Paper #3: Eco-Realism and Re-imagined Ministry in a New Future (from the Y-Axis to the X-)

CONSULTATION PREMISE #3: The New Future demands greater attention to the inevitable suffering of climate change, and the spiritual foundations of courageous and compassionate responses to it; even if such focus arouses accusations of abandoning mitigation and adaptation.

By Lowell Bliss

“Nothing was ready for the war that everyone expected. . .”
-Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

I. Naomi Klein and the Respect that Preppers May Deserve

I have a friend in our old church in Kansas whose in-laws are doomsday preppers. Our friends aren’t into it themselves, but they are dutiful children, and so once a year they make the trek to some undisclosed location in Wyoming where activities of the family reunion include freshening the water supplies and attending to upkeep. There are guns on the property. After “the Collapse,” hunting will of course be a necessity. For a while, I can imagine, there will be a propensity to share from the stockroom with other human beings, but then I can also imagine the growing threat around them that results in using those guns to “protect what is ours for our own.”

Doomsday preppers are easy enough to caricaturize, or for our purposes, they are easy enough to dismiss if we hold out optimistically for the continuation of what our Consultation is calling “the Old [triumphant] Future.” Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything begins with a key insight into climate denialists like the Heartland Institute. She writes:

So here’s my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of the “warmists” in the political center, the ones who are still insisting that the response can be gradual and painless and that we don’t need to go to war with anybody, including the fossil fuel companies. Before I go any further, let me be absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists attest, the Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. But when it comes to the political and economic consequences of those scientific findings, specifically the kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the underlying logic of our liberalized and profit-seeking economy, they have their eyes wide open (43).

If the word realism means anything—including in a coinage like eco-realism—it means that we go around with our “eyes wide open,” not only about what our efforts at mitigation and adaptation are going to require, but also about what the suffering that results from climate change is going to unleash. Yet let me be clear about what I’m trying to say in this introduction. There is a temptation for us to just add the threat of violent doomsday preppers to our growing list of probable climate change impacts and then issue a call to re-double our mitigation and adaptation efforts. Surely, we don’t need to identify a new climate impact to affirm Klein in saying the time is long past for the end of gradualism in our response and naivete regarding the fossil fuel interests. Here’s how I would rephrase Klein’s quotation for the purpose of our Consultation’s own inconvenient truths: “I think these hard-core doomsday preppers understand the real significance of climate change SUFFERING better than most of us do.” We are NOT YET PREPARED to bring a response to that suffering which is characterized by love, compassion, solidarity, and non-violence, in large part because we haven’t yet allowed our ministries/activism or our faith/theology to let go of the triumphalist conceits that are failing to address the challenges of climate change, and may have, in fact and in part, been responsible for them in the first place.

II. John Holdren and the Revision of his Programmatic Quotation

The basis for a proposal that shifts our weight more toward preparing for climate change’s suffering can be found in one of the most influential quotations—now seventeen years old—in the history of climate action. At the release of the fourth IPCC report in January 2007, John Holdren, science advisor for President Obama, proclaimed:

“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.”

Katharine Hayhoe was the first to introduce this quotation to me, and many others have found it to be a helpful structural framework for climate action, with a nice little ethical argument built in, depending on what you thought about suffering, either yours or another’s. So, what’s happened with this quotation in the seventeen years since? Instructively, we had a moment perhaps best characterized by Rex Tillerson’s interview with the Council of Foreign Relations in 2012. Tillerson was still the CEO of ExxonMobil at the time and while he was no longer denying the reality of climate change, he said, “Human beings as a species… we have spent our entire existence adapting, OK? So we will adapt to this,” meaning, no drastic mitigation efforts were really required. Climate activists were outraged, and I remember a season where it seemed any mention of adaptation, or any funds diverted to it, was considered a betrayal of mitigation. The African Group of Negotiators first proposed a Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) in 2013 and it was inserted into the Paris Agreement two years later as Article 7.1, but only at last year’s COP was the UAE-Belém Work Programme launched to try and finalize the GGA by COP30 in 2025. In other words, because adaptation was perceived as giving up on mitigation, we are late in attending to adaptation. Similarly, if pro-active preparation for suffering is perceived of as “doomism” or as giving up on mitigation and adaptation, then I wonder when we will ever cast our attention to it.

