ecospirit

THE SHAMAN AND THE INQUIRER

2012-01-05T12:46:00.003-05:00

Two traditions have anchored my personal spiritual practice since laying down college teaching at the millennium, returning to Appalachia to work for the healing of the earth – and myself. The first set of practices clusters around enlarging my field of awareness to honor the entire earth system, Gaia, as a divine whole and in her particulars, both saying thanks for participation in the exquisite natural world in the Southern Highlands and in grieving what we are losing here and elsewhere. This practice, which still feels like an apprenticeship after 10 years, grows out of my encounters and training with Joanna Macy and her process of accepting the despair which we all carry for the earth, then moving through it to empowering our place in healing the earth. All of this is framed by prayers of thanksgiving, both for what the earth gives us, and for the opportunity to speak and act on her behalf. Joanna Macy's training is in Tibetan Buddhism, which honors the natural world and a host of divinities who embody natural forces and characteristics. It incorporates elements of Himalayan shamanism as well as pre-Buddhist India, both Vedic and animistic. Though the modern term for this approach, following Arne Naess, is “Deep Ecology,” I name it as shamanistic: practices that honor the divinity shot through all of creation, mirroring each aspect through our own consciousness and ritual.

The second set of practices grows out of Advaita Vedanta. Historical circumstance threw me into the midst of a religion that accepted and accommodated every practice in South Asia, including yoga, animism, as well as priestly brahmanism and polytheism. Though I was taken by everything about the Hindu culture in 1968, it was self-inquiry as taught by Ramana Maharshi that affected me most deeply. He took the ancient practice of the jnana yogi, neti, neti – which recognized the ineffable quality of the divine by saying “not this, not that” to every experience or formulation of God, turning it into the simple inquiry, the vichara, “Who am I?” For every experience, including the customary practice of dividing experience into body-mind (the “self”), the world, and god, is at root only the emanation of the Self, (Brahman), the ultimate creator, sustainer and destroyer of the universe. The I thought is primary, and no other thought or image is possible without it. This primal thought itself arises as an epiphenomenal miracle from the Self, which is all that exists.

After a couple of years of intermittent practice as a young adult, I quit, frustrated with my lack of progress. Then, a few years ago, I discovered, virtually in my backyard, a community that trains folks in the Maharshi's self-inquiry. Turns out that the practice which the ashram authorities forbade to be transmitted at the Maharshi's ashram in South India has been taught since 1978 in NC, first in Greensboro at a storefront, now at a rural ashram near Asheboro, home of the NC Zoo. The center calls itself AHAM (Association for the Happiness of All Mankind), and its training in self-inquiry is authentic, augmented by a highly supportive structure for thoroughly incorporating the teaching in one's life.

Since re-encountering self-inquiry through the AHAM community, I have prioritized this practice. As the Maharshi said, one must always come to this in the end, no matter what practice one follows initially. But I sense that I am not sufficiently honoring the Tibetan-shamanistic practices I learned from Joanna. I am not moving through despair to an affirmation of the essential joy of our true creative nature that the Maharshi says is our natural state, and which I usually re-experience when I do the deep ecology exercises. Instead of using the sympathetic identification of shamanism, I merely glance outdoors and retire to my meditation cushion, where I struggle with the endless stream of thoughts. They occasionally cease long enough to dive within to the questions, who's experiencing, who's thinking, to the gateway question, “who am I?” There is rarely very much energy in the process (maybe I should do more yoga first, or pranayam {breathing exercises}, I ask myself). I struggle to get beyond a deadening apathy, stalked by despair over the state of the earth that I hold at bay long enough to engage in the effort at meditation.

Occasionally this works, ending despair by letting it in, going through it, and simply cutting off the feeling by retracing the I-thought, undoing karma. Despair, and any other feeling or thought, is totally destroyed as soon as one asks, “who's thinking ..who's feeling? But when the vichara is working, even with the eyes open, the world feels unreal, like an image, a mirage. When the shamanistic practice works, on the other hand, I enter into identification with the world as plant, creature or natural feature, and what starts to feel unreal is experiencing myself as a separate entity. The practice takes me outside of myself, beyond experiencing that self as encapsulated in my body, breaking down boundaries, rendering them more fluid. I expand my identity, beginning to experience what Naess called the ecological self.

So it feels like the two practices are moving in opposite directions. It is true that each of them moves beyond the ego, the little tyrant who converts everything to his dominion. Shamanism moves beyond the ego through identification with wider and wider circles of being. I am that too. Advaita, especially through the Marharshi's self-inquiry, moves beyond the ego by going through it more deeply within, moving into identity with the Self who creates the world, including Gaia in all her multifaceted being. The “I” disappears into its source, like waves into the ocean. I am only That.

I deeply honor both of these practices, and have had remarkable experiences using each method. Shamanism feels closer to my experience, because I am an embodied being. But Advaita feels fundamentally true, however fleetingly I experience its core: I am that I am. To choose one over the other feels fundamentally wrong. What eludes me is integrating them.

NEXT: Thoughts about integration of the two practices.

Climate Negotiations Sorely Test Advent

2011-12-08T17:01:00.003-05:00

Advent has become the season of UN Climate Framework talks. Always my favorite season, these annual negotiations now both deepen and heavily freight the season, a real test for the depth of my belief. Two years ago, I wrote here of a “Tiny Advent Star,” a fragile little symbol of hope in the snow pattern on my deck. This year, that star is gone. No Obama coming to “save” the talks, not one single person from the US Congress at the proceedings. In the middle of the current talks, a binding international climate treaty seems further away than ever.

I wrote then of the hope in the international community; that even if our politics were dominated by climate change denialists, other countries, including Russia and Japan (and of course Europe), were solidly convinced by the science. This year, Russia and Japan have joined the US and Canada in an attempt to block renewal of the Kyoto Protocol. Obama claims to be hamstrung by the domestic politics that George Bush and colleagues from his party engineered. There are powerful leaders, eloquent voices at Durban, but they come from civil society and First Nations, not the UN's constituent states. Bolivia's Evo Morales was impressive at Copenhagen, but only a massive peasant uprising prevented him (for now) from building a highway right through the heart of the forested Motherland he spoke so eloquently about preserving. Our leaders have feet of clay, and politics at all levels have increasingly ruled the proceedings. The hosts at Durban were embarrassed by an ugly outpouring of secular politics as the ANC youth brigade disrupted the massive protest parade on Saturday.

Last week I was in despair over the state of things in Durban. Unable to use coginitve tools or meditation techniques to stop the worsening spiral, I went deeply inside, and found the image of a very young child with purple eyes, looking straight at me, the very picture of Advent. This image stayed with me the rest of the morning, and has buoyed me since, even as the news from Durban has worsened. Jesus Christ is not my personal master, but while singing in the chorus for “Amahl and the Night Visitors” the next evening, I heard Balthazar sing of a child he had never seen, but “with eyes of a king.” If ever we needed a Second Coming, it is now.

Speaking at Durban Saturday, Desmond Tutu reminded us that few imagined South Africa would emerge from apartheid without major bloodshed, yet we all witnessed a political “miracle.” He asked us to believe in one more, a climate treaty breakthrough in that same country fifteen years later. Many have prayed deeply for such a miracle over these last few days. Today, it has been pronounced dead by a key tireless champion, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

A tough, binding inernational treaty with all major polluters signing on, including the US, China, and India, has been at the core of my commitment to mitigating massive climate change. Now, without such an agreement, the landscape looks bleak. We now must have the courage to keep the movement outside the convention center alive and growing. George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement to which I belong, said in the mid-seventeenth century that “Jesus Christ has come to teach his people himself.” What he meant was that Christ never left this world, but awaits our awakening to Him within our hearts as the Inner Light.

So the miracle Tutu speaks of is now in our hands, if we submit to the governance of that Light. It is abundantly clear that elected officials and international bodies are not capable of achieving what we must do ourselves. We need to establish a people's agreement akin to the Occupy movement outside the halls of formal treaties that will require the politicians to join us if they want to be part of the New Order. Advent is an eternal moment where we reawaken to a spiritual reality that already exists. If this earth is to remain the occasion for such a reality, then we need to make the streets, the squares, and the sanctuaries ours in the same spirit of non-violent resistance that lead Christ and Gandhi. If we do, the halls of Congress will resonate with a new sound, or else become irrelevant to history's tide. Now is the time to become those we have been waiting for, re-empowering the dispossessed and healing the suffering earth. May we be blessed with courage for the immense struggle ahead.

POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND ITS VICISSITUDES

2011-11-21T10:49:00.002-05:00

A true patriot, as well as a global citizen, would understand that the twin towers of climate change and peak oil necessitate building the foundations of a totally new society, ramping down the industrial revolution that coal and oil have made possible. But a nation addicted to the ease fossil fuels have created, and one political party in particular that draws its support from denial and reactionary fear of the inevitable changes, make this difficult.

From my perspective, the place of politics in the current situation is first to accept the incontrovertible reality of the twin challenges, and then get about the business of crafting legislation and negotiating treaties that will help us make the descent. Legitimate grounds for debate remain. How much should the government regulate the process, how much should be left to business, and who has juridicatory priority in the federal-state-local locus? We need to get on with crafting a political response based on reality, not the fantasy of unlimited growth. And informed, morally-grounded voters need to push the process, so that the 2010 election does not initiate the final slide into the barbarism that would come from a rapid disintegration of a society where the expansion of gun rights sets up the conditions for civil war of the kind the truckers promised if Obama were elected.

I wrote this in July 2010. The 2010 election is now history, and the new political reality has moved the climate debate to efforts to disempower the EPA, which has become de facto the key player in slowing the rate of climate change, now fully upon us. Climate legislation is in limbo, if not dead, and the US negotiating posture leading up to the UN sponsored annual climate talks in Durban, South Africa has hardened. Chief negotiator Todd Stern has signaled that we should not expect any breakthroughs, and the US recently joined Saudi Arabia in vetoing a Green Climate Fund to be ratified at the conference.

The business of climate denial has been hugely successful, manipulated by the same firm that masterminded the tobacco industry's decades-long dishonesty about smoking and cancer. A memo from one of the oil companies puts the strategy in a nutshell: “Reposition global warming as a theory, not a fact.” And the wholesale embrace of this position by the Republican Party (except for Jon Huntsman), coupled with a swelling conservative reaction to fears of the manifold changes unfolding at every level on the planet suggests that denialism is entrenched in our society.

Al Gore's “24 Hours” simulcast in September was designed to counteract this wave. If you base your judgment rationally, and have a decent grasp of science and statistics, then you would have been reconvinced by the powerful array of evidence. But deniers are acting from the gut, not the head, and the presence of Gore himself in the program was enough for many to close their ears. Indeed, the main purpose of the program may have been to arm climate activists in their effort to sway deniers. As Gore said, you need to have the tools and rhetorical ability to “win the argument....don't let them have the last word.” But winning the argument based on science is not going to sway these folks. In the interfaith climate movement, we are encouraged to talk about values, not scientific facts. But personally, the enormity of the facts drives me to live my values, and to see where my behavior is not consonant with them. This is not simply a morality play, where the outcome is measured by the fate of the individual soul. It is a struggle to maintain a place for intelligent life on this planet. And the facts matter, overwhelmingly, in understanding our historic moment.

Clearly what the polity needs is to insulate the problem from tired political alignments, to help our neighbors see our mutual plight with a few telling facts, some good stories bearing on the issue. The Transition movement has adhered to this, and is creating communities positioning themselves for a sustainable future outside traditional politics. Churches could also play a huge role, especially if the mainstream could be challenged by green evangelicals on the West Coast and the liberal churches in the East. And now we have Occupy Wall Street and the many co-occupations it has engendered in solidarily Though crackdowns have begun, the movment is into its third month, and there are clear signs of resilience in cities where the authorities have shut them down. I spent a day at Zircotti Park at the end of October, and found people willing to listen to straight talk about climate change. I actually needed to clarify the facts for one young protester who thought that we could solve the energy problem with nuclear reactors, abandoning efforts with solar because it was not cost-effective, both incomplete truths.

We need to abandon the old political labels and re-vision the critical problems of our society as mutual. We need to do everything we can to encourage politicians to act for the good of the nation, not for party or personal power, and thus work for bipartisan solutions that the President has consistently sought. The task is enormous, but the stakes are immense. We each have a role to play in this. Talk to your neighbors of a different political stripe; get to know your political representatives, no matter which party they represent. We need a national conversation of the sort that the Occupy Movement is calling for. Some would say it has begun.

Despair as an Invitation to Vision and Honest Hope

2011-09-27T12:06:00.006-04:00

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.
-James Baldwin

A few weeks ago at our small rural Friends Meeting, I spoke on the theme of the fading dream of humanity living gently on the earth. A dear friend had requested that we sing “I Dreamed a Dream” - an iconic song of innocent hope. When we got to the line, “The dream fades...”, I thought of our present dilemma, caught under the towering tsunami of climate change. The songwriter moves from fading dream to present vision, but my heart did not. After we settled into worship, I spoke about this feeling, recounting a brief history of climate change public opinion and politics since the wake-up occasioned by “An Inconvenient Truth.” I noted that many, including some sitting in our lovely meeting house, have gone back to sleep, and, given the present alignment of Congress and a weak Executive, the window for ordinary political action has closed.

The Meeting had recently supported my civil disobedience and arrest at the White House over the tarsands pipeline. I acknowledged this, and called for folks to join me. I did not speak from a place of helplessness, but owned my sadness, and the sense that this Woodstock era song felt dated. Feeling pulled into the maw of despair, I fumbled a bit to recall words from another time, when I spoke of the need for “honest hope.” But in the end the power of the song, still ringing in my heart, took over, and I heard my last words as I sat down, that sustainable life on earth was a “fading dream.”

I have been speaking in churches for almost a decade now, and learned from my early experiences in the pulpit that people need hope even more than they need to face the facts of our present predicament. So I tend to end all my messages on a hopeful tone, which for me, consists in a deep faith in our Creator, a faith that extends beyond the present universe into the depths of Her power to create anew, no matter how badly we may fail as stewards in this one. But this time I did not end on a note of hope.

If matters had been left there, with the words “fading dream” still reverberating as we closed meeting, I would have failed in my role as a faith leader in my community. Fortunately, traditional Quakers do not have ministers who control the liturgy and the pulpit. So, at the end of Meeting, two Friends rose to speak. One recounted recently hearing the Dalai Lama speak, who reaffirmed hope even in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems. As a teacher of religious studies at a Quaker secondary school, he added that hope is the wellspring of all religions. The second simply affirmed George Fox's statement, to look for that of God in everyone. So the collective ministry of the Meeting ministered to the congregants' need for hope.

Though I have clerked two Quaker meetings and served many years as clerk of Ministry and Nurture for yearly meeting, I have been eldered more than once for being too despairing. After all, it is our task to wait silently until we clearly hear the voice of God prompting us to speak. Given God's infinite potency, God's speech is not a message of despair. We may despair before the vision of God in the Whirlwind, or the Tsunami of Climate Change, but God within these powers and visions works thus to awaken us. What I want to acknowledge is that despair is a sign of honest awakening from the torpor of apathy and denial. If love is the first motion, then awakening to the recognition of our sin – being cut off from God and Her Creation - is the beginning of the motion back. Fox, in his journal passage prior to the famous quote on that of God in everyone, spoke of his prolonged experience of the Ocean of Darkness that leads to the Ocean of Light, if we have the courage to cross it.

So I reaffirm the need to face the facts of the present human and planetary condition, not to deny or gloss over them. If we really take in the depth and scope of our predicament, we may well despair. I also reaffirm that a practice such as Joanna Macy's despair and empowerment is critical in keeping our hope honest. We need to go into our despair, not avoid it, which only leads to a deadening, quickly becoming apathy. Into it and through it, either with the help of a trainer like Joanna in the context of group wisdom, or through a well-grounded personal spiritual practice. On the other side of despair, one frequently experiences a heightened sense of creativity and energy to deal with our dilemmas. If we block negative emotion, we close down the full range of response that unlocks our innate evolutionary creativity, opening the door to honest hope.

But is “honest hope” a non-sequitur? In the sense that hope is boundless, yes. And if we interpret honest hope to be a synonym for rational odds, then we're not talking about hope. On the other hand, innocent, untested hope has blind faith that our “unnegotiable” way of life, our capitalist religion, will save us, even in the face of a climate catastrophe whose parameters are being set more deeply every day. Hope for this world is always incomplete, ultimately a lie. The ultimate hope is in the Lord, the Creator, wherein dwells the possibility of the Phoenix Universe beyond this one. And that is where my ministry, even as it traverses the Ocean of Darkness that dominates our present world, needs to rest.

Overcoming the Tar Sands

2011-08-27T06:59:00.002-04:00

On Tuesday, August 23, I committed civil disobedience at the White House gates, part of a group of 60. We were cohorts for the fourth day of a two-week action trying to convince the President that granting permission to build a pipeline from Montana to the Texas refineries for crude oil gathered by extraordinarily polluting means in Alberta is not “in the national interest.”

Like the actions the two previous days, we were treated with respect and processed quickly. In my case, it was less than two and a half hours from arrest to release. This was not the case for the first group, which included several of our leaders, including Bill McKibben , Gus Speth, and Mike Tidwell. They spent three days in jail, arraigned and then left to wait for a court date to be set after the weekend. The authorities indicated this was meant to discourage others. It has not, for volunteers for cd continue to sign up daily, with over 2500 promising to attend the rallies, a significant number of whom will refuse to obey the dispersal order. To date, that number is 322.

The rally and action were well organized. We heard from McKibben, then the Montana Grandmothers, fresh from the Exxon Yellowstone spill, reminding us that their state was the US entry point for the pipeline, running under two major rivers there. Lastly, we listened to a quiet, dignified Native woman from the Athabasca Tarsands, Linda. When she took the mike, her speech was so soft that the large circle of us listening crowded closer, more intimate. This was her tone as well when we stood in defiance of the police order to disperse. She knelt in front of me, holding the shoulders of one of the women she had befriended and I heard her speak a prayer in her native language. Her presence was key, reminding us that the Athabasca River had been turned into both fire hydrant, source for billions of gallons of water to steam-cleanse the tar, and sewer for the toxic wastes. This homeland for the Athabasca Nation is being totally destroyed by the operation as the natives either look on helplessly, or become tarsands miners and waitresses or worse. Remember, an areas the size of Florida is being stripped for the bitumenous “tar.”

From the beginning, we were told that our tone and dress was to be dignified. But the first few days' arrest procedures were prolonged, and the group silence oppressive. So our group learned chants and a song, tarsands words set to “If It Hadn't Been for Love,” which we sang as call and response with our supporters, about a hundred folks on the other side of the police barricade. I was a chant leader and enjoyed it. Another chant leader, a young man arrested early because of his energetic leadership, continued to lead chants from the paddywagon, conveniently parked near the support line.

I confess that I am not a political animal by temperament, but a thinker. So, as has been the case with all the protest rallies in which I have taken part, some of the chant language made me uncomfortable, In this instance, the particulary troubling line was “give the people what we need” - the rhyme for “stop the pipeline, stop the greed...” The problem is that most people don't know what we need in terms of energy, and the movement has not clearly articulated an alternative that the policy wonks, as opposed to fellow enviros, buy. When Al Gore, whom I greatly admire, says that we can build an equivalent energy economy with solar in ten years, he is basing his claim on a fringe, not the core of alternative energy analysts.

Frankly, when we followed the suggestion to sing, “We Shall Overcome” - adding the verse, “We shall heal the earth” - I was moved in a way that WASP cheerleading “tarsands – NO!, pipeline – NO!” - repeated ad nauseum, did not. Afterwards, I suggested to one of the organizers that we adopt this moving hymn as part of our daily ritual, especially since our action coincided with events surrounding the dedication of the ML King Memorial. She firmly disagreed, saying that the song's sentiments were actually an insult to the natives in Athabasca. They will not overcome, for their land has been totally taken over for this rape on an unprecedented scale. She repeated what she has said twice the night before at our training, “This is serious, so we must be serious.”

I disagreed with her. I have been writing and speaking about climate change for almost a decade, and the feedback I get, especially from the churches where I have been asked to preach, is that my message is too despairing. People need hope, for as long as there is even cause for a mere ounce. My own take is to affirm “honest hope” (CITE Dumonoski).

Indeed, the “we” in the song is not the Athabasca Indians, at least not in this terrestrial sphere. But those standing and sitting in at the White House are not stand-ins for these native people. We acknowledge the anguish of their unutterable loss, but it is we, students, retirees, and mostly middle-class US citizens, who are committing to overcoming. Overcoming the greed of the oilmen, the hubris of politicians (like Obama) who feel they are indispensable to the (mostly partisan and global corporate ) good they push for, and our own addiction to petroluem is what I commit myself to, not to overcome what has already happened to the Athabascans and their land. Even if this terrible outcome cannot be reversed, if we stop the pipeline to the Gulf -- as the sovereign native nations have to the west of the mines by several separate litigations – then we will leave the project managers and their filthly tar landlocked, their own hopes for profit defeated. Overcome.

Alberta Tarsands Pipeline: Keystone to Our Tombstone?

2011-07-31T17:10:00.007-04:00

With the world's oil reserves dwindling, and production at a plateau for the last 4 years, oilmen view putting into production the world's huge tarsands deposits as key to averting peak oil and the harrowing descent on the other side. Mining these tarsands was not economical until the price of oil rose to its recent highs above one hundred dollars a barrel. Now their moment has come. Alberta and Venezuela, with the richest deposits, have estimated reserves of 3.6 trillion barrels, compared to remaining global conventional deposits of 1.75 trillion barrels. Venezuela has had political problems in organizing the capital-and-technology intensive process of harvesting these reserves, but Alberta has aggressively moved to successfully mine, seperate, recombine and finally export as heavy crude the little globules of bitumen. They have been doing this during those four years, keeping the flow of oil going in the face of steady diminishment. Canada's tarsands project is the finger in the oil dike, allowing the global economy to continue its addiction to petroleum, just barely.

The problem is that our fossil fuel habit is rendering earth atmosphere suffocating through the steady increase in CO2. Burning fossil fuels is the chief contributor to accelerating climate change. Getting these little bituminous globules, nicknamed tar, into a form that can flow through a pipeline is complicated and expensive, both in dollars and in carbon emissions. The globules are mixed with sand, clay and low-grade ores, and must be “fracked” by using high-pressure steam, which requires a lot of water. Canada has plenty of that, but exporting drinking water and channeling it into agriculture, which a warmer, drier world is going to be even more desperate for, might be more important uses (never mind the forests and lakes and birds who need it). In addition, miners must burn natural gas to liquify the viscous oil sufficiently so it will flow through the pipes. Overall, emissions from tar sands production are 3x that of conventional crude.

But this is only the beginning of the problems of utilizing this marginal source of oil. It contains 11x the nickel and sulfur, 6x the nitrogen, and 5x the lead of conventional oil. What happens with these pollutants when you refine this crude (after hydrofracking) into gasoline? You guessed it. When the Soviets were forced to abandon their client Cuba, the Cubans needed to use local deposits of heavily sulfured petroleum to run their power grid. Burning it has created severe air pollution.

Mining tarsands is an environmental catastrophe, its toxic tailing ponds visible from space. When fully implemented, the surface mining will strip away a total area of forest and peat the size of Florida. Alberta alone creates more CO2 than 145 nations. Put another way, it stands sixth among nations in emissions. As Ryan Salmon, energy policy advisor to National Wildlife Federation put it, the site of extraction constitutes “wholesale destruction of the ecosystem.” It is the single most destructive project on earth.

Alberta is remote, far to the west of Canada, so how do they get this heavy crude to market? Though there are nearer ports, the big refinery complex around Houston is an attractive target for extension of an existing pipeline to Oklahoma. Another has been built to Wisconsin (jauntily and ironically named the Alberta Clipper), with the Great Lakes nearby for shipping, but the proposed Trans Canada pipeline, called the Keystone, would complete a pipleline running through the heartland to Texas. It seems to be key to reaching a global market, with the oil-starved US being the first beneficiary.

After quickly granting the permit to build the pipeline to Wisconsin, the US State Department has called for a series of studies before granting permission for the transcontinental Keystone, responding to protests from environmentalist groups and landholders along the route, including tribes of both the US and Canada. Studies show that a rupture could release 7 million gallons of oil. But that pales in comparison to the environmental costs of the basic operation, which is fundamentally flawed from an ecological point of view. State is calling for a decision by the end of the year. It is ultimately up to the President, and some sources say he will decide by the end of September.

Stopping this project is not going to be easy. It already has a lot of momentum. To encourage President Obama to make the right decision, a politically tough one, Bill McKibben has called for greens to up the stakes. He and 350.org are calling for an ongoing action at the White House gates, running August 20-September 3, waves of protesters, with many each day willing to commit civil disobedience. I am one of them.

This is a key moment for the US and world energy economy. It is also an absolutely crucial moment for maintaining a climate for human life as we know it. If there is no Keystone, then the arch of toxic economy is weakened. Put into place, it may well complete the tombstone of civilization. Think about that as you plan where you'll be during those two last weeks of summer.

SWAMI PREMANAND AND THE TIGER

2011-05-30T09:52:00.005-04:00

“Swamiji, I fear for the tigers. They are on the brink of extinction. Such a magnificent creature, yet people don't seem to care, busily building lives that will seal its doom. But even more than the tigers, I fear for the earth. Climate change is going to wipe out so many species, and civilization itself is at risk. We are changing the atmosphere, creating another earth than the one that has provided our home.”

Swami Premanand listened with his familiar look of intelligent attention. He is the living link to my wife Geeta's lineage of Himalayan teachers, a swami beloved by our entire family. I searched his face for the sympathy that I so often found when relating a personal problem. Then he said abruptly, “And I fear the sky will turn pink.” He laughed, and that was that.

Stunned, I didn't know what to say. It was morning, and the household of our Bangalore hosts was waking. He had devotees to attend to, a talk that evening. I just sat there, wanting to extend the conversation, to hear his stories about tigers – he always had a story about everything. And yes, to defend my life focus, doing what I could to preserve a livable earth. But there were no landing places to carry this conversation forward. Now, several months later, I want to try again, in the form of an open letter.

Premanandji,
You may recall the conversation we had in Bangalore in February. I brought up my fear for the tigers, on the brink of extinction, and for the earth itself, with human activity creating carbon emissions that are rapidly changing the world's climate (I didn't mention last year's floods in Pakistan, with areas affected in your adoped Himalaya as well). You listened to my concerns, answering, “And I fear the sky will turn pink.”

Swamiji, we all are beset by various fears, some more rational than others. Yes, I understand what you were saying. Our fears, both rational and fancied, have nothing to do with Brahman, the very foundation of the apparent world. They have everything to do with Maya, the world as various forms of illusion: dream, thought, matter in its sundry forms and patterns.

You told Geeta that you have climbed the Mountain very far, not to the top, but close, and that you can see others traveling various paths to the summit. Well, Swamiji, I must be climbing on the other side of the mountain, perhaps very near the base. I love this earth, and I love the possibilities given with a human birth. For me, such a birth necessitates the challenge of living in a way that sustains the earth herself as a context for life and the continuing challenges and joys of humans and other beings living within her web. As you know, this is the main reason I don't often see you, for I am concerned about the carbon emissions associated with air travel.

