By Lowell Bliss
As an Unemployed Climate Activist (UCA), I feel stymied in my work for three reasons:
The COVID-19 lockdown/slowdown has cancelled or postponed numerous of our regular activities, including for example, the next climate summit, COP26, originally scheduled for November 2020 in Glasgow.
Concern for the environment, and climate change in particular, has slipped in society’s list of concerns, falling not only behind the pandemic and systemic racism but actually plummeting toward the bottom of the list, at least according a Harris Poll published in Forbes Magazine. Admittedly the West Coast wildfires may be changing our prioritization of concerns.
The UCA is likely convinced that helping to oust the current incumbent in the 2020 US Presidential election is the highest leverage climate action out there, but feels stymied because:
There seems to be little actual campaign work that one can do during a pandemic, and among an electorate that has made up its mind already; and
There’s a lot of written and unwritten rules to sort out: what does the IRS allow, will my funders give me this freedom, should ministers get involved in politics?
I have attempted to resolve my feelings of “unemployment” around these three factors in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. We must admit our grief, and choose to proactively acknowledge that we have not been released from our callings, i.e. we only feel unemployed; we aren’t actually unemployed. We must adopt a new holistic perspective on our activism, and re-employ ourselves not as climate activists exclusively, but as love-, justice-, or life-activists at the core of our being. We must cultivate the courage to engage politics (part of our new holism), while also maintaining a long-term perspective. We’ll strike at the roots of evil and let others hack at the leaves. In this final installment of this series, here is one more factor that lends to feelings of unemployment:
Our best efforts as climate activists have accomplished much, but it has become easier and more frequent to lie awake at night and wonder whether our efforts have been sufficient. The Paris targets (e.g., preventing anything more than a 1.5°C warming) have been just targets. The “realities” behind failure to meet those targets are felt in wildfires, heatwaves, hurricanes, and yes. . . societal collapse, perhaps most immediately in the United States of America. It’s hard as a UCA for me to take my mind there.
I got news this week that two of my friends have contracted COVID-19, not just “tested positive for the coronavirus” but indeed feeling the debilitation of the disease. One is a teacher in Spain, and so part of that nation’s “second wave.” The other is a therapist in a prison in Kansas, and thus part of the unjust distribution of the pandemic. Both were careful social distancers and mask wearers; both believed in what science had to say about how the world works. During this season, when I call myself an unemployed climate activist, I don’t want to pretend that I am on some sort of sick leave, that COVID-19 has touched my body, my family, or (greatly) my friends, or (greatly) my new adopted country. (Last week, Canada reported its first day since March 15 where no new people died from COVID-19, a “zero death” day). Similarly, when I say that I am “unemployed,” that is not true at all. I have not missed a single paycheck from Frontier Ventures, the parent company of Eden Vigil. My donors have actually increased their giving to my ministry. Meanwhile, I recognize that millions of people around the world have truly lost their jobs. Businesses have closed and have announced that they will not be re-opening. In other words, I have been fortunate, and I never meant my imagined UCA persona to be facetious. What the pandemic has done for me as a UCA is that it has provoked a work stoppage, a forced shutdown, a chance for me to just sit there and reflect.
The View from the Edge of the Abyss
Where has the pandemic plopped me down for my season of self-reflection? I can’t help but believe that I have been set down on the edge of the abyss. Climate change news in the Year 2020 was supposed to be about the hard-fought success of the Paris Agreement at the COP26 in Glasgow. The nations were going to bring their revised NDCs (emission reduction targets and plans) to Glasgow. Those NDCs were supposed to match what the scientists were saying about how X amount of CO2 in the atmosphere forces Y amount of global average temperature increase. Meanwhile, a Trump defeat in November would mean that the US could rejoin the Paris Agreement as early as March 2021. Admittedly, the success of COP26 was a tenuous projection at best, and we would still have massive amounts of work to do after a Biden inauguration, but this year, in the most hopeful narrative, was supposed to be glorious. Instead, here at the midpoint date of the ninth month of this year, the climate change news is devastating: the American West is experiencing the worst wildfires in recorded history. Death Valley, CA reached 130°F (54.4°C) on August 17, which is considered a historical world record for “reliable” readings. Phoenix, AZ also set a record: 50 days in one year above 110°F. In Part 1 of this series, I had listed these four current news stories: Canada’s last intact ice shelf collapses due to warming; 2020 may be the world’s warmest year on record, even without an El Niño; NOAA’s new hurricane outlook shows so many storms, we may have to turn to the Greek alphabet; and Kiribati's president's plans to raise islands in fight against sea-level rise.
