ecospirit

I voted this week. How about you? It is a satisfying act, especially during a Presidential year. No, I'm not as excited as I was last time. It was particularly sweet in 2008 to watch the returns with my mother, living out her life in a Republican (owner and inmates) extended care facility in Pennsylvania. She was so proud of her native North Carolina helping to deliver “my President.” My mother has passed, and we are the end of a campaign without any serious issue other than the economy. No matter who wins this time, we in the climate movement know that our work redoubles with the new administration, for this is effectively the last time we get four more years (see my August post). If we don't seriously deter carbon emissions by 2016, the CO2 momentum will be unstoppable.

Labels: bilateral climate agreements, Cantwell, cap-and-trade, carbon tax, CLEAR, Frontline, Global Warming Gridlock, Green Revolution, Kyoto Protocol, Richard Cizik, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action

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.

Labels: ANC, Ban Ki Moon, Christ, Cop 17, Desmond Tutu, Durban, Evo Morales, Gandhi, George Fox, Kyoto Protocol, Obama, Occupy movement

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.

Labels: cultural autism, cultural map, global monoculture, Interfaith Power and Light, Kyoto Protocol, natural systems theory

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.

Labels: American Clean Energy and Security Act, Copenhagen, IPCC, Kyoto Protocol, Right Relationship

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

Labels: carbon emissions, deep ecology, die-off, eco-footprint, james lovelock, Kyoto Protocol, Long Emergency, Revenge of Gaia, sustainable devlopment