Coming to your land where she still has a pawhold, I love the tiger, beset as she is by encroaching human development and, especially in the remote mountains north of you, poachers. The tiger, if it is an illusion, is a particularly beautifully designed one. My son Jesse, whom you know, said that seeing a tiger his last day at Jim Corbett Park was the most profound experience of his life. Like Jesse, I feel that this world would be much poorer if they were to vanish forever.

Is it foolish to have a sense of beauty? To judge a creature as magnificent, and to have awe before it? My own understanding is that everything, including Maya, is fashioned by God, and that is also the understanding of the English poet William Blake, who wrote this poem:

Tyger! Tyger!, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears
and water'd heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

As for the sky turning pink, your mockingly fanciful “fear,” this leads us to whether or not science is a special case, a special form of inquiry, alongside the other examples in Vedanta's exposition hall of illusions. Postmodern theory often lumps science with all other forms of knowledge, calling it the “myth of science.” According to this view, all forms of knowledge are simply asserting their own particular story of how the world came to be and how it works. None of them has any privileged position, any stronger truth claim.

Swamiji, my first “conversion” was to Plato and his theory of Forms. Vedanta teaches that Brahman, the unnameable, is the only reality. Plato's vision is that the only reality is the eternal form of things, and that our changeable world is but a play of shadows cast by the Forms, flickering on the walls of a cave. Resting on this view of things, I studied the theory of symbolic forms. According to this view, each of the disciplines has a particular form, a set of criteria, for looking at the world: history, art, myth and religion, science. Science has a particularly powerful lens upon the world, for it is bound by a stringent set of rules of inquiry, comprising the scientific method. Science requires that a hypothesis be predictive and the results replicable over many instances. Even then, it never asserts that it has found “Truth,” but, when a given hypothesis gains enough predictive and replicable power, it gains the privileged title “theory.” This is where climate science is now, its models displaying a frighteningly uncanny ability to predict with ever-increasing accuracy the kinds of unusual weather events that come with a changing climate.

This is not, dear teacher, a matter of individual fancied fears, but the working of a powerful set of tools, utilized by a global set of trained experts backed up by 25,000 data sets from all imaginable settings. What we are seeing is the work of the laws of physics and chemistry, displayed throughout this remarkable living earth system, driven by human activity on a scale that amounts to an assault on the stable weather patterns of the Holocene. As a Christian minister said on his blog in response to those who would deny climate change (a very powerful group in this country), “I believe in the laws of physics.” These laws operate independently of whether or not we believe in the “myth of science.”

When the colonial Quaker statesman William Penn earnestly inquired whether he should cease wearing his sword, a sign of his social class, our prophet George Fox answered, “Wear thy sword as long as thou canst.” Swamiji, science, the laws of physics, is the sword I still hold. And I find it significant that our dear friend and environmental champion Sunderlal Bahuguna, whom you know, argues that the union of science and Vedanta is the chief hope of this poor world.

Last night at dinner with friends, I related the topic of this post. The response was illuminating. One friend, a medical person with Buddhist training who accepts the findings of climate science, seized instead upon the form of the emotion, fear. He pointed out that fear was not a good motivator, and that perhaps you were not denying the science at all, simply mocking my fear – as well as affirming the Vedantic perspective on the illusion of material form.

This of course places the entire conversation in a new light, leading to stronger forms of motivation to combat climate change. Going back over this post, I see love, a sense of beauty, and awe instinctively creeping into my defense of the tiger. Awakening the kind of awe which Blake displays in his poem, which brings with it gratitude, love, as well as the most profound sense of godly fear, could truly transform the human presence on this planet.

As for my worries about creation and what we humans are wreaking upon it, I have posted before – answered by yet another swami. Clearly I still have much to learn.

Crucifying the Earth: The Conjunction of Earth Day and Good Friday

2011-04-21T21:19:00.008-04:00

Matthew Fox said it years ago. We are crucifying the earth. This week the calendar suggests as much, for Good Friday and Earth Day fall on the same day.

I live in the Bible Belt, and thus resisted the urge to publish my thoughts on the implications of this conjunction in the local paper. It would only arouse defensiveness, much as a recent pastor's statement that he “believes in the laws of physics.” Neither prophetic theology nor the laws of physiscs are verly popular these days. If we care about the earth, our purpose is not to score points, but to arouse the sleeping prophet-citizen to action. But for the discerning audience of this blog, the conjunction is worth examining.

When I suggested at Celo Friends Meeting at the beginning of this Earth Week that we look at the conjunction as a query, there were many responses, ranging from affirming the importance of spring rituals of rebirth (including the environmental movement, and our commitment to it) to the statement, “The earth is not a passive victim, but an elemental force we ignore at our peril. Witness recent events..”

This last statement gets beyond the general - though profound – rebirth analogies. Frankly, I was not thinking resurrection when I pointed to the conjunction, but the systematic, willful torture of the biosphere for our narrow interest, our enormous greed, colonizing the earth for our species' imperial appetite. Yes, I would answer my neighbors, theologically, there are clear differences. The key one is that once dead, the earth will not be reborn. The Creator has infinite power to create other universes, other planets with life, including intelligent life capable of seeking out its Source. But this earth, once past its developmental ability to evolve higher life, will not be “reborn” in any significant sense.

Insightful ecologists point out that we are not trying to save the earth so much as save the possibility of civilized higher life within it. To “crucify” implies that the earth is other, is an enemy, is alien, yet we are part of the earth's fabric. Crucifixion is perhaps not the best metaphor. Cancer would be more like it, where aberrant cells attack the host. Aiding and abetting that cancer through behavior normalized by habitual industrial behavior amounts to suicide. Destroying ourselves, we will bring down huge portions of the earths' intermeshed fabric of species. The fabric will reweave, using the waning energy of the sun during the waning of the earth and its host universe. But the time, as James Lovelock points out, will be insufficient for the aging earth to orchestrate an alchemy requiring enormous evolutionary time to fulfill. Peter Sawtell believes in the laws of physics, and so do I. I also agree with the laws of evolutionary biology, for which we have God to thank.

The analogy of crucifixion for the death-dance we are playing as hosts of higher life on this remarkable planet may be inexact, but consider the following: mountaintop removal, blowing up an area of the Appalachians greater than Rhode Island in three states, sending the rubble into streams, permanently blocking them, incidentally destroying many small mining towns. Deepwater drilling into the seabed, extracting oil from hundreds of square miles of ocean floor, endangering the entire oceanic ecosystem. Drilling and mining of all kinds, which was prohibited by ancient peoples, sensitive that the earth was Mother. These activities of piercing the earth begin to compare with the piercing and bloodletting of the Savior, do they not? The most striking crucifixion image analogue for me comes from hydrofracking . When gas companies inject their proprietary poison, mixed with water, into the Marcellus Shale and other irregular deposits of methane, the resultant cracking of underground bedrock creates a whole network of jagged fissures. What do you see when you observe the image? I see a crown of thorns embedded in the earth herself. It is absolutely striking.

The depletion and poisoning of water, so much more essential than oil, gas and coal, goes beyond the image of crucifixion by piercing. The other hugely desperate campaign of flushing oil from tarsands is currently consuming a significant portion of Canada's greatest resource, fresh water. We are starving species, steadily robbing habitat to swell the ranks of modern cities and farms, and now we are systematically removing freshwater from terrestrial life through industrial-scale mining of water. This larger context is not crucifixion so much as suicidal madness.

The moral crux for me is the whole business of forgiveness, and the admonition to accept it and to go and sin no more. As he lay dying, Jesus of Nazareth asked his Father to forgive them, for they know not what they do. Mother earth will not - cannot - forgive. She will persevere, although in a diminished state of complexity and wonder. And what, pray, would the father God's forgiveness mean if there were no suitable biosphere in which to continue to enact moral choice? If we fail to respond to humanity's greatest moral crisis, then presuming to understand the nature of the inscrutable, unknowable Creator's forgiveness as the trans-earthly resurrection of at least a generation of ecological sinners is frankly meaningless theologizing.

So do we know what we do? What canst thou say, oh earth citizen? My answer is yes, I know, and I keep on doing it, though moderated both by a sense of guilt and an inconstant love of the rest of Creation. I strive to be an earth citizen, but in terms of behavior, I live an industrial lifestyle, in my best years (depending on air travel) emitting five times the sustainable share of CO2 – and that's living at half the American standard.

Crucifixion, cancer, species suicide, we are all culpable. Those who kill the Earth Tree sprout on all sides: the right-wingers who would deny the laws of physics because they prefer the notion of radical freedom of a creature who is nevertheless totally enveloped in the web of creation; the liberals, Sierra Club types who want to preserve post-card views of nature while contributing far more than the poor mountaineer to its destruction by their life-style and investment habits; the progressives who would shut down all coal and nuclear plants while continuing to live industrial lifestyles insupportable by a utopian future solely powered by renewable energy sources; terrorists and the armies of the “just” who wantonly lay waste the earth as they struggle for geopolitical and ideological dominance. All of us, but especially the politicians on all sides who are more interested in re-election than in conserving the basis of civilized life

And who are the blameless? The tiny tattered bands of First Peoples deep in the forests, now numbering only a few million, who, like so many other creatures, suffer from rapidly-diminishing habitat. They and a scattering of courageous, brilliant small farmers and tinkerers are the remnant from which continued higher life on earth, still a remote possibility, might spring again. Perhaps it is more accurate to say it is these First Peoples who are crucified, and the preservation of the essential functional human form is a kind of resurrection. If we lived as they do, we would not have had to invent Earth Day, nor arguably, would a savior-god have had to be crucified to bring meaning to the lives of masses brought in great confusion to urban centers in the aftermath of broken tribal organization.

Informed by the ecologist's understanding of our deeply enmeshed life within a biocentric web, I nevertheless accept the Tea Party's emphasis on individual freedom. We are free to make moral choice, giving us meaning as beings, equally giving God's wager on us meaning, rather then simply creating puppets. Perhaps even more important, the saving grace, is that God is free to start over with Creation if his appointed stewards trash this one. I fear that if is perilously close to when. God have mercy upon us, and save us from our lost selves.

CLIMATE DENIAL II: the MASSIVE CONTINENT UNDERNEATH

2011-02-28T20:19:00.008-05:00

The world is warming. No arguing this. The Greenland ice shelf is melting, the Arctic's been ice-free for the last couple of summers, the West Antarctic ice shelf is starting to disintegrate. All of this guarantees sea-level rise, the question is simply how much (a meter and a half to 15 meters, excluding most of Antarctica). In an Oscar-nominated film, “Sun Come Up,” filmmakers document the disappearance of the Carteret islands off Indonesia, and the relocation of its people. Permafrost in the northern tundra is melting, releasing an accelerating amount of a vast methane sink, and methane is 24 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2. Last summer there were widespread fires in Russia, disrupting grain production, blanketing Moscow in smoke for weeks. Flooding in Pakistan and Australia has come from unseasonable rainfall and disruption of the Indian monsoon. Deserts are increasing, including the North American southwest, which may now be in a fateful shift from semi-arid to arid. The oceans have taken up so much CO2 that they are acidifying, threatening creatures that manufacture shells and tiny plankton that form the base of the marine food chain. We are already past some key climatic tipping points.

In the face of all these undeniable facts, there are a disturbing number of public figures who claim that climate change is a hoax . But more generally, the argument is over the cause. It goes, sure there's warming, but it's part of a cyclical pattern. Moreover, CO2 levels do not predict warming, they follow it. These folks, who receive far more press than their numbers (in both senses) deserve, agree there's warming, but do not accept an anthropogenic cause. This despite the consensus of 99% of climate scientists backed up by over 20,000 data sets from across the globe that have produced models that have come ever closer to the global climate shift unfolding around us – ahead of schedule, and clearly linked to human burning of fossil fuels.

So, this mainstream of denial argues, either we shrug our shoulders and go on as if nothing were amiss, or we invest in geo-engineering at the last possible moment to prevent absolute catastrophe. Climate change deniers' typical option of no response leaves our planet to some freak of natural history to save us, or simply accept accelerating doom. There's a core of the rapturous right that is fine with that. Tired of exercising moral choice, confident that they are already saved, they are ready for a reckoning, the Rapture. But most tea-partyers are not enraptured, more worshippers of a misunderstood US Constitution than the God of Revelations. Faced with rapid climate change, they would simply retreat further into denial,lashing out at “communists” who urge responding with deep cuts in CO2 emissions, overseen by a U.N. treaty

It is true that, as a human trait, denial has evolutionary advantages. Putting aside looming problems, we focus on what works for our family and community (thus traditional farming and other forms of settled life). If we focused too much on the threat, we might be paralyzed by fear, losing hope, unable to respond. Because of this deep hard-wiring, there is some degree of denial in all of us. We deny the full consequences so that we can retain hope. One version of this is the normalcy bias, the inability to accept change due to the comfort of habit. Such was the case with the majority of Jews who stayed in Germany as the thirties rolled on, eager to hold onto their homes, communities, and fortunes. So denial has survival value only up to a point. If the problem (i.e. climate change) requires a total revolution in behavior and yet denial persists, then any hope gained is dishonest, undercutting the possibility of mitigating the problem.

Suppose you're not convinced that anthropogenic climate change is for real, but you concede that it may be. This is the position of many in the middle of the debate. My own organization, NC Interfaith Power and Light, held several meetings with our WNC Congressman Heath Shuler, a blue dog Democrat who was initially reluctant to support climate legislation in the House. In the end, Shuler embraced the precautionary principle, explaining his action to a dubious conservative electorate as an “insurance policy.” Active in his church, he did this not just as a practical matter, but out of a sense of biblically based stewardship. He was re-elected in November. Bravo for you, Heath!

As I noted in the last post, the issue has become politicized, the parties taking polar opposite positions. Just a few months ago, we were on the verge of a climate package in the Senate, with mainstream environmental organizations working carefully towards a compromise with US senators and more sober business leaders who understood this whole climate change business was for real. The collapse of those talks is painfully traced in the New Yorker, showing the weakness of the political process. Losing sight of the stakes, the climate issue has become political football, with many Republicans who agreed to some form of legislation prior to the last election undergoing a conversion during the campaign (John McCain, co-author of the first congressional climate bill, is a sad example). Cow-towing to the center of their own party, Harry Reid and Barack Obama have shown virtually no leadership on the issue. At this point, with a wave of tea-partyers assaulting Washington, climate legislation appears dead.

This dodging of the facts and repudiation of moral responsibility is unfortunately true of many failing leaders in both industry and politics. Short term gain, be it the corporate bottom line or political success, trumps the kind of long-term planning required for victory in the greatest war humankind has ever faced. Confronted with a crisis, we are better at fabricating short term strategies from what's at hand, seeing the situation in a local or perhaps regional context, than long-term global cooperation and planning. The ascendant right fears world federalism, which they feel would inevitably follow from U.N.-sponsored emissions monitoring, yet all of us would work together to help our neighbors during a flood or a fire. On the geopolitical stage, “national interest” - viewed narrowly and short-term – prevents cooperating with our “enemies,” as we have sadly seen in climate negotiations, especially at Copenhagen.

As for the local perspective, far too many of us are willing to ignore huge changes far away from us, swayed by two severe winters in a row in most of the US. But even here, a careful observer would note that winter is still shorter than it used to be – a lot shorter this winter in Western NC. And last summer was hotter than usual for most of us. Globally, 2010 tied for the hottest year on record. Just ask the Russians, the Pakistanis, or the Aussies.

Climate change progressives, “climate hawks” as David Roberts of Grist calls us, also harbor subtle forms of denial. Like others not so convinced of the evidence, we simply need to go on with our lives, going to work, enjoying our families and hobbies, taking a vacation now and then. I quit my job as a tenured professor to devote my life to fighting climate change, but I still fly airplanes to be with my family. And if I still taught college humanities, planning classes and conducting research would be a welcome buffer against reading scientific reports of accelerating climate doom. Even grading student essays would keep despair at bay! After ten years of studying climate science and nuclear safety, reading almost no fiction, only fitfully reading poetry, which was my field of study and a source of deep inspiration and wonder, I now indulge in the occasional novel and poetry. It's just too hard to stay with our current global reality on a daily basis.

Finally, the most harmful form of denial is not of climate facts, but of personal responsibility for political action. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project wore blinders to the possible fruits of their research. As the reports cascade in, climate scientists are challenged to speak, yet few of them will take a stand on the governmental action required. They approve in principle, but not with passion, perhaps risking their careers. Last summer I hosted an Asheville climate scientist, one of the lead authors of a section of the Fourth Assessment, thus a Nobel Prize co-winner, as part of a conference on preserving the Blue Ridge bioregion. After his presentation on the effect of climate change on the US and the South, I pressed him for support of climate legislation. He shook his head, saying that was the business of politicians.

James Hansen, on the other hand, whose seminal climate science work I have frequently quoted here, breaks the mold, aggressively lobbying for (sometimes being arrested) vigorous climate legislation. Some policy wonks complain that he sometimes backs the wrong horse because he doesn't fully understand the economics. But at least he takes a position, in contrast to the studied neutrality of my Asheville IPCC contact. Ecojustice requires that we take a stand, partaking in messy politics, risking being wrong. It keeps the conversation going, hopefully lurching towards political action that is informed and effective. Leaving politics to the politicians is ultimately moral suicide.

Next: A passage to India, and a swami's brand of climate denial.

Climate Denial: Tip of the Iceberg

2010-12-14T13:00:00.006-05:00

“He's fighting for his life,” Geeta said.

I had just complained about NC Senator Richard Burr's lack of leadership on climate change legislation, knowing from a source within his office that he understood and essentially accepted the science. A few weeks before, when his opponent Elaine Marshall asked for questions to pose in their second debate, I suggested she confront him with this key contradiction.

Fighting for his life – what an odd thing to say about a rich, powerful man, seemingly in good health. I thought instead of the leaders of island nations, then the large delegation from Nags Head (Outer Banks) I accompanied to DC last fall to lobby for climate legislation. In both cases, rising sea levels actually threaten livelihoods. The base for North Carolina Republicans has long been in the eastern part of the state, but few of these conservatives actually live on the front lines, right on the ocean. It certainly did not occur to me to ask what party the gravely worried mayor belonged to as she passed photos of projected sea level change in Nags Head around the senatorial office.

But we all know that positions on climate science depend fairly uniformly upon party affiliation. As someone who is liberal to progressive in outlook and with a strong science education, I continue to struggle to take this in. But the script in Washington is clear. Republicans want to defeat anything that President Obama supports, because their principal aim is to defeat him in 2012. If you accept the science, as does Senator Burr, you do so privately and quietly. Perhaps when the season rolls around, behind the scenes he will support a Republican presidential candidate who wants to do something about climate change, which was once John McCain's position.

After the initial awakening shock among viewers of “An Inconvenient Truth,” it has now become easier to be a climate denier. The religious right is more resurgent than ever, and our science education is below average for the developed world. If even scientifically literate Republicans shy away from the moral imperative to craft a societal response to climate change, we are in huge trouble.

Let me give you an example. Several months ago I had a conversation with a brilliant conservative medical doctor who was delighted that I had actually taken the time to study safety issues involved with nuclear power and changed my position to accept nukes as a far wiser investment than any form of coal. When I shifted the conversation to climate change, he was disgusted that I was revealing my true colors, aligning with the liberals after all. He dismissed me, showing no willingness to discuss the issue. And this guy is a highly trained scientist.

More recently, I had a discussion with an old student of mine, a bright woman who understood science when she was young. She showed a profound mistrust of both scientists and the government. When I pressed her more deeply with regard to a possible motive for the right's allegation of conspiiracy on the part of global climate scientists, she said, “World government. They all want climate regulation as an excuse for world government.” And then my own prejudices flooded me as I recalled her conversion to conservative Catholicism, with its links to the Illuminati Conspiracy.

Okay, so I mistrust Big Business and the conservatives mistrust Big Government (never mind that George Bush presided over the biggest increase in the national debt in history. The second biggest was under Ronald Reagan.) In the wake of Copenhagen, which exposed the collusion between these two giants, climate activists are more and more putting their faith in smaller units – states, cities, towns, small farmers and enlightened small businesses. But, though there is definitely hope in many of these, I consider this tack another, more subtle form of climate denial. What it shows is that we cannot live without hope, and with our country as split as any time since the Civil War – on so many levels – the possibility of largescale action of any sort seems virtually nil.

But as I argued in a recent post, following Dianne Dumanoski, hope is sentimental and shallow if it lacks honesty. Honestly, I do not think we can change on the level required without concerted international action. This can happen through 1)deliberate international agreements, heretofore negotiated through the U.N., 2) a global movement like the civil rights movement of the sixties, or 3)economic collapse. One year after Copenhagen, as COP16 at Cancun concludes, an international treaty continues to elude climate diplomats. I contrast to Copenhagen, there was general goodwill, but the big decisions were again postponed until next year (Kyoto expires in 2012 folks!). And the global movement for ecojustice is growing, but unless it is rapidly transformed in terms of numbers, energy, and strategy - massive waves of civil disobedience, especially here in the US - it will be insufficient.

It's hard not to see the most painful form of mitigation, global economic collapse, as the likeliest way to avoid catastrophic runaway global warming. Its portents are many, starting with the weaker Eurozone economies, but with the world's biggest economy teetering at their heels. The political leadership so absent in the climate wars is doing little to avert a massive debt spiral, leading to hyperinflation and Endgame Depression. Witness the huge debt risks of the President's current deal with the Republicans on tax policy.

Of course the ultimate “hostages” in the current debate on tax policy go far beyond Middle America to the very boundaries of modernist civilization and beyond to the great community of life. It is past time, Senator Burr and your brothers-in-hiding, to realize that fighting for your life means working for a world in which your grandchildren can thrive. To do so means to fight for Gaia, for the health of the biosphere is the bottom line for all political posturing and economic tinkering . The Iroquois Creed of making decisions with eight generations in mind would be a modest place to start (they were a democracy!). Partisan gain does not equal survival, any more than a narrow sense of self-interest drives the Invisible Hand to dispense the wealth of nations. Our wealth is retained in an earth system that is as close to steady-state as possible. That means, Senators Burr, McCain, Lugar, Scott Brown, and the Maine Olympians, that you only win when we all win - all classes, all parties, all species. And remember, even if beleaguered President Obama achieves the improbable and wins a second term, there are term limits. Your side will have its turn again. And if you work for strong, meaningful climate legislation, I will support you. Underneath our partisan differences, we all need and want the same thing. Fighting for your life really comes down to the chance for the survival of your species on a viable planet.

FRACKING STUPID

2010-11-30T13:05:00.002-05:00

Being an environmentalist these days is like being a child sitting amongst multiple Jacks-in-the-Box, hitting them sequentially until she runs out of hands and little hammers. We are trying to address the issues separately as they spring into awareness. When I brought this up to EO Wilson a few years ago, famed entomologist turned ecologist, he threw up his hands, “One issue at a time, please.” Sorry Ed, but Gaia under assault from clever primates who skipped kindergarten morality lessons doesn't respond that way.

Quietly, while we thought we had identified all the environmental enemies, a “prolific monster” (Toronto Globe) has added itself to the small herd of elephants in the room. That monster is high-volume slick water hydrofracking of shale gas, fracking for short. This is a revolutionary process, pioneered by Halliburton, which, using horizontal drilling along potential fissures, blasts the rock with explosives, forcing under enormous pressure millions of gallons of water laced with a proprietary mix of poisonous chemicals which further fracture the rock. The result is to release many bubbles of methane diffused under the surface through the borehole. This means that a lot more methane is now recoverable, and our supplies of this “clean-burning” staple of modern energy life is much enhanced.

So why is this a monster? The answers are many, and reveal that this may be the environmental issue of our time, the biggest elephant in the herd. Orion's carcinogenic chemicals specialist Sandra Steingraber, who has written a blockbuster essay on fracking, sums it up: With every well drilled –and 32,000 wells per year are planned – a couple million gallons of fresh water are transformed into toxic fracking fluid. Some of that fluid will remain underground. Some will come flying back out of the hole, bringing with it other monsters: benzene, brine, radioactivity, and heavy metals that, for the past 400 million years, had been safely locked up a mile below us... No one knows what to do with this lethal flowback – a million or more gallons for every wellhead. Too caustic for reuse as it is, it sloshes around in open pits and sometimes is hauled away in fleets of trucks to be forced under pressure down a disposal well. And it is sometimes clandestinely dumped.

By 2012, 100 billion gallons per year of fesh waterwilll be turned into toxic fracking fluid. The technology to transform it back to drinkable water does not exist. And, even if it did, where would we put all the noxious, radioactive substances we capture from it?

So there it is, in all its irremediable horror. And we thought hogwaste ponds were bad. In the past 10 years, this method of mining methane has gone from 1% of world product to 20%, mostly in the US. The biggest deposit, in the poetic-sounding Marcellus Shale, underlies Appalachia. As bad as moutaintOp removal is, as bad as coal ash dumps are, they pale by comparison to fracking. And it's just getting started.

Why weren't there hearings on this process as it became available? (Like the bioethical questions before the bioengineering revolution started). Where is public and legislative debate on these issues of life-and-death? Do we no longer care what genies and monsters we let loose through our continued perfection of engineering technique in the service of our energy comfort? In fact, just in the last couple of weeks, the EPA has demanded trade secrets on fracking fluid from Halliburton, which has predictably stonewalled. Let us pray that the process does not drag out over years.

The irony is that far more methane than we could ever use is starting to release in the Arctic tundra and shallow seas, vents that are bubbling up, and will continue to do so until an amount roughly equal to the threat of added CO2 is released, thus effectively doubling the odds for catastrophic planetary wraming. (Unless we act rapidly to reverse that warming, which is highly unlikely.) We are risking precious reserves of groundwater, especially in Eastern Appalachia, even as methane releases in the Arctic threaten us as much as the entire CO2 build-up. One of the positive feedback loops feared by climate scientists has started to kick in, and once it accelerates, it will be too late. There are elements of that feedback loop in hydrofracking, since some of the methane will simply be released by the new boreholes. But the dangers to public health are much more immediate for those who live near these operations.

Hydrofracking is similar to the development of tar sands in Alberta, Canada. There has been some debate about that horrendous method of extracting oil, again, by using billions of gallons of precious freshwater, with the added foolishness of cutting down huge stretches of boreal forests, one of our last remaining carbon sinks. But that water is not contaminated, forever unrecoverable (though a cost analysis of restoring it, added to the environmental costs of the mining itself, would render the whole project a negative economically as well as ecologically). And then there's the whole matter of deepwater drilling for oil. With all of these massive disruptions of earth processes, not enough debate, not enough caution. What about the Precautionary Principle?

Way before the reasonable notion of a precautionary principle, First Peoples had injunctions against violating the earth's surface. When I was teaching college humanities I remember being struck by a couplet in Ovid's Metamorphoses, prescient of our tragically jaded era: The rich earth, good giver of of harvest's bounty, was asked for more: they dug into her vitals (Metamorphoses, I.129-31). Ovid goes on to write of gold, root of evil. We have asked for much more, mining and drilling with abandon. Can we now make tough enough laws with sufficient enforcement to restuff Pandora's mineral and gas box?

