This is the thirty-eighth issue of my free newsletter. Your feedback is most welcome!
I am grateful to Richard Fireman and Kim Carlyle for much of the material here.
Thomas Berry once said, “We are in between stories.” We need a new story of our human relationship with the Earth. And David Abrams wrote, “We need a human community in mutually beneficial relationship with its surrounding earth.” Wangari Maathai, who recently was given the Peace Prize for her reforestation work in Kenya, said, “Let us revive the sense of belonging to a larger family of life. We must assist Earth to heal her wounds, and thus heal our own.”
Our ecological footprint (the amount of resources each human being uses) has grown 160% in the last forty years. In North America, our lifestyle requires on average 9 or more hectares per person, while in the Middle East, Africa and Asia it is less than 2 hectares. As other countries strive to emulate the North American way of life, we are courting catastrophe on a global scale.
As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, most civilizations of the past fell due to ecological degradation, resource depletion, habitat destruction, overpopulation, climate change, wars, and failure of the groups in power to make appropriate decisions. For example, the kings among the ancient Mayans failed to respond to the evident crisis of deforestation and soil depletion because they were too busy building monuments, waging wars, and enriching themselves. Other peoples, Diamond points out, were able to survive for long periods of time despite challenging circumstances (such as the Inuit in the Arctic) by creating ways of life that were indefinitely sustainable. Empires that rely on invading and dominating other countries have not done well historically.
Now, we need to learn to “live within our means.” That means using the daily income given us by sun, wind, and wave, not the bank account of non-renewable fossil fuel; and living on what comes from our own bioregion, not through exploitation of other regions around the globe. In our economic thinking, we have not been considering the intrinsic value of forests, of clean air and water. And most of all, we have not been facing the need to wean ourselves off our suicidal dependency on fossil fuels for everything from agriculture to plastics to clothing to transportation and home heating.
With less than 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. generates over 25% of the greenhouse gases which cause global warming. We will need a 70% decrease in fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions to stabilize the climate. We need a revolution in energy-efficiency! Waste is everywhere: half of the heat energy in generating electric power is lost, computers are left on overnight, hot water tanks are the norm (instead of on-demand heaters), most cars have just one passenger, food is trucked across country instead of grown locally, buildings are poorly insulated… You probably know that compact fluorescents use ¼ the amount of power used by an incandescent to give the same amount of light. Did you know that an inkjet printer uses one-tenth the power sucked up by a laser printer?
Some folks say that to cut our energy use by 70% would send us back into the dark ages. Consider this: all the greatest achievements in art, music, literature, and architecture are generally thought to have occurred prior to the discovery of oil. Consider also the beautiful cities of Europe, created when walking and horse-drawn carriages were the favored modes of transportation, in contrast to our American strip malls, designed for the car culture. Now there are movements to green our cities, grow more food locally, revitalize neighborhoods and make them places where people congregate once again. (See the latest issue of Yes! Magazine for several inspiring articles on making our cities people-friendly.)
Cathy Holt
"Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families, and nations." - Paramahansa Yogananda
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