Discuss: Climate Revelations

Well done, Auden. 

Don’t know what God is, but I know that I experience a strong (if often elusive) pull towards action from something greater than me that I call God. Compels me to bust my ass to leave all our kids a world that works.

My religion helps me feel that pull and find the guts to act on the pull more often.

Glad to hear of your journey in these areas. Now leave your keyboard behind and reduce the carbon footprint of those big ole chairlifts!

Spirituality, Climate Change, today’s failing economy, the here and now.

It doesn’t get any more relevant than this.  Your writing ties together what I teach in my classes: that *everything* is connected.  Dealing with issues that are bigger than we are forces us to contemplate the larger than life, the desires that draw us to leave this world a better place for our grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren.  That’s the kind of perspective we need if homo sapiens sapiens is to remain on earth.  But then perhaps this is part of an evolutionary shift towards a more earth conscious homo sustainabilis?

This thoughtful article has the potential to begin reframing “sustainability” to make it more accessible to a much broader range of folks;the potential to bridge the scientific and the moral/spiritual approaches to the problem; the potential to contribute to an emerging wholistic paradigm that is needed to shift our way of looking at the world so we can help make the planet safe for humanity before Nature makes the planet inhospitable for humans in order to preserve itself for other beings.

I LOVE this article! I am an environmental scientist and a member of TAO, the Temple for Jewish Renewal.In March 2009 we will be hosting a GREEN event for a little known rabbinic observance called Birkhat HaChokmah, the Blessing for the Sun, which occurs once every 28 years. We are inviting religious leaders in the community to speak about reverence for Life and the Earth. Auden is so right-on: we need to recognize that humanity cannot exist without this planet and WE need to take care of THE WHOLE to survive. Let’s work toward Homo sustainabilis!

I wish the solutions to humanity’s problems were as easy as getting religion involved. Unfortunately we are the the cause and only solution to our continued search for security. War is our greatest disaster, and religion has been too much a part of the cause and not the solution. We may only change our way of being one individual at a time. Reform seldom works in human activities. It is breaking from the past and trying something   entirely new that creates real change.
May I suggest a discussion between J. Krishnamurti and Ivan Illich as reported on pages 301 through 307 in Pupul Jayakar’s Krishnamurti: A Biography, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986: ISBN 0-06-250401-0. Official biographer.

With human population projections indicating that the human community will have 9+ billion members by 2050, perhaps it is time to open discussions here and elsewhere about the profound implications of a 40% increase in the human population in the coming four decades. After all, the frangible biological systems and finite resources of our planetary home make clear to a sensible observer that a planet with the size, composition, and ecology of Earth cannot indefinitely sustain the unbridled increase of human overproduction, overconsumption and overpopulation activities.

Now for a question: Is it reasonable to conclude that the unbridled increase of the clearly visible and distinctly human global overgrowth activities we see overspreading Earth in our time cannot be sustained much longer, much less indefinitely, secondary both to Earth’s limitations and humankind’s “feet of clay”?

Godspeed.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1176

Straight balderdash in this non-essay.
1. Skiing is not “sustainable.” It’s a destructive, class-bound, heedless practice.
2. Amory Lovins is a pro-corporate, Reaganite fraud. Paul Hawken is another guru of greenwashing. They are snake-oil salesmen at best.
3. If this dude is an “atheist,” then I’m the King of England. When you start whimpering forth irrational terms like “God,” then you are already turned and captured. Where’s the proof for anything, anything at all discussed by these titled, learned savants? Two recent monumental books on atheism by Jack Eller will help anyone unsure of what atheism has to offer. 
4. Ah, to live in a fantasy world where you can grease the wheels of consumer capitalism and call yourself “sustainable.” You want to know what’s truly “sustainable” in this world? The production of bullshit. The mountain just keeps on growing.
5. Please, spare the world more earnest “for the kids” claptrap. The American supersystem is fraying badly now, for you and most all the others living now. It may come as a shock to some people, but there are actually consequences to remaining ignorant and deluded.

We continue to live in a capitalist country with a very rooted power structure which advocates a world view (profit is the motive for action, for life itself) that is antithetical to creating a sustainable culture,  While we are trying to get ourselves to that sustainable culture, the concept of a double bottom line (or triple) can be useful.  A capitalist endeavor, or profit making one, can also set out to enhance the life of the community, or to move sustainable goals forward.  We who are outside of the profit making world (I am a teacher) can demand that corporations attend to more than profit, that they contribute to our collective well being as they make their profit.  We have a great deal of power to move them if we can learn to use it.