to obey.
They proved this already with their institution of a one-child policy, without which the world would be in even more dire straits than it now is. China’s climate scientists have the ear of its rulers, and the struggle between unprecedented economic growth and braking emissions, especially from coal-fired plants, is underway, with tougher laws governing emissions already on the books.
In the US, the recent election poises us to vault from the biggest hold-out on the Kyoto protocol to leading negotiations for its sequel, which needs far tougher caps and closed loopholes in emissions trading. The whole business of trading, though fine in theory, may need to be replaced by a carbon tax scheme which is fair to all parties, and less vulnerable to manipulation.
Last night Barack Obama announced his Green Dream Team, an outstanding group of experienced and knowledgeable professionals. But the targets he has in mind are out-of-date, as Al Gore’s speech at the end of the latest round of climate talks in Poland implicitly acknowledged. Neither Obama nor Congress is there yet, but unlike the previous administration, which muzzled and misrepresented scientists, skewing their findings to fit a preconceived agenda, he respects science and experts of all kinds. His door is open to advice from US members of the IPCC, including the prophetic warnings of James Hansen, our leading climate scientist. Hansen has already sent him an open letter (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20081121_Obama.pdf) laying out options in the face of a limit of 350ppm CO2 emissions – rather than the 450 that was the consensus of the last IPCC report. At 387ppm, we are well past that level of emissions, which doesn’t even take into account the huge amounts of methane being released in Siberia as the permafrost melts.
If the evidence convinces the president-elect, then he needs to risk his mandate by acknowledging that we are in a state of war, not with terrorists, but our own consumerist tendencies, and that extraordinary measures must be taken. To his credit, he has already warned of sacrifices that will be necessary for us to pull through our present crisis. But economic crisis pales beside what the military reported to Bush was the greatest risk to national security: rapid climate change. We will not win this war by half-measures, for the Climate Beast does not haggle. Runaway climate change is at our doorstep, and we need the philosopher king and his oligarchy of educated prophet-advisors to step forward commensurate to the task, solving the greatest moral challenge our species has ever faced.
If he wins this improbable bet, he will be re-elected, which will only happen if the electorate matures rapidly enough to realize that war requires sacrifice from everybody. Energy consumption is not a matter of self-interest, not just the interest of the human community. Every election henceforth will be about the biosphere. We need to prove Plato wrong in his criticism of democracy by choosing wise rulers and keeping them in office.
Plato argues in his great dialogue against democracy, which ensures governance by the uncritical, uneducated, easily fooled mass of mankind, and for an oligarchy of philosopher-kings. This is his uncorrupted remnant, not the humble but just remnant of the Old Testament, but a highly trained elite. He describes this remnant as hearken[ing]to fair and free discussions whose sole endeavor is to search out the truth at any cost for knowledge’s sake... Considering that the world teeters on the brink of catastrophic climate change, and that voluntary restraint has not made a dent in rapidly accelerating CO2 emissions, it may be time to embrace Plato’s oligarchy. And we might be forgiven for substituting a fearless, uncorrupted search for a rational basis upon which to govern energy usage for Plato’s original search for pure knowledge.
The time is ripe, and whether it is divine will or Tyche, the goddess chance, at cause, we have but a few years for significantly shifting our ways of consuming energy. The give-and-take, the deals, the compromises of normal democratic legislative processes would be hard-pressed to deliver the enormous reduction levels, now approaching 100% by 2050, with immediate (by the next election) sizable cuts, required for the survival of civilization and perhaps higher life-forms on earth.
The philosopher-king and his cadre of knowledgeable advisors needs to rise up in one of the leading world powers, producers of the greatest carbon emissions, but also having the greatest potential influence on the behavior of other nations. The likely candidates are the US and China, though there are other outside possibilities: Japan, India, or a major country in the Eurozone - UK, Germany, France. Both Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy continue to show strong leadership on climate mitigation, but Angela Merkel, heretofore a leader as well, waffled at the recent talks in Poland, citing economic constraints.
Since China is an autocratic state, once the leadership decides to act, it can move directly to effect that action, constraining its citizens to obey.
They proved this already with their institution of a one-child policy, without which the world would be in even more dire straits than it now is. China’s climate scientists have the ear of its rulers, and the struggle between unprecedented economic growth and braking emissions, especially from coal-fired plants, is underway, with tougher laws governing emissions already on the books.
