Paper #1: An Eco-Realistic New Future (the Y-Axis)

CONSULTATION PREMISE #1: The New Future will experience excruciating collapses, catastrophes, and/or extinctions for which our faith in current efforts at activism, sustainability, and/or technological innovation is unfounded. It is neither pessimism nor doomism to admit this.

By Lowell Bliss

“It is still not too late to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

I am an optimist by nature, but this rallying cry of so many of my colleagues has lost all meaning for me. The problem is how two of the words—worst and late—are so subjectively imprecise but they masquerade as syntactically definitive. The word worst is a superlative adjective, and so, of course!, it’s not too late to avoid the worst-est. In Mark Lynas’ 2008 book on climate change, Six Degrees, each chapter describes the horrors of the next degree of warming, and it’s not too late to stave off chapters 4-6. It’s probably not too late to stave off chapter 3, the sufferings of a three-degree warmer world. And yet, what do I do with that portion of my howling soul that is daily confronted with “the bad-enough impacts” of climate change, or the “functionally-intolerable impacts” of climate change? I’ve consoled enough victims of climate disasters that I refuse to stand in the middle of a burned-over Chilean village and say, “You know, it is still not too late to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” It would be understandable if they picked up stones to fling at my privileged head, but they would likely just ask, “What could be worst than this?!”

The greatest siphoning of meaning from the words “not too late” has been accomplished by exceptionalists, of which I have been raised as one. The problem with borrowing from the sport of baseball for [an American] outlook on life is that even if your home team is down a score of runs in the bottom of the ninth inning, with two outs and two strikes against your weakest batter, it is still “not too late” to rally and win the game, so long as you just avoid the third out. Time is not a factor, and you are labelled a poor coach if you point out anything else to your beleaguered team. Consider the Paris targets of preventing no more than a 2° or a 1.5°C warming. I once stood in the back of a room at COP25 in Madrid in 2019 and watched a group of young activists prepare protest signs for a campaign the next day. I leaned over to a colleague, the communications director of the world’s largest faith-based climate organization, and asked him, “Simon, when are you going to give up on the 1.5° target?” He didn’t miss a beat. “When the IPCC tells us it is no longer possible,” he told me. I admit to being impressed at his Churchillian tone. But that’s the problem with a scientific equation like d=rt where “distance” is the gap closed on achieving Net Zero, and our rate of progress (invariably measured by the ambition of the next COP) is multiplied by time’s seemingly-perennial “window of opportunity.” Rate and time can be calculated with numbers that always allows us to say, “it’s not too late. . . theoretically, on paper, according to those sources we’ve trusted for too long to give up on them now.” Of course with the 12-month period ending in February likely registering, on average, 1.5°C warmer than pre-industrial years, and with James Hansen reporting on new inevitabilities, “hospice care” seems like the most appropriate site for the one Paris target that means the most to the 1.4 billion citizens whose nations are represented in the Climate Vulnerable Forum. And yet still, the UNFCCC hastens to remind us that it will take a decade of above 1.5°C increased averages to declare the target officially breached, and they seem to have introduced new terms on us—overshoot and clawback—a framework of, if not keeping 1.5 alive, at least of resuscitating it at some later date. It’s like our family has been tooling down the highway on a breezy vacation and we miss our exit; but no worries, there’s another exit up ahead, Dad reassures the kids. We can turn around and go back. A more appropriate analogy, however, would be that Dad finally decides to apply the brakes, but then, on the side of the road, must invent the hitherto unknown (or unscalable) technology known as the reverse gear.

