Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds

David L. Haberman

• Editorial: Indiana University Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780253056016
• Categoría: Teologia e religione
• Categoría: Etica e religione

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change?

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld, edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges.

People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change.

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

PART I

RECOMBINANT RESPONSES

ONE

CLIMATE CHANGE NEVER TRAVELS ALONE

Oceanian Stories

CECILIE RUBOW, UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN

OVER THE PAST DECADE, RESEARCHERS in climate-change science have repeatedly invited the social sciences to take part in the investigation of how climate change affects people around the world. In scientific communities it is accepted that climate change is cocreated by human activities and physical processes in the natural environment and that widely dispersed social action is essential to mitigate and adapt to its effects. At the same time, most studies and discussions about communities’ responses to climate change seem to revolve around categories like increased sea level rise, perceptions, institutions, or religious beliefs as if they were separate things. The natural sciences are expected to provide the hard facts and the social sciences an understanding of the soft stuff of culture and society, of which religious beliefs are usually considered the most amorphous and unpredictable, by any standards. Much work has been done by social science scholars as a result of the material turn to conceptualize and analyze how the social and the material are entangled (Latour 1993, Descola 2006, Hastrup 2014), which means that hard facts and softer knowledge enter the investigation with quasi objects, quasi subjects, hybridity, and other awkward mixes of collectivities across the sociomaterial.

In this chapter, the investigation is ethnographic, and while staying close to the ethnography, I will focus on entanglements of religious beliefs, islands, cyclones, and climate change. The obvious conclusion about climate-change adaptation and alleviation is that expecting a simple social solution is no less naive than relying on an immediate technological solution. As others have pointed out, neither top-down, policy-led implementation of adaptation nor glossing over the diversity of communities and priorities will enhance the chances for the implementation or success of adaptive strategies (Walshe et al. 2018). But to incorporate the diversity of social and cultural frameworks, among them religious perspectives, into adaptation strategies is a way of increasing complexity and multiplying the number of problems to be solved. Accordingly, this chapter will ask whether the eventual greening of religious beliefs and practices could facilitate changes in environmental attitudes and behavior. It also explores how some aspects of religion can be identified as obstacles to addressing climate change while others are considered to be means of promoting greater awareness and action for dealing with it. On a more positive note, the stories shared here are populated with voices suggesting that responses to climate change have just started. New versions of these responses with new repertoires (that is, the objects and subjects taking part in the enactments) seem to emerge in trading zones, which are, according to Galison (1997), intermediate grounds where people can meet and interact, even when broader ideas and procedures clash. Thus, emerging responses to climate change in trading zones tend to be of a somewhat awkward composition, as if they were thrown together in unfortunate circumstances. They are, nevertheless, new approximated approaches to a seemingly intractable problem.

CYCLONES AND PRAYERS

I park my motorcycle outside Rongo’s rectory. Rongo is planning to retire within the next few years after a long career as minister in the Cook Islands Christian Church. If it were up to Rongo, he would return to his home island. “It’s paradise,” he says. “You can live from fish, mango, and coconuts.” As every other minister in this church, however, he is regularly—normally every fourth year—transferred to a new congregation in the Cook Islands or in New Zealand or Australia. Thus, he has lived on atolls in the far north with fewer than one thousand inhabitants and on the southern volcanic islands, among them Rarotonga, with around seventeen thousand inhabitants. I have met Rongo a few times before, and he has agreed to have a conversation about environmental problems and the possible role of the church in that context. Today he is preparing to paint the veranda, but he invites me to sit down amid covered furniture and other possessions, while family members of many ages occasionally pass by.

I have come to know the Cook Islands Christian Church as a church of what is often termed classical Christianity in Oceania—that is, biblical and conservative. At present, it counts around half the population among its membership, a number that is declining as a result of both secularization and the proliferation of many new churches. I have looked forward to this conversation, eager to know more about ministers’ and congregations’ reactions after five cyclones hit the islands in 2005. What I have gathered from conversations and local climate-change reports has led me to conclude that these exceptional cyclones were for many Cook Islanders the first sign that climate change is real.