Looking back there is so much that was always problematic with this quotation which so many of us had embraced enthusiastically and seemed to insert into every PowerPoint presentation we gave. The linear nature of Holdren’s equation seemed to push suffering out into the future in a sort of “hey guys, if we aren’t careful” sort of way. In November of 2007, The Harvard Gazette reported on a speech Holdren gave to the Kennedy School: “’The disruption and its impacts have grown more widely than anyone ever expected a few years ago,’ Holdren contended. To fix the problem, he said, society has only three options: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. ‘We’re already doing some of each, and will do more of all three.’” From his vantage point in 2007, Holdren could see that suffering had intensified, but he still characterized it dispassionately as “disruption and its impacts,” not as intolerable trauma visited upon millions. His agenda was still “to fix the problem,” without explaining exactly how suffering helps with that, except in a Darwinian resolution, I suppose. But now we have seventeen additional years of “doing more of all three.” Just as an exercise: try and recall as many high-profile climate-related disasters that have occurred since 2007. If it is hard to remember these disasters, let alone feel anything about them still, it may be because of how frameworks like Holdren’s encourages us to process them. Once we got past the (valid) discussion of how to attribute any one extreme weather disaster to climate change, we were still the mitigationists employing suffering as a messaging strategy, saying, “See, this is what we can expect more of IN THE FUTURE if we don’t fix the problem now.” And FEMA, the World Bank, Samaritan’s Purse, or the insurance industry still had sufficient funds which could work as band-aid Adaptation: suffering fixed-up is suffering forgotten. Not to beat a dead horse, but Holdren told the Kennedy School: “Only three options will allow us to ‘manage the unavoidable and avoid the unmanageable,’” repeating the famous title of the 2007 IPCC report. Holdren speaks of three options but only names two: avoidance and management. Our Consultation asks: what do we do when the unavoidable and the unmanageable have both emerged and merged? Surely, we can admit in 2024 that Holdren’s “mix of all three” has a higher percentage of suffering in the mixture. The coloration has noticeably shifted.

In the end, a simple re-examination of Holdren’s use of the words “choices” or “options” suggest a way forward. What Holdren really meant to say was that if 1) we don’t choose to get behind mitigation, then 2) we’ll have no choice but to choose more adaptation, otherwise 3) we’ll have no choice but to endure suffering. Eco-realism is not giving up on mitigation and adaption and therefore somehow choosing suffering. No, we understand that every 0.1 degree increase in warming is worth struggling to prevent because of the exponential suffering attendant to each increase. Instead, eco-realism is saying that our eyes should be wide open to how horribly our planet’s fellow-beings are already in that third space. And our Eco-realism Consultation asserts that, just as there are choices that pertain to mitigation and adaptation, there are pro-active choices that confront us regarding climate suffering. We need to identify those choices that will be asked of us, make those choices consciously now before our triggers set in, and begin to design and implement those choices while we still have time. Call us “doomsday preppers of love” if you wish to caricaturize us, but we intend to fire up the forges and arrange the smithies so as to begin, like swords into ploughshares, to beat guns into can-openers.

III. Brendan Tarrant and the Reaction of Violence from Conservatives (and Liberals)

To return to the Nice-Kansas-Christians-Turned-Wyoming-Preppers example of my introduction, and without greatly developing these ideas here, I can imagine there is a “Good Samaritan choice” that climate suffering will ask of us. In the middle of the collapses, catastrophes, and extinctions, will we think of others—neighbours, strangers, foreigners, Others—or just think of ourselves? I can also imagine that there will be a “Peter-in-the-Garden-of-Gethsemane choice” that confronts us. At what point will we pick up the sword and start lashing out in the name of protecting ourselves (or Christendom) even if that is not something Jesus wants, and even if a pile of bloody ears around us has no effect?