I ask for law. I ask for duty, stewardship, precaution, a sense of responsibility. But only metanoia is going to save us from ourselves. This complete change in how we see ourselves living within the earth must come from two sources, justice and love. Justice is the prophetic awakening to the overwhelming fact that climate change is the moral issue of our time, an issue of intergenerational ecojustice as James Hansen points out. Loving our brother and sister species in the web, still mostly intact though with huge holes, makes sacrifice a matter of joy, not deprivation. Love of what's left would inspire a disciplined, orderly retreat. My reading of Ovid and of the remnant indigenous peoples is that the primal sense of not violating the earth involves both justice and love. Also a modicum of awe – as in fear of retribution from a wronged divinity. As to who that divinity is, take your pick – the Earth herself or the God of the Abrahamists.

If we do not reach this place quite soon, not one life at a time, but whole polycultural waves, then collapse, both macroeconomic and biospheric, will bring on loveless sacrifice on an unprecedented scale. The earth may thereby be saved, but civilization will not. We need restraint now, or human abundance will overwhelm natural abundance.

New Map for the Planetary Era (For the Children, Part Two)

2010-10-26T11:41:00.006-04:00

In a key chapter, “A New Map for the Planetary Era,” Dumanoski anchors the discussion with the ecological anthropologist Roy Rappaport's observation that all cultures face the same critical problem, “the discrepancy between cultural images of nature and the actual organization of nature.” She goes on to sum up his argument, “Whether a culture's explanation of the world is correct in a scientific sense may not be important... what matters is whether its cultural rituals and beliefs guide behavior in ways that allow the group to survive in its partucular circumstances.”

The planetary emergency we face is a crisis of context. According to the cultural map that global modernism has been following, nature is not an actor, but simply an object, merely a stage for the human enterprise. Tellingly, she points out that even those protesting exploitation frequently portray the Earth as the passive fragile victim, ignoring that we act from within a natural system that is a formidable force that may well strike back. We are not masters, nor stewards, but a cancerous part of the earth organism that sees the body only from its own peculiarly virulent perspective.

She notes that the cultural historian Thomas Berry characterized this potentially fatal disregard of perspective as cultural autism; the behavioral norms of global capitalism are in fact pathological when seen from the Gaian perspective. But unlike moralists and prophets, she does not take our current self-destructive path as evidence of a “fundamental deficiency in human nature.” From the broad sweep of anthropological perspective, our present global monoculture, mass civilization predicated upon unsustainable material growth, is not fundamental. Bill Clinton was dead wrong when he said that global trade and concomitant growth was a “force of nature.” This mass culture, homo economicus, only emerged after WWII. For most of human history, culture has been predicated upon gift-giving, which was even a form of conflict resolution for the Eskimos in the form of the ceremonial potlach.

Those Eskimo tribes, and other First Peoples, lived in a world where the inputs and outputs were readily observed. Their gods and means of livelihood were all local. Place and intimately understanding it was everything. In a world where God is one, but conveniently distant, and the means of livelihood are spread throughout the globe, with a system that makes harvesting, mining, and fabricating them dizzyingly efficient, it is critical that “global citizens” be educated in the new context. Dumanoski gets this, and cites James Lovelock's collaborator Lynn Margulis' insistence that we learn natural systems theory, the elaboration in the last quarter century of Lovelock's paradigmatic shift, the Gaia theory. If we are to understand the new planetary map, natural systems theory is the key to reading it. “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking” (Margulis). Unfortunately, it is still a tiny elite who have learned to see from a global perspective what elders from the First Peoples know without the theory: the earth is one, with exquisite interconnections and feedback loops. We live in it, not on it, and owe our existence to it, not to our fabrications of it.

Without an accurate map of the world we live in, attempts to change our behavior based on notions such as stewardship have only local or regional efficacy. We need to understand the perspective and proper scale of the current global crisis. It is a planetary one. Seen from this perspective, Dumanoski suggests Rachel Carson's “reasonable accommodation with Nature” is more appropriate. I would add, addressing what Dumanoski laments as the “taboo” of discussing economic growth, Lovelock's notion of a “dignified retreat” from the manic quest to make 7 billion human beings kings rather than subsistent coevolutionists with the rest of creation.

Dumanoski ends her book with a chapter entitled 'Honest Hope.” Hope without clear knowledge of the situation we are in is sentimental, rooted in denial. But honesty without hope is disempowering. Recognizing that we are in a planetary crisis – Carter's “moral equivalent of war” - can galvanize us, bringing out the best in our evolutionary heritage. But I fear that honest hope has a sunset somewhere between 2012 (expiry of Kyoto, not as effective instrument, but as token of the possibility of a binding international treaty) and 2017 - the end of Hansen's 2007 warning, since echoed by other climate scientists, that we had “10 years” to make a serious start in curbing carbon emissions. As Sally Bingham, founder of Interfaith Power and Light, said last week, “My hope is hanging by a thread.” Now that's honest hope. May the thread be a strong one.

For the Children: Abrupt Climate Change, Cultural Autism, and the Thread of Hope

2010-10-26T11:21:00.004-04:00

To My Children, Fearing for Them

Terrors are to come. The earth
is poisoned with narrow lives.
I think of you. What you will

live through, or perish by, eats
at my heart. What have I done? I
need better answers than there are

to the pain of coming to see
what was done in blindness,
loving what I cannot save. Nor,

your eyes turning towards me,
can I wish your lives unmade
though the pain of them is on me.

Wendell Berry published this poem in 1968. I know the children he speaks of through the poignant National Geographic photoessay focused on a Siberian farm family he imaginatively linked with his own, farming tobacco with horses in Kentucky. We had survived the McCarthy era, but Soviets were still demonized. And we had narrowly missed a nuclear exchange over the Cuban missile crisis. But here it was: the Siberian Woodsman (another poem) loved his children just as much as the poet loved his. Opposing nuclear arsenals arrayed against the demonized other, we were the same underneath.

Terrors are to come. The earth is poisoned with narrow lives. Forty years later, the theme remains. The earth is poisoned far beyond Berry's or anyone else's imagining, even as reactionaries chortle at Paul Ehrlich's failed projections of population doom. In 1986, two events signaled the coming terror, the Malthusian curse amplified by climate change. That was the year when we first exceeded the earth's annual biocapacity. In addition to rapidly burning the stores of ancient sunlight, our energy capital, we started eating into annual income. The other fact about that year was that it was the peak in grain production per capita (376 kilos), steadily declining ever since. Last year, one billion people were at risk of starvation. This year, we exceeded biocapacity on August 19, effectively employing 1.627 earths to maintain our current population of close to 7 billion.

Okay you say, but terror? Key Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are in favor of the new START treaty negotiated by the Obama administration, and the midnight clock of nuclear armageddon is poised to be set back once again (if we can keep Pakistan and Iran's hawks, and a few others closer at hand at bay). The answer lies in the Defense Department study under the last Bush administration comparing the threat of terrorism (the word is now a systematic part of both our vocabulary and government, with over a hundred new agencies dedicated to countering it) to that of “rapid climate change.” The study concludes that the latter threat far outweighs political terror.

Dianne Dumanoski's The End of the Long Summer (Why We Must Remake Our Civilization to Survive on a Volatile Earth) is an intelligent book cooly surveying the Damoclean sword of abrupt climate change and what we must do to avoid it, at least partially, and survive it (partially). I have read several books on climate change, including Bill McKibbens' recently released Eaarth, and Dumanoski's is the most comprehensive. She combines the geological and historical perspective of Tim Flannery's Weathermakers with McKibben's recital of the earth's current crisis through the lens of climate science, adding the valuable perspective of human evolutionary history and cultural biology.

Recasting McKibben's touchstone, The End of Nature (1989), Dumanoski speaks of the Return of Nature. McKibben took the historical perspective of a romantic, proclaiming the end of nature as we knew and loved her, recognizing the awesome ability of our species to dominate natural systems as a planetary power. From Dumanoski's perspective twenty years later, nature's return is the return of the repressed. The entire earth system is rising up to restore balance, and climate change is the main vehicle via which we will be chastened to our pre-agricultural and pre-industrial size, or else removed entirely from the system.

But while she acknowledges the huge challenge of our planetary emergency, Dumanoski cautiously affirms the history of our species in surviving some pretty harrowing moments of past climate change, including abrupt ones where climatic patterns shifted rapidly within a brief decade. We have already survived 700,000 years of climate variability, having evolved both a brain and cultural extensions of biological adaptation that have equipped us with the flexibility to deal with such crises – up to now. Clearly we have had a pretty easy time of it during the mild holocene, the last 12,000 years, tempting the species to overexpand as it triumphed over rivals - especially Neanderthalis - by being so remarkably adaptable and flexible. Yet we are now like a bacterial bloom that has eaten up all the fuel in the petri dish, and have nowhere else to go.

Given our precarious situation, we have the choice of changing the global industrial order, encouraged by international treaty to live sustainably in a carbon-neutral world averaging zero net economic growth, or continuing our clever manipulation of nature, “playing Prospero” with huge geoengineering technofix projects. She outlines both choices, and cautions against the latter, arguing that in effect we would be postponing the harder path of reining in our industrial excesses, placing an intolerable burden on future generations. And of course, we don't really know if these huge manipulations (like seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to simulate the effect of volcanoes, partially blocking incoming solar radiation) will even work, much as the scientists observing the first detonation of an atomic bomb in the desert at Alamogordo did not really know if unleashing this powerful toy would destroy the atmosphere. (CONTINUED)

Earth's Tragic Wound and our Collective Denial

2010-08-27T16:32:00.001-04:00

At first it seemed that the demise of Deepwater Horizon was a grim present to the environmental community, to the earth herself, reeling from the assault of a global capitalist juggernaut growing more efficiently rapacious every day. With climate legislation hanging in the balance, and only a matter of years at best before major tipping points become irreversible, here was the event to awaken us all, finally bringing together partisan politicians, the business community, enviros, and Main Street.

The terrible truth is that, despite a situation that should lead to a total rethinking and scaling back of our petroleum drilling plans in deep waters, politicians and oilmen alike are pushing for more, not less drilling. Even Obama is only asking for a six-month moratorium (which a federal judge in NOLA with oil investments overturned). After months of negotiations, waffling and compromises, Democratic leaders in the Senate decided not to push for a comprehensive climate bill after all. Then, more surprisingly, Harry Reid decided not to even bring an energy-only bill to the floor.

But even as we have watched the ugly hemorrhage 24-hours live, our eyes have already glazed over, and the main argument is whether or not BP remains a good investment and how to get on with the business of extracting oil. After all, if we don't do it someone else will, and get ahead of us in the process, leaving us in the dustbin of defeat. Just last week, BP said it still may drill in this lode, and oilmen speculated that was why the bottom kill was on hold. BP could just start drilling anew using the relief well.

In a recent post I spoke of the imperative to awaken from our collective dream. If this calamity doesn't awaken us, what will, for Godsake? Why isn't the conversation changing? In fact, the deniers have made significant headway since the wake-up response to “Inconvenient Truth.” This only makes sense if we are 1) depraved at base, ruled by an incorrigible Barbaric Heart; or 2) basically a decent lot, simply addicted to the comforts afforded by oil. Addicted so deeply that we could be shown the imminent destruction of the earth and then go right back to doing everything we can to extract the last drops of ancient sunlight, behaving like crack addicts.

The Old Dream has a tenacious grip, and Business as Usual has all the momentum, despite recent setbacks. It may well be that only global industrial collapse will stop this runaway train, which hasn't really tested its brakes (i.e. becoming “sustainable” by maintaining our present speed rather than accelerating). But if the train is already out of control, actually over the cliff, “sustainability” is a meaningless fantasy.

So what awakens the addict to his addiction, and how does he then change?

We need, now more than ever, to engage the moral imagination – as individuals, and as communities planning what the Transition Town movement calls an “energy descent pathway.” Lovelock calls it a “dignified retreat.” Such an engagement is the first step towards prophecy, which begins with asserting the truth, eyes wide open, actually seeing what is going on and admitting it. The emperor is stark naked, drip lines attached to deep veins of petroleum.

Many of us have had moments of realization, recognizing in a flash that we cannot keep the juggernaut going. Just yesterday I realized that I needed to find honest ways to enhance my retirement income, which includes a modest SS check, rather than persisting to buy penny stocks that might make my margins more comfortable. But this morning I compulsively checked into a lead on a small company with the license to sell efficient refrigerator-sized South Korean nuclear reactors in North America. I may entertain ending my addiction to petroleum, but not to growing my portfolio.

After these moments of awakening, the key is not to go immediately back into the Mainline Dream, mainlining our energy-and-stuff addiction, but to follow the insight with a step towards its realization. Instead, like crack addicts, we resume stealing, something we practice as a civilization, but long ago stopped noticing: archaic mining, mercantile trade, colonial extraction (also slavery, stealing labor and souls), and now global industrial mayhem. Such moments of realization are not truly moral unless they result in action. If we are to preserve a gradual slope to the energy descent pathway, then we continue to need oil. But the moral necessity, what Bill McKibben calls the “moral math”, is 350 ppm CO2 - and we're already at 390. Thus we have more than enough reason to stop deepwater drilling – likewise for flushing out shale oil deposits, blowing up mountains for coal and fracking for methane

Cross-species empathy lies at the core of the mammalian brain. If we were not so removed from the interspecies experience of our ancestors, insulated by our comfortable enclaves, we might well experience this empathy so regularly that we would be incapable of destroying more habitat. I recognize that we have more affinity to the chimp than the bonobo, solving disputes through violence rather than having sex. (Remember Make love, not war?) But we also have an ability perhaps unique in the universe: self-reflection., enabling us to become aware of the divine at our core, indeed at the core of all things. Thomas Berry wrote that we represent the universe's capacity to see itself. So however chimp-like we may behave as a norm, we have within us a radically different way of seeing, and thus living.

So why can't we take it in, the horror in the Gulf from the perspective of all of its inhabitants? Is it simply that the healthy psyche protects itself from imagined pain of this magnitude? Or is that, if we did, we would be given the moral task of ending our dependence on oil - not only for our comfort:
personal autos, air travel, credit cards, foam mattresses, tv dinners...

but the very fabric of our material existence?
running shoes, polyester, nylon, plastic utensils, shopping bags, toothbrushes, computers, CD's, DVD's, bike pumps, insulation, PVC windows, paints, varnish, glue, carpets, pharmaceuticals, most commercial food inputs.

The moral imagination is the uniquely human faculty that connects our divine root, what we Quakers call the Light within, with our lives in the world. Activating that connection, we would see that our material lives have thoroughly intwined us in the entire earth, our mother, poisoning and strangling her. If we were to stay acutely morally awake while continuing to behave as ordinary modern industrial people, the daily contradiction would drive many of us to sacrifice our lives. Such a sickness unto death would expose the moral lie inherent in the “happy (industrial) family.” William James, writing during our industrial adolescence, called those rich in this kind of moral sensitivity sick souls, contrasting them with the “healthy-minded.” But as RD Laing famously pointed out at the end of the sixties, when the world itself has gone mad, the psychotic may be the sanest person around.

There is a moral alternative, though immensely difficult. It is to break the addiction to fossil fuels and the comfortable, option-filled lives they have afforded us, living like kings. How? By forming self-sufficient communities, places to realize that it's not about comfort and endless choice, but about re-experiencing closely interwoven human community - its simple joys, and inevitably sorrow and tragedy as well. The Transition movement is a good place to start. Thse communities can grow where you are, rural or urban. If enough of these form quickly enough, then we will have a shadow society, something to build upon after industrial collapse. And I repeat the growing prophecy. Collapse will come, and it will be soon, when you have it least in mind. Il faut cultiver nos jardins – et nos amis.

Southern Baptists Weigh in on Climate Change

2010-07-29T10:43:00.007-04:00

Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change:
“We believe our current denominational engagement with these issues has often been too timid, failing to produce a unified moral voice. Our cautious response in the face of mounting evidence may be seen by the world as uncaring, reckless and ill-informed. We can do better. To abandon these issues to the secular world is to shirk from our responsibility to be salt and light. The time for timidity regarding God's creation is no more.”

The declaration goes on to say, “There is undeniable evidence that the earth – wildlife, water, land, and air – can be damaged by human activity, and that people suffer as a result. When this happens, it is especially egregious because creation serves as revelation of God's presence, majesty and provision.”

Not only "can be damaged" but unquestionably has been damaged, causing not just human suffering, but initiating the sixth great extinction event in Earth's history. It has not been central to most Yancey residents, who have their hands full with pressing issues that seem closer at hand. But climate change, and global ecocrisis involving waste and resource depletion on a planetary scale, has already arrived, and is on our doorstep. Just ask residents of the Gulf, or the Carolina coast, for that matter.

I speak not as a secular environmentalist, but as a person of faith. But if we look at the record, the relatively godless Brits, Europeans and Japanese, and the countries most directly affected by the looming catastrophe in Africa and South Asia are the ones leading climate negotiations. Is the failure of the US to show ecojustice leadership not shameful to citizens of God's kingdom in a nation which once led the world in moral respect?

The House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill one year ago that amounts to a poker ante, and it was to that timid level of response that President Obama and his negotiators were limited at Copenhagen in December. But further action in the Senate has been postponed virtually indefinitely, with partisan politics on both sides leading to our current impasse. Isn't the fate of the Earth, a Creation that has been entrusted to our care by a loving God, more important than anything else in this bitterly partisan political climate?

For one last time before a bitterly contested election which may close the window for any effective movement towards a comprehensive energy and climate bill, I implore my fellow Yancey people of faith to flood our US senators with prayerful demands to pass significant climate legislation that is stronger than the House's first step. And you might give Harry Reid and President Obama a call as well. (The Cantwell-Collins CLEAR bill, featuring a carbon tax and citizen dividend, is the strongest and simplest of the bills, and the only remaining bipartisan effort.)

Time is running out, not just for us, but for the remnant of God's good Garden. You may not trust me, my Quaker brethren at Friends Committee on National Legislation, nor the climate scientists. In that case, reread the Southern Baptist declaration. Pray for discernment, and act accordingly.

Letter to the Editor
Yancey Common Times Journal
July 21, 2010

Caveat: At the request of George Reed, executive director of NC Council of Churches, I researched the statement on-line and learned that the “declaration” is a project of a student at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, NC, Jonathan Merrit. It is, however, signed by 40 pastors, some of them prominent in the SBC. The official Southern Baptist position on climate change remains the resolution from June 2007, essentially rejecting the claims of climate science.

Awakening from Our Collective Trance

2010-05-28T08:30:00.002-04:00

I attended an “Awakening the Dreamer” symposium in Asheville in late April, a program which is being offered all over the developed world, in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. The presentation was initiated by a visionary North American couple, working under the guidance of Ecuadoran shamans from the Achuar tribe of the Amazonian rain forest. They visited the tribe several years ago, asking what they could do to “help.” You know, economic development, what we with a social conscience do to help the poor attain their share of the economic bonanza. Their answer was to go back and teach their countrymen and other industrialized modern citizens to change their dream.

So I went to change my dream, the trance of modernity, as these shamans see it. They are part of a growing number of indigenous seers who understand that in order to protect their ways of life, they must convince the dominant industrial tribe to change its ways by changing its cosmology, it's world-dream. In doing so, we would emerge from the trance that manifests as an addiction to comfort, stuff, and inordinate power over the natural world.

The evening was co-led by three Asheville area volunteers who had undergone basic training. This was their first public event, and there were glitches. But the program is well designed, regularly revised to make it more inclusive and more effective. The videography, which documents a wide range of ecological and social abuses as well as the global response of the earth's (humanity's) “immune system,” is superb, strong enough to carry the symposium, no matter the quality of local presenters. I found it particularly refreshing that it was not centered on the US, featuring multiple perspectives from cultures both north and south.

The video is broken into segments, accompanied by a text which the volunteers have studied and can simply read aloud. Each of these segments is followed by a brief response in pairs and trios from the audience, emphasizing the heart rather than the head. I found these experiential interludes to be too short, but at least they began processing unsettling material, and helped build camaraderie with other participants (there were about 20 of us). If I were to lead a symposium, I would build more time into the program so that the experiential interludes were longer, requiring the audience to go deeper.

I have worked with climate change and global ecocrisis for almost ten years now, keeping abreast of the climate science, writing, and facilitating workshops and discussions about our reponse to the crisis. The work itself invites despair, so huge is the problem, so inadequate the response.

Though brief, these processing interludes taught me something very important. Forced to go into feeling, as I do when I lead others, I quickly realized that my work of taking the long view of evolutionary history and future possibility beyond our species, even beyond our planet and its gifts that we seem to be terminally squandering, was a way of distancing myself from the requirement to grieve. I realized that the major writing I have done in the last few years served to buttress me by taking this longterm view. I call it ecological and cosmological faith. Yes, at bottom it is about faith, but its daily effect is to take me so far above the struggle that I don't have to experience the enormous stakes, the pain, the despair. The current Gulf oil spill, and its invitation for empathetic response from the perspective of each species and community at risk, ecological and human, is the latest in a continuing line of ecological tragedies crying out for awareness, to be honestly held, leading to a vigorous response.

“Awakening the Dreamer” suggests that the emergent dream will have something to do with the South American prophecy that the eagle and condor will fly together. According to this prophecy, after a long period in which the condor, representing spirit and heart, dominated, about two hundred years ago, the eagle, representing power and intellect, became rampant. Shortly before the Asheville symposium, Bolivia hosted a conference for many nations left out of the hasty partial deal Obama brokered at Copenhagen in December. Evo Morales, Bolivia's president, an eloquent voice of the first peoples of his “plurinational” state, has frequently said that unbridled capitalism is to blame for the global ecological crisis. However, at this conference he was quite honest that mining of both traditional metals (silver) and new ones (lithium) was part of the wealth of his country that would continue to be developed, but whose proceeeds would be shared by her native peoples. Perhaps this manifests the eagle and condor flying together, though I find “appropriate technology” more representative of that vision.

I highly recommend attending an Awakening the Dreamer symposium. We are all in this together, and we need a new myth, a new societal dream. No more offshore drilling, no more coal-fired plants - these are individual stances, and important ones. But what is the new dream? What is “appropriate” to our condition? Can the remnant of primary peoples and those of us who were once “indigenous” ourselves learn how to reinhabit the earth by working together?

RESPONSE to GEORGE OWEN, PART TWO

2010-04-16T10:49:00.004-04:00

Compromised and incomplete it may be, but working to reduce our carbon footprint to sustainable is one way of starting to live a more subsistent life style. Without government or UN encouragement, Geeta and I have worked for close to a decade to reduce our footprint. We're halfway there, now reduced from four times the world average to double. Twice we signed a pledge card from NC Interfaith Power and Light to reduce my footprint by 10% within a year. We fulfilled it each time (cutting out flying, installing photovoltaics for 85% of our electric needs). We preceded these pledges by getting rid of our second car. But after these three big shifts, we've hit a wall.

After a year's hiatus, I have started flying again. Was I going to refuse the invitation to have my expenses paid to go lobby my senators and representative in DC on climate legislation? And because we didn't work it out for my mother to come live with us, I now drive 4500 more miles a year to visit her continuing care facility in Pittsburgh. George, I'm actually going the other way, and there's no cap on carbon to stop me, only the still small voice. What about the voice of family and friendship, as well as the pure pleasure of going South for the winter? Wendell Berry has this fine idea of taking family vacations in your own bioregion. I feel very fortunate to inhabit the Southern Appalachian Highlands, and parts of them remain unexplored for me. But what if your son and his wife, your sister and nephews now live permanently on the West Coast? George, I dont' know how all this goes for you and your children, but “love miles” (Monbiot) really pull me. Hard. As for Christianity's inaccessible ideals, do you recall Jesus' admonition to cut all ties with family? How many of us are prepared to do that?

George, you ask us to change. However, accepting that human beings are flawed, greedy, undisciplined, self-interested, I've worked to get the government to insure change by passing climate legislation. Not just any legislation, but damned good legislation, because I know we will do whatever we can to game the system – not just the corporate giants and Bernie Madoff , but all of us. Create limits for us all, including progressives with willing ideologies, but weak spirits and flesh. My friend, you ask us to dig down and live our Quaker values. That's splendid George, but I want the government to insure that if I fail, if my community fails, we're still covered. Maybe I want them to do the dirty work. Unfortunately, our leaders and representatives are just as fundamentally flawed as I am, and under far more pressure to deny or ignore what's facing us.

Students of human nature, now advisors in the White House schooled in behavioral economics, say we change by increments, when we understand that the changed behavior brings us something we really want. Carbon footprinting involves calibrating our behavioral changes, rewarding incremental change with “good” scores. Legislation to cap carbon emissions would also involve calibration, keeping score. The assumption behind this is that we won't do what's difficult, no matter how principled we are. Race relations are far from ideal, but the Civil Rights Act created a legal baseline to support ongoing change in folks' behavior. Wouldn't strong, enforcable climate legislation perform the same role?

But George, you speak the language of the heart, which says, surrender. To repeat your words: “My belief is that if we feel the consequences of our actions deeply enough, we will radically change our lives.” Or as Arne Naess put it, “We won't save what we don't love.” Perhaps measurement is something love will never do.

George, I know I can do better, which would involve both pain and creativity. But when I've done all I can, I'm still going to come up short. We are complex creatures of multiple motivations. Greed and comfort are built into a system in the US where even a street person has a greater footprint than the world average. Reason says that changing the world one community at a time when the Titanic is already headed towards a huge iceberg dead ahead is not going to be sufficient. But those who have surrendered, who have undergone transformation because they so loved this world, are an inspiration to the rest of us, as long as we stay with them and remain aware, rather than turning away in denial and fear. Ultimately our life is about metanoia, radical transformation, and dedicating ourselves to this even in the face of certain cataclysm is ennobling.

Meanwhile in future exchanges, I trust you can give some concrete examples of how your community is starting to transform according to our Quaker values. Thank you for the occasion to really dig into this challenge.

CARBON FOOTPRINTS, CLIMATE LEGISLATION, REALISM, AND QUAKER VALUES

2010-04-16T10:36:00.002-04:00

My response to George Owen:

I have previously written about the excruciating challenge of living Quaker values on this blog, when I reluctantly embraced nuclear power (see April 13) as the lesser of evils (vs. coal) for maintaining the grid to preserve “civil society.” My chief point was that those who railed against nukes without examining their own complicity in modernism and globalism were hypocrites. We live in a world deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised by our industrial choices.

When I go back and read my arguments about the (relative) morality of nuclear power, I am uncomfortable, though I thoroughly endorse my statement about simplicity: “I have no response other than shame to the challenge around simplicity, which does not exclude me even though I built a passive solar house from salvaged and local material, and now have added photovoltaic panels. So much that we take for granted in modern life is anything but simple, both materially and spiritually.” The assumption in all of this is that I dont' believe our society can extricate itself from modernity, entailing using resources far beyond their availability, until suddenly forced to by economic and ecosystem collapse. I don't say this cynically, simply realistically.

What George calls us to, though, is not economic or political realism, but a Quaker version of the purity of values which we like to think the early Christians lived. I recall a critique of Christianity which said that it was an unrealistic religion, virtually impossible to live up to. Obviously the critic was not speaking of mainstream Christianity, which has been captive since Constantine to empire, and is virtually a state religion as practiced by the religious right in this country. Rather, he was talking about the spiritual values taught by Jesus of Nazareth.

“Realistic” folks say we can't just drop our way of life; and we certainly can't go back to a previous level of existence. But realism is not going to be suffcient in these desperate times. Realism is what guides Barack Obama, or any politician, in working to get what is achievable over what is “right” or required by the facts. The fact is that nature does not compromise, and we have so far compromised the earth that she (Gaia) holds all the cards now. On the other hand, I know that two billion people on this planet, close to a third of humanity, are living a subsistent lifestyle, and a sustainable one. It does not require “going back” to an unrecoverable past to live like them.