In the US, the recent election poises us to vault from the biggest hold-out on the Kyoto protocol to leading negotiations for its sequel, which needs far tougher caps and closed loopholes in emissions trading. The whole business of trading, though fine in theory, may need to be replaced by a carbon tax scheme which is fair to all parties, and less vulnerable to manipulation.
Last night Barack Obama announced his Green Dream Team, an outstanding group of experienced and knowledgeable professionals. But the targets he has in mind are out-of-date, as Al Gore’s speech at the end of the latest round of climate talks in Poland implicitly acknowledged. Neither Obama nor Congress is there yet, but unlike the previous administration, which muzzled and misrepresented scientists, skewing their findings to fit a preconceived agenda, he respects science and experts of all kinds. His door is open to advice from US members of the IPCC, including the prophetic warnings of James Hansen, our leading climate scientist. Hansen has already sent him an open letter (http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/20081121_Obama.pdf) laying out options in the face of a limit of 350ppm CO2 emissions – rather than the 450 that was the consensus of the last IPCC report. At 387ppm, we are well past that level of emissions, which doesn’t even take into account the huge amounts of methane being released in Siberia as the permafrost melts.
If the evidence convinces the president-elect, then he needs to risk his mandate by acknowledging that we are in a state of war, not with terrorists, but our own consumerist tendencies, and that extraordinary measures must be taken. To his credit, he has already warned of sacrifices that will be necessary for us to pull through our present crisis. But economic crisis pales beside what the military reported to Bush was the greatest risk to national security: rapid climate change. We will not win this war by half-measures, for the Climate Beast does not haggle. Runaway climate change is at our doorstep, and we need the philosopher king and his oligarchy of educated prophet-advisors to step forward commensurate to the task, solving the greatest moral challenge our species has ever faced.
If he wins this improbable bet, he will be re-elected, which will only happen if the electorate matures rapidly enough to realize that war requires sacrifice from everybody. Energy consumption is not a matter of self-interest, not just the interest of the human community. Every election henceforth will be about the biosphere. We need to prove Plato wrong in his criticism of democracy by choosing wise rulers and keeping them in office.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
The Burden of the Gospels (Wendell Berry)
Some of you have been indignant that I would compare, following Matthew Fox, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ with our treatment of the Earth at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christina era. I will not defend what I wrote, and have subsequently spoken in Quaker Meeting, but share the following, the last two paragraphs from Wendell Berry’s piece “The Burden of the Gospels” They are absolutely key. He doesn’t write it as a secular “environmental” essay, but from within the tradition which still has claims upon us in this post-modern, “post-Christian” world. It is on the burden of being mindful of human vocation in the industrial era.
Wendell Berry’s conclusion to “The Burden of the Gospels”
“To be convinced of the sanctity of the world and to be mindful of a human vocation to responsible membership in such a world, must always have been a burden. But it is a burden that falls with greatest weight on us humans of the industrial age who have been and are, by any measure, the humans most guilty of desecrating the world and of destroying creation… It seems as though industrial humanity had brought about phase two of original sin. We all are now complicit in the murder of creation. We certainly do know how to apply better measures to our conduct and our world. We know how to do far better than we are doing. But we don’t know how to extricate ourselves from our complicity very surely or very soon. How could we live without degrading our soils, slaughtering our forests, polluting our streams, poisoning the air and the rain? How could we live without the ozone hole and hypotoxic zones? How could we live without endangering species, including our own? How could we live without the war economy and the holocaust of fossil fuels? To the offer of more abundant life, we have responded with choosing the economics of extinction.
If we take the Gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God’s presence in his work and in all his creatures? The answer we may say, is given in Jesus’ teaching about love But that answer raises another question that plunges us into the abyss of our ignorance, which is both human and peculiarly modern. How are we to make of that love an economic practice?
That question calls for many answers and we don’t know most of them. It is a question that those humans who want to answer it will be living and working with for a long time – if they are allowed a long time. Meanwhile, may heaven guard us from those who think they already have the answers.”
