ecospirit

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.

Labels: Carteret Islands, climate denial, climate hawks, ecojustice, global flooding, James Hansen, methane sink, normalcy bias, the Rapture, tundra melt, world federalism

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.

Labels: bricoleur, climate change, ecojustice, IPCC, just remnant, Katuah, Long Emergency, NOAA, Paulus Berensohn, Thomas Rain Crowe

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.

Labels: Axial religions, ecojustice, Elijah, holocene, Isaiah, just remnant, Noah, remnant

“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

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.

Labels: ecojustice, efficiency, negative population growth, nuclear power, Quaker testimonies

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