Resilience, COVID-19, and Our Climate Emergency

This is not quite the blog post I planned to write.  

The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) as a global pandemic has forced abrupted changes in the way we live and is making us reevaluate the way we have been living up until now.

I’m going to be connecting culture and ecology, not only thinking about humans as part of an ecological system – a web of interconnections and interdependencies – but also using natural ecology as a model for understanding our culture (our total way of life and thought) itself.  This is not only important for dealing with COVID-19 now but also the challenges posed by climate change and other ecological challenges we face in a dangerous 21^st century.  The way we have been living is neither sustainable nor up to the task of meeting our current and coming challenges.

Sustainability has become a fashionable buzzword across many sectors of our society, but what does it mean for a system to be sustainable?

Henry A. Regier, former director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for environmental studies writes about the idea of “ecological integrity: “A living system exhibits integrity if, when subjected to disturbance, it sustains an organizing, self-correcting capability to recover toward an end-state that is normal and ‘good’ for that system.”  Ethnomusicologist Burt Feintuch takes this idea and applies it to the realm of culture, formulating an idea of “cultural integrity”,

a community’s ability to articulate and maintain what it values about living a good life in the company of others who share one’s place in the world.  The term implies wholeness, interconnectedness, and the soundness of those connections.  And, fundamentally, it involves what can only be subjective – the “goodness” or adherence to moral and ethical standards in community life.  Call that last point an ethic of community life.

Is there any more denying that the status quo is built on a poor ethic of community life?  In the midst of a pandemic unprecedented in our lifetimes, millions of Americans still lack health insurance, and even those with insurance may face financial disaster for seeking medical help due to high deductibles and limited coverage. And even now, when testing for coronavirus is most important for public health, the rich seem to have no problem getting tests otherwise rationed out to only the sickest individuals.  Furthermore, 74% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck, and our social safety net is constantly under attack in the political arena. How can we as individuals or as a society possibly afford respond to unforeseen disturbances?  

For a system to be sustainable, it requires that system to exhibit resilience. 

Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon writes:

Resilience refers to a system’s capacity to recover and maintain its integrity, identity, and continuity when subjected to disturbance and change…Resilient systems share certain characteristics.  Identifying what makes a…culture vulnerable, what makes it resilient, and ameliorating the former while strengthening the latter becomes, therefore, a practical strategy for enhancing a…culture’s sustainability.  Resilience does not simply mean “learning to live with it,” as people new to the term mistakenly think.  Nor does it mean hunkering down in a defensive stance.  Rather, resilience implies a way to manage disturbance and change and guide the outcome toward a desirable end…

Resilience strategies are meant to exhibit resilience themselves; that is, managing for resilience means living with a degree of uncertainty (although trying to minimize it).  It means to experiment, sometimes to fail, and to adapt management techniques so as to learn from successes and failures.  In the current phraseology, resilience thinking requires adaptive management.  Adaptive management anticipates, and reacts to, changing circumstances, changes in values, and changes in knowledge.  Resilience is meant to be pragmatic and realistic .

How do we become more resilient as local, national, and global societies?  What strategies of adaptive management will we adopt, not only in the face of our current public health emergency but also in the face of the long-term ecological emergencies into which we are currently hurtling?  The challenges in an uncertain and dangerous 21^st century are vast.

David W. Orr suggests that resilience will mean challenging what he refers to as our “pre-analytic assumptions”.  Among these are the possibility of unlimited economic growth, the preeminence of the individual, and the idea that we can solve nearly any problem with technological ingenuity.

Instead, we need a fundamental transformation of society.  Speaking during the Vietnam War, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that,

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

As Christians we must recognize that, when individualism, “profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people,” we have abandoned the gospel of Christ, and that as a society (religious or not), such priorities are not sustainable.

COVID-19 has laid bare our interconnectedness in new ways and caused us to reevaluate just how well equipped our social, economic, and political systems respond to large-scale disturbance, and yet what we are currently experiencing pales in comparison to what climate change and other ecological degradation promise.