Philip Jenkins’ 2021 book is entitled Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval. It is part of a growing body of scholarship which makes the claim “throughout history, when other climate-related disasters have occurred, they have commonly had wide-ranging religious consequences,” as well as political, social, and economic consequences (2). One study of antisemitism went quite granular: “Between the years 1100 and 1800 CE, one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature (about one-third of a degree Celsius) raised the probability that a [Jewish] community would be persecuted from a baseline of about 2% to between 3% and 3.5% in the subsequent five-year period. This effect is larger in cities with poor quality soil and with weak states.” Jenkins clarifies: “As in the case of the Great Awakening, this does not mean that climatic conditions directly caused such outbreaks or currents; rather, they created an atmosphere in which those changes could manifest themselves, and in historical terms this happened very suddenly (2).” (For further references of this “growing body of scholarship”, see footnote #1 from John, and footnote #2 from fellow consultant George McKibbon.)

Trauma is traumatic. And any vestige of Triumphalism won’t likely go down peaceably. Homo sapiens naturally respond with fight, flight, or freeze, and when those responses grow and metastasize throughout a society we identify them as tribalism, nationalism, sectarian violence, antisemitism, xenophobia, pietism as disengagement from others, or millenarianism as disengagement from history. On March 15, 2019, Brenton Tarrant walked into two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand during Friday prayers and gunned down 51 Muslim worshippers, wounding some 40 others. The day before, Tarrant had published a hate-filled manifesto, which the Government of New Zealand has now locked down except for study by scholars and journalists. Tarrant did consider that he was murdering Muslims in the name of what he called “Christian Europe” (recognizable to us as standard ethnic violence) but additionally he was doing it in the name of climate change. In his manifesto, Tarrant claimed that climate change was real and urgent. He understood that climate change would bring certain resource pressures and so he determined in some dark place of his heart to strike first: to preserve those resources for people who looked like him, who were labelled like him as “Christian Europeans.” He proudly called himself an “eco-fascist.” Three years later, the gunman who travelled 200 miles to attack shoppers at a supermarket in a predominately black neighbourhood in Buffalo, NY was quoted as saying in his manifesto: “I would prefer to call myself a populist, but you can call me an ethno-nationalist eco-fascist national socialist if you want, I wouldn’t disagree with you.”

Yet, it won’t only be the Far Right who are tempted toward violence, and not all violence is physical. Newt Gingrich is an example of a conservative who, before the 2008 Obama election was arguably eco-realistic, and who, unlike Tarrant, chose non-physical violence. Teaming up with Rush Limbaugh, Gingrich’s verbal abuse unleashed unconscionable sexist trolling and death threats on our friend Katharine Hayhoe. On the liberal side, Michael Mann’s endless Climate War-posturing results in such tweets as this from 2023: “As I’ve said before, climate deniers are HORRIBLE people. Typically bigoted, xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, antisemitic. . .” In the defamation suit that he recently won, he was forced to admit under oath that the story of his rival Dr. Judith Curry’s extramarital affair were “rumours I was passing along” and that his “facts could be wrong.” Meanwhile, Curry told the court that one of the worst things that could happen to a female scientist is the false rumour that she had slept her way to attainment. What sort of violence are we willing to tolerate among those we consider climate allies?

Who would we identify among the liberals as akin to the violent responses of Tarrant and the eco-fascists? We could remind ourselves of the destructiveness wrecked by Earth First! back in the 1980s. We could begin to critically examine the vandalism and other tactics of Extinction Rebellion. I’m going to propose that we imagine from Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, The Ministry for the Future, the activities of the as-of-yet-fictional Children of Kali, an eco-realistic terrorist group that employs violence to advance the climate change solutions that the governments are refusing to implement. If governments are not willing to mandate emission reductions in the airline industry, then shoot down an airliner or two, killing all the passengers; the rest of the public will be too afraid to fly. Torpedo and sink a few diesel-powered container ships and you have a strategy that can actually force innovation; shipping companies would redesign their vessels to employ clean-energy sails. As Gandhi and Martin Luther King instruct us, a commitment to Non-Violence must be made, declared, and cultivated as part of one’s PREPARATION for the weeks, months, and years of struggle that ensue.

