Climate change, the moral imperative of our age

In response to Sarah Palin's recent claims that climate change is based on "junk science and doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood," Al Gore said that "global warming is not a political issue but a moral one," he said. Which is it? Is it immoral to do nothing about global warming?

Responding to climate change is the moral imperative of our time, and people of spirit and faith can play a vital role in helping us make this crucial transition. God, Goddess, Allah, Jehovah, Buddha, Krishna and the Great Spirit know that the politicians aren't doing it! Watching the manipulations, stalling and deceptions going on in Copenhagen is enough to make us wonder if the Goddess really knew what she was up to in involving human beings--or if she simply didn't finish the job.

There's a Native American proverb, I'm told, that says, "If we don't change our direction, we're going to wind up where we're headed." And where we're headed is disastrous: the disappearance of glaciers (already melting!) that supply water to hundreds of millions of people; the intensification of storms and hurricanes; the rising sea levels that will drown whole island nations and menace all the world's coastal cities; the loss of huge sectors of the biodiversity, the menace to all the life support systems upon which we depend.

These impacts will first be felt more deeply by those with the least resources and the least responsibility for creating them. That's a moral issue, and for the richest, most developed countries to evade responsibility and refuse to provide resources and funding for the shift is a complete moral failure that should have us all blushing in shame if not cringing at the short-sighted greed and stupidity. For eventually we in the developed world will also have our prosperity and survival undermined.

The road we're on keeps us dependent on sources of energy--oil and coal--which poison lands and water. To extract them, we level mountains in Appalachia, pollute the deltas of the Niger, drive indigenous peoples off their lands in Latin America and wage endless wars in the Middle East. We beggar ourselves to buy them and despoil oceans and wilderness in their transport. Their artificially cheap price, which does not count their cost to the planet, supports an economics of injustice that bankrupts once-thriving communities while corporations roam the globe in search of every-cheaper labor.

The alternative? We turn instead to sources of energy that are clean, abundant, truly renewable, non-polluting and decentralized--the sun, the wind, the waves, sustainably produced biofuels. We in the developed world who have created this crisis shoulder our responsibility and provide resources for the less developed countries to skip over the technologies of the last centuries and go directly to renewables. We use our human ingenuity and creativity to make even more effective use of those resources. We root our enterprises and businesses in communities and hold them accountable to those communities--and bring resources, training and opportunities into inner-city ghettos and impoverished rural areas and communities whose economies are displaced by the transition. We rebuild our depleted and damaged soils so they can sequester carbon in the form of humus, increasing the health of the land, the quality of our food and the stability of our land base. We preserve the forests and the rainforests. We spend more time with people we love and gain satisfaction more from relationships than from stuff. We breathe clean air, eat healthier food, drink cleaner water. Our grandchildren continue to enjoy a world that contains wild places and polar bears and pristine waters, thriving farms and vibrant cities.

Seems like a no-brainer to me. Yeah, it's a challenge, but hey, we're certainly up to it. As a friend of mine said, "I have more computing power in my I-Phone than the whole world had in 1969 when we put a man on the moon. We can do this!"

So what's in our way? We're clinging to an old story and a fantasy--that somehow we humans have transcended nature and her constraints, that we can expand our extractive economies endlessly in a finite world, that the profit and greed of the few outweigh the costs to the many.

As George Monbiot put it in his recent post for the London Newspaper The Guardian. "A new movement,
most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere,
demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It
will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety,
especially environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted
the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a
moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful
mindlessness."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Archive/0,5673,-66,00.html

To make the transition, to call our politicians to account and to make the changes we need to make in our daily lives we need a new mythology that roots us back in nature and teaches us that her constraints are the very structures that sustain our lives. Indigenous communities, Pagans and Witches have always maintained that we are part of nature, not separate, and that our relationship with the natural world is the core of our morality and spirituality. But now every religion is called to find its own version of a story that can bring us back home to our responsibilities to this world.

And we need a new commitment to an old morality--a morality preached worldwide by the most diverse religions and spiritual traditions, one that tells us that a moral person puts the common good above personal gain, the health of the planet above the plumpness of the purse, that we are here on earth not to exploit one another but to take care of one another and the whole web of relationships upon which we depend.

Religious leaders have amplified voices with which to call their communities to moral account. We need to hear those voices raised across the land--and fast--making clear that the health of the earth is the ground of all morality, all well being, all good.

And we need real commitments. What if every church, synagogue, mosque, temple, and Pagan grove committed to reduce their carbon footprint by the 90 percent that we truly need to reach by 2050? What if they started study groups and chevras and support groups to help people learn the skills and fund the projects and make the changes together?

As politicians met behind closed doors in Copenhagen, tens of thousands of people have been in the streets, facing police harassment, tear gas and preemptive arrests to call the politicians to account. Hundreds of civil society organizations have clamored for representation. Millions of people around the world have signed petitions, made calls, written letters, held vigils and organized protests at home. Cities and towns all over the globe are organizing their own sustainability initiatives or joining the Transition Town movement, begun in Britain but now spreading worldwide, to encourage communities to make a plan for the transition to a low carbon future.

We can and do need to do more. Let Copenhagen be a wakeup call--none of us can afford to sit back and let someone else take care of this one. We are each moral agents, responsible for our common welfare. Listen to the earth and what she is telling us. Learn what the alternatives are and how to create them. Connect with others who share your concerns and your goals. Build the alternatives where you can--and get together to agitate and clamor until our raised voices drown out the murmurs of the profiteers. Step out onto the good road, the moral road, that leads to a future we all share.

www.starhawk.org

Sign a petition calling for real action at:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_copenhagen

Starhawk's "Climate Change Primer" is a short overview of all the positive solutions. Her "Climate Change Yeses and Nos" is a simple list of what we want and don't want. Both are available to download at:

http://www.earthactivisttraining.org/climate_resources.html

They're free--but anything you can donate will help us train more people to share the skills and insights we need to meet this challenge!

By Starhawk  |  December 18, 2009; 4:41 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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