-Wendell Berry: yeoman-farmer, poet, essayist, novelist, American prophet
Remnants (first of four)
The prophet Isaiah, addressing a tribe once again exiled, this time among the Assyrians, spoke of the remnant of the just who would inherit a restored kingdom. As the most powerful empire ever assembled starts to crumble, and our geological era, the Cenozoic, heads into its terminal period due to the planet's fifth wave of extinction, we are once again in endtimes of biblical proportions. We must pray for a remnant who will sow the seeds of righteousness among men, as well as a remnant gene pool embedded in an ecosystem sufficient to repopulate the earth's web. For a just remnant at the end of a geological era needs address not only justice to our fellow man, but to the earth itself.
Let's be clear. In the Hebrew Bible, justice was never only a matter of how we treated one another, it operated within a land ethic to which the prophets constantly referred. Theirs was a world of farmers and herders, Cains and Abels, and unless one cared for the land, there could be no justice among men. But all "Axial" religions have worked within the axis of the holocene, the mild, stable climate we have enjoyed for the breadth of the neolithic revolution, or ten thousand years. What kind of ecosystem does the just remnant inherit when the holocene ends, and with it, neolithic stability? What crops does the farmer plant when the capriciousness of the weather becomes fundamental climate shift, and conditions in which crops grow are guaranteed to change during their lifetime? Justice at the end of the Cenozoic is more than human, more than a condition for right governance of lands we have colonized. It is fundamentally ecojustice.
The first remnant in this tradition was Noah, who preserved genetically viable pairs of all the visible species he could fit on the proverbial Ark. At the end of the holocene, we again face a flood, much more threatening than that which occurred in the Black Sea ca. 5600 BCE, yet again called to be Noahs. As with Noah, the just remnant in our time must address conditions not only for our species survival, not just the "land", beloved because of what it gives us, but the very conditions of life on the planet. Radical climate change invokes the possibility of a planetscape like Venus, or the infant Earth, where CO2 is so concentrated that the planet is too hot for life.
Who is this remmant, and how can we assure their success? Isaiah's colleague Elijah fled to the wilderness, fearful for his own preservation, for he considered himself the last just man among the Israelites. Yahweh came to him and said, "What are you doing out here? I tell you there are 7000 just men and women back amongst the tribal settlements. You just don't know who they are..." Elijah packed up and went back to town, reassured that others were quietly reinforcing his work.
Are we the change we have been looking for? The just remnant are not necessarily the prophetic, the charismatic, the self-anointed eco-warriors. One of their characteristics is facelessness and humility. Perhaps we will not recognize them until we become like them.
Let's be clear. In the Hebrew Bible, justice was never only a matter of how we treated one another, it operated within a land ethic to which the prophets constantly referred. Theirs was a world of farmers and herders, Cains and Abels, and unless one cared for the land, there could be no justice among men. But all "Axial" religions have worked within the axis of the holocene, the mild, stable climate we have enjoyed for the breadth of the neolithic revolution, or ten thousand years. What kind of ecosystem does the just remnant inherit when the holocene ends, and with it, neolithic stability? What crops does the farmer plant when the capriciousness of the weather becomes fundamental climate shift, and conditions in which crops grow are guaranteed to change during their lifetime? Justice at the end of the Cenozoic is more than human, more than a condition for right governance of lands we have colonized. It is fundamentally ecojustice.
The first remnant in this tradition was Noah, who preserved genetically viable pairs of all the visible species he could fit on the proverbial Ark. At the end of the holocene, we again face a flood, much more threatening than that which occurred in the Black Sea ca. 5600 BCE, yet again called to be Noahs. As with Noah, the just remnant in our time must address conditions not only for our species survival, not just the "land", beloved because of what it gives us, but the very conditions of life on the planet. Radical climate change invokes the possibility of a planetscape like Venus, or the infant Earth, where CO2 is so concentrated that the planet is too hot for life.
Who is this remmant, and how can we assure their success? Isaiah's colleague Elijah fled to the wilderness, fearful for his own preservation, for he considered himself the last just man among the Israelites. Yahweh came to him and said, "What are you doing out here? I tell you there are 7000 just men and women back amongst the tribal settlements. You just don't know who they are..." Elijah packed up and went back to town, reassured that others were quietly reinforcing his work.
Are we the change we have been looking for? The just remnant are not necessarily the prophetic, the charismatic, the self-anointed eco-warriors. One of their characteristics is facelessness and humility. Perhaps we will not recognize them until we become like them.
Labels: Axial religions, ecojustice, Elijah, holocene, Isaiah, just remnant, Noah, remnant
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