To tell you the truth, and with all due respect to the horrific images that came out of the Australian wildfires, the news about current climate change impacts (as compared to projected scenarios) is as bad here in August and September of 2020 as they have ever been. One interesting outcome is that a new term has been coined in the last week that I suspect will stick: instead of calling them “wildfires” or “forest fires,” some are beginning to refer to them as “climate fires.” Enough of this namby-pamby handwringing that dares not ascribe terrible events to climate change. That feels like just more “lying so that people won’t panic.”
When the pandemic first hit and countries began to institute lockdowns, it was hoped that photos of the blue skies over New Delhi or Los Angeles could inspire the world with a vision for what healthy living could look like with carbon emissions reduced to the level of the Paris targets. The result, I fear, was the opposite: we got a glimpse of what economic hardship could mean. We took our eyes off the blue skies in order to check the stock market reports, and never gave thought to what an orderly step-down or what the systematic build-up to a renewable energy economy could look like. We desperately wanted to get “back to normal,” and while our lifestyles have yet to return to normal, our carbon emissions certainly have. The World Meteorological Society reported last week that greenhouse gas emissions are back to pre-pandemic levels. We blew a second opportunity as well: the chance for the world to work together on a truly global problem. We had a choice: we could blame China for the coronavirus just as we could blame the industrialized world for climate change, or we could get down to the work of international cooperation which could help us manage the pandemic. Instead, the United States at least chose nationalism—withdrawing from the WHO, making racist slurs about the “Kung Flu,” and abandoning the international compact on vaccine development. The third opportunity we lost was perhaps the most grievous: scientists have no more status in the Trump Administration, the Republican Party, or the white American evangelical church than they had before the pandemic began, when the only “hoax” was the “climate change hoax.” It sounds like Dr. Fauci has received as much abuse (and death threats) as Michael Mann or Katharine Hayhoe have. According to the Woodward tapes, President Trump had listened sufficiently enough to his scientific advisers and his national security experts to know of the deadliness, severity, scope, and transmission properties of the coronavirus. To use his words, he chose to “play it down. . . because I don’t want to cause a panic.” Trump’s national security advisor, Robert O’Brien, had told him: “This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency. This is going to be the roughest thing you face." How many times have those exact words been used in the Oval Office or the UN General Assembly to talk about climate change. Alas. Early in the pandemic, Neil deGrasse Tyson thought he needed to tweet: “You know it’s true. . . every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.” We are way past the opening credits.
At the beginning of 2020, that is, before the pandemic, my colleague John Elwood and I were working on a project which we may as well call “A Christian Perspective on Deep Adaptation.” Jem Bendell is a former professor of Sustainability Leadership of the University of Cumbria. In 2018, Bendell published a paper entitled “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.” I’ll spare you all the links now; John and I did write up a primer which introduces DA more systematically, and we can make that available soon. For now, I’ll say that looking at the scope, speed, and severity of climate change (as someone like author David Wallace-Wells chronicles in The Uninhabitable Earth), Bendell arrived at three conclusions:
Collapse is inevitable
Catastrophe is probable
·Extinction is possible
John and I have presented DA to a good handful of people and the immediate reaction of many, if not most, is to balk so badly at the third premise—the possibility of extinction—that they refuse to consider the first two, collapse or catastrophe. I met up with George Marshall at the COP25 climate summit in Madrid last November. George is one of the world’s leading experts on climate messaging. I asked him if he had an opinion about Deep Adaptation. “Are those the ‘we-are-all-doomed’ guys?” he asked me, his face screwed up in disgust. Bendell advises us not to be surprised by this aversion since there are three types of denial that even the most clear-sighted of climate activists are susceptible to:
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.”
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.”
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.”
Ouch. Bendell is not only unafraid to step on the toes of a UCA, but also to grind his heel into our instep. These three things—which he dares to label as denials—have been some of the fuel driving my hopes and motivation up until the day of my unemployment.
