Tuesday, May 31, 2016
And What Does QEW Call Us To Do?
The steering
committee of Quaker Earthcare Witness met again at a convent in
the lovely Lincoln Park area of Chicago April 28-May 1. Geeta and I
drove over 700 miles to visit with old Friends, with a strong hope to
effectively share the Pisac Minute (see last post) and enlist QEW's
support in extending that message through the wider Quaker world in
North America. We were scheduled to host a panel Friday night on the
making and propagation of the minute.
QEW is an
organization primarily made up of liberal Friends, affiliated with
Friends General Conference. If you check the link above you will
encounter a rich website exploring resources of a group which
“seek[s] emerging insights into right relationship with Earth and
unity with nature.” It goes on to emphasize the importance of
Quaker processes and testimonies in its work, noting that its primary
calling is to facilitate personal transformation rather than
structural and educational reforms. I have been attending its
conferences off and on since the early days (1990's). Geeta has
joined me in recent years.
A highlight for me
of these gatherings is everyone's sharing the leading edge of their
lives the first night (Thursday). The group includes many seasoned
Friends, both in terms of ecological activism and contemplative
depth. As with all Quaker groups, it tends to be a heady bunch, with
a lot of education and a number of published authors. The sharing was
both powerful and humbling, showing me examples of colleagues who
walked their talk far more than I do. The concern for ecojustice was
matched by a tenderness for each other. As I noted during a group
sharing on Saturday night, revisiting our statement of purpose, this
initial session demonstrated the best of what we human beings have to
offer, what this fragile planet would lose should we go extinct.
Though almost all of
us are liberal FGC Friends, the group is nevertheless diverse. In
its early years, it was named Friends in Unity with Nature, and
though the name changed many years ago to make it sound less pagan,
there is a continuing tension between those who are passionately
connected to the earth and her worship and those of us who are more
panentheist than pantheist. Another related fault line is between
those who favor immersion in the “nature” that is left to us and
those who are willing to set aside that experience in order to
participate in direct action and civil disobedience. Of course some
of us do both, including this blogger.
Two young people in
their twenties joined us, one an evangelical. Their voices were
crucial for me. The young man spoke glumly of how the politicians
didn't care, and the difficulty of finding hope for his generation,
though he had started a service at the restaurant where he worked to
compost hundreds of pounds of food scraps at the communal building
where he and his companion lived. His companion identified herself
as an evangelical with a passion for climate justice, and seemed
genuinely thankful to be among us. I knew of only one other person
present, another first -timer with deep Quaker roots, who identified
himself as a follower of Christ Jesus. Other than a lively woman who
had been with Geeta in Pisac, perhaps in her mid-fifties,
participants were in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. More
young people might help the dialogue and give the organization
perspective. Everyone knows this.
Some of the
leadership have had a serious split with FCNL (the respected liberal Friends lobbying organization) over their signing a
letter from faith organizations in support of the Green Climate
Fund. Experienced financial and policy analysts in our group
continued to educate us about the false promises and dirty
capitalist tricks (carbon markets, for instance, are rigged) that are
embedded within this initiative. They argue that REDD, the global
effort to protect forests in Third World countries through carbon
offsets is deeply flawed, sometimes fraudulent. An old QEW Friend I
talked to in Pisac expressed her disillusionment with the UN after a
dozen years of being a Quaker observer. She was particularly
disheartened when a charismatic Eastern European diplomat in a
leadership position with a clear vision of healing the earth and
forestalling catastrophic climate change was replaced by an
apparatchnik who appeared to be a pawn of the corporate interests
present at the table. She said the UN had been hopelessly
compromised by bringing global corporate entities into the UNFCCC
The counter-argument
from the FCNL climate lobbyist, Jose Aguto, is that one has to remain
part of the conversation in a process where nation states have
engaged with corporate entities in the efforts to forestall rapid
climate change under the aegis of the UN. The compelling
presentations in Chicago appeared to seal the better arguments on the
side of the anti-global finance people, but the willingness to work
with everyone at the table on the part of the coalition of religious
groups, including the “enemy,” remains persuasive for me. This
is the central struggle in the UNFCCC and other international bodies
(like the World Bank and IMF) in the climate wars. Sometimes it is
hard to find the God within those who present themselves as other,
seemingly diametrically opposed to one's own values. But that is our
commitment as Friends. Of course, the question is, where is God in
the structures themselves, the committees, organizations, and
corporations? Unless there are honest, open personal relations among
all sides in these groups, God is unnamed and unrecognized.
