BEYOND ECO-DENIAL

(An Edited Excerpt from Beyond Denial) 

In the Gospels, Jesus often says, “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.” But if there is one thing many of us clearly don’t want to hear about, it is the severity of the global crisis of the environment, especially as it is appearing in the changes taking place in our climate.

This spring, a group of us from several local faith communities has been meeting to address this issue. We’ve focused on how we might adjust our local and personal behaviors: making our houses of worship more environmentally efficient; buying more socially responsible products; supporting the companies that make them; and engaging in public advocacy.

Important as practical action-steps are, we’ve also talked about how addressing this issue calls for more awareness about our own inner attitudes and thought-patterns. Environmental degradation is not caused solely by a small cadre of powerful people doing bad things. It is produced, rather, by the systemic lifestyle of our society, which all of us take part in through the ways we drive and eat, purchase and consume. And I believe that an important part of the spiritual life involves doing the inner work of learning why our consumption—and consequent waste production—is so excessive.

Much of this can be traced back to the prevalence of fear. Most of us give enormous attention to stuffing down and numbing our anxieties, especially our fear of lack, as well as our feelings of disconnection and incompleteness, our sense weakness and unworthiness. In service to this attempt to numb our uncomfortable feelings, we chronically fill our lives with a series of distractions, which very much includes massive material acquisition and consumption.

This is where the spiritual work of what we might call “right consciousness” comes in. It gives us tools for learning to see through, and grow beyond, being captive to the patterns of fear, distraction, and denial which are so common in our culture, and which we so easily become ensnared in. 

One important starting point is learning to recognize where and how our own personal denial patterns appear and operate. From there, the work continues with making small but tangible changes in our own habits and actions. And one of the important possible changes many of us can make is to join hands with other like-minded people to engage in ongoing advocacy for more responsible and sustainable public policies to protect the health and wellbeing of the living world around us, upon which our own lives are so utterly and vulnerably dependent.