The Ec ology of Economics (economics that assume that ecology has budgets/costs)
“The planet on which our civilization evolved no longer exists. The stability that produced that civilization has vanished; epic changes have begun. We may, with commitment and luck, yet be able to maintain a planet that will sustain some kind of civilization, but it won’t be the same planet, and hence it can’t be the same civilization. The earth that Continue Reading
Speaking of “Holy Conversation”: Here is one of the variety that we in the church need to have in a theological context. It was Naomi Klein’s 2014 book, “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate”, that launched me into a mission/calling from which I have not turned back (and won’t be for the duration). I went straight from reading this Continue Reading
For almost 5 years, I’ve noticed a distinct lack of “comfort” in being able to respond to news such as the Ecological Crisis. The list of other issues that Progressives are very willing to discuss (and I am also), racism, immigration, abortion, Islamaphobia, War and Peace, The Christian Right’s capitulation to the American Empire…all of these things are undoubtedly urgent Continue Reading
My friend Tim Gossett tagged me yesterday re: an article in the Guardian on “language usage about the environment”with this:“You have some new phases to add to your vocabulary, Dale Lature “ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/17/why-the-guardian-is-changing-the-language-it-uses-about-the-environment I replied, which resulted in several comments , which I will post this morning as comments (as often happens in comments as people interact with me on Continue Reading
This is a problem we have even in the “sane” side of responses to the Ecological Crisis. We have what I have been calling “soft denial”, which “recognizes that we have a problem, but somehow hasn’t let it sink in that it is far worse than what would be headed off by “incremental solutions”, which have gotten us far on Continue Reading
More on my thoughts about the “soft denial” that permeates a lot of “Progressive/Liberal” thinking re: the Ecological Crisis. This quote from McKibben has a lot to say to illuminate my sense of how inadequate are all of our accustomed-to political language. “The question of time is the question that haunts me. I remain optimistic enough to think that in Continue Reading
The typical “soft denial” argument: “You do know nothing gets accomplished in politics without compromise? What’s more important: your ideology, or actually doing something?” Me: Ecology doesn’t run on polls; it doesn’t “take into account” what we think. It merely deals with the balances or lack of it. We need to face up to that, and “adapt” (which means to Continue Reading
Dances With Wolves, which I watched in segments over the past week, is like a parable for the ecological damage done to the world. It was more than a parable to the Native Americans who experienced it directly, in many cases all the way to their own premature deaths. When they spoke of “the white men coming” in the film, Continue Reading
“All of our lenses have various perspectival tints, but Western worldviews seem to have several in common, including the foundational influence of Platonic dualism, inherited from the Greeks. This particular influence absolutizes the realm of the abstract (spirit, soul, mind) and reduces the importance of the concrete realm (earth, body, material), disengaging them from one another. In dualistic thinking, we Continue Reading
Income inequality and the Ecological Crisis go hand in hand it seems. The powerful are so drunk that they fail the reality test. My earlier years 2011-2014 as occupytheology.org (domain is still active, ends up here) lead logically to ecoecclesia.org “In 2017, the same year the United States pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the country also approved a $2.3 trillion tax cut—primarily Continue Reading
A brief but still scary enough summary of the previous much longer quote: “most of the time we measure economic fluctuations in ticks of decimal points—2.9 this year, 2.7 that. What climate change proposes is an economic setback of an entirely different category.” Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 118). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
Scary to ponder, and yet another blow to what is perhaps the most common denier argument against full-scale (or much of any) transition to renewables and other ecological reversals and transitions we must correct: which is, “it will cost too much” and “wreck the economy” and “hurt the poor”. Consider the costs if we stick close to the status quo: Continue Reading
On “Capitalism has lifted people out of poverty”: “In 2018, the World Bank estimated that the current path of carbon emissions would sharply diminish the living conditions of 800 million living throughout South Asia. One hundred million, they say, will be dragged into extreme poverty by climate change just over the next decade. Perhaps “back into” is more appropriate: many Continue Reading
One of the most frequent push-backs I get from Christians is that I need to be more “positive and hopeful”; to suggest more things that individuals can do. ( I got this from a denominational news person when I was suggesting that they cover an upcoming local Earth Care conference hosted by a large church of their denomination. They implied Continue Reading
Somehow, we as a church need to find our way through to the recognition of how this crisis has unfolded through a long, but even more so more recent history of human trespassing of limits, through hubris and pride. This takes us back, theologically and existentially, to “the fall”, to the eating of the fruit of the tree of the Continue Reading