8 page essay due 4.13
Nancy 00001
week10.pptxFaith and Climate Change
“…religions have found ways to build strong belief in some extremely uncertain and under substantiated claims through the power of social proof and communicator trust.” (Marshall, 2014: 216).
“… It [climate change’ requires people to accept that some thing is true solely because of the authority of the communicator, it manifests itself in events that are distant in time and place, and it challenges our normal experience and our assumptions about the world. Above all, climate change requires people to endure certain short-term loses in order to avoid uncertain long-term costs. Religion faces every one of these obstacles, but to an even greater degree.” (Marshall, 2014: 215).
“I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.” – James Gustave Speth
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Climate change as an ‘ontological’ crisis
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Sacred and Limits
“Finally, it is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits and limitations, and this in turn, is, I think, intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one may wish to conceive of it.” (Ghosh, 2017: 160-161)
“… religious worldviews are not subject to the limitations that have made climate change such a challenge for our existing institutions of governance: they transcend nation-states, and they acknowledge intergenerational, long-term responsibilities…” (Ghosh, 2017: 161)
Climate change is a “cultural event”
“Insofar as climate change is entangled with humans, from causes to consequences and from meanings to meliorations, it is also entangled with all the ways in which religion shapes, haunts, interprets, inspires, or otherwise attends human ways of being. Fully understanding climate change therefore requires understanding its religious aspects, especially the way religion is involved in human experiences of and human responses to climate change.” (Jenkins et al, 2018: 86).
Faith statistics in Canada
2011 Census – 76% of Canadians identify as having a religion.
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The Comforting Whirlwind: God and the Environmental Crisis – Bill McKibben
“…the message that comes through that television all the time every day and it comes through most of the other instruments of our consumer society is simple. It's that "you're the most important thing on earth. You're the absolute center of the universe, you're the heaviest object and everything is going to orbit around you." If you had to pick one message that was most effective for building a huge, strong economy that would probably be it…. But if you wanted to create a message that was profoundly troubling from a spiritual point of view and one that made progress on issues of great importance, especially issues of the environment, particularly difficult ones, you couldn't pick a better one than "You're the most important thing on earth. You're the center of the planet." This is an old question, where we stand in relation to everything else.” (Mckibben, 2001: 2).
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Faith as the problem
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The Lynn White Jr. thesis in the 80’s…“asserted a negative correlation between “Judeo-Christian” religiosity and pro-environmental beliefs and behaviors.” (Jenkins et al, 2018: 87)
“At the heart of debates about religion and climate change is a question about whether religious commitments are the key drivers of worldly action, or whether beliefs are themselves embedded in broader systems of identity that conjoin secular and religious modalities.” (Jenkins et al, 2018: 87)
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Religion = problem summary
A) Religion is a sort of delusion and therefore not the answer. Climate Change requires sober assessment of evidence and faith cannot provide this.
B) Religion, and in particular Christianity, is not helpful because it provides a moral and philosophical cover for human domination of the world.
Religion = answer summary
A) Faith offers a set of confessional and constructive beliefs that give insight into how to think about climate change through otherwise unconsidered environmental, ethical, and mystical frames.
B) Faith is a sociological tool, an example of the sorts of ways that we can build communities of care outside of the dominant narratives of capitalism and industrialization.
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Who said it?
“Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism is one example of how the techno-economic paradigm affects individuals [149]. This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. Amid this confusion, postmodern humanity has not yet achieved a new self-awareness capable of offering guidance and direction, and this lack of identity is a source of anxiety. We have too many means and only a few insubstantial ends.” (150)
“We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it.” (166)
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“Religion is, in reality, living. Our religion is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our religions is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think – all of these things – twetny-four hours a day. One’s religion, then, is ones life, not merely the ideal life but the life as it is actually lived.” Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not theistic, it is not atheistic, is has little to do with what white people call ‘religion.’ It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do, is our religion.” (15).
Topic of my own research… inspired by two things: A contrast really… between this…
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https://protecttheinlet.ca/faith-leaders-arrested-at-kinder-morgan-gates/
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11% of stories.
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The Black Snake
The Black Snake(s)
Big in DAPL
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Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston
Well first. A bit of fascination. As climate thinker George Marshall likes to point out, there’s as many people in this church
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"Every week Lakewood Church achieves a level of mass mobilization that climate change activists can only dream. Consider it this way: In February 2013, sixty environmental organizations pulled out all the stops to mobilize forty-five thousand people for the largest-ever climate change rally in Washington, D.C. That week, just as many people came to this one church. Moreover, just as many came the next. Six times more people will watch this service on television and the Internet than watched An Inconvenient Truth in U.S. cinemas” (Marshall, 2014: 218).
“If Christianity were promoted like climate change, it would amount to no more than reading a Gideon's Bible in a motel chalet and trying to be nice to people" (Marshall, 2014: 223).
Sacred Values
In summary
Those who believe that religion is part of the climate change problem, (or at least particular expressions of religion).
a) religion is irrational and therefore not a legitimate form of knowledge.
b) religion enables anti-ecological and human centered modes of thought that support human superiority and domination.
Those who believe that religion can be, and is, part of the climate change solution.
a) religion is a non-linear, relational, way of knowing that decentres human exceptionalism, challenges power and presents a more holistic relations to the natural world.
b) religious communities are examples of how to communicate with, and care for, one another.
One more thing…
“Just because climate change is irreducibly cultural does not, of course, mean that religious responses to it are intrinsically helpful.” (Jenkins et al, 2018: 86).
Katharine Hayhoe
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