V. Corrie ten Boom and the Righteous Future that Some Gentiles Choose

I was recently interviewed by a seminary student from Zurich who is doing research on prayer, climate change, and the topic of hope. In one of his final questions, he asked me, “What image comes to mind for you when you think of the future?” I immediately offered him the photo that introduces this paper, for four reasons. First, this is a photo of my three children and so they naturally represent “the future” for me. They are all adults now, but in the Year 2030, supposedly a key benchmark for the success or failure of the Paris Agreement, I will be age 68 and my youngest will be 28. My season of activism will be waning while theirs still waxes. Secondly, this is a photo of a secret room used to hide Jews during the Nazi occupation of Holland in World War II. Do I believe that an eco-realistic New Future—with its collapses, catastrophes, and extinctions, with trauma’s triggers toward violence—will devolve into Holocaust-like conditions? Yes, I do, for billions, and perhaps even for these three whom I love with all my heart.

But this is no ordinary secret room. This is the Hiding Place, made famous in the story of Corrie ten Boom, her father Casper, and her sister Betsie. They rescued Jews in their home before they were betrayed and led off to Auschwitz. Only Corrie survived the war. My family visited Haarlem in 2007 where the ten Boom watch shop and home has been turned into a museum. We could see as we entered the front door that the ten Boom’s operated just 120 meters from where Nazi headquarters were, in a direct line of sight. Such courage! When we got to the top floor where Corrie’s bedroom and the hiding place was situated, the tour guide suddenly grabbed one of my kids, lifted her up, and placed her inside the closet. I let out an audible gasp. I had grown up with the story of Corrie ten Boom. This was holy ground, and my children were standing right in the middle of it. Hence and thirdly, this photo is an image of the future for me because the New Future will contain its own stories of courage, heroism, compassion, and survival.

David Gushee was a seminary student at Union casting about for a dissertation topic when he was confronted by the fact that, for all the wonderful stories of families like the ten Booms, only a small percentage of European Christians participated in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust. He concluded that “Indeed, the Holocaust was not merely an event in Christian history but in fact a nauseating Christian moral failure” (Righteous 26). Many more Christians chose, according to Gushee’s typology, to be perpetrators, informants, thieves or bystanders. But those Christians who chose otherwise, who chose to rescue Jews and to do so without reward or payment, would eventually be declared hasidei ummot ha-olam, translated from Hebrew as “the righteous ones among the nations of the world,” commonly shortened to “Righteous Gentiles.” Gushee undertook to investigate what led Righteous Gentiles to act in ways differently than their other Christian brothers and sisters, despite sharing the same external threats. Nechama Tec, an earlier researcher, “has said that devout rescuers were ‘religious in a special way,’ that they exhibited ‘a certain kind of Christianity” (Righteous 236). Gushee responds, “It demands the question: What exactly is the content of this ‘certain kind of Christianity’?” (Righteous 236). Gushee summarizes his findings in his book Still Christian:

To get to rescuing Jews, Christians needed a theology that at least did not prevent their rescuing and might even encourage it, an ethic that motivated rescuing based on a commitment to honoring life’s sacredness and advancing justice, a heart capable of compassion toward suffering people, and courage to do what their ethic and their emotions motivated them to do (Still 47).

The final reason why this photo is an image for me of an eco-realistic New Future is because it represents the most important contribution that I can make to that future: the formation of others. I know that those three kids are all grown up now, but I still have some influence on them. Others of you might look out over a classroom of students. Some of you might minister the Eucharist to a group of parishioners. Others of you might be training a new generation of climate activists. Some of you might have your fingers poised above a keyboard, a prayer on your lips for your potential readers. “Can Christians be righteous?” Gushee asks before answering,

The rabbis had it just about right. Christians can be righteous—but not many of us are, or likely will be. Righteous Christians are the exception. Some Christians will harm a person in need. Some will feel no stir of compassion. A great many others will feel compassion but lack courage. A small minority will be both compassionate and courageous and act on those attributes to help a person in need (Righteous 305).