Global warming is changing the earth’s weather patterns in complex ways, leading to more and more extreme weather events such as hurricanes, large scale forest fires, flooding, and droughts and ecosystems and plant communities that used to mitigate the effects of many of these disasters by control flooding and preventing erosion have been cleared out for agriculture, housing, shipping, and other development.  Furthermore, a hotter world has led to an increase in heat-related deaths, especially among the elderly and people with underlying health conditions like myself.

As glaciers and ice sheets melt, sea level rise is making coastal regions progressively less habitable, requiring whole communities to pick up and move.  Some years ago, the low-lying island nation of Kiribati was even considering evacuating its entire population to other countries as the waters continue to rise.

Melting permafrost and sea ice are making the Arctic unrecognizable to earlier generations and threaten the lifeways of indigenous peoples as well as the animals they have depended on for thousands of years.

Pesticide-induced die-offs of pollinators like bees threaten the crops that feed us all.

Overfishing and pollution from oils spills, agricultural runoff, and other sources have caused the collapse of fisheries around the world, including in the Gulf of Mexico, which now has a dead zone that covers up to 6,000-7,000 square miles.

In the North Pacific Ocean, floating garbage patches cover an area of one million square miles,  approximately twice the size of Texas.

     According to the World health Organization, over four million people die every year from outdoor air pollution.

In India, where I lived for some time, the Ganges River provides drinking water for millions, yet it’s so polluted that fecal coliform levels are through the roof, even far upstream from its largest cities.

And, while we don’t yet know the source of COVID-19, many recent epidemics have been directly linked to environmental degradation.  

We can’t keep living like this.  

Our way of life is unsustainable, and we are paying a price that will only increase as time goes on.  And yet, we are not, however, all paying that price equally.  Instead, it is falling most heavily on our country’s and the world’s poor and marginalized.  Those with enough money can insulate themselves for a time, shipping our garbage to poor countries and ignoring what is not in our own immediate backyards, but most of the world’s population is not so lucky.

In Matthew 22:36-40, a religious scholar asks Jesus, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  Jesus responds, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

And in Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus tells His disciples,

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. ³⁴ Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, ³⁶ I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ ³⁷ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? ³⁸ And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? ³⁹ And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ ⁴⁰ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it to me.’

⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ ⁴⁴ Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ ⁴⁵ Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ ⁴⁶ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

If Jesus says, “Whatever you do to the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you do to me,” what does that say about our environmental impact, or for that matter our response to COVID-19?  Because, as individuals and as a species, we are harming one another, especially those who are the most powerless and vulnerable.

The Bible expresses time and time again that we are responsible for one another.  Will we structure our society and economy in ways that are resilient, sustainable, and care for “the least of these”, or will we continue to put profits over human wellbeing?  Both our present and our future depend on us choosing the former and finally abandoning the latter.

Genesis and the World as God's Temple

This is the second in a series of weekly Lenten pieces on environmentalism.  

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In this post, I want to consider the idea of Creation itself and our place within the created order, particularly what the beginning chapters of Genesis can tell us about our role in today’s ecological landscape.

One of the problems we come across in reading historical texts is that we often exist in a different cultural context and view things through different conceptual frameworks that the authors and original audiences of those texts.  Nowhere does the average American Christian run up against this difficulty on a more regular basis than when encountering the Bible, yet I think we frequently underestimate what can and does get lost in translation when we in the post-Enlightenment West try to make sense of a collection of texts from the ancient Near East.

Whatever we may think as post-Enlightenment Westerners, we need to dig into the ancient cultural context in which a text like Genesis was written if we want to know just what information is trying to be communicated and how.  While some of us have a tendency to see the beginning of Genesis as being a very literal physical and temporal description of creative processes, this may say more about our cultural and interpretive frameworks than those of the author(s) and what they meant to communicate.

Instead, John H. Walton argues in The Lost World of Genesis One that the creation story of that chapter should be interpreted in its original context as being primarily about functional cosmology – that is, that for its ancient Hebrew author(s) and audience, the seven days of creation are about the establishment of the functions of various components of the cosmos, such that their very existence is bound up not in their materiality but in the functions they fulfil. 