The following post
goes into detail about our sharing of the Pisac Minute and what then
transpired at Business Meeting, “Geeta Answers the Call.”
Labels: FCNL, FGC Friends, Friends in Unity with Nature, Green climate fund, Pisac Minute, Quaker Earthcare Witness, REDD, UNFCC
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Lima COP as Patchwork Quilt
I must confess to being one who has
been caught up in strategy and effectiveness, sometimes discounting
or forgetting my leadings. This has meant a series of Advents in
which I have had my faith in the rebirth of Light regularly
challenged by the failure of climate geopolitics. Reading my friend
Mary's comment today brings me back to my own little square, leaving
the grand design of solving humankind's greatest challenge ever. And
today's piece of that square is simply giving an honest appraisal of
what happened at Lima.
The image of a patchwork is actually a
good one for the outlines of a Paris accord. Instead of a grand
design, a treaty where every nation agrees to the same action, the
last couple of years of patient exhausting work have led to an
agreement where each nation chooses its way forward toward the goal
of holding global warming to 2 degrees C.
The language in the approved text is
“common but differentiated responsibilities and respective
capabilities.” It's not a binding deal.
It's all about early adopters and peer pressure. But the biggest
three emitters have provided momentum, with the US, China, and
the EU promising the most at this point. And they produce over 60%
of current emissions. For once, the rest of the world is not
pointing at the US for blocking progress.
Still missing is a commitment from the fourth largest emitter, India, which is still playing catch-up in economic development (and I can tell you from experience that it has the world's most inefficient electrical grid). Hopefully that will change by the end of March, which is when nations have agreed to present their “ante,” the initial reduction promises. Narendra Modi, the wildly popular new PM, besides being a business booster, had a something of a reputation as a green chief minister of Gujarat. We shall see.
One of the big roadblocks in
negotiations thusfar has been over the climate justice argument.
Poor nations argue that those who have historically created the most
emissions should provide substantial assistance to developing
economies as a kind of reparations payment. The rich nations have
responded that the most important thing is to address current
emissions, where some of the developing nations are the worst
offenders, especially China, the world's biggest emitter, and India.
Though the divide is still large, Lima saw a softening of these
positions. $10 billion has now been committed to the Green Climate
Fund (designated funds to help with both mitigation and adaptation to
climate change among poor nations). Most importantly, several
developing nations have now committed to this fund, including several
South and Central American nations and South Korea (technically a
developing nation in UNFCCC terms). This is still a small amount,
considering the goal of providing $100 billion a year for these
efforts worldwide. But there is now a core of countries on both
sides of the divide willing to cooperate.
The biggest boost to a potential Paris
accord, and to breaking through the rich-poor divide, was the joint
announcement by US and Chinese leaders to reduce (US) and cap (China)
carbon emissions a few weeks prior to the Lima conference. China has
promised to cap its carbon emissions by 2030, and the US to reduce
its emissions from 2005 levels in 2025 by 26-28%. These reductions
would be primarily due to the EPA's recent decision to severely
curtail coal in the mix of fuels for the US electrical grid, along
with last year's mandated fuel economy increases for vehicles,
including for the first time, freight trucks. As for China, it has
the biggest green energy program on earth, as well as the largest
build-up of nuclear power plants, which are virtually fossil-free
after they are built. After a record-breaking build-up of coal-fired
plants, they now promise to stop building new ones in a few years.
Looking at the global picture, the
patchwork metaphor allows us to see that there is indeed a trend
towards reducing CO2 emissions, a combination of regional carbon
markets, commitments by individual nations, as well as hundreds of
cities world-wide. The week of the People's Climate Rally, a World
Bank director announced that there was a substantial surge in the
world's carbon markets, now covering 25% of carbon emissions. During the Lima talks, representatives of these markets were
hard at work making their interactions more efficient.
