Systemic Piety

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Michael Dowd:

"living in right relationship to Reality, especially the inescapable geological, ecological, and thermodynamic constraints to which humanity must rapidly adjust. Both the nonrenewable ("stock") resources and the renewable ("flow") resources upon which we depend I call natural grace. The one-time endowments of stock resources and the sustainable use rates of flow resources are both necessarily constrained on a finite planet. These constraints I call grace limits. These are the limits that ecologists point to when discerning carrying capacity. When we overshoot Earth's bounty and renewal capacities, we effectively remove ourselves from paradise and put ourselves on the path to hell. To learn to recognize and then scrupulously honor carrying capacity as Reality's grace limits is a task to which the authors included here are devoted. I think of these advocates as prophets of sacred realism, or factual faith. Each one, in his or her own way, reveals how the future is calling us to greatness. If we hope to spare our grandchildren from hell and spare ourselves their condemnation, we must now urgently attend to, not just personal piety, but systemic piety. We must immediately begin measuring 'progress' and 'success' in long-term, life-centered ways, rather than short-term, human-centered ways; nothing is more important than this." (http://thegreatstory.org/sustainability-audios.html?)