To my surprise, on this particular day, Rongo starts out by saying that he is not doing any theology in relation to the environment—and that the Cook Islands Christian Church does not play any role concerning climate change. It is not a priority. Rongo quickly qualifies this statement by adding that eco-theology has not been developed locally: he knows of theologians elsewhere in the Pacific who have worked in that area, especially in Fiji, but nobody on these islands seems interested. He thinks that pastors will be inclined to say that the phenomena environmentalists attribute to climate change are actually the works of God. But he has the feeling that pressure might come from the congregations; as far as he remembers, he says, one congregation actually organized a prayer week with the environment as the main topic some time ago.

This is my third field trip to Rarotonga, the largest of the fifteen islands forming the Cook Islands archipelago. I am coming from overseas and have been doing fieldwork with an almost constant feeling of uneasiness, which I think I share, at least on some occasions—as I will show later on—with my interlocutors. As a northern European anthropologist interested in environmental issues and how theologies and broader metaphysical and ethical engagements take part in local understandings of climate change, I look for people who share my interests in some way or another. I am carrying with me the presupposition that climate change is a confluence of real, long-term, and not always readily discernible processes that are deeply entangled with social life. Therefore, climatic changes may look very different in different people’s lives. It is, I assume, thinking with Annemarie Mol’s (2002) concepts, “enacted” differently, and with different “repertoires”: scientific numbers and concepts, experiences from childhood, the Bible, awareness workshops, fact sheets, hopes and worries, and so forth.

During my fieldwork trips, this hypothesis, with all its flexibility, has been confirmed often enough to feed my ethnographic zeal. My strategy is to start conversations without mentioning climate change or religion in order to avoid pushing my interlocutors in those directions. Both topics can narrow the perspective too much when you are searching for an understanding of concrete, lived enactments. It is not surprising that the effect is a sense of getting lost again and again in too many lives and stories of lagoons, cyclones, childhoods, newspaper stories becoming truisms, truisms becoming riddles, proverbs, longings, and sorrows, spawning many new questions for the ethnographer trying to take note of everything.

Of course, sitting now on Rongo’s veranda, I wonder why he, after our first few conversations, agreed in the first place to talk with me about theology and the environment when he dismisses theology’s role in the environment as unimportant. As we start talking about the islands and his vocation as a minister, I feel lost again, but Rongo seems to be on track. He talks about cyclones—the one in 1967 that blew off their roof and where he, only a child, carried his blind mother to a safe place. And there was cyclone Sally in 1987, on the atoll Penrhyn, which lasted for three days, when he secured a boat right on the veranda, packed with dry clothes and other necessities, covered by a tarpaulin. “That’s what you do on the outer islands. It’s atolls; there are no hills to flee to,” he says. “There’s nothing you can do. You can’t decide what Mother Nature does.” Rongo was praying, everybody was praying, and they were heard, he says, because no lives were lost.

We talk about the five cyclones that hit Cook Islands in 2005. Rongo understands cyclones as “God’s punishment.” He claims that “they do a lot of good things. They clean up the sea, the shore, the island, and the people. It is a punishment for sinful acts—not that you know whose acts; only God knows.” Rongo does not want to scare people, he says. “The role of the pastor and the church is to help. To go down on the knees and pray.”