Congratulations to Dr. Michael Mann for winning his defamation lawsuit. No climatologist (or human being) deserves the abuse he’s undergone. There is some evidence that Mann comes by his combativeness naturally, but if he were a baseball coach in the bottom of the ninth inning he would be one who yells at his players and throws equipment bags across the dugout. In his 2021 book, The New Climate War, Mann claims that the climate data is now so convincing, that our enemy’s battlefield strategy has “shifted to a softer form of denialism while keeping the oil flowing and fossil fuels burning, engaging in a multipronged offensive based on deception, distraction, and delay” (5). We have witnessed all of this, including most recently at COP28 in Dubai. But Mann reserves his greatest rebuke for those he calls “doomists,” those who might dare to wonder or verbalize whether it is too late to avoid the worst(ish) impacts of climate change. To be fair to Mann, his complaint is against those who violate “an objective assessment of the scientific evidence [that is] adequate to motivate immediate and concerted action on climate. There is no need to overstate it” (179). But life is not played out in the measured prose of scientific journals, and certainly not when he coins and popularizes a term like “doomist” and then insists “doomism today arguably poses a greater threat to climate action than outright denial” (179). What might later get labelled as early legitimate works of eco-realism (such as Jonathan Franzen’s 2019 article in The New Yorker, or David Wallace-Well’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth), Mann castigates as “messengers of doom,” railing against what he fears will turn the readers of Franzen and Wallace-Wells into “inactivists.” While any writer is fair game for critique (and Franzen certainly from the standpoint of privilege), here’s one thing that I wish we co-combatants in the Climate Wars would understand: whereas Mann’s new de-mons (deceivers, distractors, and delayers) are just re-deployed deniers, the ones that he labels as “doomists” come from our own ranks. They are our wounded warriors. They were in the trenches alongside Mann. Do we turn and bayonet them just because they have become shell-shocked?

And many of these doomists are young, a generation hoping that they can avoid our scorn with more acceptable terms like “climate anxiety” or “eco-anxiety.” After sending out our Save-the-Date invitation letters, I got one phone call and a couple e-mails from young activists (whom I know and love dearly) saying, “I don’t know if my level of climate-anxiety will allow me to attend your July 26 consultation.” Too often we respond by trying to talk them out of their anxiety with our latest optimistic projections. (Former Rep. Bob Inglis of RepublicEN just released a webinar entitled “Why We’re Going to Win on Climate” where even a Trump election can’t prevent “reality, demographic, and policy waves” from kicking in no later than 2026.) If we can’t convert the eco-anxious, we at least hope they will suppress it sufficiently enough to remain active, and, certainly, please, don’t talk about it; you are only infecting others. It is our hope that an indirect consequence of our Consultation will be to move Christians to more compassionate approaches to eco-anxiety (perhaps like what Sheryl Paul describes in her book The Wisdom of Anxiety.)

When I hear my Christian colleagues allying themselves with Mann’s language of doomism, I can recognize a genuine and well-meaning decision: a commitment to discipline their messaging so as not to add a single degree of slope to the edge of despair. They are compassionate buttress-builders. Yet, I want to say to them: You’ve forgotten your Brueggemann. Walter Brueggemann’s 1970 classic The Prophetic Imagination argues that the Old Testament prophets were not primarily prognosticators nor preachers (as per our traditional understanding of them); they were poets. They gave voice to the people’s grief and gave imagistic language that helped conceive a new future. Brueggemann teaches that it is natural for human beings when confronted with a harsh reality to revert to denialism, just as Israel proclaimed, “There is NO way we are going into exile. We’re God’s chosen people. We have the Law. We have the temple.” There is plenty of current sociological evidence about climate denial to prove the claim which Brueggemann also makes, namely, that to repeatedly confront denialists with “the truth of REALITY!” more-often-than-not causes them to double down on their denial. Grief, however, can help dissipate denial. Tears can wash it from our eyes. After that, Brueggemann says, the pathway away from despair to hope is laid by the proactive and prophetic work of imagination. We need to help triumphalists grieve the death of the Old Future, and imagine good, positive, loving, and non-violent responses to the New Future.

Nowadays, I listen to Al Gore conclude his current 90-minute slide show with a scant five minutes given to the question “Will we change?” The first two questions are “Must we?” and “Can we?” and he’s got very convincing arguments with evidence for our moral imperative and our technological and economic capability to address the climate crisis. But the question of “will we change?” or “will we solve the crisis?” or “will we win?” invariably gets answered with his closing tag line: “The only thing we lack is the political will and I believe political will is a renewable resource!” The audiences, many of which have included me, rise to their feet in applause, but of late I find myself asking, “Have we—the Old Future climate activists, Michael Mann, myself—have we become the new climate denialists?” Are we the ones refusing to believe that eco-triumphalism is dead? Sure, we’ve had “God on our side”, but the eco-future we are heading into sure feels like exile into Babylon.