Peter Enns makes a similar point in his book, Inspiration and Incarnation, arguing that our obsession with human origins vis-à-vis Darwinian evolution causes us to mistake the kind of literature we are reading and its purpose for both author(s) and audience.

Both support their theses by making use of a significant number of other extraordinarily similar texts from surrounding cultures.  For neither does this mean that the biblical accounts are based on these other texts, but rather that they are similar because they come from similar cultural contexts that used similar language and imagery to say things about their gods, and that these texts can tell us about how Genesis fits into broader cultural and cosmological understandings.

 As such, I’m going to set aside the issue of whether or not Genesis is an account of the physical details of human origins altogether as having comparatively little relevance to the actual topic at hand, which is our place in the created order with respect to today’s ecological needs.  Rather, those concerns are most powerfully addressed by the functional cosmology that provides the original context and message for Chapters 1-3.

For Walton the seven days of creation in Genesis 1 and the following accounts in Genesis 2-3 ultimately represent the process of temple inauguration in ancient Near Eastern cosmology as echoed in a number of other ancient texts, with the completed cosmos as a temple – the dwelling place of God – and humanity installed as its priests and stewards.  

Like the later Tabernacle and Jerusalem Temple, which reflect its imagery, the Garden of Eden’s serves as a microcosm of the cosmic temple and as the center of sacred space into which Adam is placed in a priestly role.  English translations of the Bible tend to understand Genesis 2 as involving Adam being put into the Garden of Eden to work the ground and be its caretaker, but Walton believes that there’s more to it than this. In The Lost World of Adam and Eve, he argues that the words in Genesis 2:15, ^cbd and šmr, variously translated as “work” and “take care of” in the NIV and “till” and “keep” in the NRSV, refer not to agricultural work here but to priestly worship that maintains the proper relationships of cosmic order.

Walton continues, writing that,

Adam’s role must be understood in light of the role of priests in the ancient world.  When we read the Bible, we often think of priests as ritual experts and as those instructing the people in the ways of the Lord and the law.  That is true, but those tasks fit into a larger picture.  The main task of the priest was the preservation of sacred space.  They preserved sacred space by

-       instructing people regarding what sacred space requires of them (purity standards for each zone of sacred space, behavior appropriate to scared space) so that its sanctity can be maintained

-       offering sacrifices in the appropriate ways at the appropriate times and with appropriate gifts so that its sanctity may be preserved

-       guarding sacred space and sacred objects found therein so that their sanctity is preserved

-       keeping out anything that would compromise or corrupt the sanctity of sacred space

-       serving as mediators who make the benefits of sacred space available to the people (thereby extending sacred space) and who assure that the gifts of the people get to God

This final point of humanity as mediator is key to a historical Christian understanding of our place in the created order that seems to much more developed in the Eastern Church than here in the West, certainly among Protestants.  For Eastern Orthodox theologians, the priestly role of humanity is not only a key theological point but is inherent in our very being, as humanity’s dual nature as both a physical creature and a spiritual being in the image of God unites Heaven and Earth as a microcosm of the created order and a mediator through which God unites Himself with His earthly creation.

For example, fourth-century theologian Gregory of Nyssa writes,

Now, by a provision of the supreme Mind there is an intermixture of the intellectual with the sensible world, in order that nothing in creation may be thrown aside as worthless, as says the Apostle, or be left without its portion of the Divine fellowship. On this account it is that the commixture of the intellectual and sensible in man is effected by the Divine Being...God, taking dust of the ground, formed the man, and by an inspiration from Himself He planted life in the work of His hand, that thus the earthy might be raised up to the Divine, and so one certain grace of equal value might pervade the whole creation, the lower nature being mingled with the supramundane.

Likewise, Theodore of Mopsuestia suggests that humanity’s interaction with and use of the rest of Creation should be a blessing to it:

Wanting to make one cosmos of the universe and to epitomize in one being the whole creation, which is composed of such diverse natures…God constituted humankind as the link of all things.  This is why [God] has brought everything back for their use, in order that the entire creation might be united in them and they might be for it a manifest pledge of friendship.