I built my blogpost in Part 2 of this series around a political cartoon by Graeme MacKay of the Hamilton Spectator: the two, three or four tsunamis about to crash on our sandbar of a country. In today’s article, let’s feature another cartoon, this one: the world and the virus in a boxing ring, by the cartoonist KAL, appearing in The Economist on April 23. KAL considered the coronavirus to be a formidable opponent, but the world optimistically lands the first punch. In fact, as drawn, the world seems to be the more robust boxer. It will be a tough match, but if you were a gambler back on April 23, you could put your money on the globe with better-than-even odds. But today is September 15, not April 23, and if KAL were to draw the isolationist USA as the boxer, how would America, with her 200,000 dead, match up against her opponent? And of course, KAL’s point is that the pandemic is just “the preliminary round.” Leaning on the ropes, malevolently waiting to once again take center stage, is climate change—bigger, more muscular, undefeated, able to deliver the knockout blow. For those who are naturally pessimists, then KAL surely sketches a scene of despair, not unakin to Graeme’s tsunamis. For those who choose to look at the cartoon with optimistic eyes, then our only hope is that the world will use its preliminary round against the coronavirus to become just that much more wise as a boxer, skilled as a pugilist, scrappy and resilient as a fighter. Alas, just yesterday the President sat impatiently while a California official made a plea to add climate action to vegetation management in the fight against the wildfires—similar to a boxer developing an uppercut or roundhouse to add to his repertoire of jabs—and told the official essentially to not panic because: “It will get cooler. . . I don’t think science knows, actually.”
Here’s the good news. The whole point of the “Unemployed Climate Activist” series is that, whereas the Trump administration or the USA may not have used the pandemic to become wiser, more skilled, and more resilient—by God’s grace, I HAVE. And you can as well. This UCA is ready to be re-employed and Eden Vigil will be organizing our renewed efforts around four main projects.
1. The Radical Hope Project
In 2018, I undertook a study of hope—Christian hope, biblical hope, radical hope. Each week, I wrote and produced a video blog and posted a new ten-minute-on-average episode each week on YouTube. The entire series of 53 episodes is collected here: Hope series. I learned from such thinkers as Walter Brueggemann, Jacques Ellul, and Chief Plenty Coups that hope should not be conflated with optimism; it is its own creature. I learned how hope must be rooted in realism, and that there is a mechanism for eroding denialism. I plan to revisit this material, since I’ve forgotten so much. I may repackage the material into a book or seminar, I don’t know. Mostly, I intend to promote the idea that radical hope is THE MOST IMPORTANT GIFT that Christian activists have to offer to the climate struggle. We have successfully built the moral case for climate action, and the justice case for climate action. We have successfully exegeted the Scriptures to the satisfaction of all of those who are not enslaved by a Republican Party hermeneutic: our good stewardship of creation is an act of worship to the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the universe. When it comes to mobilizing a voting bloc for climate legislation and candidates—something that secular environmentalists pinned their hopes on when we first joined them as allies—we have failed. Now here in September 2020, we are heading into a period of global crucifixion; what a privilege to preach the resurrection in the midst of it. We Christian activists have long done ministry IN the name of Jesus, now we will do ministry WITH the name of Jesus. And think of the implications for evangelism—we have spent so long preaching the Gospel of Truth [Claims] that our exclusionary miserliness has sucked so much of the goodness of the Good News. Now we can embark on developing and preaching a Gospel of Hope in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus.
2. Christian Deep Adaptation
People hear about Jem Bendell, and tend to dismiss him out of hand, as George Marshall did. No, as a Re-employed Climate Activist (RCA) I don’t intend to re-emerge as all “doom-and-gloom.” Nonetheless, if there are Christian doomsday preppers who are loading their secret bunkers with provisions and firearms so that they can fight off the godless hordes who are hungry, homeless, unclothed, ill, and in prison (cf. Matt 25)—shouldn’t there be some Christians who present a different model of doomsday prepping: of loving your neighbour, of sharing freely in calamity, of radical hope? I do believe that what Bendell presents in DA is a good framework for moving forward, and that what we already believe about realism and denialism should make us open to his opening premises. The most important thing about the DA framework however is NOT Bendell’s theories of collapse. Instead, Bendell wants us to move quickly beyond them to four positive and healthy conversations, conversations which we as a society are slow to organize and conduct because we don’t feel the urgency of them. These conversations are the four “R’s” and Eden Vigil will be adding a fifth.
Resilience: ask each other: “what is it that we most want to keep, why and how?” (e.g. valued norms and behaviours)
Relinquishment: ask each other: “what must we give up or make matters worse?” (e.g. cherished assets, behaviours, beliefs--such as, receding from coastlines, giving up certain consumption patterns)
Restoration: ask each other: “what is it that we can bring back to reduce harm? (e.g. rewilding landscapes, recovering non-electronic entertainment, community-level productivity)
Reconciliation: ask each other: “what could I make peace with to lessen suffering?”
Our proposed fifth conversation is:
Resurrection: ask each other: “how do we cultivate a ‘radical hope’ in Christ Jesus that sustains us in the work of deep adaptation?”
