Climate Change, Risk Denial and Collective Hope..."Or we are not Christians?"

A meditation after reading the Washington Post’s 2-part series about climate-related flooding on the Northern Gulf, particularly in coastal Mobile County (4/29/24). 

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For over a half century in the USA, we've known that--statistically--1 in 4 persons will get cancer. We're smart. We look around at our family of 4 and can do the 'maths.' Yet, we deny our own risk because we feel impotent or unable to grasp just how we'd cope when our world is turned upside down and inside out. Or, hey, maybe soon there'll be a cure. (BTW, technology is not our friend but rather that forked-tongued bad boy your mom told you to steer clear of, but that's another reflection.) 

Grasping climate change presents a similar predicament. We know the risk, we can do the math. We devote thoughts and prayers to a "cure." "Let this cup pass from my hands." But, don't ask me to give up my riches, comfort, convenience, security, complacency. I'm pampering myself now in case the tragedy comes tomorrow at 8am. The parable of the rich, young ruler does indeed jump to mind!

And tragedy is coming for all of us. The "new normal," it is named. 

Since we feel impotent in the face of the enormity of the challenge, never having lived through tragedy beyond our control, we cannot imagine it happening to us. Maybe the next hurricane will take out my neighbor's house rather than mine? Certainly, I'll take them a green bean casserole and express my sympathies. Maybe that rising water inching up my dock is an aberration that will bring the crabs nearer to catch but then soon recede. "We'll cross that bridge when we get to it."

(Psst...we're there.) 

With waning empathy in modernity due to diminished community, we "let the good times roll," denying both our impotence and our failure of imagination. God forbid we should sacrifice the good life for the common good. Not while we're rolling snake eyes with loaded dice. 

Maybe it’s true that pilgrims go to Lourdes seeking the Virgin Mary, not so much believing they'll be healed but seeking the strength to endure when no miracle comes? 

Even in an egregiously individualistic society where everyone in a rich country inhabits their own climate-controlled, security-enabled bubble, what if that is what resilience means? Shared strength. Perhaps "misery loves company" because that is where hope lives? 

If hope is collective, perhaps there's a reactive role for faith communities in climate destabilization. If so, it will be the greatest test of faith Christianity has ever faced. 

If you've lived and worked on the frontlines in poor countries that have faced unrelenting, sequential concurrent tragedies, you can imagine both the gory and the glory, the incapacity and the resilience. The former are humbling, the latter ennobling. Scarcity brings out the worst and best in us--sometimes at the same moment. Like when we are called to nurse an enemy with the resources intended for a loved one. The test of hospitality is when there simply is not enough to go around. Amidst abundance, hospitality may be lacking or not, but it is never tested. Abundance evaporates in the blazing direct light of unrelenting, sequentially concurrent existential crises. 

Collective hope is sharing. Both the sustenance and the suffering. A distinguishing hallmark of the Primate Order (monkeys, apes and humans)--unique among social mammals, is that it is hard-wired in our nature to share in times of abundance and scarcity. 

The eisegesis of Christian theologians seeking scriptural relevance for creation care waxes poetic on the transcendent significance of the incarnation, transfiguration and resurrection. Yet, all the practical theology one needs for creation care is in the Sermon on the Mount. Of course, that depends on how inclusive and expansive your Kingdom of God is. 

The climate catastrophe now unfolding, and irreversible, will rekindle community. Bubbles will be burst. We'll survive if we can truly live Micah 6:8 and Matthew 25:35-45. If we can't, we'll face the dilemma of the Medieval scholar who first encountered the Gospels in a Monastery library and mumbled: "Either these are not the Gospels or we are not Christians." 

Photo credit: Rob Bearden

Does a tree falling in the rainforest make a sound in the neocolonialist mind?

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds..."--the Prophet Bob Marley.

If a tree falls in the forest and there are no humans to hear it, does it make a sound?

In post-Soviet times, we harp--legitimately--about neoliberalism yet often fail to conflate it with neocolonialism. Neoliberalism is an elitist tool using the global legal system to steal and direct the flow of resources from the poor countries to the rich countries. It is aided and abetted by the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Climate change is the ultimate form of colonialization: plundering resources to feed the insatiable appetites of those whose addiction to comfort, choices, convenience and personal security overrides any sense of equity, obscures the suffering of millions in the Majority World and the frontlines rural people, and shows no respect for the Commons. If you are reading this right now, the odds are good you join company with me as one of those elites who are amusing themselves to death with the ease and flippancy of fossil-fuel fed keystrokes.

Decarbonization and decommodification of Nature are essential features of decolonization. From the Berlin Conference to Bandung, plunder has been the primary instrument of domination and supremacy. In recent decades, the International Criminal Court has made a paltry attempt to redress crimes against humanity. However, until we codify ecocide and the legal rights of Nature, there simply are no tools to stop the plunder. While the crime of genocide is in the Rome Statute, genocide will continue unabated until we stop the ecocidal looting. The current definition of genocide is not sufficiently expansive to protect indigenous people and the land upon which their survival depends. We can do that legally amongst the community of nation-states, or as Naomi Klein suggests, the laws of Nature will prevail over the laws of [capitalist] economics. She wrote:

"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature." In other words, the biosphere will collapse.

In the immediate, near-term, please remember that there is no true enforcement mechanism on the frontlines of the Developing World. A corrupt, bad-faith multinational corporation can toss a few $thousands to bribe government officials to look the other way, throw a few worthless beads, blankets and assorted trinkets at an impoverished community, and plunder the timber, rare-earth minerals, gold, diamonds, fossil fuels that modern technology requires to keep us deluded in our comfort and pomposity. It is truly the "Wild West" where "might makes right." And soon enough, we see the level of deforestation that changes microclimate, then global climate, but moreover deprives locals of their heritage and livelihood, and denies us the forest's gift of carbon sequestration. Since the Age of Exploration [circa14th-19th Centuries CE), we've lost perhaps one-half of the estimated 6000 pre-contact societies--each a unique manifestation of the human spirit and the accumulated wisdom across the millennia about how to be fully human and live in communitas.