What then of God’s command to Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”?  While it has often been used to prioritize the interests of humans over those of the rest of Creation, the priestly role of humanity in Genesis speaks out against the idea that this is a license for unbridled exploitation.  Walton writes,

Adam was given access to…sacred space as a priest in order to be involved in preserving its sanctity and mediating its benefits.  Sacred space was also the center of order, because order emanates from God.  The idea that people would “subdue” and “rule” is based on the idea that they would have a continuing role as God’s vice-regents (in his image) to preserve order and to extend it under God.

One could argue that exploitation of Creation for their own perceived gain rather than for God’s purposes is a core part of Adam and Eve’s sin.  Seen through the lens of Genesis and later theologians like Gregory and Theodore, their sin is not merely spiritual, as it is often de facto treated, but deeply bound up in the physical world.  (We will see more of this is the following weeks as we examine how physical creation plays into New Testament narratives of salvation, transfiguration, resurrection, eschatology, and the Kingdom of God.)

As Adam and Eve turned from their priestly roles, not only was fellowship with God broken, but so was our relationship with other creatures, with the whole created order itself.  The cosmic order of Eden, as well as the reflections of theologians like Gregory and Theodore, suggest a harmony with nature far from our relationship to it in the modern world.  It seems that we as a species are recapitulating Adam and Eve’s sin far more closely than we even realize.

If Creation is God’s temple and if, as Psalm 24:1 states, "The Earth is the Lord's and everything in it," what does that mean for how we treat the Earth and the other creatures in it?

By trashing the environment and driving countless species to extinction, are we desecrating His temple in which we are meant to serve, mocking God in His own house?  Aren’t we supposed to be the very guardians and caretakers of that house?

We would be heartbroken, maybe deeply angry, if we found the church we attend had been brutally ransacked and vandalized.  Why do we rarely seem to feel anything remotely like that about environmental destruction and ecological tragedy?

Passionate care for the Earth and its creatures is not at its root a replacement for God, as some strangely see it: it is rightly a form of His worship. 

Next week we will consider environmentalism as it relates to Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as yourself” and the human costs of ecological degradation and disaster.  

Climate Change and “Christians against the World”

This is the first in a series of weekly Lenten pieces on environmentalism aimed at an Evangelical audience.  If you know me personally or have read other posts on this blog, you probably know that my relationship with the Evangelicalism I grew up with has been rocky, but Evangelicals are still my spiritual family whom I love in spite of everything.  These posts represent an attempt to communicate ecological science and theology to my brothers and sisters in the language of Evangelicalism.

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Climate Change and “Christians against the World”

The following passages are likely familiar to any Evangelical and are often a closely-held part of our identity, symbols of faithfulness to Christ, regardless of what others say:

Matthew 5:11-12

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

1 Corinthians 1:18-27

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.  For it is written,

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
    and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?  For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.  For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise…

These passages and others are often used to justify what Robin Globus Veldman refers to as the “Embattlement Mentality”, a sense that Christians and the Christian faith in America are under constant attack, leading to the suspicion of science and academia as part of a secular liberal elite determined to undermine Christian faith.  “But wait,” you may be thinking, “biblical Christianity is under attack in Western society!”  Let’s set the question of how true that sentiment is aside right now.  The extent to which our culture has or hasn’t turned against Christianity is beside the point of this series of posts.  What I am arguing is that environmental concerns are not foreign to Christianity but are a fundamental part of our relationship with God and the rest of His creation.  Before we can talk about our spiritual duty to be good stewards of Creation, we need an honest assessment of the state of Creation, and to do that, we need to leave culture war-conditioned, knee-jerk skepticism of science at the door.

There is an overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that the earth is warming rapidly because of our actions and that if we don’t do something now, we will face – and we are already beginning to see – catastrophic consequences.  For a list of nearly 200 international scientific associations, agencies, and institutions that hold this position, see here.  