With care, love, and sacrifice that is less painful because undertaken communally, we could do the same, though our lives would be vastly different, in ways that few are willing to contemplate. Yes, as I argued in my February post, we would end up living a lot more like our great-grandparents, and with a few carefully-chosen exceptions (like an internet decentrally powered, but with global reach), we would need to let go of the myth of progress.

Christianity seems to be impossible to embody when we respond from our individual flawed natures. But early Christians succeeded in living their values because they undertook the task of becoming a “peculiar people” communally. This was also true of early Quakers. When someone traveled in the ministry, often entailing great risk, they traveled in pairs, with an elder. The family left behind was supported in every way necessary by the greater Meeting family.

Fortunately, we live on a land-trust, Celo Community, which includes a thriving, caring Meeting. We have lifetime leases on personal housing and manage the 1100 acres and a few common structures through a consensus process. But though there are many common enterprises, we do not live communally, nor share incomes. We participate in a robust, but small community garden (4 families). In Celo Community, with a large percentage of Friends, we at least have a basis for the kind of transformation George calls us to.

But there are huge challenges. Anticipating a need for distributed energy, Geeta and I sought others to buy into a small photovoltaic facility on community common land to supplement our rural electric cooperative. We ran into many challenges about the business model, especially what to do when a shareholder left, and reverted to installing the panels on our own house. I agree with George that local communities need to be as self-reliant and resilient as possible, but who's going to pay for the distributed generating systems, and housing (if centralized) for the elderly, to give two examples?
CONTINUED...

LETS LIVE OUR QUAKER VALUES: Letter from GEORGE OWEN

2010-03-30T11:13:00.004-04:00

This deeply-rooted, loving challenge came as a response to an article I wrote in BeFriending Creation, the journalistic arm of Quaker Earthcare Witness, reporting the success of our carbon reduction campaign for travel associated with the 2009 FGC annual sessions. It has been the occasion for reconsideration of carbon footprinting as a tool of religious ecology, and for much soul-searching among QEW's Sustainability Committee - Editor

Is it time for QEW to let go of carbon footprinting? My short answer is no, but my plea is to focus our energy on a much larger project. My problem with our efforts at carbon footprinting, or driving less and in more efficient cars, or lobbying for more responsible government action, is that while these are useful and important they often distract us from the true scale and depth of the predicament we are in. We are working on relieving symptoms instead of healing the deeper disease. Relieving symptoms is essential, even critical, work, but as a spiritual community perhaps healing the disease is our greater calling.

Centuries before there were any ideas of peak oil or climate change, thoughtful people observed with sadness and dismay the abuse and detachment with which their fellow humans interacted with nature. Here is a modern English version of William Penn writing in 1682: It would go a long way toward cautioning and directing people in the use of Nature, if they were better educated and knowledgeable about the Creation of it. For how could humanity find the confidence to abuse Nature, while they see the Great Creator in all and every part of it, staring them in the face? The global predicament we find ourselves in today is not rooted in fossil-fuels, industrialization, technology or growth-dependant economics. These are simply manifestations of the real cause: our failure to live in connectedness, solidarity and right-relationship with all aspects of the world around us.

The earth with all its abundance of resources and diversity of life is the only home we humans have. We share this home with all the life in the Earth’s biosphere. Together we are part of the interdependent life cycles and ecosystems by which Nature keeps everything in dynamic balance and keeps reinventing itself anew. We can choose to work with nature, honoring its systems of balance to help us flourish, or we can choose to try to control nature to our advantage, to gain more wealth, power, and comfort. We can choose to be an integral part of nature from which we are inseparable, or we can choose to see nature as “other,” separate from us, a resource, gift, or object for us to enslave, harvest or ignore.
`
But what if we only want enough for our fair share? What if we humbly accept our small place in the biosphere and delight in the mutual flourishing of the whole commonwealth of life in which we live?

This is a radically different vision of our role in the world than has been typical of our history. This is not a vision of plunderers or victims, not even of stewards or disciples, but of partners, neighbors, and co-inhabitants with all life, sharing the earth in awe and humility and doing it with equality, simplicity, integrity and peace, having learned to live in harmony with conflict.

How do we change? How do we return to the path that honors creation and reconnects us with awe and humility to our home? How are we to live in a way that nourishes deep intimacy with our inward faith and right relationship with our outward world? Can we give up the idea that we, individually and as a species, are in any way superior or entitled regarding our use of other humans, other life forms or any of the other resources of the Earth? Can we honor and obey Nature as our only home and source of all our wellbeing and survival? Can we share her abundance equitably with all life?

We Quakers have been hiding our light under a bushel, and we are not alone. But historically we have from time to time risen above our adaptations to prevailing culture and witnessed our continuing revelation of the Truth. I see the opportunity for us to do this again. We could follow the logic of our Quaker testimonies and open our hearts to a deep connectedness with all of God’s creation. We could witness right relationship. Some say that people are not ready to receive such witness, not ready for the spiritual dimensions of our environmental and economic predicament. I suspect that it is we who are not ready, we who fear the change that will be unleashed by tapping into our core values. As long as we are dealing with incremental physical/mental change, we remain in control. But once we surrender to Spirit, once our hearts are broken open, once we allow our Light to shine out, we have no choice but to follow.

Without this deeper value-based response, I fear that we will keep falling victim to relaxing our vigilance every time things improve, however slightly or temporarily. If our actions are measured in response to conditions, then conditions rule. But if instead our actions keep referencing our deepest evolving values, then our values rule, and that is where we need to be for a sustainable future.

The economist Milton Friedman also writes about this idea: Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the [values] that are lying around. We are surrounded by our technology and growth-dependent economy, but let us not be distracted by the values that have led us ever more disastrously into our current global predicament. Instead let us ask what are our gifts that we Quakers can bring forward? What values do we have lying around? Everywhere new life is trying to emerge from the old. How do we forge what progress we have made into a new vision? What kind of world do we want? How do we practice and witness a new flowering from our deepest roots?

I find that I am called to contribute positively to the “values that are lying around.” My hope is that we will all be called to seek greater connection with and compassion for all of God’s creation. My vision is that we will then feel the consequences of our actions so deeply that we will gather ourselves in community to radically change our lives. This will not be easy work. For courage, resolve, love and forgiveness, we will need each other more than ever. But we can be joyful in our strong Quaker roots and delight in the flourishing of community and movement of Spirit amongst us as we do this work. And we can celebrate returning home to our Earth, home to our brothers and sisters in the vast commonwealth of life, grieving for the damage that has been done and working together on a brighter future.

Faithfully,
George Owen

DEPLETION AND ABUNDANCE: THRESHOLD OF RADICAL SIMPLICITY

2010-02-26T16:10:00.006-05:00

The best brief on living through economic collapse, a how-to manual on how to survive the shift, is Sharon Astyk's Depletion and Abundance. Astyk is a former Renaissance scholar married to a PhD astrophysicist. After getting the message that economic collapse, augmented by climate disequilibrium, was imminent, she decided that the ecology of Shakespeare's plays was less interesting than the ecology she was blogging about, and became a farmer-housewife-writer. Her writing and his adjunct classes at a nearby NY State university are their sole income (if you've ever been an adjunct, you know that's not much). But they have evolved a low-impact, small farming lifestyle that needs minimal cash, which she argues will soon be a necessity for most of us.

I first noticed Astyk's work when the blogosphere led me to her admirable experiment, the “Riot for Austerity,” in which she and a friend committed to reducing their family's carbon output to 90% of the US average within one year, which is where we need to be by 2050. Both families achieved the goal, and Astyk reports they didn't miss too many comforts and were happier overall. This approach, seeing the future that is rapidly arriving and trying to adjust to it in advance, is the whole gist of her book. The result, as so many studies and observations of life in poorer countries have shown, is that actually being immersed in basic life functions like producing food and heat, and practicing thrift in clothing, energy use, and every other aspect of life you can think of, makes us feel more alive and healthy.

Even before the Copenhagen disaster, the news from Astyk and several other writers with their eyes open has been disconcerting: dont' trust government to make everything all-right, because it's not going to happen, even if we elect an Obama. Electing candidates who promise major initiatives for the public good or governmental reform would still not be able to do it, because our system appears to be terminally flawed, stalled by an over-efficient separation of powers and by continuing adherence to Keynesian economics in an era when the engine of growth cannot make up for government intervention in the form of job-creation, various forms of infrastructure subsidy, and currency expansion.

If nothing else, the present level of debt and promises of future indebtedness render a huge probability that we 'll never dig ourselves out. Just today, a chart was published showing the ratio of the percentage of external indebtedness to GDP for thirty countries with a ratio exceeding 60%, the critical threshold above which economic growth is cut with increasingly severity. At 90%, growth is cut in half. The US., with a ration of 94% stands 26th in this list of countries at greatest risk of sovereign default. Greece, which is on the brink, stands at 163%; Zimbabwe at 164%, but the figures go dizzyingly higher. Check it out at 01:46.

Depletion AND abundance... Many folks have been clamoring about the depletion side of the equation for years. Those in corporate and governmental power continue to deny it, extolling the American dream of endless opportunity with no sacrifice. What I really like about Astyk is that she emphasizes on virtually every page the abundant opportunities for personal and community renewal that a capitalist world crippled by the sudden intrusion of “externalities” like air, water, and topsoil will be unable to provide. These are virtually all in the “real economy,” which has continued to support 2 billion people worldwide who are negibly part of the public economy upon which growth figures are charted. These subsistent farmers point the way for those of us who have disdained the hard (but sometimes deeply satisfying) work of feeding, housing, and clothing our families.

From perhaps the most solitary (and narcissistic) culture in history, Astyk sees the necessity to transform into a “permaculture of family,” where our overbuilt houses will need to shelter family members (like my mother who is in “continuing care” near Pittsburgh, selling her house to be able to afford it), out-of-work friends, and eventually strangers (perhaps sponsored by the church) who need housing. Nuclear families will revert to extended ones, not necessarily based upon kinship. Two-thirds of us will be farmers, at least part-time, and a less-centralized commercial world will need shopkeepers and fabricators of all sorts.

Her friend and neighbor James Kunstler has argued that our country spent more than half a century in the postwar period creating a boondoggle called suburbia that we're going to have to simply write off with the advent of peak oil. Astyk disagrees, saying we will need to reconfigure all that land so there will be enough acreage to feed a hungry world of a few more billion. Rather than being stranded from distant, non-existent jobs, folks will make do with what they have, and anyone who owns a house will do everything they can to hold onto it. Suburbs will become towns, with a grid of markets and shops and the occasion for distributed power; they will not be abandoned because they were foolishly built in inconvenient places.

On the energy front, post-centralized power production, she recognizes what a lot of alternative energy zealots do not: that most people can't afford it, the money for subsides will soon vanish, and most important of all, even renewables aren't sustainable if you factor in all that it takes to produce the hardware: the 'embodied energy” represented by solar collectors, windmills, geothermal drilling and maintenance, etc. I'm still bullish on algae (not cellulosic ethanol), but in general I have to agree with her assessment.

I really appreciate Astyk's practicality and her sharp analysis of the bare necessities of living close to the bone. I also appreciate her honesty, as when, in her fine chapter on population, she confesses to failure in birth control, resulting in being the mother of four children. Hardly a model for a world where even two replacement children is probably too much of a burden on Gaia. But her re-situating the argument from the “old men” to the perspective of women childbearing age is absolutely critical if we're going to make any progress on this front. For those women are the locus of decision making, increasingly even in patriarchal cultures.

Essentially, this is my summary of Astyk's position. From the collapse of unsustainable global capitalism we will return to the way our great-grandparents lived in a more agrarian, localized economy, organized regionally. Much of the work energy will again come from human beings and draft animals. We will need to live in tight, efficient houses, with much larger margins of indoor temperatures, liberally sharing available square footage. The impending crisis can bring out the best in us, but only if we work together, rebuilding community and joining those communities together into a viable network. It's an exhilarating dash of icewater in my boomer's mug.

The Knife Edge Universe, Complexity, and Collapse

2010-01-26T10:18:00.008-05:00

After the Big Bang, the universe evolved on a knife edge. If it had expanded a little faster, it would have been an explosion producing the rapid dissipation of the infant universe. If it had gone just a tad slower, it would have collapsed back on itself. What we have is the perfect rate of expansion, sustaining the miracle of the known universe, including our galaxy, our sun, and us, at the midpoint of the turning world.

Civilization also exists on the knife edge. If you leave out the scattered indigenous tribes and the subsistent poor, the rest of us are hugely dependent upon an extremely complex system whose interconnecting parts must function exceedingly efficiently just for us to be fed, housed, and maintain optimum living temperatures. As most of you realize by now, this is made possible by fossil fuels, with petroleum the wonder fuel that has made it all possible. If the US trucking fleet were grounded for three days, food would rapidly disappear from the supermarket shelves, and most people wouldn't know where to get more. But the “petroleum interval” (Thomas Berry) is rapidly drawing to a close, with nothing on the horizon to replace the luxury it afforded us.

Peak Oil is now accepted even by the oil industry (though the exact time is under debate. I simply note here that production has held steady now for four years, while demand has continued to increase rapidly). Shrewd observers now speak of Peak Everything, and the necessity to constantly organize it on the knife-edge produces a high likelihood for collapse. The funny thing is, we've gotten so used to it functioning this way (those of us, now two generations, who didnt' know the Depression or WWII rationing) that we've become complacent. This is just the way it is. Though politicians have moved slowly, responding more to lobbyists than policy analysts, business is positioning itself to respond to the inevitable, in some cases even lobbying for cap and trade, which could well be the next boondoggle, certainly ripe for a derivatives market. Meanwhile the public is an uneducated cheerleader for the corporation making the slickest ads, sleepwalking through the supermarket on a knife's edge.

There is not much room to maneuver. We could make transport fuel by liquifying coal, as Germany did during WWII, but that would add to the already intolerable carbon burden of the earth system, and hasten Peak Coal. The same would be true if we went to a substantially electric vehicle system, since coal is the main source of electricity. Nuclear power plants, for which I have previously argued, might help make up the gap, but they are prohibitively expensive to be built in enough quantity or fast enough for us to stay on the knife-edge of our present lifestyle. Another huge factor slowing down nuclear expansion is the lack of trained engineers. Talk about complexity!

“But we can do it all with renewables,” progressives cry. By 2030, we are on a pathway to fulfilling 15% of our power needs with renewables (including hydropower, which is close to maxed out in the developed world). But the crucial factor here, pointed out by James Kunstler, and now Sharon Astyk (see next post), is that all that hardware has to be built from a platform powered by fossil fuels. We can only build a modest first generation of renewables with the remnant of fossil-powered energy. Going from that 15% to a “sustainable” steady state simply isn't possible. Without fossil fuels, how will my solar panels be replaced when they start to give out after 20 years?

We live on a knife-edge, and each moment is a miracle. The Shaivites insist that the universe is created and destroyed every moment. The point is standard Vedanta: the Creator/Self is all that exists, and the self, world, and supposed deities are all projections, all Maya. So there are two ways to leave the knife-edge universe. One is through the heat-death of matter-energy, with other interesting exit points like the Singularity I wrote about a few posts back. The other is simply to shut down the whole projection by re-immersing with the Self who made and continues to make the world, the epiphenomenal dance of Shiva and Maya.

The complex dance is now habitual. Just paying attention would reveal the miraculous nature of it all. Real or unreal, there is an alternative to the dizzying speed and complexty of modernist society, and it would be a solution to the twin peaks, Peak Commodities and the Towering Tsunami of Climate Change, hovering over our unprotected heads. Collapse would bring on involuntary simplicity. And if it comes soon enough, the complexity of natural systems would have a chance to reassert itself after being increasingly usurped by the complexity of human technology. If it comes too late, then the knife-edge within which we enjoy the miracle of material existence will finally implode, leaving the possibility of evolving higher life and consciousness to other places in the universe.

Tiny Advent Star

2009-12-23T09:53:00.001-05:00

There's a star-sized hole in the snow balanced on my deck railing, but you can only see it from one angle. We look for the star during this season, especially this year, with CoP-15 concurrent with Solstice and Advent. Amidst the post-Copenhagen spin, there is a smallish star, when looked at from the angle of climate diplomacy, namely the little non-binding agreement that Obama brokered in an accidental context, a coda to the exhausting proceedings.

But we look for Big Things during Advent, a guiding star that is unmistakable And the summit did not bring this from the world leaders. However, the mass movement generated by a significant portion of the world population through the organizing efforts of 350.org, Avaaz, and other groups was the real star of the season, starting with the Oct 24 rallies, on through the vigils Dec 12 and the mass petition signed by 12 million, tens of thousands of whose names were read aloud in the conference hall, the Bella Center. The only reason that many of us are not in despair right now is that this movement is primed to grow, keeping the pressure up for a “real deal.” The climate justice movement provides a genuine counterweight to the Tea Party movement in the US and the neo-Nazis in Europe.

President Obama, after his feat of extraordinary diplomacy, barging in on a cabal of developing nations plotting against the US and turning it into a collaborative session, albeit too late to significantly alter this much-ballyhooed summit, declared that what we need most as a global community of nations is trust. Both in the halls of international summitry and within the D.C. Beltway, trust is the missing ingredient, even though we all have interests that are more common and vital than national, sectarian, or party. Without it, nothing important can be accomplished as a nation or as a world community.

That is why the international quality of the climate change movement gives some grounds for hope. In terms of the politics of a climate treaty, there is far more hope in Europe, the UK, Japan, even Russia, because virtually all parties recognize and accept the science of climate change, and therefore the urgency of abating it. In the US, party and ideological divisions are rendering intelligent conversation on the issue extremely difficult. A key indicator of the difficulty is that the co-sponsor of the first climate bill, John McCain, has not shown any willingness to support the bill presently clogged in the Senate. It is more important for his party to wreck Obama's presidency than to save civilization as we know it.

This must change. Our main hope, now that our leaders have failed us, is to build an unstoppable people's movement that must be heard. Last Thursday, a day before the climate summit ended, 350.org called for a worldwide fast in support of a “real deal.” We will need more, longer fasts, and acts of civil disobedience. Everything will need to be disciplined and well-organized. The targets of these acts of conscience in this country are US Senators, who hold the key to our country's seriously joining a just, meaningful, and binding climate treaty. The Congress as a whole must come up with a bill for the President to sign, but it is the Senate that must ratify a UN treaty, by a two-thirds vote. Electing Obama was not the political act of the era; winning that treaty vote for the planet will be.

So, on to Mexico City without faltering. And start preparing now for your own role in the treaty vote in the Senate. The fate of the Earth depends upon it.

"ADVENT IS COPENHAGEN"

2009-12-22T09:42:00.003-05:00

Saturday, December 19

That was how I entitled a discussion group post the eve of the climate summit in Copenhagen. The next day, I broke six weeks' silence at Meeting with ministry on a haunting Gaelic carol, Christ often comes in the stranger's guise, reminding Friends that, in the climate emergency, it is the poor and island countries who are the stranger at the table. They were indeed present at the table in Copenhagen, but were lucky to get even crumbs from the repast. If Copenhagen has proved the impotence of our international political system, what are we to make of Solstice 2009, and the hope of Advent?

Yesterday, as the COP-15 talks concluded in a whirlwind of desperate diplomacy, I went for a walk with my wife Geeta in the fresh deep snow of our drive. Hemlocks, pines, and rhodos hung low, heavy with snow. Mirroring Copenhagen coming up with so little, the forest seemed to bow, draped in sympathy with the colossal failure of the international political system. It reinforced my deep sadness.

I mentioned this to Geeta, and she laughed, recognizing the pathetic fallacy. But I went deeper than sympathetic magic, recognizing that they are bowing to the Earth. The earth and all her myriad creation, yes, but also honoring her as natura naturans, the infinitely creative matrix of life. Gaia may well be in mourning as the deepest of Solstice nights approached, but she still retains the miraculous power to produce new life-forms.

Then, last night, as I played a variety of seasonal music, marking the whole scope of the seaon, I felt a deep sweetness, surrounded by darkness marked by white tree-sentinels. This was indeed a pivotal Solstice for humanity, and we may now be heading towards climate disaster. If so, I remind readers that emotionally, it is the same as facing personal death within a web of family. Experiencing the “last time” with our loved ones is both immensely sad, and for some, fearful, but at the same time it can be sweet, harvesting the richness and depth we have created through faithful relationships.

So I cherish each little bird I hear singing, rather than remembering when there were more. I admire the grace and beauty of the deer who eat my garden. I delight in the constant number of chattering, busy squirrels, still fed by our stand of hickories in a Southern Appalachian forest that remains, for a while longer, oak-hickory.

If you know your family well, but not the earth-place that gives you a home, then by all means, get to know that place while it still has some integrity. Even if we are headed into a downward spiral, there is so much to cherish.

And as the brave folks at 350.org remind us all today, through we lost a big battle yesterday, the war for climate justice goes on, and the cadre of climate warriors could welcome a boost. But first, gather 'round with those you love, get outside despite the weather and greet your earth-place and its denizens. Enjoy a sabbath. Then, with the New Year, be ready to bring it on again, and that's going to mean holding Congress to the task of passing climate and energy legislation worthy of the science and faithful to the cause of climate justice.

This is obviously no mean task, but when you come to the end of the road, will you look back and see that you were too preoccupied with your own comfort to join the biggest moral campaign in history? Weakened by a rebellious Congress, our political savior had no prophetic rallying cry, only scrappy diplomacy to round up some key developing nations, promising to do more next time. The real heroes at Copenhagen were the little countires who wouldn't fold on the rack of pressure, and the people in the streets, including all the NGO's progressively ousted from the negotiating hall, massing outside as the summit headed into virtual deadlock. Our leaders have failed us; now leadership needs to come from the people.

It's our turn to lead, friends, each in ways that we never dreamed we could. The courage and creativity are all there, if only we have the faith to dig for it.

FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL

2009-12-17T11:48:00.003-05:00

December 11 we vigiled around the Burnsville Square with our sign, “350= Climate Justice!” Three of us from Celo Friends Meeting were joined by a retired couple from Atlanta, sojourning at the Episcopal church in town. We were barely noticed, except when we stood under the “Go Cougars” sign. The same night, the Mountain Heritage high school football team was playing in Chapel Hill for the state 2A championship. It was very cold, and all got frosty fingers and toes. We walked around the square several times, turning our sign towards passing motorists. A woman walked across the crosswalk and gave us a quick, warm smile. There were no jeers, but also no inquiries or thumbs up. The only one among us born in the county was the gentleman from St Thomas, and he was impressed simply by the fact that such a vigil was possible in the town where he grew up. We vigiled until dark, the sky turning from deep blue to charcoal.

This was Friday night. On Sunday, Jim, one of the vigilers, brought a bell which we passed around at the close of Meeting, each person ringing it twenty times, until the number 350 was reached. (350 ppm CO2 is the upper limit climate scientists agree the earth can absorb and maintain anything like the world we grew up in. The present concentration of CO2 is 390.) Answering the call of 350.org and the World Council of Churches, bells tolled 350 times around the world, calling the negotiaters and climate ministers to climate justice via the treaty being negotiated in Copenhagen. A Baptist minister, shepherd of the church on the square, had first answered that they'd ring the bells 350 times Sunday afternoon, but he failed to respond to my calls for confirmation during the preceding week. Most people in Yancey county don't accept climate change, and so this proclamation was probably too risky for him.

For whom do these bells toll? First, they toll for the nations most at risk, the island nations, nations like Bangladesh with low coastlines, the African nations being pushed more and more irrevocably into drought. These are the countries providing leadership at the conference, courageously standing up to the industrial powers who have used strong-arm tactics against them in each of the negotiating sessions prior to COP-15. Meanwhile, the US and China carry on a diplomatic duel, pointing fingers at each other over responsibility for the mess. The EU has continued to provide leadership of its own, both promising the most cuts in CO2 emissions and the most money to help poorer nations pay the costs of shifting to lower carbon energy economies. Russia and Japan have also promised fairly deep cuts by 2020. But these levels remain insufficient, and as the climate summit heads into its final days, the rich and poor nations, and the US and China, remain deadlocked. Heads of state have started arriving and giving speeches ahead of the final scramble for a treaty framework. Gordon Brown, the British PM, arrived early, trying to help the poor nations and NGO's, (the latter being progressively excluded from the final sessions) broker a deal with the rich countires who have caused most of the pollution.

For whom do these bells toll? The poorer nations are clearly most at risk from climate change. But the bells toll not only for them, but for all nations, for rising seas and changing weather patterns will affect all, if not now, soon. Climate change has begun, and is picking up speed. Only a few years ago, scientists worried that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2070. Now a credible study by the US Navy points to five-seven years. And they have tolled already in New Orleans, where the poor either died, hang on with scant help or have become some of the earliest climate refugees.

Negotiating a treaty that will lay out a pathway towards climate justice will be difficult, close to impossible. The divides at COP-15 are many and deep, especially those between the developed and developing worlds, and the US and China. The key problem is the clash between politics and the laws of nature. Climate science reveals a narrowing window for action and a steepening curve for the costs of stabilizing and eventually cutting back carbon emissions. These costs, politically and economically, are enormous, verging on the astronomical as the window for action closes. Since we are dealing with tipping points for a whole interlocking series of positive feedback loops, what the Brits call “add-on effects,” it's not something we can fix after we are dead certain these effects have been unleashed. Some have already, yet denial allows many to enjoy “normal”life for a short while. We are a remarkably resilient species, and the mind is especiallly pliable, entertaining multiple fantasies of escape and salvation, either by technology or divine intervention. But as we sleepwalk like lemmings towards the rising seas, the Four Horsemen have already entered the field, swords and scythes upraised.

Concurrent with COP-15, the Parliament of World Religions has convened in Melbourne. I attended the last one in Barcelona in 2004, trying to get the religions of the world to accept anthropogenic climate instability as the chief moral issue of our times. Gary Gardner, the religion editor for Worldwatch, and I announced a meeting for those who agreed. One Spanish priest showed. Another meeting, held in Gaudi's storied la Pedrera, replete with wonderful speakers and multilingual translators, was attended by less than 50. A friend who was with me at Barcelona is attending, and says that religious leaders are very focused this time on the primacy of climate as a moral issue. A Christian pastor, he assured me this fall that “God will not let us fail..” Yesterday he wrote that things were looking pretty bleak for a new climate treaty, adding that he was holding out for a miracle.

All of us are praying for that miracle at Copenhagen, including some atheists trying new behavior. The miracle would be a fair, scientifically honest, binding treaty that builds on Kyoto and includes the US, China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia as signatories, as well as the 37 nations bound by emissions reductions in the Kyoto Accord. The bells are tolling, not just for rich and poor, but for the amphibians, the birds, and the mammals, including our species: all higher life on this remarkably blessed planet.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do...

Friends, what have we done? Can it still be undone?

