ecospirit

“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.

Labels: CO2 emissions, compassion, ecojustice, economic collapse, nuclear power

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

Labels: compassion, deep ecology, ecojustice, image of God, nuclear power