This overwhelming consensus says that we are precipitating an unprecedented mass extinction event, with scientists estimating that around one million of the planet’s eight million species will soon face extinction from manmade causes, primarily the rapidly warming climate caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in various forms.  While we have known about the dangers of greenhouse gasses for decades, we have almost completely ignored the problem in practical term.  Around 50% of the carbon dioxide (one of the most common greenhouse gasses) that has been released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been done so since 1992.

Though we may continue to exist as a species created in the image of God, we will not escape the consequences of our destructive practices.  Climate change is not only warming the atmosphere and the ocean, killing marine life and rapidly melting ice and permafrost, but it is already altering weather patterns, magnifying the severity of heatwaves, drought, storms, and flooding, making coastal areas increasingly uninhabitable and contributing to rising global food insecurity.  Furthermore, these consequences fall most heavily on the poor and marginalized, “the least of these” with whom Christ identifies.

These are not partisan talking points, these are conclusions based on decades of rigorous, peer-reviewed research.  I’m not trying to make you liberal or vote for Bernie Sanders.  What I am doing is trying to give you a sober and honest assessment of our situation so that you can care for the earth in a way that honors and glorifies God and loves our neighbors as ourselves.

Think of all the things we trust scientists for.  The device you’re reading this on is a masterpiece of science and engineering.  So are the cars we drive and the airplanes we fly in.  We put men on the moon.  If it wasn’t for the state of medical science when I born, I wouldn’t be here to write this today.  Every time we drive to work or go to the doctor or check our email or look at distant galaxies, we lean on generations of scientific investigation.  To quote Isaac Newton and Bernard of Chartres, we “stand on the shoulders of giants.”

We certainly have no trouble believing scientists when they offer evidence for things that we already believe.  Those scientists are suddenly impeccably trustworthy.  So why do so many of us doubt something so universally accepted by the scientific community as climate change?

Some will say, “We don’t have the ability to change something as fundamental that God has made as the climate.”  Says who?  Does the Bible?  Not in any clear way.

Rather, we have the need for humility.

The late fourth- and early fifth-century Church Father, Augustine of Hippo wrote,

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

“But God is in control.  If He is allowing this to happen, who are we to try to stand in the way of His will?”

Think about that logic, though.  Should we stop trying to cure diseases?  Stop trying to prevent or ameliorate the impact of natural disasters?  If we could safely prevent earthquakes and hurricanes or cure cancer, wouldn’t we do that?  

Of course we would.  

Then why not do something about climate change?

Ultimately, our greatest reasons for doubt likely have little to do with theology or the examination of scientific evidence.  

A large part of Evangelical climate change denial is, at its root, simple political partisanship.  The close association of conservative Evangelicalism with the Republican Party for the last four decades have led to a number of politically conservative policy positions taking on a status akin to religious orthodoxy with the increasing polarized nature of American politics making the situation ever worse.  A pro-business, anti-environmental regulation stance is one of those positions, and its propagation is anything but passive.

In 2013 Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle found that, beyond direct corporate lobbying, over 90 think tanks with a combined budget of nearly a billion dollars annually operate a well-orchestrated effort to create doubt about climate change and influence environmental policy.  Among the think tanks are a who’s who of conservative organizations, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and Americans for Prosperity.  

While the conservative credentials of these organizations may suggest their trustworthiness to many Evangelicals, these groups and their lobbying campaigns regularly obscure widely understood scientific facts in order to put corporate and individual profits over the good of God’s creation and, by extension, His people.  We have to remember that our duty is to God, not political allies. 

Again, this is not about partisan politics – I’m not here for that right now – it’s about God’s creation and God’s priorities.

Whatever one thinks about the overall appropriateness of Evangelical Christianity’s alliance with the Republican Party, I hope that the following weeks’ posts will convince you that the actively anti-environmentalist agenda that has come with it is not only unbiblical but profoundly anti-biblical.

Next week, we’ll launch into ecological theology, exploring Genesis and the role of stewardship for which we are created.