Sustainable Religion?

Concurrently with Global Econ & Susty, I'm also taking Kabbalah & Psych. The text, Sacred Therapy: Jewish Spiritual Teachings on Emotional Healing and Inner Wholeness by Estelle Frankel has provided me some interesting insights into the nature of sustainability from a non-physical perspective.

So often it's the physical things that draw our attention to sustainability. How much food do we have, how much water is there, how much land do we have to live on, what's out waste output, etc etc. Very measurable things. What about the softer side of sustainability, such as religion and/or spirituality? I'd like to reflect a moment, keeping our course material in mind, on a passage from Sacred Therapy:

"The tzaddik's holy visioning has the power to reconnect the individual person with her role in the cosmic scheme of things. Reb Salman Schachter-Shalomi is underscoring that role when he quotes the famous Israeli author S. Y. Agnon: 'A person has three beings. The first being is the way in which a person perceives himself, the second is the way in which a person is seen by others, and the third being is prior to the first, and it is the being by which he was created by Him who created him. If a person merited and did not damage the being which his Creator made him, then that being overwhelms the other two, and then even his shadow inspires grace and beauty.'" (pg. 132)

'...even his shadow inspires grace and beauty.' This sounds strikingly familiar to the top level of the sustainability chart, where our impact is life-giving. Could this be a way to interpret spiritual/religions sustainability? I'm having difficulty grasping this fully, as I'm still even bound by the material aspect of sustainability. My mind wants to see sustainability formulaicly, X amounts of trash, Y amounts of recycling, Z amounts of liters of water used per day, and so on.

How exactly do concepts like what's above fit into sustainability? It's not like these concepts are unique either, eastern and western religions share common themes of the positive impact of 'enlightened' ones. Where does that fit today though?

I have questions, but no answers yet. I must explore further.

- Jason

Externalization of Resources

There's a certain negligence in countries (and even localities) migrating their water production (pg. 43) and biofuel production (pg. 49) to other countries. In essence it's externalizing the problems that the local governments are having with these resources and ignores the overall issue that demand is simply too high within that locality. If it was a matter of balancing out global demand, with some places having demand too high and some places with supply too high, then it's a simple matter of trade and economics to deal with. However the implication is that the *global* carrying capacity is lower than what is being consumed.

In a way, global trade provides a form of blinders for nations, allowing them to get the resources they need externally, while ignoring the consequences behind their purchase. 'Reduced water supply? That's their problem now. It's their water production, not ours.' It's not that trade is inherently evil, but that it makes it easier to ignore the consequences of one's actions, as the deed is being done by another at the payment of the needing nation. When the nation selling water runs out, the needing nation will look for another nation to trade with, and when there's no more nations willing to trade their water, what's left? You have a nation with a population that cannot sustain itself at its current level, and people will start dying from dehydration.

In a sense, having an unsustainable population and/or food production is genocidal.

- Jason

Population Issues

With the reading and classes, population growth issues have come up the strongest for me. Probably because of my previous history studying the issue (Check out https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nizmrBp_O7FcvXszRHFAr53Znf-n1KoUqDLM48chQQ4/edit?hl=en_US for my previous work on it). Indeed there is a population growth issue in much of the modernizing world, and it's creating a completely unsustainable growth of people. At almost 7 billion people (over two of which come from just two nations, India and China) we have pushed the practical carrying capacity of the Earth pretty hard, if not beyond it's limits. Yet a part of this conversation is missing.

CNN's 1992 documentary, The People Bomb, reported on an interesting post-modern trend: population decline. The example that CNN primarily works with is in Japan. Small villages are slowly becoming extinct due to the low birth rates in Japan. The sustainability question comes up here as well, but from another direction. Instead of pushing the earth's carrying capacity, we are now looking at cultural extinction. If this low birth trend continues we will see small villages vanishing, taking with them their cultural history and legacy. Over the long haul, larger cities, and/or nations, could suffer this problem, and (in contrast to high birth rate nations) the government may need to institute laws to increase population levels to reach a point of cultural sustainability.

Food for thought.

- Jason