DURIKA: MODEL FOR SURVIVING COLLAPSE

2009-12-12T12:34:00.003-05:00

When we were in Costa Rica last year, we visited an inspiring community adjacent to the Parc National La Amistad, which straddles the Talamanca Range forming a backbone running from Costa Rica through northern Panama. The founders wanted to protect the park from encroachment by neighboring farmers who wanted more land for pasture by setting up a buffer and monitoring it. Indeed, the first evening we were at Durika, one of the residents showed us the fires burning across the valley, climbing up several facing ridges. The man shook his head, mourning the continuing loss of rainforest to cattle. There are only 6 rangers for the entire park, which is huge (give acreage). So, after years of planning and pooling funds, the Durika folks purchased 8500 hectares bordering the park. Their plan, now into its 18th year, was to build a self-sustaining community and host eco-tourists. Guided tours of the park would both provide education and give the community members the opportunity to patrol their end of the park via walkie-talkies, providing a supplementary presence for the rangers.

Durika's plan is working. A community of 20-25 makes a living there, growing fruit and vegetables, with a sizable goat operation which porduces yogurt and cheese. They trade fruit for beans grown by their indigenous neighbors, and receive rice from a farming partner who lives about 100 km away. The income from ecotourists goes primarily towards Durika's monthly land payments. Available food goes to the guests first; what remains is equitably distributed to the individuals and families who make up the community: so much for each adult, so much for each child. They have not missed a payment, and the members are strong and lean, but not malnourished. Financial resources are pooled, but each member has a modest yearly personal allowance.

The bunkhouses where we stayed are spartan, but there is plenty of running water and electricity, which both come from a generously flowing stream with an impressive fall, issuing from the mountain slopes above the community. (GUY who designed it). Hydropower is a major source of electricity in Costa Rica, which only requires fossil fuels for 10% of the total. The community was hosting a solar power workshop the day we left, and the American leadig it told us that the main plan was to provides power for the indigenous school on adjacent land that operates minimally for lack of electricity.

Schooling at Durika is Montessori-style through eighth grade. The high schoolers have tutoring to help them pass qualifying tests for college. We met several kids, ranging from infants to age 16. They were well-adjusted, bright, and knew how to take care of themselves while backpacking. They had a sense of independence and fun. The Montessori teacher was a man in his seventies who had just decided to retire and work full-time with the goats. A woman in her late twenties was taking over the position.

Though they hope that the children will return to the community after college, Durikans are senstive to the huge differences between their way of life and the urban life that their kids might one day join. So, every year, they take a field trip to the favelas and bordellos, interviewing prostitutes and druggies. (As a retired humanities teacher, I see a great opportunity for a journaling assignment!) One of the most impressive members we met was a self-described “party-girl” who had come to Durika to kick her alcohol habit, then undergone a year's trial membership, then welcomed into membership by consensus. She is a perfect example of the kind of initiation that I described the need for in my last post. It was clear that she lived an integrated life with meaning and purpose, whereas she was on the brink of disaster before she discovered Durika. It is she who will be the new lead Montessori teacher.

Durika is very tight-knit, as you can imagine. They hold a community meeting every night after dinner, which includes everyone still awake. These are open to everything possible affecting the life of the community, and can be alternately intense, business-like or humorous. This is a family, and even the divorced couple who live separately but continue to co-parent treat each other with respect and affection, like brother and sister.

Like any community, there are problems, both interpersonal and structural. Right now, there is not enough housing for everyone who needs it, and building goes slowly when you have to raise the money and the crew have other daily responsibilities. I detected some tension between those who had nothing except what the community gave them, and those who seemed to have other sources of income (there is no requirement to hand over your bank account). In terms of food sustainability, they still import wheat, and I wondered why they didnt grow corn. We discussed potatoes and setting up a mill for potato flour, but this does not seem imminent. The farmer who donates the rice is a key to their survival, as is their voluntary submission to food rationing. I learned elsewhere of a family who left after nine months, since they had all lost weight, the father and mother 30 and 20 pounds respectively.

But that's where we're headed as a civilization, and if you're gonna survive, it means lean and mean. Durika is really pointing the way. In a world of decline and collapse, none of us, including farming communities, is going to be “self-sufficient.” Community is something that will need to transcend immediate locality, though the ability to ship gargantuan volumes of material long distances will soon disappear, due to peak oil. If you have a story of community, or meaningful intitiation back into indigenous life-styles, please respond with comments and links. We are all in this together.

COLLAPSE

2009-11-30T11:47:00.009-05:00

There's something decidedly twenty-first century about an inventor telling us that technology is about to make us into God. This would be the final realization of the line in Genesis, ye shall be as gods. The emphasis there was on our stepping across the line into moral choice, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. No more trusting obedience to the ordering principle of life in the Garden. But post-Eden, tending the Garden became our neolithic charge. We need to stop short of the God-equation, and go back to living within our niche, if that still has any meaning at all.

Let's face it, those who are not techno-hip, or not saved, will have a time of it. The stark limit of biological evolution is population overshoot, not conscious control of the inner springs of life and consciousness (though there will always be a tiny handful who achieve this state, as the yogins of India have shown for at least four and a half millennia). We crossed that line ca. 1986, when we pushed the earth beyond 100% bio-capacity. And that was before the rise of China and India, with a third of planetary population.

Since Kyoto, carbon emissions have gone up, not down, and the curve has steepened since China's big push. The faint hopes of a climate treaty (not in Copenhagen, alas, but “sometime” next year), rest on getting the nations of the world to play by corporate rules, agreeing to commoditize carbon, allowing market manipulators to distort the process to the degree that the goal is effectively subverted. A real integration of science and economics can only reasonably come from a clear-cut carbon tax, with subsidies to the industrial poor to offset it. But that is off the table. We can deny the ensuing rolling collapse, which is the response of the vast majority of humanity - including almost all my colleagues, friends and family- or meet it as an existential challenge.

In Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse, Carolyn Baker argues that we listen to the still small voice and recognize the process of industrial civilization’s collapse, making it an opportunity for initiation for those of us who survive. Baker, following Dmitri Orlov, says this process has already started, and the challenge is no longer economic or technological fixes, but spiritual transformation. I have long argued that the global ecological crisis is the greatest moral challenge in human history. Baker and other “Doomers” proclaim that we have already failed that challenge, which leads to the next, crossing the archipelago back into our still–waiting indigenous selves.

Many wise people have argued that this has been the challenge for our species ever since we left the Garden of hunting and gathering. I’ve always loved Jung’s term , the “two million year-old Great Man.” This is the type of the human, the creature who knew how to inhabit its niche, wherever its ancestors happened to live. Now that the late industrial is fast becoming the post-industrial, the long repressed cry for elders is beginning to find voice, and suburbians travel to deserts or mountain fastnesses to walk further than they’ve ever walked before, fast intensely, and pray as deeply as they can, seeking the blessed Grail of initiation into deeper, more meaningful lives than consumerism and jetting to adventurelands for “cultural enrichment” could ever provide.

At an earlier climate conference,1992 in Rio, George Bush Sr proclaimed, “The American way of life is unnegotiable.” Baker's analysis of this kind of thinking (she attributes the original quote to Cheney) is that it reveals the underlying psychology of industrial capitalism: the developmental stage of a 2-year old, “believing that there are no limits and we can have whatever we want.” Not only can, but should. My own sense that democracy operates at the level of a young adolescent is trumped here by an even deeper analysis, reminiscent of Paul Shepard's critique of industrial society acting to juvenilize nature.

But let’s face it, there aren’t many initiators out there. The remaining treasures are the remnant of archaic men and women who know how to live in place within what remains of their tattered ecosystems. The far-sighted and courageous among the dominant industrial culture are training themselves to learn to live again in place, thus to become indigenous once again. But the key, as Baker, Bill Plotkin, Maladoma Some, and Michael Murphy all proclaim, is that our type, morphologically, genotypically and spiritually, still lives deep within us, accessible to anyone with full awareness of what is needed in our desperate times. Whether accession leads to initiation into an integrated, empowered adult in touch with the Great Man (or Woman) who can live in the ruins of the Petroleum Interval is another matter. It is my challenge and yours, dear reader.

Next up: a community providing a courageous example of embracing the challenge of becoming indigenous: Durika, in Costa Rica.

Apocalypse Now: the Rapture, the Singularity, or Collapse?

2009-11-18T16:26:00.005-05:00

Though the millennium has passed, and we’re still here, an apocalyptic mood remains. Small wonder. We are in a global recession, the worst since the Great Depression, multiple conflicts contradict the German left’s pronouncement that war is “obsolete”, and climate change threatens the world as we know it. Christian fundamentalists still speak of End Times and the Rapture, including some inside the late unlamented Bush administration. Radical Muslims are in continual jihad against Western civilization and its elder brother Abrahamic faith, a desperate battle which will not end until industrial civilization ends. And now the Mayan prophecy, computed on independent calendars, of the world’s end December 21, 2012 stares us in the face.

Another camp, following mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge, has translated the whole business of the singularity, occurring at the event horizon of the visible universe, into the human realm, as Stewart Brand explains in The Clock of the Long Now. The rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, throwing off the constants figured in the first half of the 20th century. Similarly, the rate of technological explosion is accelerating, and our ancient primate and mammalian encoded genetic make-up struggles to cope. Vinge thinks this isn’t just sci-fi, but that our consciousness is rapidly approaching singularity, something like a Black Hole, which, once entered, will feel like being pulled like a piece of taffy, infinitely, or until we change states. If you resist it, you’re torn apart. “Society itself could be dismembered, as some people ride the breaking wave of ever-new technology over the event horizon into invisibility while others lag behind, feeling the immense gravitational pull of still–accelerating tech, while no longer able to see it” (Long Now, 21).

The consensus date for this techno-singularity is 2035. What happens beyond that point is “unknown and unknowable.” The crest of the wave of humanity disappearing into the singularity is the new age tech version of the Rapture. Inventor Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near, 2005) speaks confidently of these highly skilled techno-surfers as becoming asymptotic to God, who would thus be the chaotic attractor within the Black Hole.

This leaves us a long way from the blueprints in our archaic genetic makeup. I have long been troubled by loose talk about “conscious evolution,” something you can go study with Andrew Cohen, or pursue as a higher degree at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Classical biological evolution has never been “conscious”; it is driven by natural selection, and the qualities being selected for may be very different from the consequences to the species of the traits produced. I believe deeply, however, in immanence, that the Divine is present throughout the universe at every level, and that all outer evolutionary traits express an interiority that is purposeful. Call me an adherent of Intelligent Design if you will, but I am not talking about a grand Wizard/Puppeteer, staging this whole thing from some archimedean point outside the universe. Divine intelligence is a kind of entelechy working from within, expressed in outer forms which only make sense when one sees the pattern of the whole.

Allan Combs tries to make sense of the different ingredients in “evolution soup” in his book, The Radiance of Being. He distinguishes biological evolution from historical evolution, which has more to do with the progressive development and maturation of the psychospiritual dimension, including progressive structures of consciousness. This is not the place to go into the vast sweep of the historical development of hominid consciousness. But the last step envisioned by Combs’ two theorists of these structures, Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber, may have the potential to position us at the cusp of the moment of singularity. Gebser called it the Integral stage, when all structures of consciousness work together to re-member the “ever-present Origin.” As in Vedanta, unlike biological evolution, which is seemingly without a goal, the telos of spiritual evolution is to remember that each of us seemingly separate sentient beings is, and always has been, the Origin, God.

My understanding of conscious evolution, as opposed to evolution of consciousness, is that it involves individual consciousness. It occurs after the awakening of the soul to its higher goal of divine fulfilment, throughout the history of the truly human. But lately, in the last 15-20 years, some theorists have begun speaking as if this individual process actually was the laboratory for conscious evolution of the species. As Thomas Berry put it in the Great Work, we are at the juncture where it is necessary to reinvent the human at the species level.

The work of Rupert Sheldrake, among others, shows that Lamarck's ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics may not be as far-fetched as we once thought, opening the door to the possibility of something like conscious evolution at the species level. But it still feels to me like a category error: what is true for the individual is not at all the same as what occurs at the species level. In Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy distinguishes between the transformation of individual consciousness and self-reflexivity on the level of social systems. She wonders if our current global eco-crisis might engender the next step in systemic self-organization, a holonic shift in group consciousness. But if this were to occur, would we call it “conscious evolution” or an evolutinary response from within the Gaian system to preserve interspecies equilibrium?

Theorists of biological evolution point to periods of relatively rapid evolution, when genetic changes happened far more quickly than the traditional Darwinian process would predict. Combs speaks of “emergent evolution” in terms of transforming individual consciousness, rapid quantum-like shifts rather than the gradual development characteristic of “constructive” evolution. There seems to be a collective fantasy for this to happen globally, working at the species level. The leading wave goes into the Singularity, and the rest of us are left behind on an aging terrestrial wreck. This would be something like the triumph of homo sapiens over neanderthalis. In that instance, we proved to be more adaptable to a wide variety of conditions, and technology apparently played a part in it.

Pressured by the immense force of accelerating technological advancement, New Age techies literalize the process of historical evolution of consciousness, observed in homo sapiens on a fortunately-placed planet in a particular solar system in the Milky Way, making it a just-so narrative. For them it is not a matter of analogy or metaphor, an as if scenario. The leading edge, asymptotic to God, will simply disappear into the Singularity. This is the twenty-first century modulation of space colonization, which, however unworkable and morally repugnant, clung to a faint echo of possibility.

This new sci-fi fantasy has power because of our intuitive pull to the immense attractor within the Black Hole. But it remains sci-fi for me, nevertheless. Vinge and Kurzweil make the category error of imagining that spiritual development and technological development, as an extension of biological evolution, are one, occuring on the same ontological plane. It may feel as if the high-flying techies have disappeared, which is certainly the experience I've had trying to be mutually present with some of them. But to actually disappear is another thing altogether. This is true as well of the “gravitational pull of still-accelerating tech.” We would not experience this pull unless we assented to it as a spiritual reality. Archaic spiritual practices still remain valid, for instance those of truly gifted shamans. Those anchored in the Origin are not to be numbered just among the accelerating crest of the tech wave.

Instead of following this Singular crowd, how about looking at our whole enterprise from the perspective of that crusty old nineteeth century discipline of population biology? Placing conscious evolution within the physical constraints of biological evolution might well be instructive. Hence , our next post, which is on to the sobering prospect of population overshoot and collapse.

POPULATION and CLIMATE CHANGE

2009-10-20T14:42:00.005-04:00

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 a sobering recent post.

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 on the Remnant of the Meek). 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.

Waxman-Markey Bill up for House Vote

2009-06-24T15:49:00.001-04:00

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.

Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie

2009-04-23T09:38:00.004-04:00

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)

Remnants: Piecing a Just, Sustainable Society from the Detritus of Empire

2009-02-28T11:50:00.006-05:00

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.

Remnant III: the meek shall inherit the earth

2009-01-29T12:30:00.001-05:00

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.

Plato's Remnant: the Way to Tackle Climate Change?

2008-12-18T12:20:00.001-05:00

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.

The Burden of the Gospels (Wendell Berry)

2008-10-29T13:19:00.002-04:00

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)

2008-10-29T12:52:00.002-04:00

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.

Forgive them, for they know not what they do

2008-09-11T14:54:00.005-04:00

But what if we do indeed know what we do? A small number of ecologists, climate scientists, and elders of first peoples have known that we are crucifying the earth for a long time. And now, many more have witnessed "An Inconvenient Truth," and thus recognize that we are creating an accelerating greenhouse effect by burning up the earth's fossilized carbon sinks. But the vast majority of us are unwilling to take personal responsibility for this greatest of sins because of our habit of easy compliance with the structural sin of global industrial capitalism. This sin is condoned by the church itself, as the initial Protestant blessing of its children, seeing those who reaped the abundance of capitalism as a sign of God's favor, has morphed into the church's sanction of rampant greed in the late industrial and terminal holocene ages.

Unfettered corporate behavior, complicit with sovereign nations' pandering to their richest citizens' comfort over all other government responsibilities defines the deeply entrenched structural sin whereby we have thoroughly commoditized the earth. Though we protect ourselves by burying the guilt the moment it starts to grow in our hearts, deep down we know that our everyday actions trash the earth. But as my cousin says, that's somebody else's problem. Let the government take care of it.

We know not that we crucify something divine by poisoning the atmosphere? That would be pantheism, the whole terrible universe experienced as divine. But if God is the Ground of Being, the beloved earth is His raiments. For the pantheist, it is divine simply as it is. For the panentheist, it is divine because God made it, working from within, its holy source.

And does the traditional Christian, viewing the earth from God's perspective above and around her in the vastness of space, does she not also know what we do? God told us to be stewards, and the closer we look at our lives, the more we realize we defy him. We are not stewards, except in the limited ways we tithe to the earth at the margins of our economic lives. So in this sense, we do know what we do.

Forgive them... How can we be forgiven if we knowingly destroy creation? The earth cannot forgive; she can only heal though adaptation. And what would the Creator's forgiveness entail? Given that the earth is entering old age, there is probably insufficient time to recover the complexity of higher life, once extinct, during her remaining lifetime. Accepting such divine forgiveness would entail a faith of cosmic dimensions, trusting the everabundant Creator to recreate the unlikely conditions of life on earth in another universe, either with a new start or in some kind of "parallel play" in which theoretical physicists like to speculatively engage.

But do we really know what we are doing to the earth? I was at a discussion this spring of global challenges with a group of highly educated, spiritually grounded "elders" (our median age was in the 60's). One woman blurted, "We're not in crisis." Industrial urban life hides eco-justice and social justice effects from the consumer, for our resource and trade base is the whole world. Lacking systemic thinking and moral imagination, we are blind to the beginning wave of distant environmental refugees, the huge holes in the fabric of Gaia opening as we dredge the seas for protein, and slash and burn rainforests. And at home in our comfortable enclaves, we ignore the small, but numerous signs of the unraveling of Gaia's web.

Isn't our collective behavior the sign of an addiction so deeply entrenched that we cannot fathom it? The order of sin from within late industrial capitalism is so enormous that we in our complicity can scarcely imagine being forgiven. How can we contemplate the level of forgiveness required if we cannot even imagine the sin itself?

The scale of the Creators’ forgiveness is beyond our imagining, even when we realize we have been complicit in the murder of Creation. Facing up to this complicity can be a huge burden. Personally, I need to move beyond superego-driven, human judgment to allow divine compassion. It is not up to me to forgive. Yet as along as I am part of this culture, however aware and careful I am with my material choices, I simply cannot honestly accept Jesus' admonition, Go, and sin no more. Go where on this commoditized earth? To do so would be to accept self-annihilation, and to wish my own or my species’ death would be blasphemy, for we are integral to Creation. Once we accept ecological sin, we need to accept the infinite nature of God's forgiveness, even unto the end of the earth.

IS SCIENCE THE PROPHETIC VOICE OF OUR TIME?

2008-05-27T11:53:00.003-04:00

A colleague posed this query a few weeks ago. It accompanied James Hansen’s letter to Jim Rogers, Duke Power CEO, passionately trying to dissuade him from building a huge new coal-fired plant at Cliffside, south of Charlotte, NC. Hansen is one of the worlds’ foremost climate scientists, working tirelessly to inform politicians and corporate leaders of the disastrous consequences of business as usual.

Climate change is the key moral issue of our time and the greatest challenge our species has ever faced. Chief among the Pandora’s box of ecological crises unleashed by the global corporate industrial complex, it is worthy of enlisting prophetic voices. But because it is sworn to value neutrality, science itself is not prophetic. Peer review attempts to assure allegiance to the scientific method, but in the public statements which the IPCC releases periodically, it is the politics of careful consensus that determines the averaged truth we hear.

What makes the reports of bodies like the IPCC prophetic is that they deliver with considerable authority a truthful view of the world, one which our shackles of habit and comfort resist. Cal DeWitt, legendary environmental science professor, pointed out recently that the job of the scientist, as well as the ordinary citizen, is simply to describe what he sees when he honestly looks at the world we live in. Thus the scientist and the honest citizen play the role of the little boy who pointed out to a kingdom of sycophants that the emperor wore no clothes.

Science is descriptive. By its ability to measure concentrations of atmospheric gases, and compare them to other climatic eras, the IPCC is able to make a comprehensive case for the earth’s condition. By taking on the role as arbiter of truthful evidence in the post-Enlightenment world, science plays less the role of prophet than priest. In the case of climate change, it provides an enormous counterweight to industry and the politicians who do its bidding. But in other cases, like the pharmaceutical industry, it is thoroughly complicit in the corporate goal of fleecing the consumer by controlling the means of relief from the mortal reality framing our lives.

In the case of the IPCC reports, the sense that science is prophetic comes from its ability to predict future climates based on more and more precise modeling of those from the past and present. Since its models are so powerful, we experience the dawning future like a fearsome wave asymptotic to the present reality; the future is collapsing upon our poorly-defended present. For those with eyes open it feels like prophecy unfolding.

Science is also normative, and those norms not only dictate the practice of science, they enshrine it as the technological fix. Running out of food? No problem, we’ll synthesize it in the lab. Too much CO2? Let’s pump it into the ground, perhaps piping it under the ocean. The latter dream reminds me of Goethe’s Faust and his vast scheme for water projects spanning the northern hemisphere. Ignoring Faustus’ fate in the Medieval morality play and in Marlowe’s drama, we honor him as Goethe’s romantic hero, the superscientist who holds the keys to the kingdom of sustainability.

Individual scientists take what their science has given them to speak in moral terms. In his letter to Jim Rogers, Hansen speaks of both the tragedy and the dangers to humankind presented by desperate climate refugees. He speaks of the moral imperative to preserve a habitable world for our children and grandchildren. But in the same letter, knowing he’s addressing a businessman, he dwells longest on the liability of building coal-fired plants in a business climate overshadowed by global warming.

Hansen acknowledges greed by pointing out the similarity in the disinformation campaign on climate change to the tobacco industry’s use of the same strategy, enabling it to amass huge profits while it diverted society from incontrovertible evidence that smoking caused cancer. But a true prophet would address our common greed, a whole society that has turned away from God’s charge to be stewards of the Garden. We like to blame the politicians and corporate overlords, but we are the ones who elect the politicians and buy the array of plastic from China, demanding food, oil, and electric power anytime from anywhere, at a huge cost to the earth.

The prophetic response to climate change emerges not from science but from allegiance to a power deeper than humanity. In the case of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that power resides in the Old Testament land ethic and in Jesus’s social gospel. The prophet would point out the special risk to the poor from climate disruption. To the prophetic ear, the message of the climate scientist leads to an examination of structural sin, a political liberalism that discounts the good of the whole, confident that individual liberty will liberate us all, including the least of these, into the horn of plenty. The mechanism for this is the Market, today’s Mammon enshrined by left and right alike, an economic structure that continues to enrich a minority while the poor remain mired in poverty. A rising tide raises all boats say the other modernist priests, neoliberal economists. Tell this to islanders and coastal dwellers already washed by that tide.

“See how Christ's blood streams from the firmament!” says Marlowe’s Faustus, his heart locked against repentance. In the next scene, the demons pull him bodily into hell. In contrast to the cool view of science, the universe is shot through with the divine, and has a moral structure. Faustus looks up and beholds the river of the suffering divine as it enters into relation with the world. Creation may not have taken place by means of the haunting poetry of Genesis, but scripture points out that ours is world structured by the divine, not chance. The Genesis Garden is laid out in quarters by the two rivers flowing through it. Prophecy is rooted in the recognition of this moral structure, and today it proclaims how our ecological sin has damaged it hugely.

Fundamentalists are retrograde to deny the atmospheric facts, but they are faithful in their witness to the divine foundation of prophetic speech and action. We need science’s help in getting the facts of Creation right, but all people of faith need to reach for the requisite motivation to preserve this old earth in the face of another great wave of extinction. We must re-affirm our deepest love and stewardship, for this time around, we are the Flood, and must learn again to be Noahs, undoing what our engine of progress has wrought.

EO Wilson, Hotspots, and Global Warming

2008-05-27T11:17:00.002-04:00

Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC pioneers educating for environmentalist careers and building a sustainable college community. When Nobel laureate E.O. Wilson, who created the new sub-field of sociobiology, spoke at the college a few years ago, he highlighted the challenge and adventure of a naturalist’s career, showing scientists in cloud forest canopy walkways such as those we experienced in Monteverde. At the end of his talk, a suitably awed student asked, “And who will carry on this work when you are gone?”, Wilson immediately answered with a smile, scanning the thronged chapel, “Why you will, of course.”

Preserving hotspots, and training those who will safeguard them, is a splendid idea, and organizations like Conservation International are making great strides in doing just that (though preserving the human cultures who live alongside these rich genetic troves has proved a challenge. But during the question period, I raised the issue of the impact of climate change upon these preserves, forcing their inhabitants to shift to more suitable climates, and thus frequently facing the daunting prospect of traversing adjacent areas heavily populated by human beings. Wilson was perturbed. “One problem at a time,” he begged.

Up to the late twentieth century, science advanced through just this approach. But I’m sorry Professor Wilson, we can’t pick and choose our problems; they are all happening at once. During the last half century, the field of ecology has matured, and has necessarily introduced the study of the systemic complexity characterized by many mutually-affecting variables. Wilson was unhappy with the question because he was at Warren Wilson to recruit naturalists. But the question still stands, and we face the awesome task of addressing the whole host of variables in the earth-system unleashed by global warming. We are the Flood, and we need to collectively remember how to be Noahs, not just by preserving ecologically sensitive hotspots, but by fundamentally changing the way we live.

My last post chronicled a happy sojourn in Costa Rica and its hotspots, preserved by an enlightened government and citizenry. The discerning reader might ask, “But what about the ecological cost of ecotourism?” Among the perplexing tasks of sorting variables is weighing the relative carbon costs of flying in ecotourists to the cutting of trees and putting in cattle in unsuitable terrain, as the Quaker “pioneers” did at Monteverde. Raising cattle is perhaps the single most destructive thing that we do. Ecotourism seems to be a progressive move, but just how much do the consumers, the eco-tourists, do to help the equation?

No matter what our efforts to set aside habitat for future genetic diversity, the larger issue always remains the human context for these areas. Excepting the most basic elements of life - the bacteria, algae, fungi, and insects - we have become the dominant life-form, and all other species live within our context - the honeybees surviving in urban and suburban areas while dying in the countryside - or they are in preserves, effectively, zoos.

But there are moments when the primordial still rears up and swallows us, natives who were thrown out of the Garden, now casually and mindlessly raising colonialists of the natural order, addicted to our industrial ways and imagined separation from our ground in Gaia. When Geeta and I arrived at our lodge adjacent to the Corcovado rainforest preserve in the Osa Peninsula, the sound of the cicadas was so deafening I couldn’t hear myself think. I was worried, fearful that I would be trapped for a week amidst this deafening chant, unable to thread my identity along the string of my occasionally brilliant reflections. Mercifully, at nightfall, the chorus abruptly ceased, and I relaxed. But during our stay at this glorious place, each day inevitably produced a time when the chorus rose up to swallow me again, reminding me that in the big scheme of things, I and my thoughts were perhaps not so important after all.

Ecotourists in Costa Rica

2008-02-29T12:59:00.001-05:00

Dear reader, following the meandering gifts of a privileged life, I am going to post a series of blogs on Costa Rica before returning to our “Two Paradigms and the Perils Between” – title of my Cabin Fever University course here in the WNC mountains, ongoing...

Celebrating our thirty-fifth anniversary, Geeta and I just spent three glorious weeks in Costa Rica. It contains the most biodiversity of any place in the Americas, and after decades of struggling to build an economy in more conventional ways (coffee, bananas and pineapples, cattle), it has embraced ecotourism, taking advantage of its greatest resource of all. Not only does Costa Rica host a tremendous diversity of wildlife and flora, the people are unabashedly friendly. This combination, enhanced by a sensibly designed tourist infrastructure, makes a visit to Costa Rica a unique, unforgettable adventure.