That lovely dining-room furniture set made of rare mahogany or teak you enjoy comes from a round log [ancient tree]--since it was stolen and had no intrinsic value placed upon it by capitalists--cost only a few $thousand to extract, transport and fashion into consumer items worth an aggregate downstream rich-country value of $1million for every round log.

By the way, watching one of those towering, majestic creatures being felled is a horrendous, PTSD-inducing physical and emotional experience. As it creaks, moans, cracks and begins to topple--being attached in communion to nearby trees with vines and branches intertwined--it pulls down all vegetation with the forest creatures in residence, the entire canopy of plants and animals screeching, wailing, and screaming in a high-pitched cacophony of tongues such that it deafens the bystander. The massive roots, rootmass and buttresses are ripped from the forest floor community, leaving a gaping-pit wound that swallows even the tallest bystander. The final sensory experience the bystander feels is the knee-buckling, chest-rumbling earthquake caused by hundreds of tons crashing with a death-rattle rustling of leaves and somber thud onto the forest floor that echoes interminably across the forest. Then, eerie silence. Like that in the savanna after the lion roars. Nothing dares to breathe. Or, make a sound. Or move. In the chaos that ensues next, and provided no bystanders have been crushed in the football-pitch sized treefall zone, the wildlife poachers begin shooting the stunned and maimed animals--some rare and endangered--to cook as bushmeat stew to feed the timber workers. "Living off the land," they say in laughter. And then, it all begins again when the treefinder designates the next giant to be felled, ad infinitum, to appease our wellbeing and complacency in the style to which we've become accustomed.

"When a tree is felled, a star falls from the sky. If you are going to chop down a tree, you had better ask permission of the Keeper of the Trees and of the Keeper of the Stars"--as told to me by a Lacandón Maya shaman.

The arrogant loggers do not even ask permission of the forest spirits to enter when they come to defile the forest and destroy the communities of the forest keepers. The Forest will have the final word.

The poisonous mercury used in gold-mining, and natural toxins [arsenic, uranium, etc.] released from massive extraction of minerals will cause immediate health effects in local people, and long-term congenital defects for generations, in areas totally without medical care, clinics, medications. The emotional trauma of experiencing the loss of sacred lands and being separated from one's native human and nonhuman community of beings will become epigenetically encoded in the DNA of victims and inherited by children and grandchildren whose suffering will last their entire lives.

Those indigenes living by their wits and ancient wisdom on the fringes of survival can, at best, hope to endure the intentional consequences: desecrated sacred groves, polluted water sources, poisoned earth and creatures, degraded land destined to be stripped by erosion such that it can no longer support subsistence gardening. Most likely, they will be forced into migration to urban areas where their survival skills and preliterate intelligence confer no means by which to subsist, forced to live in squalor and hunger, or they will be forced into local indentured slavery to the extractive multi-national corporations, primarily mining and palm-oil plantations.

They are us, our ancestors, only 100 years ago. Have we grown too smart by half? Unable to remember lessons learned, deceived by our affluence into a failure of empathy, unwilling to sacrifice for the common good which is the legacy of our shared humanity? Unable to rekindle our shared community on a very fragile, sacred Planet Earth? Does a falling tree make a sound? Listen. The sound is likely there in your genetic memory. If you can't retrieve it, sear the description above into your compassion and hear it every time you look at an online photo of deforestation and resolve to empathize with, to be in solidarity with, frontlines people in this war on Nature, on our communal soul.

As we live into allyship, know this: "Another world is not only possible...She is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."--Arundhati Roy

When Fear and Anxiety are Rational, Hope and Joy are Catalysts

In times of rapid social change, our leaders often speak glibly of hope and joy as antidotes to fear and anxiety. When we have deep attachments, fear and anxiety are very real, rational, justified. But hope and joy as cerebral nouns have no agency over visceral fear and anxiety. Certainly, hope--as well as joy--can be galvanizing, but as Hannah Arendt said, it can also be paralyzing. 

Passive hope and joy are not antidotes. Hope and joy must be catalyzing. Hope and joy are, and elicit, a promise by acting on a promise. 

In Nowness (sentience) with all the senses (faculties) centered, the nouns hope and joy become verbs with agency, and then as verbs they move from the infinitive to the participle. They become adjectives that describe, that activate, our agency. Work, Working, Working woman. Hope, Hoping, Hoping man. The working woman tills and keeps the soil. The hoping man plants a seedling.

When one plants a seedling, hope-the-noun becomes hope-the-verb and then hope-the-catalyst of one's agency. When you let joy-the-noun catch you, joy-the-verb becomes a catalyst for reciprocating joy. 

Hope and joy, then, are like infectious agents (nouns) that hijack the molecular machinery of our soul and churn out (verbs) prodigious quantities of clones of themselves amplifying hope and joy in ourselves that is transmitted to others. Hope and Joy become catalysts for promise.

The promise of Hope and Joy is revealed when a seedling pops up through the early Spring snow cover. Working woman and hoping man made a joyous, transformative promise and the seedling received and fulfilled it. And that is how we get out of this environmental mess. Or, as Inez Aponte more eloquently and poignantly explains: "The wrong question is: How do we reduce carbon emissions? The right question is: How do we meet our genuine needs versus our manufactured wants while regenerating the ability of the Earth to sustain life?" 

Photo attribution: An embed from Getty Images by Jana Engel