As I gather from this and other conversations with pastors, the notion of climate change is first and foremost a foreign discourse, supported by some people on the island, the environmentalists, who generally worry too much about the human impact on nature. Rongo and my pastoral interlocutors seem not to be at all convinced that climate is changing due to human impact. God, and with Him Mother Nature’s power, is far too strong, and the pastors are more confident about looking for nature’s order in the scriptures than in unstable weather patterns. “When I read the Bible,” another senior pastor explained me, “it says that in the age before Noah, people lived longer, sometimes more than eight hundred years. Why so? We don’t know, but it’s perhaps partly because of the diet, partly because they weren’t as exposed to the sun as we are.” Those were literally darker times in that age, he explains. Before the flood, in the age of innocence, scripture says that there were two compartments of water, one in the sky, released in the flood, and one compartment in the ground. From that perspective, “man’s history, the one we know of now, is very short.” The pastor goes on to explain that, according to this understanding, we now live in the age of grace (following a theological scheme known as dispensationalism), to be followed by the age of millennium. “Is this also what you teach in church?” I ask, quite intrigued by this literalist reading and unsure about its standing in the wider community. The pastor answers that it has to be kept simpler in church but that it is taught at the local theological college. I add that it is fascinating that people live with so many different conceptions of time and futurity and wonder how this may play out more concretely. “The future has already begun,” he answers, referring, I presume, according to his exegesis, to Christ’s Second Coming.

According to Rongo’s own observations along the shores he knows and the fields where he cultivates taro and greens, he notes remarkable changes. For instance, in the previous year, there were very few mangoes on his home island. Some people say that is because so many people have moved from the island (primarily to Rarotonga, New Zealand, and Australia), Rongo tells me. I have learned from other islanders that they ascribe changes in fruiting patterns to both natural cyclic changes and global warming. Other pastors note that the seasons and the weather patterns have changed; a senior pastor was already told so by his grandmother, he says. Before, the cyclones came with a seven-year interval, and it was possible to predict their arrival, because breadfruit was plentiful and the leaves at the tops of new banana palms were curling up before the storm. Now, too, I am told, the nights are colder, some days are very hot, and animals are moving from one habitat to another. But Rongo’s best guess is that the mango trees do not fruit because nobody comes and sits under the trees anymore. He talks to his plants, he says; he prays and sings for them. “If you’re not doing so, the caterpillars think it’s their garden.” Those mango trees are used to people.

I have come to understand the cyclones, the flying roof, the prayers, and mango trees in Rongo’s stories as a way of explaining, to the outsider, that the world he lives in is not exactly “an environment” but first and foremost God’s creation, permeated by His power and His story with the world. Rongo’s surroundings, his islands, and the sea where he catches fish for the family are neither explicable nor meaningfully understood as an ecosystem or as “nature” ruled by physical laws and regularities. It’s more important, I gather, that the islands are endowed with the spirituality of the people and their history with God.

As other researchers have remarked in relation to Oceania, on the face of it, this point of view does not fit with scientific enactments of climate change. Neither does the scientific version of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fit well when communicated with fact sheets and awareness programs educating islanders about the logic of global warming. This observation sometimes brings scholars of climate-change adaptation to the conclusion that biblical beliefs lead to what they call maladaptive practices (e.g., Weir, Dovey, and Orcherton 2017). Thus, religious perceptions, along with lack of resources and proper institutions, are seen as “barriers to adaptation” (Betzold 2015, 485). Keeping closer to the ethnographic mood in this chapter, the geographer Nunn (2017), who has worked in innumerable Pacific island communities, suggests turning the perspective 180 degrees around. He states, “My research suggests that one reason for the failure of external interventions for climate-change adaptation in Pacific Island communities is the wholly secular nature of their messages. Among spiritually engaged communities, these secular messages can be met with indifference or even hostility if they clash with the community’s spiritual agenda” (2017). Thus, after reminding the reader about the colonial history in the Pacific, Nunn’s plea is that “more is to be done”; church leaders are “an important potential target for agencies aiming to make a real difference in how Pacific Islanders cope with climate change.”

The next time I meet Rongo, he has a report he wants to show me. It was given to him at an environmental workshop on biodiversity that he attended the day before. He is often invited to say the opening and closing prayer in such meetings, and he finds the meetings interesting: some of the things the environmentalists do he finds quite good. It makes good sense, he says, to clean up the island and the beaches—and to protect the endangered species, for instance—...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World
• Part I. Recombinant Responses
• Part II. Local Knowledge
• Part III. Loss, Anxiety, and Doubt
• Part IV. Religious Transformations
• Conclusion: Religion and Climate Change: An Emerging Research Agenda
• Index