We organized our trip around visits to forest reserves, both tropical rain forests and cloud forests. We traveled for the most part by bus, though we did take one private taxi, some boat launches, as well as a short plane ride in a tiny plane utilizing a gravel airstrip. Costa Rican buses are modern, on time, clean, and have mostly middle class riders, plus a sprinkling of tourists. The meal stops are also clean, with good food – local diners with cafeteria-style service. They put Greyhound to shame.

We are Quaker, and visiting the Quaker community at Monteverde in the northwestern highlands was a high priority. The core settlers were farmers from Fairhope Alabama, who arrived in 1952 during one of the government’s periods of agricultural expansion, giving land away in remote forested areas to squatters who were willing to improve it. The Quakers paid off the squatters, who were happy to squat again as neighbor. These “pioneers,” as the locals call them, took the patchwork of holdings, divided it amongst themselves, and proceeded to do what they knew best - clear most it for cattle.

In the early seventies, a series of visiting biologists persuaded the Monteverde Community that what they were doing was a huge mistake. One young man in particular, who had come to research his doctoral project, was so alarmed that he dropped out of his doctoral program and stayed to educate the Monteverde community. The Quakers renounced clearing more land, and supported the young biologist in his efforts to establish a forest research reserve, the Tropical Science Center, now 3500 hectares.

So the settlers who had modeled the government’s efforts at expanding the cattle industry now were chastened into the forefront of the preservationist movement, and a second wave of homesteading deeds became the last, superceded by a remarkable national effort to preserve as much rain forest as possible (now over 25%). In the Monteverde area, there are now three forest reserves; we stayed at a bed and breakfast between two of them. The Monteverdeans also took the lead in developing ecotourism.

Before our day in the Monteverde cloud forest reserve, we spent a morning on ziplines and canopy walks in a nearby park. It was exhilarating, and from canopy bridges we looked down on the scene we would explore on forest trails the next day. One quickly learns within these forests the immense importance of preserving them. Not only is there plant life in virtually every available patch of earth, but the trees themselves are covered with epiphytes, vines that root in the canopy and grow down towards the earth. Plants grow upon plants who grow upon other plants, a riot of symbiosis. One researcher found that a mature tree in the Monteverde forest hosted a ton or more biomass – dry weight! All of this is a carbon sink, the exact opposite of raising cattle, which when done conventionally is the most destructive agricultural practice on the planet, emitting vast amounts of CO2.

At the Monteverde Tropical Science Center, we went in a group of eight (the maximum countrywide) on a guided walk with a well-educated guide with a fancy scope for spying birds in the tall canopy. He confessed to us that as a boy, he used to come into the forest with a slingshot, but that attitudes had changed in twenty-first century Costa Rica. He helped us see that the mass of plant life also hosts a huge array of creatures: mammals, birds, snakes and butterflies. Geeta became an overnight birder, and we saw over 50 different species between us in our various walks, including a handful of the heralded quetzals and an amazing array of hummingbirds of all colors and sizes.

Our final stay was in the Osa peninsula in the country’s southwest corner, at a delightful but funky (“faded elegance” Geeta called it) ecotourist lodge. Marenco Lodge excelled in genuine hospitality and superbly trained guides. On an unaccompanied hike to see the “Giant Tree,” I saw a large herd of peccaries, who diverted from our path as we approached them. For the next fifty yards, I smelled their strong, distinct odor.

In the Corcovado Rainforest Reserve, which, like everything else on the peninsula we accessed by boat, our guide helped us see sloths, foraging coatis (raccoon-like creatures), a huge variety of birds, including many scarlet macaws, a Jesus Christ lizard (who walks on water), a crocodile, a tent-bat, and several monkeys. Jose had just been written up in the Tico Times as the “guide of guides,” and he was indeed marvelous, including detailed interlocking evolutionary history of much of the plant life, not just providing a pair of trained eyes and a lexicon. At one juncture, he pointed out a hummingbird nest that thrummed to the rapid heartbeat of the chicks it contained. While I was looking at a baby howler monkey, the infant woke up, and I suddenly found these piercingly alert eyes looking back through the scope at me. When we spied some spider monkeys, the most spectacular, with prehensile tails featuring a patch that is sensitive like our finger tips, Geeta had the unforgettable sight through her binoculars of a newborn, still glistening with an amniotic slick.

Being plunged in the midst of all this biodiversity was pure glory. Looking up at gigantic trees, some of them a thousand years old, trying to absorb the acres of biomass, and feeling surprisingly marginalized by the assured way in which the animals traversed their territory, I began to realize the primal truth that modern life has led us to disbelieve: we are guests in this place. Indeed I was a careful guest, not yet even a participant observer.

We need far more areas like this, places that can heal, serve as laboratories for future evolution, and remind us that we can be guests, not always masters. This is the approach strenuously argued by EO Wilson, the Nobel laureate entomologist and ecologist, founder of sociobiology. NEXT, second in a series of three: E.O. Wilson, Hotspots, and Global Warming.

The Agrarian Challenge of the Twenty-first Century

2008-01-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

My wife Geeta and I attended a conference at Duke Divinity School, “Our Daily Bread” in October, which essentially outlined the worldview of what I call the New Agrarians, a way of life much closer to traditional agriculture as practiced prior to the massive industrial build-up of the second world war and its aftermath. The keynote speaker was Norman Wirzba, who brilliantly highlighted the substantial biblical underpinnings of an agrarian way of life and an ethic that included the land as well as how we should treat each other. But the highlight for us was the extended conversation between Wendell Berry and his old buddy Wes Jackson. I have long been an admirer of Wendell Berry, whose critique of industrial agriculture, The Unsettling of America, many consider to be the best American book of the late twentieth century. Wendell is a literary man as well as a Kentucky tobacco farmer who farmed with mules. We had heard him before, and admire his poetry and essays. I consider him to be the guardian of the American soul.

But the real delight for me was hearing and meeting Wes, Wendell’s foil. Thought they are both farmers, Wes is a man of science, a soil agronomist, even drier than Wendell. For this audience of mostly ministerial graduates, his pastoral plea was for an understanding of the basic science of ecology. He posed the key problem that framed the conference by showing the graph of bacteria consuming sugar in a petri dish and of humanity consuming petroleum in our petri dish, the earth. They were essentially the same. He pointed out that once the sugar was consumed, the population of bacteria plunged, and posed the question: Are we, who consider ourselves a unique species, made in the Creator’s image and capable of profound spiritual growth, really any different from those bacteria?

Beyond his ability as a dialectical teacher, Wes Jackson is the most revolutionary soil agronomist since the beginning of settled agriculture. At his Land Institute in Salina Kansas, he is working with a team of scientists and students to hybridize species of perennial grains, crossing, backcrossing, and re-crossing native prairie grasses with a variety of annual food grains If his team is able to accomplish this, then Wes Jackson will have re-invented agriculture. Seventy per cent of our calories are provided by food grains. He has been at it for 22 years, and has already been given a MacArthur Prize for his efforts.

The key to his approach, like any good ecologist involved in providing human sustenance, is to mimic the local ecosystem as much as possible. With their keep roots, the mixed prairie grasses are able to efficiently utilize the sparse annual water of the Prairie. And by cultivating perennial plants, Wes avoids the gross disturbance created by annual plowing, which releases a lot of CO2. The best soils in the world have been sacrificed in the Great Plains, dedicated since the late nineteenth century to producing annual wheat (as well as soybeans, beetroot, and sunflower seeds). Along with this waste of topsoil, the region’s industrial farmers have systematically extracted fossil water reserves as they drew down the world’s biggest Paleolithic aquifer, the Oglalla Aquifer.

I have just finished Wes Jackson’s book, Becoming Native to this Place. In this 1994 work, he outlines an agrarian revolution in the short amount of time left before the system starts to collapse. Our way of life in North America would shift from an extractive economy to one that lives on current sunlight. Jackson’s forebears in Kansas accomplished this by hunting buffalo, even though the bison, and the short grasses form which they created their calories, was an “import” via the buffaloes’ wanderings. His vision for a new agrarian economy is to repopulate the ghost towns of the Prairie with young families who farm sustainably with as little machinery as possible and provide their household energy through solar panels. He says, laughing, that he will need one hundred years for hybridizing the perennial grains (no gene-splicing here, with unforeseen results, but the careful crossing long practiced by plant husbandists).

But no-till is fast becoming a watchword among farmers of many regions, including the upper Midwest, where we lived in economic exile for a decade. So maybe post petroleum, post corporate farmers can hang on until Wes’s descendants at the Land Institute have accomplished their goal. Having been there, I understand both the importance of wheat fields to our economy and physical well-being, and I have seen many ghost towns, sober reminders of the perils of living off the land in a money economy where agribusiness rules. One of my colleagues at Moorhead State was totally depressed by going to her fortieth high school reunion, a little town in western North Dakota, and finding that out of a class of 9, she was the only one who had “made it.” Most (including her) had divorced, and four – farmers and smalltown businessmen - had suicided.

The vision of Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, backed by the neo-agrarian theology of Norman Wirzba (see his Essential Agrarian Reader), is both heartening and challenging. My question is, can we still make the transition in a meaningful way to a sustainable agrarian future? What sacrifices and compromises will be necessary? What kinds of perennial agriculture might emerge in other bioregions, and is there anybody out there working on it? What happens to the “surplus population” in a post-industrial era without artificially pumped-up yields?

Two Paradigms

2007-12-29T10:34:00.000-05:00

During this year’s Friends General Conference, Quaker Earthcare Witness sponsored a panel, “How Green is Nuclear Power?” I participated, along with Karen Street and Louis Cox, QEW’s information officer . Our aim was not only to debate nuclear power, but to discuss the value systems underlying our positions. Louis laid out two paradigms through which to think about the issue. The first was industrial, whereby technological innovations coupled to mandated economic reforms could lead to maintaining the projected world population of 9 billion at mid-century. The second was ecological, in which human culture would mimic the ecosystem and re-integrate with it. Louis identified with the ecological paradigm, implying that a pro-nuclear power person would represent the technological mind-set. Karen felt her position was more nuanced, but basically demonstrated her accord with it, emphasizing the costs to both humans and other species if we did not severely dampen our carbon emissions by decisively adopting nuclear power.

I found myself in the middle, for I identified with Louis’s value system, while accepting at the same time that the numbers just don’t support the splendid ideal of “doing it all” with renewable energy pathways. It is difficult, but I find it necessary to hold both of these paradigms within me, and see what emerges from the encounter. I am disturbed both by the unwillingness of environmentalists to look at the figures and study new information, and by the policy community’s ignoring the human capacity for metanoia (radical change of mind). We need environmentalists who use reason, rather than emotionally reacting from untested positions, and we need scientists and economists who understand that we need more than policy tinkering. The human community cries out for thoroughgoing structural change.

Let me be clear. I do not think we can commit to caring for an eventual population of 8.5 to 9 billion. We crossed the boundary of the earth’s ability to replenish herself in 1985, when the global population was around 4.5 billion. With great care of engineering, international mandates, and personal restraint, the earth might be able to sustain that many people, but more likely the figure is far less. The laws of population, the limits that Malthus clearly saw, are the same for any species. If the population exceeds the carrying capacity of its habitat, then it will suffer a crash, a die-off. Willfully mistaking what dominion means, we have exceeded the entire earth’s carrying capacity, and the technological fixes are but a momentary stay against the inevitable. When I advocate nuclear power, it is not for the purpose of continuing mad growth of population and resource use, but as one of the means to allow us to make a transition to future sustainability.

Thomas Berry, when queried over the fact that he continued to use a car, spoke of the “ambiguity” of the automobile as we made the shift to an ecocentric human presence on the planet. I want to suggest that nuclear power is another such ambiguity, an awkward compromise that is a trademark of our times, as we transition from the late industrial to the post-industrial era. In a remarkable book full of hope, Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken shows that this transition is well underway, with at least two million small organizations and NGO’s awakening to protect Gaia, acting as part of her immune system. This bottom-up systemic response is healthy, and contains the instinctive passion that will be necessary for our survival, but more importantly, the survival of a planetary ecosystem still resilient enough to support complex life. But I fear that the auto-immune system will lose its vital connection with the head, with reason exemplified in the policy community’s careful, peer-reviewed recommendations. We need both; neither has exclusive claim to truth.

NEXT: Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and the New Agrarians. Can we make perennial grains the basis for sustainable farming?

When We've Been Here Ten Thousand Years

2007-11-29T11:14:00.000-05:00

When we've been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we've no less time to sing God's praise than when we first begun. So the hymn "Amazing Grace" proclaims with artless triumph from the perspective of heaven: beyond time, everlasting. In a world where almost all bold predictions falter after 2050, the thought of some kind of human consciousness after 10,000 years is comforting. I would welcome angels here on this beloved earth, cheering us on as we belatedly seized the opportunity of avoided stewardship, but heavenly existence is not this earthling's goal.

Historically, ten thousand years has been a popular frame of measurement. The Greeks called it the Great Year, the length of an era. It is roughly the length of time since the invention of settled agriculture, and thus civilization, where cities (fortified granaries) and their specialized hierarchies replaced the yeoman's ancestor, the hunter-gatherer. She was not "self-sufficient" but lived in a band whose unit of sufficiency was the whole extended family.

We live at the end of the Great Year, the end of the holocene period, its moment of harvest. Fittingly, there is interest in the next ten thousand years. In an interview with New Dimensions radio host Michael Toms, Gary Snyder laughed at the question about human maturity: will we mature fast enough to save the earth in time? Snyder said we were still an adolescent species, and that maybe we'd reach maturity in another ten thousand years. Meanwhile, Stewart Brand and friends are building The Clock of the Long Now, which will keep time without fancy electronic gadgetry for another ten thousand years. The premise is that if we slow down the frenzied now, and focus on the slow movement of time, we can brake the forces presently catapulting us into oblivion. If they succeed, they will have achieved another pragmatic, neolithic-style sculpture along the lines of the astronomical calendar at Stonehenge.

Whether a remnant of our species in ten thousand years will be around to reap maturity and read the clock is another question. In my childhood the kid who wanted to save Mobile, Alabama from the Soviet Bomb, worried about nuclear Armageddon - along with a whole bureaucracy that regularly herded us under our desks, lines of cars waiting to ferry us out to the swampy countryside to relative safety. Now human adolescence is armed not only with nuclear bombs, but we have also perfected a global capitalism that is frightfully efficient at transforming earth capital into affluent effluent. Whole ecosystems are going into rapid decline, even as the CO2 we have already pumped into the atmosphere has yet to produce its warming effects, due to the twenty-year lag caused by the time it takes for the released gas to work its way through the earth's magnificent system of buffers.

If we survive, we will certainly not number in the billions, and the scarcity of resources that has the capitalist wolves licking their chops for gold, oil, platinum, and uranium stocks will no longer be an asset. Commodities will necessarily be replaced by skill, knowledge, and (finally) wise use, and any high tech that remains will necessarily be appropriate tech. A diminished earth will be busy re-knitting a less diverse network of species, even as the sun burns hotter, hastening towards its own winter.

Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme (The Universe Story) bravely speak of the "Ecologic" era replacing the Cenozoic (less grandly, a period replacing the holocene, which is roughly the same as the neolithic). If this reaches fruition, its foundations must be laid quickly by an adolescent species with a mission. But usually such behavior results in mistakes greater than than the perceived problem. Maturity is a long process, and at the species level, in geologic time, the two and half million years since the emergence of homo habilis hardly even merits the term "adolescence." Whatever the future of the human experiment, now poised at the midpoint of crucial back-to-back Great Years, maturity has never been synonomous with growth - the term end-game capitalists throw around so casually. Unchecked, disordered growth in the biological realm reveals itself as cancer, and economics is necessarily a subset of ecology. If there is actually the higher purpose to human emergence testified in "Amazing Grace," the biggest die-off and largest shift in earth climate since the dinosaur extinction will leave our species still standing, or crouching in polar caves, awaiting another Phoenix rising.

Juvenile Chimp Lands in Alaskan Methane Lake

2007-10-31T11:26:00.000-04:00

It was another gripping NPR field interview, this time with a young woman PhD, a specialist in lake formations. As the seaplane buzzed steadily to its destination, the biggest new lake in Alaska caused by melting permafrost, the young woman shared her mounting enthusiasm at the research prospects. She carefully explained the phenomenon, widely noted in Siberia, trans-Finland, and Alaska: with accelerated polar warming, the tundra is beginning to melt, forming lakes where only a few years lay frozen spongy peat-like surfaces, dotted with trees. Now more and more lakes are forming, trees starkly protruding from the waters, and with them, methane gas, lots of it. Methane is 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and vast amounts have been bottled up as clathrates in frozen permafrost bands near the poles.

The young PhD was an obvious candidate for a popular interview. Not only was she a female scientist, but she had an engaging, bubbly personality. Her enthusiasm for her work was contagious. She especially liked the simple test of lighting a match to detect the methane. More sophisticated were the subsequent steps of bottling it for further study in the lab when she got home. But encountering methane from these lakes, the likes of which the earth hasn’t seen in several million years, was what really turned her on. She told the woman interviewer about the time when she struck a match and the combustion knocked her over backwards, badly singing her eyebrows, lashes and hair. What a blast!

The interviewer asked the researcher about the perennial problem of the young woman professional: what about marriage? Can you do your best work and progress in your field while raising a family? Still unmarried, she responded thoughtfully, admitting that she knew far too many women who had lost their place in the fiercely competitive world of academic research after starting families. Yes, she wanted a family, but she wanted to work in this newly emerging field to her utmost as long as she could.

As the seaplane started its descent to the lake, the excitement in her voice rose. Upon landing, she rushed to be the first to jump out of the plane. You could hear the whomp and crackling roll as she hit the ground, whooping loudly with joy. Clearly she had found work that was passionate play. How fortunate she was, and how inspiring for us, the listeners, to hear such joy over important work in an emerging field.

But not long into the interview I began to shrink in horror at this unfolding personality. What a prime example of our flawed species. Celebrating the achievement of the pinnacle of her sub-specialty by lighting methane, laughing at the rush of excitement with the explosive whoosh, she behaved like a tomboy juvenile chimp. Lost in this excitement was that she was celebrating very likely the beginning of our end, since the accelerated release of methane from the polar tundra would be more than enough to shove Gaia into uncontrollable warming.

Our species behavior has always been thus. The young scientist’s ebullient methane burning is eerily like the men who discovered oil wells, the stuff spewing over little towns in Pennsylvania and Texas like uncorked black champagne. It also reminds me of friends and acquaintances, all male, who had accidents with their basement chemistry kits, some serious, one fatal. We love to play, and fire is our favorite plaything. We are on the verge of destroying ourselves, taking many of our co-species with us in a fit of burning. The party began with the coal-powered steam engine and we've never looked back - until now. It has reached a paroxysm, the rate of CO2 emissions – and now methane - increasing every month, despite dire warnings from the climate scientists. The methane flames at the mouth of each oil well are signal fires of the Last Party, while China builds a new coal-fired plant each week to make damned sure it's a blowout.

In reflection, most of us know where we are headed. But our paleolithic emotional heritage is more like the chimp, and studies have shown that our moral code is a rational overlay on a much more basic, instinctive core that makes instantaneous decisions – for reasons of immediate survival (or gratification) - that we share with other mammals. We act first, then think afterwards, deftly rationalizing our actions.

So would the chimp-scientist be more sober about the implications for the fate of mankind of her rapidly-expanding field of study if she became a mother? I would hope so. For it is only when we reflect upon the consequences of this global bonfire for our children, grandchildren, all the seven generations, that we pause, perhaps breaking the addictive chain that fuels endless gratification of our material desires. EO Wilson builds his hope for those future generations, and continued species diversity , upon biophilia, the innate love of all life-forms. The cosmologist Brian Swimme cites studies of cross-species mammalian bonding as the basis for living with other creatures growing out of more than cultivated respect, reaching more deeply into our emotional core to affective bonding.

To counterbalance our prodigious advance in the connection between the neocortex and the technological extensions of the opposable thumb, we need remedial work in biophilia, best experienced as a creature (the hunter-gatherer)living in a nested habitat that of necessity teaches respect for the intertwined neighbor species. Lacking that, we need to raise our young, and thus place ourselves, with frequent experience of the outdoors, in a world affording as much wildness as possible, teaching by sympathetic identification the moral imagination which NPR’s engaging young woman scientist seems profoundly to lack.

Tender Mercies Versus Ecological Justice

2007-09-04T15:33:00.001-04:00

“The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.” Proverbs 12:10
“Your wrongdoing has upset nature's order." Jeremiah 5:25

Tender mercies. Fellow Quaker electronic journalist Marshall Massey brought up this phrase in response to my arguments for nuclear power as the most compassionate energy source in an era when we dare not burn more carbon. Massey got the phrase from reading John Woolman’s journal. In a famous (among us Quakes) passage, Woolman describes killing a mother bird for sport, then, mindful of tender mercies, reluctantly kills her brood, who would perish without her. Going back to the source in Proverbs, Massey shows that “tender mercies” follow in the train of wickedness, a belated effort to set right some wrong. “Wow. He hit the nail on the head,” I thought at first. But then I remembered my own argument on nuclear morality: The overall moral issue is not nuclear power per se, but of how we care for the web of Creation. It is stewardship in an era when our numbers are overwhelming Gaia, multiplied by an extravagant lifestyle (look at the freezer and the clothes dryer, air conditioning and electric heat, the car and multiple-car families). We live in a world deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised by our industrial choices.

Nevertheless, Friend Massey performs an important service by getting me to look at how global thinkers and policy experts omit attention to individual moral acts. Living as we now do, we gloss over so much wickedness, accustomed by an habitual industrial lifestyle to regular mayhem against the ecosystem. Anyone, including myself, who argues for upholding any part of the global industrial machine can only do so in terms of relative harm. Thus we regularize wickedness even as we try to exercise moral sensibility. Massey questions the place of tender mercies in a world where injustice reigns, a global corporate world that ignores the deeper structure of the natural world, which is one of limits, both in terms of quantity and in terms of boundary – especially in the case of transgenic research.

Yet the whole world screams out for mercy! Why pick on the particular cruelties of nuclear power and wastes, when the cruelty is in the industrial system: cruelty to human beings, cruelty to ecosystems and individual members. I shot the parakeet, again and again, and lo, they came back for more as the dead littered the ground wrote a well-munitioned hunter in the North Carolina forest 250 years ago, amazed that they did not fear him. The Carolina parakeet is now long extinct. Today, extinction is the final ruin we inflict not by individual thoughtless acts, but by our whole way of life.

So, Marshall, you have alerted my moral compass to the task, which is to move beyond acts of compassion motivated by shame and remorse. It is not compassion that is the key to righting our wrongs, but justice – ecojustice. Getting right with God in Jeremiah’s terms is more important than tender mercies. Justice trumps compassion, suffering is a necessity, and we muster as much compassion as we can as a consequence. To re-establish a just earth system, we must dismantle what we have wrought. Dismantle a system that commodifies everything, causing us to hasten commerce for short term monetary profit, thus burning more carbon. It’s just a matter of how far we go, and how it comes to pass. Some would say that we need to dismantle settled agriculture itself and return to hunter-gatherer existence (maybe a few million human beings worldwide).

We are not going to do this. We might set up a few adulterated laws to slow down emissions (we and the Europeans and other signatories to Kyoto). But the Chinese are going to keep building their economy until they reach the living standard of Portugal. So they hope. If that is true, if we are to have a Portugal of 1.5 billion people, then our tinkering with carbon caps in the rest of the world will be for nought, and the Climate Beast will go into avalanche.

But there are things we can do. We can grow our food and trade for goods that are locally produced. We can stop buying Chinese goods. We can get rid of our cars and stop riding airplanes. We need to cut our electricity usage by more than half, and where appropriate, shift from reliance on the electrical grid to distributed power. Planners argue against distributed power as “inefficient.” Is this true as well of food production? Is industrial scale efficiency really the answer? We need to stop globalization. But structural changes are the most difficult, and frankly, we don’t have time.

How many can the earth support? Living at what level? The poor African seems to live in a more ecologically just way. Electricity and personal motorized transport are conveniences, but are they a necessity? But even if we all lived a simple lifestyle in tiny houses or efficiency apartment complexes, this itself accepts commandeering the amount of land we’ve stolen from other species, leaving them starving into extinction. It is an argument based on human use-value, not ecojustice.

Given North American bloated lifestyles requiring three and a half to four earths (that’s just the average, which includes the homeless with their assured hot meals and street life near vents of waste heat), living a truly sustainable lifestyle is remote. To be sustainable in a world of 6.5 billion means no coal-fired plants, to be sure, but remember that solar panels, windmills, and hybrid cars all require fossil-fuel inputs to build. Energy and materials intensive manufactured items of any kind are problematic in such a world. And nuclear power on the scale required to replace coal (as well as replacing decommissioned nuclear plants) will cost a fortune that is probably unattainable. But in a world where subsistence is more the norm, durability (Bill McKibben’s word) is within reach. A system that can sustain and renew itself will require belt-tightening on an unprecedented scale. We need a universal one child policy and carbon tax, with a cap on both corporate and individual emissions. Remember, this is war, requiring war’s emergency measures – war against our own rapacious human nature. Short of this, we will have what population biologists call a die-off.

But if we as a species are not going to respond with huge structural changes in the global economy in time to answer the trumpet of ecojustice that clearly rings, what we need to work and pray for is economic collapse. Our retirement portfolios will suffer (a coordinated sell-off of stocks would help bring this on). This will cause the most pain to the poor, just as global warming will. But the order, the natural and the human order is so disordered, so far out of balance, that the suffering has been deferred. The bill of pain has now come due: economic pain, physical pain, the pain of hunger, the pain of dying younger with less offspring to care for us. The balance of nature has to be reset, and the longer we wait to restore that balance (or more accurately, the longer the system takes to right itself), the more pain.

After making this argument, what am I willing to do? How do I live? Will I give up my freezer? Not my car, for I live in the country, nor our dehumidifier, for my wife could not live in this mouldy partially buried house without it, nor our large refrigerator (by global standards). I could give up air travel. I already spend less than the world average on goods and clothes, and yet I have far more clothes and goods than I need due to a nature that is both frugal and possessive. I have virtually given up buying distant produce (California, South and Central America) and have a fairly large garden. I live in a passive solar house, and use wood for the remainder of my space heating (very inefficient in terms of carbon usage, but it’s within the normal cycle of forest growth on my leasehold). We’re putting in photovoltaic panels this fall, but that means cutting thirteen more trees, and even with pv’s we could not run the dehumidifier without reliance on supplemental power from the grid.

Friends, we have only about six years left until the chances will be 50-50 that unstoppable climate change is upon us (at 450 ppm CO2e). James Hansen said in January 2006 that we had “ten years” to make a significant reduction in global CO2 emissions, 10%. Since then, the rate of global emissions has increased, so that we are now at 430ppm CO2e, the figure that includes not only CO2 but other greenhouse gases like methane, NO2 and fluorocarbons. With CO2 alone being produced at 3ppm/year, I read 2013 as the Reckoning Point. If neither personal choice nor continually deferred government action are going to effectively achieve the kinds of needed reductions, then that enticing subset of the biosphere, the global human economy, needs to fail sufficiently to lessen the CO2 outputs that are tied to the production and consumption curves. At that point, we will begin to learn what “community” really means.