The Consultation known as “The Old Future is Gone”: Eco-Realism and Reimagined Faith in the New Future” is constructed around a grid with two axes and four quadrants.

The grid is premised on the death of old assumptions (or desperate longings) about our future, which we have called eco-triumphalism and religious-triumphalism. Data, or what we could call “reality,” seems to be naturally pushing us across the axis line into a New Future, one characterized by what we are calling eco-realism, a term that John Elwood helped coin in his 2022 thesis at Union Seminary. (As for the opposite end of the religious-triumphalism spectrum: John is busy synthesizing his Douglas John Hall and a handful of Japanese theologians in order to unveil a term next month when it is his turn to write the newsletter!) As a Consultation, this grid and its terminology is fair game for your critique and revision. And yet, the call for a consultation is so that we might sit together for a while in the quadrant of a New Future ecologically and religiously. We will sit in it and imagine. What are new possibilities that open up for us? What are new callings? What are new responsibilities? What does love require of us in this space?

For years I have been haunted by a quotation that economist Milton Friedmann applied so cynically to New Orleans in the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He said,

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend upon the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our [the Neo-Cons’] basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

We want to flip this quotation on them. This time we want ideas of love, community, and solidarity to be “lying around” because a group of at least forty consultants, through our spring newsletters and in a room at Catholic U in July 2024, did our small part in helping “develop alternatives” to fear, delusion, despair, and violence.

The remaining task of this first newsletter will simply be to explain the Y-axis of eco-realism. I’ll employ the framework of Jem Bendell and Deep Adaptation because that’s where the conversation ostensibly began, pre-pandemic, for John and me. (A fuller introduction to Bendell and DA is included in a footnote.)* Bendell describes the eco-triumphalist end of the Y-axis with three stances we take, which he considers to be three forms of denial to which we are prone:

1. We can do it! -- “We must try harder and re-double our efforts at GHG emission reductions. We need greater effort within the existing system. We can reform capitalism and still win the Paris Agreement targets in time.”
2. Grow our own! -- “We can turn from capitalism and return to community. We can grow our own food and grow our way sustainably out of this crisis.”
3. Eureka! -- “Geo-engineering and new technological innovation will save us, despite fears of unintended and localized consequences, despite the enormous task of scaling up promising technologies.”

On the eco-realistic end of the Y-axis, we recognize that climate-related disasters will not happen in isolation. They will have a cumulative effect and will result in what David Wallace-Wells calls “cascades,” the title of the first chapter in his book. Political, sociological, economic, and psychological systems (among others) will experience enough stress so as to lead, according to Bendell, to “inevitable short-term social collapse.” Bendell argues:

Collapse is inevitable
Catastrophe is probable
Extinction is possible

The probability of catastrophe and the possibility of extinction depends on human agency. Collapse, Bendell believes, is inevitable, but nonetheless the severity, scope, and speed of collapse is also dependant on human agency (i.e., the degree to which we foreground eco-realism and switch our attention to “getting ready”).

The trick to avoiding a visceral reaction to Bendell and to employing Deep Adaptation fruitfully is to realize that the Y-axis is a spectrum. The work of activism, sustainability, and technological innovation are noble pursuits and in fact are the means that God and human agency will use in the New Future to mitigate whatever collapse, catastrophe, and extinction is mitigatable. We are not asking you to abandon these pursuits nor to denigrate what successes they have attained. We are asking that you abandon the triumphalistic claims they continue to make.

Similarly, the eco-realistic end of the Y-axis is not absolute. The range of possible outcomes for our climate action is narrowing on a daily basis, but it is still a range. However we conceive of the Paris targets, the prevention of each 0.1° of warming is worth fighting for, especially since the attendant suffering on the planet appears to be unfolding exponentially. And so I’ll say it—but hopefully with some Consultation-derived fresh meaning: “It is not too late to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.” Most people, understandably, trip over any reference to the possibility of human extinction. (Even James Lovelock, the great scientist and futurist, before his death on his 103rd birthday in 2022, clawed back from his position that he articulated in The Revenge of Gaia (2006), namely, that only a small band of humans would be huddled together at some northern latitude.) When our minds refuse to entertain such projections, we can nonetheless allow for the possibility of an extinction of multiple island homelands, of the Amazon rainforest tipping over into savannah, of whole species lost in the Sixth Extinction.

