ecospirit

Last week, I ventured into the chilling territory of the Artic News blog. I don't do this regularly, because invariably the news is terrifying. For years, I have feared a potential rapid extinction event from a huge upwelling of methane from the shallow shelves of the Arctic (East Siberian) Sea. The man who posts this material is the affable Peter Wadhams, expert on all things Arctic. This time, he makes the case for a potential mass extinction event in 2026, trumping Guy McPherson, who has predicted mass extinction in the northern hemisphere by 2033. The next morning I woke with the thought, "My cat will still be alive then."

As I went through my annual fact-checking ritual, I found once again the reasons I was able to sleep again last time, with peers arguing for a much more gradual process of climate disruption, and the surprising response from Gaia: methane-eating bacteria populations seem to increase every time methane bubbles do.

One of the articles that popped up from an online search really caught my eye. A contributor to Skeptical Science, a site that debunks climate prediction errors (Wadhams has been cited twice before) made the point that, despite the fact that Wadhams was an "alarmist" whose claims needed to be tempered, he was nevertheless a "respected scientist," and that climate deniers were far more egregious in the damage they did. So, the writer argued, the site needed to work much more vigorously at countering their falsifications than scientists like Wadhams.

I still live far from where most of the climate disruption occurs, and it is hard to remember on a mild summer day in the southern mountains that we are encountering tipping points that make a mockery of humanity's slow awakening and politicians' gradualist approaches (I include the Green New Deal). Wadhams and folks like him remind us that the stakes are huge, and that time is of the essence.

One of Wadhams' claims is that the jet stream, driven by the polar vortex, will likely collapse within five years (a factor in his 2026 warning), bringing a wave of heat from the Equator to the North Pole. This would exacerbate the already rapid warming of the Arctic, now averaging more than 3C, versus 1C for the planet, and all the processes driven by that warming. (Last spring, there were spikes in spring temperature in Siberia 35C above average, with the average daily temps up to 20C higher than average for the Arctic overall.) One of the biggest concerns is the effect upon the mid-northern latitudes, humanity's breadbasket. Instead of the gradual shift northward of the grain belt predicted by the IPCC, such an event would effectively end grain production overnight, due to the huge, sudden increase in temperature.

My searches to corroborate this position, however, have found nothing to support Wadhams' assertion. Climate modeling once predicted a tightening of the polar vortex, moving closer to the north pole. Then scientists started using a "gray radiation scheme," which omits the effects of water vapor and clouds, which reflect incoming radiation. This model predicted that the jet stream would shift towards the Equator, which is what we have observed in recent years, the telltale wobble that has led to extreme weather events, of both hot and cold. Last spring, Arctic temperatures were far warmer than in Europe, which has unusual cold temps and snowfall.

But the most recent research corroborates a shift of the jet stream northward (wobble continuing, because it continues to weaken), by employing a "simple four-factor long wave radiation scheme" that re-incorporates the effect of water vapor on the system. (Question: why in the world would scientists ever leave out such a huge factor???)

What I gather from a 48-hour review of a dizzying amount of information is that climate science is exceedingly complex, and that predictions like those from Wadhams are perilous. As for the effect to date on grain-growing, the net effect up to 2016 has been to increase corn yields in the American Midwest (as predicted in early studies of climate change), due to more rainfall. This spring, however, catastrophic flooding has prevented farmers from planting. Jet stream wobbles mean that the uncertainties associated with farming are amplified, but it is not leading clearly - at least not yet - to a breakdown of the polar vortex altogether.

The focus of my faith, and the basis of my hope, has been for many years one of trusting the indwelling Spirit, the First Mover, the Creator who is wellspring of the material universe, source of our breath and soul. I wrote an essay at the request of the National Council of Churches about this, first calling it ecological faith, then moving to the more inclusive term cosmogenetic faith. Ecological faith takes me beyond faith in our brave, flawed species to a trust in the system, trust in Gaia as one self-regulating being, its intelligence sustaining the whole by being distributed throughout it. Cosmogenetic faith moves beyond planetary ecological processes to the radical Good News that the Creator creates on an infinite scale, ecosystem after ecosystem, universe after universe.

Despite this eco-theological buttress, I have been obsessed these last several years with near-term human extinction. As I have struggled with this frighteningly probable event, I have come to realize what the crux of it for me is. It is not just the unimaginable suffering of billions (human and non-human). It is not just the specific imagining of the untimely demise of my grandchildren. Nor is it the loss of so much that I hold dear in the Cenozoic Era and Holocene Epoch, the context of our blessed opportunity to work and dance on the material plane. What it really comes down to is the consequences this would have for one of Thomas Berry's central realizations, that the universe is aware of itself through us, homo sapiens. In The Universe Story, he names this reflective awareness a ”new power, a power of consciousness whereby Earth, and the universe as a whole, turned back and reflected on itself.” (143) So my question, what happens to this essential self-awareness, radical creative generativity being conscious of itself as world-making, if we go extinct?