Be Ye Therefore Perfect...

2007-07-31T20:46:00.001-04:00

BE YE THEREFORE PERFECT...

Marshall Massey's blog, Earth Witness, recently hosted a significant exchange on the Morality of Nuclear Power, which I blogged about this spring (“The Morality of Nuclear Power,” April 2007). It was occasioned by an impassioned, eloquent post by Angela Manno in which she spoke of the "abomination" of nuclear power and went on to demonstrate that Friends testimonies, the Quaker values that are as close as we get to credal religions, all implicitly condemn nuclear power. Marshall, commenting on the responses from Karen Street and myself, spoke of the conflict between absolute and relative values within the context of Quaker theological history, and promised to respond more fully at some point.

In my previous post I tried to place the question of the morality of nuclear power in the context of our industrial life, showing that it was not benign, but the least harmful way to power the grid, and, in time, personal transport in the form of plug-in hybrids or as a source of hydrogen for fuel cells. But Angela's impassioned call has continued to trouble me. I want to stick by my point that all of this is relative: all of our professed testimonies accuse us in an era when we have compromised the earth's integrity to accommodate unsustainable numbers of people on earth, one billion of whom live much, much more profligately than the earth can sustain, two billion of whom live in abject poverty. Karen Street, my personal policy wonk consultant on energy and climate change, responded point by point to some of the inaccuracies and wrong assumptions behind Angela's post. But I want to carry the conversation further by responding to the challenge with respect to the testimonies, for I think to look at these core values in the context of our way of life, with far-flung tentacles into every corner and all depths of the earth and its fragile atmosphere, is a worthy exercise. For it's not a matter of sitting with a bunch of sympatico Friends in a wooded glen affirming these values as ones we can live by. It's a matter of honestly looking at what degree our lives speak these values.

Simplicity. I cannot deny her point here. Karen and I are talking about nuclear as our best hope to provide non carbon-emitting baseline power for the grid. Almost all of us are hooked to the grid, which because of economy of scale, is the most efficient means of providing electricity . But efficiency is not simplicity. Paul Hawken has said, "Never before has there been a system so ubiquitous, so destructive, and so well managed." The greater the efficiencies we achieve, the faster we deplete the earth. In the earth system’s hour of crisis the only efficiency that will help is one enthralled to negative development and negative population growth. Then, and only then, efficiency might take a turn towards simplicity.

If my wife and I follow our plan and install solar panels this fall, we will be more carbon-free, but certainly not living more simply. I heat with wood, but would be severely challenged to do so without my chainsaw. Yeah, it'll help those nasty emissions when the 2008 federal law bans all new 2-stroke engines, but my trusty saw will be grandfathered in. We have worked for decades to simplify our lives, and I could enumerate many un-American ways we live, but the fact is that though I live at half the American standard, it is still about twice the average world standard of living,.

Peace: reverence for life and the practice of respectful, nurturing relationships, non-violent living, conflict prevention, conflict resolution, working to reduce and eliminate the causes of war and violence. Another tough one. Nuclear power moves us a little closer towards conflict prevention with respect to oil use, since the biggest users of oil have very little of it, and it takes far less uranium than coal, oil, and natural gas to provide lower-emission energy. To the degree that the spread of nuclear power increases the chances of weapons proliferation, then fission power means less peace. But it's the wealthy nations of the world who have that option, not the poorer ones. Rogue weapons are inefficient weapons (mostly "dirty bombs"), which while they are threats to peace, are far less threatening than the nations with delivery systems and plenty of bombs to mount on them. Security issues are real. The path towards coping with them is to strengthen the IAEA. But the greatest risks to our security are the nuclear weapons states, among which we are the proud leaders.

Perhaps the main nuclear assault to peace is the process of mining and drilling, which the First Nations have always resisted because it is like ripping into the womb of the earth. Since it takes far less uranium (or thorium, a better alternative) to power the grid than coal or natural gas, the assault is less with nuclear power. But none of our industrial level comforts and conveniences promote peace when you get right down to it.

Equality. I have already blogged about this in terms of ecojustice. Ecojustice is best served if we devolve from our industrial ways entirely and essentially give up the enterprise of civilization. If we are talking about human equality, nuclear is the better choice, for it is more affordable and, if we commit to it, more quickly available than other non carbon-emitting sources of energy.

Integrity. This one is huge for me. If we're talking about the integrity of the whole earth system, then we need to devolve as rapidly as possible. Human systems need to back off or more likely, break down, so that the rest of the earth system might heal. This is true for cultural preservation as well as natural preservation. On the other hand, what are Eskimos and similar folk to do if they are only allowed enough whale and walrus kills to eat, not to power their lives? Not one of us can live a life of integrity on this planet given the current industrial order of arrangements. Our order has supplanted the natural order, as Jeremiah said long ago. Only we have done it on a scale unimaginable to his audience of sinners. Deep down, I still resonate with my own thesis - "Don't mess with the nucleus" - as fundamentally a witness about integrity. In terms of integrity on the planetary scale, the scale of deep ecology, we need to suffer economic and population collapse and work to reassume our place in the democracy of planetary life.

But if you're talking about integrity on the scale of human interaction and witness, then the point is not to kid ourselves that by being anti-nuke we are pure, holier than the nuclear power advocate. I am so tired of anti-nuke folk willfully ignoring their own ecological sin while blasting those who speak in terms of relative harm. (One recent example was a prominent anti-nuclear Quaker activist damning our exercise of reason and deliberation as she stepped on a plane to Turkey. Whether this was to do "important work" or for pleasure is beside the point; emissions are emissions to the earth system, whatever our motivation.) Yes, we will talk of integrity, but we must make a pact to walk with integrity.

Community. Which community? Nuclear power violates the earth community in some ways, common to other power sources which require mining and drilling and industrial scale use of ever-narrowing supplies of fresh water. And yes, it requires more resource use to safeguard its wastes. But it violates the human community less. "Not in my backyard" ignores the fact that coal and oil wastes don't have any boundaries. The chief person the nuclear power plant effects negatively is the trout fisherman by warming the waters (not to mention the trout).

"Friends Testimonies and the Ecological World View" is Canadian Friend Keith Helmuth's commentary on the testimonies from the biospheric perspective. Just one example, his expansion on my key testimony of integrity: "Ecological Sound Adaptation: design for living according to the integrity of the biotic environment; ways of life and means of livelihood that are congruent with earth's life support processes and systems,; active enhancement of biotic processes and systems." Fine. this is basic Leopold, who undergirds my "Morality of Nuclear Power” blogpost. Keith is a member of a think-tank (Quaker Institute for the Future) to help lead us in the direction of a restored land ethic. However, they have not come up with a way to get the current mass of humanity to the middle of the century without overheating the planet to such a degree that all of our values except compassion in the face of annihilation will be moot.

I pray that my grandchild and his child can live the values of Angela Manno and Keith Helmuth as integral, whole beings, without speaking hypocritically. These are my values, too, and I find honestly facing my impact on the earth very painful, even more painful than changing my long-cherished anti-nuclear position. St Paul's statement, that his flesh continues to sin, even as his Inner Guide counsels not to sin, still fits not just our traditional sense of sin, but ecological sin as well. As inhabitants of the earth's biosphere, the only one we know in the universe, we are not yet in the place where we can truly follow the advice of Paul's Master, "go and sin no more."

Marshall, gentle, firm guide to our conversation, I await your response, which I suspect must move beyond the perfection of absolute values to embrace ethical relativism at some level. No matter what our history as a people of faith in these matters, we are at an entirely new place. It is either the end of history, or the threshold of metanoia.

Flying the Guilt-Free Skies: Paying to Absolve the Sin of Emissions

2007-05-12T18:49:00.001-04:00

How to Fly the Guilt-Free Skies. This was my introduction to carbon offsets, an article in the NRDC journal (winter 2005) by a travel writer with environmental sympathies trying to rationalize his way of life. The idea is to offset carbon emissions by coupling these actions with others that create carbon sinks of equal proportion. There are organizations, especially websites, that can do the computation for you and take your money to supposedly fund the offsetting activities.

The foundational offsetting action is tree-planting. Forests as well as oceans are carbon sinks. I heat with wood. When I first took my forested “holding” on our landtrust – essentially a lifetime lease – a fellow community member, a retired nuclear engineer, calculated that I could heat with wood and sustain the 3.8 acres, for the woodlot would easily regenerate 2-3 cords of wood harvested yearly. In fact, we use on average one to one and a half cords, and there have been times that I contemplated a little side cordwood business to keep up with the dead and dying specimens in our healthy ridge forest. The balance I strive to achieve does not rely on tree planting, but is the natural process of ongoing forest regeneration.

“Scrubbing” our emissions by carbon offsets in the form of tree-planting is a mixed bag. Sources that I trust say NOT to fund offsetting technologies that rely on tree-planting because the efficacy of such actions depends upon where you plant, and which species are used. It is a complex process, involving albedo as well as the speed of the respiration cycle in trees. And when does this offsetting ameliorization take place? Granted the main CO2 uptake is in a young forest, but the calculations are made over a 60 year life cycle. If we’re talking about offsetting our emissions in the imperiled now, not during the potentially chaotic downswing in the latter half of the century, then a more honest tree-planting activity would be Real Time Carbon Banking, where enough trees are planted to offset 2007 emissions in 2007. That is a lot of trees. Alternatively, one can purchase offsets that fund alternative energy projects in a wide variety of places, especially those groups who would have a hard time raising money for these capital-intensive projects. Examples:

The screening of An Inconvenient Truth was undoubtedly a protracted watershed moment, for 2006 marked the year that most US citizens got it, and the retrograde anti-science types began their final retreat, shrieking louder as they sensed their historical moment was passing. The film deserved it’s award as the best, and indeed most timely, documentary. But the most prominent image in the film was Al Gore’s jetting all over the world to give his presentations. Knowing what I do about jet fuel emissions, I found this deeply disturbing as a model for the potential activists seeing the film.

All of us have to weigh the importance of our footprints as we work to change our own and others’ habitual carbon-filthy behaviors, and certainly there are going to be incidental contradictions as we start contracting the footprint. I was struck in the Ram Das interview with the Australian John Seed, a leading deep ecologist, that Seed readily accepted this contradiction as an occupational hazard necessary to meet the dire emergency of our times. But by which criteria do we assess the means we employ to enact our imperative to act at this critical juncture in earth history? Gandhi walked and rode the train to project his message. The website What Would Jesus Drive? misses the radical nature of his message. I think you can forget the idea of Jesus as driving a hybrid, even more, being a jet-setter.

A few weeks after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, I saw Gore’s claim that his family lived a carbon-neutral existence. I was deeply skeptical. Recently, I read about the huge Gore mansion, and the amount of natural gas, costing more than $2400/month, required for space heating and cooling. Something is deeply wrong with the assumption that one can simply buy green credits and keep living an excessive lifestyle. Gore and Queen Elizabeth, who spent $20,000 to offset her recent trip for the Jamestown quater-centenary, may be able to afford these offsets. The rich are invited to buy indulgences in the form of carbon offsets, leaving the rest of us to wallow in our state of ecological sin. Most of us live like kings but can’t afford to pay the true costs. As for the efficacy of the indulgences, are they guaranteed to deliver on their carbon-reduction promises? Green indulgence would indeed be a better term than carbon offsets, for it would point back to our greatest unmerited indulgence, to live as if there were three or four earths to support our (American) lifestyles.

Case in point: college age kids. Grist just ran an article featuring an eco-activist working with the students and administration to make Brown University’s carbon-neutral pledge an honest one. Yet these same Brown students fly an average of 16,000 miles a year (documented by an on-line commentator, citing examples from that student body’s version of “What did you do this summer?”). With or without offsets, is this just and sustainable? A friend who “graduated” from one of my deep ecology workshops gave a similar story about her daughter-in-law’s eco-footprint calculation. She was looking great until she plugged in her three-four air trips for the year. This is a familiar story for many of my friends and family. My own son, a deeply committed environmentalist, has made it clear that he will not curtail his air travel in order to be “pure,” to be carbon-neutral.He owns no real estate and very little stuff - other than climbing gear. Yet when he travels - on average slightly less than the Brown figure - he is producing roughly the same footprint as a burgher with a large house, inefficient space heating, and conventional diet who stays put. We love travel, and, thanks to the petroleum interval, are in its golden age – at least until the markets realize oil has peaked. And I understand that travel, undertaken with care and a sympathetic, open-minded, inquisitive spirit, can help make a more rounded, whole person, certainly one with a global perspective. Many of us assume that traveling widely is part of a liberal education. This is particularly true of travel to cultures that are radically different from our own. I have frequently thought that the value of universal service for our youth would be that many of the options could include exposure to these cultures, such as Peace Corps service. But accessing many of them requires transoceanic travel. On the other hand, one can reach some of the nearer cultures by train and bus. If one is not committed yet to a job and family, still in a state of psychosocial moratorium (those college kids), why not even bicycle or take a freighter? And those of us who don’t have to measure our yearly vacation in terms of a few weeks have sufficient time to take the train, even across the continent (as I will do for the fourth time to attend that same son’s wedding in Yosemite this fall). But air travel is more convenient, and still absurdly cheap, so we – virtually all of us – are tempted. Some, businesspeople and the moneyed class, are tempted a lot. I certainly am not ready to give up my free miles. The imperative in the face of climate change is not for the shrinking number of those who can afford them to buy indulgences but to radically change our lives. And I do not mean simply becoming more efficient and conserving more. I mean letting go of whole categories of desire, and subjecting every supposed need to what are the implications of this act for Gaia? What we all really want, beyond meeting our basic needs, is spiritual fulfillment, meaningful lives, and, because we are social animals, community. Giving up on habitually using three and a half earths to fulfill what we think we require need not mean deprivation, but an opportunity to live more fully, and yes, much closer to home, which would be a huge boost towards fulfilling our neglected need for community.

Union of Concerned Scientists has a helpful analysis of comparative emissions by air, train, bus, and car. Going by train is significantly more efficient only if the train is mostly full, which is true only on some routes. A transcontinental air trip on a fully loaded plane uses the same emissions as a 35 mpg car with two passengers. Short flights are the worst, since so much energy is used in takeoff and landing (braking). But flying has the added downside that its emissions occur in the stratosphere, whose chemistry multiplies their effect. The most efficient means of motor travel is a long-distance bus.

The Fearsome Wave Revisited: Is there Still a Strawberry at the End of the World?

2007-05-04T12:17:00.000-04:00

At the zenith of human history, half the oil extracted from her bowels, the victory is the earth's. "Sustainable development" we cried! James Lovelock, who brought Gaia back into our vocabulary and systems theory to its most elegant earthly summit with his theory that the Earth is one self-regulating organism, says in his testament that the words are an oxymoron. On an earth unable since 1985 to replenish herself, what we need is not more development but a "dignified retreat" if we still can pull it off. The kairos cries out for it. Lovelock calls it The Revengeof Gaia.

Never mind the ten-year-olds, what do we do at such a moment? The core of these moments is that nothing you could do would really matter. The sun is setting. That is Lovelock's position, as he points to a future in a mere hundred years of "isolated breeding pairs" at the still-habitable poles, the remnants of humanity ruled by warlords. But, unlike Kenneth Deffeyes, Lovelock is trusting his intuition, reading the graphs idiosyncratically, following his hunches - which made him a genius of a theorist, conceiving Gaia as more than metaphor. Yet if we stick with the cold probabilities, regularly recomputed with ever more elegant climate models, we may be on the brink, asymptotic to the moment. It is not inevitable, ony highly probable. Unlike peak oil, it is not a plateau, because even the Kyoto signatories are emitting more, not less CO₂. And then there's the US, China, and India, the fossil-guzzling Three Tipping Tipplers. The expectant noise in the halls of Congress and in the iconic Step It Up sites is that our represetatives might pass a tough law mandating 80% reductions by 2050. James Hansen, the climate scientist I take my cues from, gives us until 2015 to acheive a global 10% reduction of CO2 emissions - or there won't be any second chances.

Mittelpunkt III
Analysts like to talk about the stock market's moving average. What about the moving average of species diversity, as we lose 30 a day? The middle of today's heat, near-record for April 30. It is now 80. I duck my gardening, turning off the hose tied to my lifeline as a gardener, the deep artesian well with 2.5 gallons/minute flow (when last we checked). A renter, an avid gardener, once drained it dry by watering heavily, and we had to pull the submersible pump and replace it. We are again having semi-drought. But out West, they are entering their sixth or seventh year in some cases. The aquifers are being drained and there's no recharge available. Some climate scientists think that the American Southwest is no longer in drought, but has simply changed to a desert climate. Look at a geological map and, thinking like the earth, experience how little it would take for this to occur. Ignore the vast cities, multiplying like vigorous cancers. For the earth will ignore them as she realizes her changed geology. Remember the mighty Colorado River? So does the earth, but her preferences in these matters are less predjudiced than ours.

Right in the middle of this afternoon's heat is the power that gave rise to all of this, and that can take it all away, riding the moving average. Midpoint of the Lord: the Sun.

The birds chirp drily. I write in shorts, ready for a hot run with the dog, avid as ever for the fray. Good thing he's not a polar bear, bless 'em. The moving average is going to carry them in a few short decades to the brutal teen-boy world of toast, dead meat. Meanwhile, conservation agencies ask me for $25,000 to do my part in moving them to Siberia, where they might have a chance to avoid extinction a little longer. Siberia? The tundra is melting, not yet recorded in the methane tables for this year, where we are told that atmospheric methane is on the rise .03%. Bullshit. Read the gauges thrust into the permafrost and the satellite data, compute, and then think again. The moving average, the midpoint of this quickly turning world, needs to be published daily. But everybody, including me and the sunnysmug Amory Lovins - needs to check their figures. Never say my antinuke physician colleagues with "scientific training." I understand where they're coming from, but let me submit this. The Hippocratic oath needs to be revised to pay attention to greenhouse gases, otherwise it is suddenly quaintly irrelevant

At such a moment the perfect action is to string the tanpura. Yes, the shaman's act, like Orpheus tuning his lyre, then raising his plectrum on Mount Parnassos in mid-winter, Helios' rays passing through the atmosphere his model for tonal perfection. Or maybe change your life! That would mean extending the fleeting moment of non-doing, converting our greedy global civilization person by person to carbon neutrality. Paying attention, mindfully suspending the moment asymptotic to Peak Oil, Peak Human, Peak Interglacial.

Doing this we would become more responsible farmers, honoring subsistence and local and regional self-sufficiency. We would become a "one-child world" - or less. (One author, a sardonic environmental humorist, calls for having no sex for a hundred years, a "Shaker Final Solution" that would improbably restore the biosphere.) We would have to watch people die - no life-support systems or quintuple bypass surgeries - starving as the industrial farming machine withered for lack of oil and we prayerfully gave over vast reaches of earth to desert as we preserved nigh-drained aquifers for careful farming. The Israelis could send drip-agriculture consultants out to join Castro's 100,000 doctors who would move into the vaccum left by the collapsing US healthcare system and its bloated predators. Two homes in a world where 4000 square feet is considered a "small house," up to your neck in stuff and still dissatisfied?

Let's talk about air travel, one of the most insidious and entrapping forms of desire, making even our nomadic youths with virtually no possessions into atmospheric players who consume multiple earths. We live between moments, precariously close to giving way to the next one, in which we'll helplessly watch the towering Wave, the tsunami of climate change, hovering above us until we tumble into it. How do you choose to live this moment, brothers and sisters? The outcome of our biggest battle, the moral equivalent of war, is nigh.

Next Post:Flying the Guilt-Free Skies: Paying to Absolve the Sin of Emissions

Earth's Midpoint, Leaning Towards Empty

2007-05-03T11:20:00.000-04:00

Mid-afternoon vast emptiness. Perfectly still, the sun beaming off the rhododendron leaves, tree branches frozen in their lacy patterns.On the window, sixty ladybugs flit, crawl and tumble, herded by two wasps. At the fulcrum of each day there is a moment when you think of the 10,000 things to do, or the books to read, or the silent hungry writing desk, or the four directions in which you could walk through these mountains.Today, at such a moment, going outside to pee in the compost, smelling the cold fresh air and feeling acutely alive...

On such an afternoon you entered the Udaigiri Caves of Madhya Pradesh, the Middle State, and while the sun blazed outside on the Malwa Plain, watched a thousand hanging bats turning as one to observe you. Another time, you lay with Judith in a North Alabama's farmer's wide latewinter field to make love, a helicopter buzzing us in lazy circles. Afterwards, lying there, this vast turning cosmos - the same huge emptiness as if nothing had happened. Our little moment spent, we were ant-husks to the voyeurs above, who buzzed on.

The core of these moments is that nothing you could do would really matter, and, recognizing this, there is a fleeting desire to do nothing, to extend the nap, or go cuddle the dog. This moment is so sweet, so empty of action, like you are harvesting the whole 15 billion years' yearning of the Fireball universe - a net zero. But what passion is summed in that level scale! You are at a fulcrum bridging that blue sky, and the scythe of time is dead still, all desires that were ready to clamor forth herded, momentarily checked. It is at such a moment when the perfect action is to string the tanpura.

MITTELPUNKT II
High Noon; look up. The Greeks knew the outcome of a battle by observing who had the momentum when the sun first started to set, that is the instant after noon. If you didn't have Helios with you when he started his downward course, it was just too much inertia to fight the combined forces of your present position and the sun's setting gravity.

December 28, 2006. Earth's Mittelpunkt, when all the energy we have usurped started running back into the system. The trees around me told me this, on this deck. Above me, a prop-plane, at Mittelpunkt since childhood, droning through the sky. Birdsong, a dog yapping in the distance. The huge space, the eternal space-time of it. Then, the sting of wool on my ankle, and I'm here.

Expert oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes reached his mittelpunkt on December 16, 2005, when he announced global Peak Oil on NPR, tagging the moment when we had pumped half the available oil from the earth's entrails. He reached his date not by intuition or listening to the dying hemlocks, but by graphing all the data on oil availability and extraction rates. The NPR statement was radio theater, not a statement of scientific fact, based on probability. Extremely high probability.

High Noon: Mittelpunkt. Last hours of ancient sunlight Hartman calls it. We've used up half the stored sunlight, and we are now headed inexorably towards twilight. This solar peak is simultaneous with the setting sun of human history. Peak Oil, now being pictured on graphs spreading around the earth in corporate offices, schools and coffee tables, is chronological. But it is also a moment with quality, what the Greeks called kairos. In the heat of battle, there was a quality to the moment, not just a ticking of time. At just this moment Hector fell, and all that followed was pregnant within that moment: his being dragged around the walls, his wife and children enslaved, the recording of the Greeks victorious. Last hours of ancient sunlight.

The other characteristic of the kairos of the early twenty-first century is that we are on the cusp of runaway Global Warming. By a fit of burning like there was no tomorrow the beneficiaries of the industrial revolution have doomed future generations to tribal battles like the Greeks fought, too many people with too scarce resources. One is going on right now in the Sudan, another in Palestine, yet another in Iraq. Burning the stores of ancient sunlight, we are releasing CO2 in a global bonfire, trapping the sun's heat. The geologian Thomas Berry calls this fit of burning the "petroleum interval." Though brief, it has been pivotal, levering us into unsustainable territory, past our species boundaries to the precipice of population crash. We are subject to the same laws of population as the "dumb" animals and silent plants. Peak Oil and Global Warming are two spikes produced by the same madness: to splurge when there's available food and energy. We are like a ferocious algal bloom.

The sound of that prop-plane has always comforted me, made me feel secure. Once, though, when I was ten, I dreamt that it was suspended over Mobile's Crawford Park, and I ran to catch the Soviet nuke it had released. The huge round bomb just touched my hands as the dream dissolved. What do our ten-year olds do when they realize we are in global eco-crisis, midpoint turning quickly to endgame?

The Challenge of Compassion in a World Ravaged by Global Warming

2007-04-26T09:39:00.001-04:00

In a warming world of diminished resources creating tensions over oil and water, encroaching seas producing unprecedented numbers of refugees, and severely compromised farmland leading to widespread famine, compassion is the resource we are going to need to grow most of all, not just for fellow human beings, but extending to the entire web of life. Thus ended my last post. I am interested in hearing from readers about pro-active training programs, as well as personal transformation as compassionate beings, in preparation for the arrival of this wave of disaster, which is already gathering. The tensions are going to elevate – already have with oil wars - long before some of the worst effects like refugees from flooding coastal areas. But if this is the greatest crisis we’ve ever faced, then the level of response will need to be correspondingly huge.

In the midst of my analysis of nuclear power, retooling my thought, I stopped one day to reread some of the touchstones of my personal values, Edwin Goldsmith and Thomas Berry. It was only after integrating with these previous mentors that I proceeded to write the piece on nuclear morality which I posted last week.

Feb 25 Ah, the beauty of Goldsmith's analysis (The Way), speaking to my depths as a human being, to my animal, my Adam. And oh, the sullied world in which we have to embrace nukes to have a chance of getting through. We're certainly not going to just give up carbon-burning and shrivel up and die. We're gonna go down swinging, one way or another. So perhaps his is yet another statement that shows us who we could be, if we hewed close to our type. And I would prefer to write and teach about that. Yes, I feel dirty and compromised, though Lovelock and Karen Street (that “Quaker woman”) would argue otherwise. Coal plants are even dirtier and far more deadly; I've just looked the other way. Those who prefer that we'd destroy ourselves have some sympathy from me when I try to listen deeply to the earth..

How can we hold ourselves to our best selves, as Thomas Berry and Goldsmith do, and continue to build nukes? How can we hold to our best selves and continue to grow a civilization on the scale we now mount it?

How will we hold ourselves to our best while death and destruction rain all around us? When refugees swarm at our borders, our doors? When there's not enough food for our fellow humans, let alone the creatures whose habitats we've robbed? I was hungry and you fed me. That will apply until the end, breaking the last crust of bread with the stranger. But what if it's a group of fifty desperate starving people? What happens when you must measure out compassion so that one in every eight survives? How will we choose?

I remember my fury when I read a memo from Larry Summers, recently resigned as president of Harvard, stating coolly that one of the poorest Latin American countries (Haiti?) should be left to collapse, that it wasn't worth the investment in a world with insufficient resources. But what would you or I do? Lester Brown has answers, and so do I: subsistence farming is a key one. Having overrun the planet and outstripped her resources, subsistence, not sustainability, must be our response until our numbers have been vastly reduced. Aran Island and its potato farmers will be gone, but we will farm the cement crannies as they once did their deep rock crevices, buckets lowered into the darkening loam.

Thich Nat Hanh says that the most important thing for us to do now is to hear the sound of the Earth crying within us. How do we feel both the pain of the earth and the pain of humanity? What does it mean to choose your battles in such a situation, when all of it is necessary and holy? Yet, to avoid the “blooming, buzzing confusion,” even perception requires that we choose. We need to learn how to align our ears and eyes and touch, even as we continue to choose our battles - without shutting down entirely. Our media endlessly lament, and thereby glorify, the slaughter at Virginia Tech. But what of the forgotten Iraquis? And who tolls the bell for the species as they pass behind the infinite black curtain of extinction?

Compassion not only for the earth and others but for ourselves. For if we don’t’ have that, then we have the hatred and anger of the activists who are having a final field day with this, our darkest moment (no wonder nobody will listen!). We can’t love the earth without loving other humans, and we can’t love them without loving ourselves.

