Christianity in a Time of Climate Change

To Give a Future with Hope

Kristen Poole

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781725257153
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

What does climate change have to do with religion and spirituality? Even though a changing environment will have a dire impact on human populations--affecting everything from food supply to health to housing--the vast majority of Americans do not consider climate change a moral or a religious issue. Yet the damage of climate change, a phenomenon to which we all contribute through our collective carbon emissions, presents an unprecedented ethical problem, one that touches a foundational moral principle of Christianity: Jesus's dictate to love the neighbor. This care for the neighbor stretches across time as well as space. We are called to care for the neighbors of the future as well as those of the present. How can we connect the ethical considerations of climate change--the knowledge that our actions directly or indirectly cause harm to others--to our individual and collective spiritual practice? Christianity in a Time of Climate Change offers a series of reflective essays that consider the Christian ethics of climate change and suggest ways to fold the neighbors of the future into our spiritual lives as an impetus to meaningful personal, social, and ultimately environmental transformations.

1

Changing

An Environment in Peril and a Christian Response

You do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” . . . Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.

—James 4:14–17

An environmental problem

How does the lay person, the non-scientist, imagine and respond to global climate change? The factors that are creating the problem can be described in some very big words—hydrochlorofluorocarbons, Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, Holocene climatic optimum—but those don’t really help me out. Traditionally, the image used to describe the physics of climate change has been that of a greenhouse: carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collect in the earth’s atmosphere and act like the glass roof of a greenhouse, so that the sun’s warmth can come into the greenhouse but cannot leave in the same way, thereby trapping heat.37 As an English professor who spends her time working with metaphor, I think the word choice of “greenhouse” is a bit dumb. Maybe the image of a greenhouse does a decent job of presenting a process, but it does a lousy job of presenting a problem. My connotations of “house” are positive; we can think of the coziness of “dwelling,” of “hearth,” of “home.” And green—don’t we all want to be green these days? “Green” has entered the advertising mainstream as a vague ecological positive, a word that signals good (consumer) choices. “Green house” doesn’t sound that bad to me, in fact it sounds both appealingly domestic and environmentally responsible. When I think of actual greenhouses, I think of luscious, wondrous places in which deeply fragrant and exotic plants like orange trees and orchids luxuriate.38 Or I think of practical places where healthy food is grown, or where beautiful garden plants are cultivated and nurtured. I wouldn’t mind being in a greenhouse right now.

Many wise people have recently tuned in to the fact that how we talk about climate change is part of the problem of climate change. Word choice matters, and fuzzy knowledge of some of the basic working terms impedes comprehension of the climate issue. People confuse weather and climate, and carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, and often vaguely remember from school that CO2 is involved with trees. They conflate the climate crisis and the “hole” in the ozone layer (phenomena that are in fact more the inverse of each other, the former caused by the atmospheric build-up of gasses, the latter resulting from the atmospheric depletion of a gas).39 If the person on the street cannot explain the problem of climate change, they are unlikely to respond to it. Recently I attended a workshop on climate communications led by the National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation (NNOCCI). There was a lot of helpful information on how to explain the problem, such as distinguishing between regular CO2 emissions—everyone is doing it! humans and animals emit CO2 when we breathe—and rampant CO2 emissions, the overload we are pumping into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. CO2, on its own, is an integral part of the wondrous, intricate design of the ecosystem we inhabit. But we are upsetting this system through our CO2 excesses.

As part of our communication training exercises, we learned that the greenhouse model wasn’t working well to convey the problem. (Evidently I am not the only one who feels warmly about greenhouses.) We were taught that a better way to express the problem is to think of the atmospheric build-up of CO2 as forming a heat-trapping blanket around the earth.40 The planet is always blanketed by our atmosphere, of course, otherwise we would be like Mars, where temperatures can range from a comfortable 68°F in the daytime to -119°F at night.41 The problem occurs when excess CO2 makes earth’s blanket thicker, turning it from a gauzy shawl to a heavy piece of felt through which heat can’t escape. This model can be easily demonstrated using people: wrap someone in a thin piece of fabric on a sunny day and they are fine, but wrap them in a thick blanket for a few minutes and their body temperature quickly rises.

The static metaphors of the greenhouse and the heat-trapping blanket might help me to better understand environmental physics, but these images still don’t quite explain why planetary warming is a problem and what we are supposed to do about it. So I have developed my own highly unscientific model that I think does a better job of imagining the problem, if not accurately depicting the process, of climate change. Picture a bathtub: there is a faucet where the water comes into the tub, and a drain where the water can leave the tub. Let’s pretend that you are not actually going to take a bath, but for some reason you leave the water running. As long as there is an equal amount of water simultaneously pouring into and draining out of the tub, you are fine. But let’s say that you increase the amount of water flowing out of the tap. Now there is more water going into the tub than can leave at the same rate. At first, you do not have real problem—the excess water simply accumulates in the tub. But let’s say the water is left running for hours. Now the tub is really filling up with water. And let’s say that the water is not just left running, but that you actually keep turning the faucet so that the water is gushing out more and more. Before too long, the tub is full. There is still water draining out of the bottom, of course, but not fast enough to manage the inflow. The water starts to dribble over the side of the tub. Then it starts to pour over the edge, and onto the bathroom floor. You run around and grab towels to try to mop up the excess. But soon you have used up all of your towels, and it’s not solving the problem. The water continues to flow for days, months, years. It starts to run down the staircase. It gets into your living room, and destroys old family photo albums, and books, and your children’s artwork. It gets into your kitchen and ruins your food. It gets into the plaster and the drywall and the rafters . . .

As a scientific analogy, my bathtub probably doesn’t, well, hold water. But as a way to picture the problem on a pragmatic level, I think it does a good job.42 The idea of standing in a greenhouse, or of being wrapped in a blanket, doesn’t really convey the dangerous environmental consequences of climate change. From what I can make out from my lay person’s reading, we are at the historic moment when the water is starting to trickle over the edge of the tub—or perhaps it is already seeping into the walls. I think my analogy is obvious, but just to spell it out: The water flowing out of the faucet represents CO2 emissions. Again, CO2 is a normal and necessary part of our ecosystem; we need CO2 flowing into the atmosphere as part of a healthy, balanced world. But starting with the Industrial Revolution, we have been pouring more CO2 into the air than the system can handle. For a long time this wasn’t much of a problem, as the planet’s carbon “sinks” (most notably the ocean) took in the excess and the absolute quantity of emissions remained relatively small.43 But as we have continued to increase our emissions in the last half century, a larger portion of the excess carbon increasingly cannot be handled through the earth’s normal environmental processes. And so it builds up, causing the changes in climate that threaten our homes, our food supply, our health, our cultural heritage, and our children’s future. The bathtub analogy not only captures a sense of the problem and the consequences of pouring carbon emissions into the atmosphere, but also indicates that action is required on our part. Picturing myself standing in the rich sensory space of a greenhouse, marveling at the vegetation around me, or picturing myself standing, weirdly, in a big blanket on a summer’s day, I can’t imagine what I am supposed to do. But as a homeowner, I can sense the urgent need to take action when my tub is about to overflow.

Of course, the obvious thing to do when your bathtub is about to overflow is to turn off the water. And this is where things get difficult. Because while you can imagine the natural environment as the house you live in...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Changing
• 2. Embarrassment
• 3. Across Time
• 4. Individuality
• 5. Hoping Against Hope
• Epilogue
• Bibliography