When I saw George Marshall, an expert in climate messaging, at COP25 in Madrid in 2019, I asked him what he thought about Jem Bendell and Deep Adaptation. He searched his memory and said, “Oh, you mean the doom-and-gloom guys?” If “doomism” does signify for you, no one is asking you to slingshot from “We can do it!” to “Extinction is possible.” Nonetheless, those who self-select for our Consultation will undoubtably be conscious of having crossed a threshold into a willingness to “foreground” eco-realism. What do we mean by the term eco-realism? To quote from John’s thesis:

The stage on which the human drama is played out is in doubt in ways unimagined since the Black Death of the fourteenth century or the General Crisis of the seventeenth. I begin by positing a terrible, forbidden truth: For much of humanity and the interconnected web of planetary life, it is now, in fact, too late for life as remembered in the Holocene – that hospitable epoch that nurtured human civilization. This terrible truth I name “eco-realism.”

And to quote from the paper he presented at the annual meeting of the American Scientific Affiliation last summer: “It is now too late to avoid global ecosystem crisis, portending dislocation, suffering and death on an unprecedented scale. We call this eco-realism.” Grim, I know. Nonetheless, on a scale of 1-10, how highly would you affirm these two statements of John? What do you feel you need to learn more about? How would you revise what John has written to make it more aligned with your thoughts of New Future eco-realities?

For all the thinking we have in common, John and I are different, as will be your own perspective as an active and bona fide consultant. We’ve had many long conversations where I’ve tried to argue that “realism” is not a synonym for “pessimism” and that just because we American Christians, in particular, have conflated “hope” with “optimism” doesn’t mean that hope, one of three theological virtues according to Aquinas, can be so easily abandoned, and certainly not when we will be dependant on a re-imagined form of it in the New Future. Jacques Ellul argues that the opposite of realism is idealism. He writes:

Idealism is equally damnable when it is philosophic. Hope, which feeds on the real, obliges us to reject consideration of the Idea, or of any reality other than that which we can take note of by the means at our disposal (I might call them scientific), of any reality which would be more true than that lived on the level of everyday life. Idealism is a source of man’s continual disillusionment. It is his temptation to live something other than himself. (Hope in Time of Abandonment, 277).

Thank you for reading,
You are very dear to God,
Lowell

* Footnote on Jem Bendell and Deep Adaptation: Bendell is emeritus professor of Sustainability Leadership at the University of Cumbria (Carlisle, UK). In 2018, he published “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy” as an IFLAS Occasional Paper. For a more curated discussion of Deep Adaptation, including a Christian approach, we recommend “Deep Adaptation: A Primer” by Lowell Bliss and John Elwood (October 10, 2019).

NEXT STEPS

1. If you want to explore more of the argument and data of crossing the New Future axis into a foregrounding of eco-realism, please avail yourself to the links that we’ve sprinkled throughout this newsletter.

2. Or, explore this month’s “book report” An Inconvenient Apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen. (See below. We intended to promote one book each month as recommended reading related to the newsletter topic. Each book will be easily readable in one month.)

3. Within the next few days, you will receive a follow-up newsletter that includes two responses to my essay, one from John and the other from Dr. Janel Curry. A mechanism will be provided for you too to weigh in, as you wish.

4. Next month, John will write about the X-axis and the death (and or at least the deadliness) of religious triumphalism.

5. I will return to eco-realism in May with an essay examining how civilization will likely react to collapse as it has done historically, namely with tribalism, barbarism, pietistic millenarianism, xenophobia, antisemitism, and what the mosque shooter in Christchurch, NZ in 2019 actually called “eco-fascism.” We’ve seen this before. This time, let’s be prepared to help society deal with its triggers, and proactively choose love, community, and solidarity instead.

6. Please keep directing people to our website: www.edenvigil.org where they can access old newsletters and subscribe to new ones. Who among your contacts and colleagues have been waiting for just this conversation we are having?

7. Please begin thinking about in-person attendance on July 26. Room capacity limits us to 40, and registration will open in May.

8. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation for the Consultation through our fiscal agent, William Carey International University. Thank you. Donate here.