Is such an assessment of contemporary Christians heading into the pathologies of an eco-realistic New Future cynical, doomist, or untethered from historical precedent or sound sociology? You decide. But our Consultation is poised to take up Gushee’s great project: “it can be said that Christian ethics is about increasing the number of Christianzaddikim(righteous) the churches produce. . . This must be our quest despite those stubborn forces within and around the human person that so often block the attainment of authentic righteousness” (Righteous 306).

Footnotes:

John Elwood writes: “Climatic shocks create conditions that tend toward violence and suffering. While this premise is assumed in our assessment of the New Future, abundant historical evidence also supports it, as recorded in the following sources, among others: Harper, Kyle. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton University Press, 2017: Harper documents how the Roman Empire flourished in the stable warmth of the Roman Climatic Optimum (c. 250 BCE-400 CE), but declined and ultimately fell under the stresses associated with the Late Antique Little Ice Age (c. 530-700 CE). Jenkins, Philip. Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021: Jenkins examines the role of religious faith in previous times of climatic changes, documenting how such changes were associated with the rise in religious conflict, violence, and extremism. Parker, Geoffrey. Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013: Parker documents how the mid-seventeenth-century “Maunder Minimum” of the Little Ice Age drove not only massive crop failures but inescapable civil brutality driven by ubiquitous scarcity—spanning Europe, the Ottoman, Mughal and Ming Chinese empires, and the Americas.”
Thank you to George McKibbon for adding one title to John’s list: Blom, Philipp. Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017. George is also the co-author of a paper that has proven to be a helpful analogy from the COVID pandemic to eco-realism. Forester J, McKibbon G. Beyond blame: leadership, collaboration and compassion in the time of COVID-19. Socioecol Pract Res. 2020;2(3):205-216. The authors write: “What we see, then, is that the COVID-19 pandemic teaches us not just about sickness and medical pathologies, but about pathologies of response to fear and vulnerability as well and the potential creativity of a critically designed compassionate approach. We see that responses to fear and vulnerability can take more or less compassionate paths.”

Unlinked References in order of appearance:

Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon and Schuster, 2014.
Jenkins, Philip. Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 2021.
Anderson, Robert Warren, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama. “Jewish Persecutions and Weather Shocks: 1100–1800.” The Economic Journal 127, no. 602 (June 1, 2017): 924–58. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12331.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Ministry for the Future. Orbit Books, 2020.
Ten Boom, Corrie and Elizabeth Sherrill. The Hiding Place. Chosen Books, 35th Anniversary ed., 2006.
Gushee, David. Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: Genocide and Moral Obligation. 2nd ed. Paragon House. Kindle Edition. 2003.
Gushee, David. Still Christian. Westminster John Knox, 2017.

NEXT STEPS

1. You can explore this topic further by checking out “Recommended Pre-Consultation Reading for May” below.

2. Registration is now open for our in-person Consultation: Friday, July 26, 2024, 9 AM- 4PM, at Catholic University in Washington, DC. Cost is $75. The American Scientific Affiliation is graciously administering our registration here. NOTE: lodging is only available Thursday and/or Friday night for those registering for the entire ASA Conference, which is a separate registration. (See below). An explanatory letter will go out to everyone tomorrow.

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 Elsa Barron, a Research Fellow at The Center for Climate and Security, and co-director of the Christian Climate Observers Program.

4. Next month, John will return for Pre-Consultation Paper #4, which he previews as: “If “Positive Christianity” fit well with the Old Future of anticipated “Eco-triumphalism,” it is arguably unintelligible in the New Future of pervasive and unavoidable suffering. But what, specifically, must “Cruciform Christianity” now foreground—and what must it interrogate or lay aside—to serve a darkening world with compassion and courage?”.

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

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