Even as I have pondered and written about this these last eight years, astronomers have discovered a vastly-increasing number of exoplanets that may harbor intelligent life, and of course some are open to the possibility of parallel worlds. A few, those with a more Eastern sensibility, even entertain the notion of serial universes, as the Hindus believe. But this particular place, the Garden of Yahweh, is my home, and the rest is a thoroughgoing mixture of conjecture and faith. Human extinction matters to me perhaps most importantly because I was raised with the biblical story of Yahweh having a special, chosen relationship with us. And I am not aware of any other species for which this is an intimate, felt relationship. You could call this a failure of imagination, but it is related to a trait that I value, namely that I am more interested in experience of the divine mystery than in any belief about it.

Evolutionary Religion comes back to the spiritually modest, materially expansive proposition that though development of a mature religious perspective on this Earth is still quite rudimentary, “we” still have a very long time in which to make more progress, even if we destroy much of the gift we were given in terms of the 63 million year bloom of the Cenozoic. That destruction would involve ecological and civilizational collapse, including an epochal number of extinctions, perhaps including our own. It is quite possible that positive feedback cycles will become so severe that the earth becomes uninhabitable for higher life, in which case Schellenberg's thesis would be moot. But if the conditions for higher life remain after the ongoing series of shocks we have already started have reached equilibrium, then “we” may survive the bottleneck industrial humans have created. The referent for this “we” is intelligent life on this planet with a thirst for ultimate meaning, necessitating a deep religious faith. Homo sapiens can suicide, yet Berry's intuitive proposition about the self-reflective quality of the universe can survive! This is crucial to the possibility of meaning in this universe, which Schellenberg sees, without reference to Berry, as crucial, even as a religious skeptic. And it cognitively restores the grounds for my faith and hope.

DEEP TIME. This is key to Schellenberg's argument, and something with which I have a modicum of familiarity. Joanna Macy introduced me to the concept through some exercises in my training with her in California in 2000. We did a “Dance of the Ancestors” in which we moved through evolutionary history, experiencing our hominin forebears, as well as our ancient Old World ones. We experienced guided meditations of cosmic history since the Big Bang, and a couple in which we imagined future beings, presumably human, who thanked us for making it through the evolutionary bottleneck caused by climate change and habitat loss. But explorations of future time remained in the relatively near future, as Joanna had us imagine beings a hundred or perhaps a few hundred years in the future. When I have asked groups to choose future moments in some of my workshops, they have ventured as far as 10,000 years. (This is the figure Gary Snyder says is required for our maturation as a species.) But Schellenberg has his sights on really deep time, which he says we have missed in our backward-looking habits.

According to Schellenberg, the Darwinian revolution is only half finished, and our religious quest barely begun. Geology and Darwinian evolution, with their focus on the past, have achieved the initial half of the needed revolution. They discovered deep time, but stopped in the present. He argues that it extends as well into the evolutionary future, “Darwin's Door,” and evolutionary religion banks on that time for developmental advances in our maturity as a species, towards which religion is essential. This involves cultural evolution as well as biological. Intelligent life has the capacity to extend into what is rather unfathomable, a billion years of evolution of life on this planet (perhaps up to 2.4 billion years, the latter figure based on potential variations in atmospheric pressure as the sun gets hotter and hotter in its progression towards star death in another 4 billion years). Clearly a careful and imaginative teacher, he outlines exercises he uses with students for them to start to imagine, to move from vague cognition to gut recognition, the vast time scale involved here.

For myself, having been opened to a sense of deep time through exercises such as plotting on the floor the spiraling history of this universe since the supposed Big Bang, I had a second moment of recognition. If you assume the I behind the we witnessing evolving space-time, that is, the Creator within us, and sense that I in a continuing series of present moments, you begin to feel the vastness of possibility. And i, as the little perplexed, neurotic thinker who is worried about near-term extinction, find my fear for the near term (tremendously multiplied by reading Guy McPherson, Carolyn Baker and their ilk) eroding so fast that joy and hope return. When you look at it, virtually nobody in the current climate debate tends to think beyond 2050 or “a hundred years from now,” which has crept forward 12-15 years since climate scientists first ventured to project present trends, with respect to human presence in the earth's evolutionary history. We are collectively so enormously frightened of the near future, we cannot imagine anything beyond it, except the return of pre-conscious geological time. Replace this by a vigorously imagined (no daydreams here!) billion years of persistence of that I-thought, and we are in different territory indeed.

Up next: A "beliefless faith” is the necessary basis for a truly evolutionary religion on this planet.