The COP process itself is adopting this
approach, which means more participation, but less assurance of
success. Nation-by-nation commitments due by March 31 are voluntary,
as is compliance. The hope is that a regular cycle of review will
provide the impetus to improve on these initial positions, an "ex-ante" process whereby the carbon reduction stakes can be
raised, driven forward by peer pressure. The potential success of a
Paris accord rests squarely on how well this process works.
Obviously, for any hope of even getting close to the 2 degrees C goal
(which many feel is not attainable), this process will need to ramp
up rapidly.
The clerk of Quaker Earthcare Witness, my friend Roy, responded later in the day to the quilt square analogy, pointing out that the frame and backing for the global carbon reduction quilt is provided by the community. It is the group that stitches the backing and the borders of the quilt. Otherwise, you just have a bunch of squares lying around. This is the context provided by the UNFCCC process, and the whole idea of international cooperation. Many green activists, despairing over the slow progress made thusfar, have given up on the frame and backing, retiring to their own piece of the quilt. That's okay, because the whole process goes forward regardless of our individual postions. But I want to affirm the international process, flawed as it is, because it provides the frame and backing for this emergent quilt.
The clerk of Quaker Earthcare Witness, my friend Roy, responded later in the day to the quilt square analogy, pointing out that the frame and backing for the global carbon reduction quilt is provided by the community. It is the group that stitches the backing and the borders of the quilt. Otherwise, you just have a bunch of squares lying around. This is the context provided by the UNFCCC process, and the whole idea of international cooperation. Many green activists, despairing over the slow progress made thusfar, have given up on the frame and backing, retiring to their own piece of the quilt. That's okay, because the whole process goes forward regardless of our individual postions. But I want to affirm the international process, flawed as it is, because it provides the frame and backing for this emergent quilt.
Will it be finished in time to
accomplish the goal of halting runaway climate change? This remains
improbable, but we are all working within the web, and cannot step
out and see the whole picture, including the Mystery which underlies
the process, the ultimate frame and backing for our effort at
planetary survival. My bedrock hope is in the power of that Mystery,
which supports and transcends the individual conscience and the
checkered endeavors of the global community.
Labels: Advent, carbon market, COP 15 and 20, Copenhagen, ex-ante process, Lima, Narendra Modi, Paris climate accord, patchwork quilt, Quaker Earthcare Witness, UNFCCC
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
POPULATION and CLIMATE CHANGE
Isn’t this the elephant in the room? Secular enviros are scared to death to mention it, as are religious ecologists. Those most willing are the engineer-rationalist types, who have been warning of overshoot for decades now. It’s well past time this issue was brought into the deliberations on global ecological deterioration.
The human-earth relationship reached a critical moment when we pushed the planet past biocapacity, sometime around 1986. World population then was around 4.8 billion The latest figures, from 2006, put us at 130% of biocapacity, with the average biocapacity at 5.25 acres/person, whereas the average footprint (carbon, developed land, and food/fiber/timber) was 6.725. World population now is 6.7 billion. Population is definitely a critical component of our current, and potentially fatal, overshoot. Even at 4.8 billion, we were squeezing out other species’ habitat, and the extinction curve that is currently accelerating, now well over one hundred species a day, was already rising.
But it is absolutely critical to note the relative proportion of biocapacity used by the rich and the poor. The wealthiest 1 billion now use 100% of biocapacity (Jim Merkel, Radical Simplicity)! The remaining 5.7, living marginally in cities and rural areas, use the overshoot amount. This does not mean we would reach steady-state if we simply got rid of those rich billion, which includes you and me. The desperately poor repeatedly cut down fledgling trees and sometimes eat “bushmeat” in the form of our simian cousins, simply to survive. But George Monbiot details the huge damage that the wealthy inflict upon the earth in 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.
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.
Labels: biocapacity, clearness committee, climate change, Golden Quadrilateral, population crash, Quaker Earthcare Witness
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Two Paradigms
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?
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?
Labels: dominion, ecological paradigm, industrial paradigm, metanoia, nuclear power, Quaker Earthcare Witness, Thomas Berry, Thomas Malthus
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