Tags
So I am writing this on my new kindle, which means please forgive me if this is lacking in quality or spelling.
Patheos.com’s pagan section apparently is on fire about climate change and how this effects pagan practices and more than a little about how there is a need to go to war against capitalism or I think something about how Pagans have failed to protect the environment.
I would like to address a few points in this regard.
1) Pagans have not failed to protect the environment. Most are very conscious of the environment, but we as a whole we are but a few thousand in the face of nearly seven billion, of which I would say barring the populations of America, canada, and Europe, most of the world doesn’t care that much about the environment so much as survival. I hate this expression, but environmentalism is very much what would be called a “first world problem.”
2) The primary forces creating the pollution that is “causing” climate change at this point isn’t a “western country.” Not even America with all its coal plants and cars. In fact, pretty much all coal plants are about to be shut down because they don’t have the money to convert to the even more stringent regulations being passed or to build more plants that meet them. In my own area, that means pretty close to 70% of all energy creation is going to go away.
No the vast majority is coming from two places, India and China. Both are countries who didn’t have to sign the treaties about protecting the environment. For every plant the U.S. shuts down, they open three more coal plants that don’t have any environmental safe guards, unlike plants here which already had very tight restrictions. It’s that way for all “3rd world” countries. It was deemed that industrialized modern countries didn’t have the right to dictate or hinder their development, even though it could cause great environmental damage.
3) This means no matter how hard we fight to protect the environment, we will fail. People fail to realize how big our world is, or what exactly 7 billion people looks like.
4) The environment is always changing. That’s the point, we have seasons, which is climate change. That the planet is growing warmer via increases in carbon dioxide and so forth isn’t a bad thing. Higher CO2 levels means more plant growth, which means not only growth to heal destroyed environments but increased food production. In other words, global warming or. Climate change is more beneficial than not. Either by hand of man or not, it would solve some of our problems.
5) A theory I have that most Pagans seem to have not come up with is that climate change could be caused by the Gods themselves. Hopefully I’m not the only one that has noticed that the climate is changing as the power of the Christan God fades. The Gods and Goddesses effected the environment around them. Is it so hard for Pagans to conceptualize that more storms might mean Thor or another storm God is working in the area? Or dozens of other examples? Rather than say that they have failed, perhaps Pagans have succeeded and we have awakened the Gods of old, changing the world around us.
Leave your thoughts below.
Son of Hel 
There is definitely an intriguing possibility in your last point, as least as far as “the dead” go. The quote I used in my “A Call To War,” by the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, plays with the notions of withdrawal, disenchantment, and sovereignty around human’s use of oil.
If we can play with this idea a little bit–we’re burning the dead. Coal and oil are the compressed remains of primeval life, which makes it ancestral matter transmuted through a chthonic (rather than solar) alchemy. We drain, dredge, and otherwise extract it from the earth, use its raw potential to power machines, and the CO2 emissions are pretty much the final remains of the remains…that is, what’s left of those ancestral spirits. One can almost say we’re “releasing” them.
And perhaps they’re extracting their vengeance, or at least making themselves known.
But if so, we’re still doing it inadvertantly, not as an attempt to awaken the dead or bring back the gods, but an attempt to attain increasing levels of wealth and “progress” outside of the constraints of the land and sovereignty. If there’s any possibility that such things are related, it would seem the return of the gods isn’t precisely the sort of thing humanity will necessarily celebrate.
Either way, I don’t mind having ’em back. Wouldn’t mind if we could also keep the forests, though….
LikeLike
You make some very good points here and I’m glad that you’ve made them. I think that pagans are more concerned about the environment than most people that i know. I’m concerned about how our actions have led to where we are. Continue blogging and I’ll keep on reading.
LikeLike