Cultivate the compassion of the crucified God deep within all of creation. Dwell in it, rather than in how to escape it and get on with salvation, either through piling up material wealth, doing good works or becoming spirit-beings. Salvation is the temptation in a world where the shadow of capitalist cornucopia from an infinite earth, scarcity, has finally come to deeply shade the final fruits of a system that works by creating infinite desire while colonizing dear, immediate necessity. Even as ecosystems are in the early stages of collapse, the stock market reached new highs this week. Who is singing a requiem to the latest extinctions – both biological and cultural?

We scramble for oil, water, farmland. On the other hand compassion for all who lack that, who are starving, being beaten, tortured and raped, who thirst. Do you share your last glass of water with a roomful of refugees, and all die of thirst? Larry Summers' grim choice looms. Sophie's Choice is minor compared with the triage we will face by the latter third of this century.

To hunger and thirst after righteousness. Ecojustice, while we still have a chance this might include the poor and the marginal native peoples of the earth. It is narrowing, and will give way to Gaia's justice. The problem identified in Stephen Jay Gould's essay (“Nonmoral Nature”) comparing morality in the human world and the amoral world of nature. This root problem will be coldly exposed in a world of cascading extinction. Is justice itself the key human intervention, the one we have avoided, and the communist experiment failed to realize? If so, is there really something like ecojustice?

April 15 Celo Friends Meeting. I minister with Joan Baez' song, "Just a Little Rain" and speak of our moving from worries about Strontium 90 rains seeded by atmospheric testing to a shift in the entire Earth climate: what have they done to the rain? And then I wonder aloud at the contradiction between what we have wrought and the statement in Genesis that we are made in G-d's image.

At the end of meeting a young woman reads from Brother Nouwen: once we move into prayer mode, any thought becomes a prayer. Reflecting on my dark thought about our rapacious race, I realize that the infinite depths of compassion, the ability to suffer with our fellow human beings, the Earth with all her critters and plants, is also in the image of God. We have become as gods, and must therefore be God-like in our compassion for what we have brought to pass. From the Garden to the neolithic sweat of our brows to the doomed global industrial machine. And then, as the Earth takes back her due, the garden again, farming the paved cracks in the ghosts of cities. The inner city will be one big vacant lot waiting to be redeemed. And the broken and wounded will be everywhere, desperate for healing. Redemption is mine, sayeth the Earth. May the wave of destruction seed a whole tribe of Mother Theresas, flinging them into those same failed cities.

NEXT: Justice and Ecojustice in the Shadow of the Fearsome Wave

2007-04-19T12:58:00.000-04:00

The Myth of Sustainable Development and the Great Die-Off

James Lovelock, in his haunting The Revenge of Gaia, points out the obvious when he says that “sustainable development” is an oxymoron. What we need, he says, is a “dignified retreat,” or in more contemporary language, negative development. Along with the deep ecologists, Lovelock argues that negative development would provide habitat for earth’s ongoing evolutionary project beyond the overbearing human. The earth passed the threshold of sustainability in 1985, after which the average global eco-footprint has exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity. At that point, we numbered 4.85 billion, and used slightly more than half the total energy we use now (with 6.5 billion people who are more “developed”). Since the Kyoto protocols went into effect, not one of the “developed” signatories have reduced their carbon emissions, and the US continues to increase more than the rest of the G8, though at a slightly lower rate than it did ten years ago. Meanwhile, China and to a lesser degree India, with their combined 2.3 billion people, are just getting revved up. In 2004 alone, China built more coal-fired power plants than Britain has its entire history – the home of the industrial revolution. Just yesterday, the UN changed its prediction of when China would overtake the US in carbon emissions from three years to later this year.

In terms of our energy discussion, without fossil fuels or nuclear power, 6.5 to 9 billion people (in 2050) cannot be serviced at a modest level (Costa Rica or Romania, say). Even with a ravaged earth, the one billion on earth at the beginning of the industrial revolution could be sustainable with subsequent technological improvements. I am no expert, but I seriously doubt that 4.5 billion would be. With assured global warming, the amount to which the system is already “committed” as the climate scientists say, added to the reduction in biomass since 1985, I suspect that the number we can sustainably support is from 2.5 to 4 billion – if we increase nuclear power capacity,* work to increase efficiency at all levels, conserve power (again, how much is enough?) and vigorously develop alternative sources of energy . But in order to build increased nuclear capacity as we decommission old coal plants, we will need a lot of capital, and as James Kunstler convincingly argues in The Long Emergency, capital is firmly built upon the platform of cheap oil. As soon as global markets realize that oil extraction has peaked, the markets will plummet, and with them our window of making any significant large-scale, capital-intensive conversion of business as usual. With peak oil immanent, we don’t have much time to achieve a new platform for a steady-state.

If the looming systemic adjustment of human population is going to make room for replenishment of biodiversity, then the number is probably going to be on the low side, perhaps in the long run closer to the number we supported at the beginning of the industrial era. Along with species extinction of 20% (committed) to 50% or more (probable), a human population collapse inevitable. Gaia will take care that there is a die-back, and the current momentum of pumping carbon from underground reservoirs into the atmosphere is pushing the earth system towards a human die-off of unprecedented magnitude. As significant players in concentrations of atmospheric gases, we are as gods, a “planetary power” (Brian Swimme), which, along with overexpanded terrestrial and oceanic habitat, is on the threshold of being brought firmly back into scale, animals subject like any others to population dynamics. Metaphorically, we are a cancer, but looked at more simply, we’re a population in dangerously overextended bloom due to the “petroleum interval.”

Planning can lessen the impact. Alternatively, an economic crash, which is virtually assured in some form by looming peak oil, would slow the surge in CO2, which correlates directly with economic growth. Either way, the sooner we curb our greenhouse emissions, the less the scale of die-off. But it is inevitably going to mean a lot of suffering for human beings. In a warming world of diminished resources creating tensions over oil and water, encroaching seas producing unprecedented numbers of refugees, and severely compromised farmland leading to widespread famine, compassion is the resource we are going to need to grow most of all, not just for fellow human beings, but extending to the entire web of life.

*When I argue that nuclear power is a necessity, I do not mean for unrestrained development and continued growth of material fulfillment (“development”) for an overpopulated world. With nukes, human beings in equilibrium with the web could still drive vehicles (electricity for plug-ins; hydrogen for fuel cells if that ever becomes viable), repair roads, sail ships, (though not fly). Public transportation and ride-shares in efficient vehicles would be far more necessary than private vehicles, which will become luxuries of the rich. We could maintain a grid, rather than having patchwork of independent distributed electrical generating sources. We could provide supplemental heat to underbuilt buildings, which might be able to maintain indoor plumbing during northern winters, though that is something of questionable value in a sustainable world, both in terms water usage and btu’s for space heating.

NEXT: The Challenge of Compassion in a World Ravaged by Global Warming

The Morality of Nuclear Power

2007-04-13T10:11:00.001-04:00

The overall moral issue is not nuclear power per se, but of how we care for the web of Creation. It is stewardship in an era when our numbers are overwhelming Gaia, multiplied by an extravagant lifestyle (look at the freezer and the clothes dryer, air conditioning and electric heat, the car and multiple-car families). We live in a world deeply, perhaps fatally, compromised by our industrial choices. As a human being struggling with moral choice I am deeply embedded in the accumulated world of infrastructure and culture built upon layers of thought, pre-existing decisions, my very perceptions structured by millennia-soaked predetermining gesture, thought, and decision.

Starting with Romanticism, signaled by William Blake’s total horror before the effects of the industrial revolution upon London, a genuine critique has emerged from within this embeddedness, ending with a clear statement that is the antithesis to the presuppositions of modern industrialism. This critique is ecocentric rather than anthropocentric, and it is represented by deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecotheology: the view of the divine as immanent, the primal creative intelligence spread throughout the universe.

My own moral stance is strongly indebted to the Hebraic sense of justice, including the prophets’ land ethic, the compassion preached by Jesus, and Gandhian non-violence, which I learned primarily in the Hindustani context of my early twenties. Once I settled into life in Appalachia, the Quakers became my moral/spiritual home, uniting all of these strands. John Woolman’s testimonies on slavery and respectful treatment of Native Americans led me upon further study to his positions on whaling and industrial dyes. About the same time, I came upon the ideas of deep ecology.

In the early seventies, Arne Naess articulated deep ecology, a philosophy in counterpoint to the anthropocentric, use-value oriented environmental movement. It is deep ecology which touches me most deeply, connecting me to my Paleolithic forebears and my brethren among the critters (see my very first blogpost from November 2005). This is the ultimate test for any of our technologies: energy use, agricultural and manufacturing practices, and housing. An ever-expanding awareness of intrinsic rights has led from Locke, Jefferson and Paine through Woolman and the suffragette movement to include animal rights, even plant rights (The Secret Life of Plants). Everything has an equal right to exist in the biosphere, and it is all necessary to the web of creation. Today, slavery is that state of misguided human greed in which all of nature is enslaved to our industrial machine and global capitalism.

Aldo Leopold laid the foundation for deep ecology with his land ethic: A thing is right when it preserves the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. Nuclear power, and everything other tool of the late industrial era, needs to be judged by this overarching ethic, buttressed by the values of the world’s great religions. As Edwin Goldsmith, editor of the journal Ecology, points out in his magisterial book, The Way, these religions developed in the wake of abandoning a human way of life which intrinsically honored the land ethic. They laid out a pathway to salvation from a world of sorrow in the cities which expressed human “progress” in escaping the Garden. “Revealed” religions provided solace to the individual and the nuclearized family that was torn from the web of Gaia. Their accompanying values, including justice, compassion, and ahimsa (non-violence), now need to be enlisted as we find our torturous way back, not to the Garden, but to a sustainable human lifepath which honors what remains of the web as Gaia embarks once again upon reweaving in the wake of eco-collapse.

Justice. The Old Testament land ethic was an ethic of herders, one step better than the banished Cain and his tillers. Their stunting of the forest was effected by moving around herds of herbivores, rather than plowing the earth, breaking the arc towards stable climax and cultivating juvenile, annual plants. But it was a land ethic nevertheless. It grew into a more comprehensive ethic to include the relative right livelihood of the conserving farmer, exemplified in the late modern era by Wendell Berry. But the most embracing term is eco-justice. Post-Leopold, the forms of livelihood, and in our case, energy production, that do least harm to the web are the most just to all. We need to simplify our lifestyles, let go of the idea of space heating and cooling (construction improvements), drive personal vehicles less (or abandon the car entirely), and get rid of unnecessary appliances, especially clothes dryers, my pet peeve. The extent to which we can do this, and lower our standard of consumption, is key to how much energy we can save. Which standard of living are we going to strive for? Are there models? Vermont, Cuba, Costa Rica, Romania, Kerala,? We don’t have to retreat to the level of poor African countries, but the planet could sustain a lot more folks who lived at 1/200^th the American lifestyle – though not on sub-Sahel farmland.

Compassion: if it includes humanity, which it does for all but the most misanthropic Earth Firster, then we need to accept nuclear power, however reluctantly. If it is for the greater system, for Gaia, then perhaps we should stop burning fossil fuels, shut down the nukes and take the money for renewables and put it into habitat restoration for other species, transferring land back to our brother and sister species as we accelerate starvation and disease and the general die-off of homo sapiens. But we’re not going to do that, and as religious people we are already committed to compassion for our own species, including the enemy we are to love. If we are compassionate to both our species and to Gaia, we must embrace the necessity of nuclear power, at least for an interim period of a hundred years or more, along with other sources which emit less carbon than fossil fuels.

Ahimsa. Arguing against my testimony on behalf of nuclear power to the State Utilities Commission, a Buddhist colleague on the NC Interfaith Power and Light board built his case on the foundation of ahimsa, the Hindu/Buddhist concept “to do no harm.” Unfortunately, in the vast drawing down of Earth’s resources that has led to the fit of burning that Thomas Berry calls the “petroleum interval,” the very concept of doing no harm exists relative to the greatest harm we have every perpetrated, both to ourselves and to the earth system. Each of us witnesses from within a system that continues to perpetrate this rape, including those of us who rely on solar and other technologies that are dependent upon the embodied energy of oil (this is true of nuclear power as well). None of us is pure, nor outside it. So all statements about ahimsa are relative. I would have to say that our goal needs to be to do the least harm, for “no harm” is not possible as human beings living in the 21^st century. Just how much harm we cause is being judged right now not by a transcendent God in heaven, but by the earth herself, and for those of us who are theists, the immanent God whose outer garment is the ecosystem. Least harm in terms of Gaia and continued civilized existence is a mix of energy sources that brings carbon emissions as close to neutral as possible. If we manage to make it that far, then by the latter third of the century, the emissions need to be a net zero.

We have a chance to still be decision-makers then if we radically reduce coal and petroleum use, initiating the shifts in behavior required immediately. As Tim Flannery says at the end of The Weather Makers, “If everyone who has the means to do so takes concerted action to rid atmospheric carbon emissions from their lives, I believe we can stabilize and then save the cryosphere.”[1] (the “eternal realm of ice and snow” at the two poles of the earth. The cryosphere is necessary to buffer solar radiation, both by temperature and the albedo effect of reflecting it. For coastal civilization and tidal and marshland life, its holding water out of the seas is also critical.) My personal response to “everyone” is to go beyond efficiency and conservation to install photovoltaic panels. But in a world of social inequality, civil society needs to supplement what is achievable by those with relative wealth so that the poor, too, can contribute to a sustainable lifestyle – and survive. Up to now, that has meant relying on cheap oil and cheap coal. In the near future, that will mean supporting nuclear power so that the huddled masses in the northern latitudes will survive winter. Justice, compassion, and ahimsa are all involved in reaching this conclusion.

Frankly, I would prefer to quietly let the nuclear power industry die. I’d rather be sharing with you the morally neater essay, “Don’t’ Mess with the Nucleus” that I drafted five years ago. When I was first asked to write about the moral and spiritual aspects of accepting nuclear power, I realized with a shudder that what I was doing didn’t feel very spiritual. It felt technical, intellectual, political - but not spiritual. But I am the same person whose last stage of life is given over to Creation Care, to convincing enough of my brothers and sisters to change their carbon-producing ways to give Creation a chance. A chance for us and a chance for the critters and flora. I have had to accept my lack of purity, my ability to feel above it all (or so embedded in the web as a deep ecologist that nuclear power would be unthinkable). I have come face-to face with the implications of coal-burning and all that that entails. And that’s just it. When Leopold published the Sand County Almanac (1947), there were 2.5 billion humans on the planet, and CO2 levels were at 305 ppm (now above 6.5 and 382 ppm. Remember, 450ppm is the probable tipping point). Global Warming was not yet a hypothesis.

[1] Flannery, The Weather Makers, 296.

2007-04-12T16:25:00.000-04:00

NUCLEAR INTERLUDE PART II

I have been an environmentalist since the first Earth Day. I have tried to make that posture into something I can live into, to “walk the talk.” In the 70’s I built a passive solar house, and have provided the extra margin of heat – about 50%, or one cord/year, with wood ever since. We have worked on getting more efficient appliances, turning off lights (and phantom loads) and now replacing virtually all of them with compact fluorescents. This year we plan to install a photovoltaic system, either as a residential consumer or as part of a solar co-op with others in our land-trust. The last car we bought was the most efficient available in 1996, a Honda Civic equipped with a nifty V-tech engine Since 2001 it has been our only vehicle. We expect it to last until 2012 at our present rate of consumption. The old Ford pick-up from my dream moulders vine-covered in a field a few miles away. I borrow trucks to haul trash and get manure for a productive garden. Taking the last jet flight is still ahead of us.

One of the cardinal tenets of my environmentalism has been to shun nuclear power. Eisenhower’s “peaceful nukes” was a program of disinformation, a figleaf for the real business of world domination through military power. It was a no-brainer, with the allied problem of nuclear proliferation, and most especially the unsolved problem of nuclear waste disposal. My basic position evolved into “don’t mess with the nucleus” (applicable as well to genetic manipulation) – because it’s not our business. The nucleus is a driving force of creation, and God is our Creator. We were playing God .

But unfortunately, the genies of the nuclei are loose, and we have to live with the consequences as responsibly as we can. More importantly, we’ve dug up and burned a huge store of ancient sunlight in the form of coal and oil. Much earlier, the hunter- gatherers warned that it was a sin to dig into the entrails of the earth, even to plow for annual agriculture. In hindsight we can see their immense wisdom.

However, the neolithic revolution is history, enabling us to grow to 1 billion before the industrial revolution. It continues to envelop us, providing a platform for the industrial revolution, and the subsequent accelerated rape of the earth, much species habitat, and indigenous cultures to get at the coal and oil, so that we could grow through a fit of burning to 6.5 billion and counting (UN estimates for 2050 8.5-9 billion, the Great Year of reckoning by so many accounts). If we take fossil fuels out of the equation, we are either pre or post-industrial, with tremendous implications for sustaining our current population, much less current rates of growth and development.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth, I was struck by the fact that I, along with a generation of eco-activists, ignored the warnings about impending climate change. Al Gore was one year behind me at Harvard. We activists knew who the enemy was, Nixon, Big Government, the corporations – anybody but ourselves. But when Carter said that the energy crisis of the early 70’s, which coincided with that first Earth Day, was the “moral equivalent of war,” he made the prescient turn which now haunts us. The war we need to mount is with ourselves, our very nature. All of us are modern industrial consumers in an overpopulated world which is hugely dependent on fossil fuels for its very existence. Now that we’re finally getting the message about global warming, we recognize that what is unsustainable in terms of supply and demand is also threatening the very basis of higher life on earth. It is this context, especially the imperative to reduce carbon emissions immediately, which forces a revision of the nuclear part of the equation.

Since becoming aware of climate change, like many of my enviro colleagues, I have been optimistic about the possibility of “doing it all” – ramping down carbon consumption – with conservation and renewables. In the process of my research, it quickly hit me that I had never looked at the numbers, going on my God-given values, and my gut instincts: don’t mess with the nucleus. Even if we ramped up R and D of the “other renewables,” that little 2.3% piece of the pie-chart which is chiefly wind and solar, it would not grow to replace both fossil fuels and nuclear power in the next 3 or 4 decades. If we act to limit our carbon emissions, and thus save civilization from its own excesses, we will need something greater than “other renewables” to provide base power for the grid. In other words, if you’re anti-coal, you’d better be pro nuclear power.

There are other parts of human impact upon Gaia: transportation, housing and infrastructure, food. Nuclear enthusiasts point out that nuclear power would be a relatively carbon-free method to get hydrogen to power fuel cells. But the infrastructure changes required for fuel cells are massive, and we don’t have enough time to make that transition. Huge changes are needed in all areas of human lifestyle. For our present purposes, I want to focus on the necessity of nuclear power for maintaining the power grid. For I feel that if the grid is not maintained, civil society will unravel, and with it the very basis for moral and spiritual existence. We must keep the lights on if we want to continue searching for Light.

2007-03-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

NUCLEAR INTERLUDE (in which the BLADE OF WHEAT prospers awhile longer)

Greetings to my patient blogosphere readers. My last post was in June 2006, on human extinction and the infinite chain of creation. Then my ecospiritual world turned upside down.

While attending the Friends General Conference annual gathering in Tacoma Washington, I was challenged by a global warming workshop leader to think again about accepting, indeed promoting nuclear power as a necessary part of the package of solutions to climate change. We were both teaching global warming workshops. Mine, entitled “We are the Flood”, was a high school version of the deep ecology workshop I had been trained by Joanna Macy to lead (see my blog of April 2006). It did not go well. The theory of despair and empowerment I outlined in my post on Joanna’s work is tough enough to enact successfully with motivated adults. My teen group included some kids who were there because their parents enrolled them, and were generally young. One kid wrote on his evaluation that he thought we were “literally going to build an Ark,” and was disappointed to miss this feel-good Sunday School exercise. It really hit home for one high school senior, and it was touching to see the others comfort her as she broke down in grief for humanity and the earth. Theirs is a tough generation to be a part of, with the end of the species in plain sight.

Karen, on the other hand, was teaching a group of consenting adults about the science of global warming. Embedded in this was her explanation of energy options, including the key option of nuclear power as the source of base power for the grid. We were both lifelong environmentalists, and we couldn’t have been going at this more differently.

After six months of research, I concluded she was right. The numbers for renewable, intermittent sources like wind and solar just aren’t there (2.3% of power). Not now, and not in a projected 20-30 years. Improved efficiency and conservation, including radically ramping down our overcharged lifestyle, could definitely improve our chances of avoiding the end of civil society within this century. And renewables must be part of the mix. Geeta and I are planning to install photovoltaic panels this year, either as a residential user or as part of a small partnership producer. But in terms of keeping the lights on, nuclear power is a necessity if we stop using coal to fuel base grid power.

Again, pushed by Karen, I’ve realized just how bad coal is. When I say we need nuclear power maintained and capacity strongly increased, I am speaking in the context of a massive emergency late-industrial shift away from fossil fuels. CO2, which is produced most egregiously per unit consumed by coal (along with radiation, mercury, sulphur, you name it), is the key poison in our atmosphere at post-industrial concentrations (now 382/ppm versus 280 at the start of the industrial revolution, with 450 the limit beyond which we risk runaway climate change). So, relative to the (mostly) contained radiation from nuclear waste and the risk of weapons proliferation, the stark immediacy of atmospheric CO2 overload is far worse. The result would be an even greater extinction rate (now pushing 20%), the assured end of civilization, and perhaps human extinction. Gaia, the living, self-regulating system of life on this planet, would go into an extreme state of heating that she hasn’t seen in 250 million years.

In January, a NC Public Utilities Commission hearing for Duke Power’s request to build two new huge coal-fired plants at their Cliffside facility in Rutherford County approached. It was good timing, for a special study authorized by the state legislature had reported in December that, with conservation, efficiency and promoting renewables, the state did not need any new power plants for ten years. Karen’s straightforward remark a fortnight before the hearing, “If you’re anti-nuclear, you’re pro-coal” was irrefutable, so I decided I had to speak out. Then I started to back away, feeling inadequate to the task of defending my position, most of all among my environmental and ecospiritual friends. Two nights before the hearing, I had a dream which sealed the decision. “Ol Blackie”, the workhorse Ford pickup powered by a V-8 350 Cleveland engine with which I built my homesteading base, was swamped with brown-black dusty coal at a garbage compacting station while I napped in the front row of an auditorium whose stage was the truck, coal, and compacter. Okay, I get it.

My testimony was against coal, for renewables and conservation, and for nuclear power. I identified myself as a lifelong environmentalist, and spoke of the twin vise of Peak Oil and Climate Change, ending with the prayer, “God help us.” That night I appeared on two television stations, one highlighting my testimony against coal, the other focusing on the pro-nuclear stance. The Charlotte Observer ran an article that included a quote which surprised me, but I must own, since I remember hearing myself saying it in a departure from my prepared text: “We must build as many as we can wherever we can,” which coincides with the definitive MIT study which calls for a threefold expansion of nuclear power plants worldwide by 2050 to avert climate catastrophe.

So, dear reader, here we are. The philosopher-teacher has taken a public stand, politics has intruded, and I huddle once again at the keyboard. Another dream has come, where my one year-old grandson has lumps of coal in his diapers. As for the hearing, the Utilities Commission refused to authorize but one of the plants Duke Power requested. (I hope many of you know about the improbable victory over TXU’s plan to build 11 new coal plants in Texas. With inspired intervention by lawyers from EDF and others, the company was bought out by a consortium of banks with an agreement to build only three of them). You’re going to be hearing from me regularly again. And I’d like to hear from you, especially inviting my readers to share stories of effective ways to motivate people to change energy habits - starting with you.

NEXT: The Morality of Nuclear Power (with a concluding note on its Spiritual Context)

THE BLADE OF WHEAT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

2006-06-15T09:18:00.001-04:00

"Swamiji, what happens to the Creator's desire for creation to know him through attaining self-realization as human beings if an irreversible wave of climate change leads to the extinction of our species on this planet?"

There were audible gasps in the full hall of listeners. Mine was a frightening, but good question.

Swami Paramanand, supposedly a realized being himself, answering in Hindi responded, "Do you know creation?"

Chastened by the knowledge of all that I did not know, I replied, "Sounds like what God said to Job out of the whirlwind."

Swami Parmanand went on to mime a stalk of wheat. "What happens when the stalk ripens to maturity?" he asked.

"It is harvested," Job replied.

The Swami nodded his head. Just so the world when it has run its course, and thus our species when it's race is run, whether the divine lila - the game that God plays by hiding Himself in all creation, as the Upanishad playfully details - is fulfilled or not.

As Swami Parmanand held his forearm to the the sky, I was struck by the homology with the Eleusinian mysteries, where the priest holds up a blade of wheat to be sacrificed, Demeter sacrificing her daughter Persephone, to be reborn as spring. Both the Dionysian and Christian mysteries replay this ritual. I suddenly realized that now the swami was extending our local imagery - local to the West and to the planet, to the universal dance of death and rebirth, universe after universe.

The swami went on. "Do you know the purpose for which you were born?"

Damn. They always got to this, these teachers. Even the casual Hindu fellow traveler on the train would ask, "And what is your purpose, my goodsirrh?" My purpose, from the standpoint of Vedanta and a line of sages stretching back at least 3500 years was the Hindu version of know thyself. Become realized yourself, and stop worrying about creation, the earth I was trying to save.

"Swamiji, I understand what you are saying. But I don't accept this with the same equanimity as a realized being."

Swamiji nodded again, smiling. At least the aspirant knew where things stood. And I knew that even if I were the Last Man on Earth, this was my purpose.

After the question period ended Swamiji's translator Sunil approached and asked if Swamiji's answer had been sufficient for me.

"Yes, Sunil, because while in India as a young man, I learned a metaphysical context for what Swamiji said." He smiled and nodded, satisfied that the cryptic response had done it's job. The wheat dies, but if it is not realized yet, then the universe is born again, and sentience has another chance to play the game of Realization. It's all alive, it's all God and all matter has interiority. The interiority ultimately is the Self that created it, which periodically retires unto itself (the sleep of Brahma), either satisfied that it is fully known by sentient matter, or else creates the universe anew at another moment of extroverted Spirit.

Swami Paramanand reminds me of the same task that has confronted me since meeting Maurice Frydman, Krishnamurthi's sparring partner in Bombay, in 1968. The purpose of my life, from a Vedantist perspective whose truth I cannot deny, is to know the Self, not to save the earth. But on the other hand, one wears the sword as long as one can. And I want to write with that sword about what it feels like to see the human template slip back into potentiality, the web of life shredded as we flail our way to oblivion.

This is about despair, celebration and joy, humor and irony, divine lila fully occupying every space of creation. It is mind-boggling to think that our place in the Great Dance of Creation may soon vanish, but the Hindu metaphysics of my hippy-saddhu youth has permeated me. I think the West, both the scientists and the Abrahamic priests, has got it wrong. You don't "only go 'round once." As a Buddhist friend said in the face of the immolation of a Himalayan city by hydro-dam builders a decade ago, "Kali Yuga is the end of an era, not the end of time."

Brahma may well be making his preparations for sleep once again. Meanwhile, I want to observe and record how we respond to the greatest challenge we have ever faced. And I will continue to celebrate my own dance of creation even as I do everything I can to reduce my eco-footprint, come what may. Courage, friends...