Surely you would agree that promulgating these five conversations are worthy pursuits, even if you can’t buy into all the talk of collapse.
3. The Future Perfect Tense Project
I refuse to give up on mitigation, on the struggle to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, but as a Re-employed Climate Activist, I intend to reframe my efforts. During a quiet moment at COP25 in Madrid, I asked my colleague Simon Chambers, Toronto-based Director of Communications for ACT Alliance: “When do you think you will give up on the 1.5° target?” He didn’t miss a beat in replying: “When the IPCC tells us that it is no longer possible.” I admire his answer, but if the IPCC scientists think of the 1.5°C target in terms of physical possibilities, then surely sociologists and political scientists also can chime in with equally valid perspectives. After all, scientists still form their theories of possibility along the lines of “If the countries of the world do X, Y, and Z—then preventing a 1.5°C warming is theoretically possible,” and of course, it is also physically possible for the countries of the world to do X, Y, and Z, otherwise the IPCC scientists wouldn’t bother saying what they are saying. Nonetheless, we understand that there are more than physical obstacles standing in the way of the world implementing the terms of the Paris Agreement.
I do intend to give up on the Paris targets, but only as targets. Instead, I intend to do as Katharine Hayhoe advises, to fight for the prevention of every single 0.1°C of warming, beginning now with 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4. Part of the purpose of this new approach is to build resiliency because I fear the massive surrender that will occur when we breach the 1.5°C degree (which is a likely scenario) or the 2.0°C target (which unfortunately also seems currently like a more-likely-than-not scenario, based on the status of the nations’ NDCs). Climate change isn’t a game that we win or lose after the nine innings (and 27 outs) determined by a particular Paris target. We won’t walk away and say like the Brooklyn Dodgers of old: “Wait ‘til next year.”
Despite my last allusion, I do turn to baseball to frame up my new approach. In particular, I’ve been struck by a question that George Will once asked MVP pitcher Orel Hershiser about how he retains his competitive edge once an opposing batter gets past him and gets to first base. In other words, having lost “the perfect game” (defined by no one from the opposing team getting to first base by a hit, a walk, or a hit-by-pitch), what keeps Hershiser pressing forward with the same energy and passion that he had when he threw the first pitch of the game? Hershiser replied: “If they get a hit, then I am throwing a one-hitter. If they get a walk, it’s my last walk. I deal with perfection to the point that it is logical to conceive it. History is history, the future is perfect.” In other words, whereas a “perfect game” is perfect, a one-hitter is better than giving up two hits, which in turn is better than giving up three, or allowing a run. One walk is unfortunate, but it can be the last one. The writer George Will calls this “the future perfect tense,” and you can read about how I apply this to climate change in my article “Living in the Future Perfect Tense” Preventing a 1.5° warming is exponentially better than 2.0° warming, as the latest IPCC report tells us, but so is a preventing a 1.6° warming or a 1.7° warming. And should we breach 2.0°, then I hope to have the resiliency and endurance to still be there fighting against 2.1°. (I also speak about the Future Perfect Tense and climate change in Episode 35 in the Hope Series.)
4. The Earth-honouring Faith Project
After much anguished reflection, I have reached the conclusion that, like a root-bound houseplant, creation care has outgrown the container which is white American evangelical Christianity. It must be repotted. I don’t have much to say about this “project” yet, not at this point. My own journey finds many parallels in what David Gushee wrote in his spiritual autobiography Still Christian: Following Jesus out of American Evangelicalism. Consequently, I was happy to hear Gushee speak more prescriptively in his recently published book After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity. There is already a community of those who left evangelicalism, though according to the appendix in Gushee’s book, many of us might correctly be labelled “Still-Vangelicals” because the new container for our re-potting has not yet been constructed. The last section in After Evangelicalism is devoted to a new set of prevailing ethics and contains three chapters entitled “Sex: From Sexual Purity to Covenant Realism;” “Politics: Starting Over after White Evangelicalism’s Embrace of Trumpism;” and “Race: Unveiling and Ending White-Supremacist Christianity.” As a Re-employed Climate Activist, I want to be part of writing After Evangelicalism’s chapter on creation care. It might be subtitled “Privileging Genesis 1 over Genesis 3” or “Finally Listening to Christian Indigenous Theologians” (like Terry LeBlanc, Brooke Prentis, or WEA’s Jay Matenga.) To borrow a term from Larry Rasmussen, I intend to be a “Christian follower in an Earth-honouring Faith.”