climate justice

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Elizabeth Weinberg draws connections between things many of us haven’t thought to link together. In her 2022 book, Unsettling: Surviving Extinction Together, a whale’s excrement is not just feces but the nourishment that fuels whole ecosystems.

Mallory McDuff 5-12-2023

Adults wearing red t-shirts saying "Mom's Clean Air Force" and children holding signs that says "Kids need you to fight for a healthy climate" and "Fight for clean air" at a press conference where Senate and House Democrats voiced support for the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps, July 20, 2021 - Washington, D.C. Photo credit: Reuters/Michael Brochstein/Sipa USA.

As a mother and teacher, I spent one year researching 50 women — one from each state in the country — who are working toward climate justice. I documented these stories in the book Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice. What I found in the South were role models on the frontlines of the climate crisis: From the hurricane zone of the Gulf Coast to the urban center of Atlanta, I discovered women who knew how to use their wit, intelligence, faith, and family to fight for their connection to home and the health of those they love.

Larry Rasmussen 2-21-2023
An illustration of four anthropomorphic representations of human revolutions. From left to right, a blue man is digging. A tan woman is holding a vase. An orange figure has a mechanical gear for a head. A man is wearing a suit with smokestacks for a head.

Illustration by Eoin Ryan

PHILIP JENKINS’ REMARKABLE  Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval leads off with Voltaire: “Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of [humankind] — climate, government, and religion ... That is the only way of explaining the enigma of this world.”

Climate and geology are now the new prisms for our shared discernment of how we are to live in our own time and place as followers of Christ. We’re driven to centering climate because we can no longer live with the expectation of the balanced climate of the last 12,000 years, the geologic epoch called the late Holocene. We are now in a new geologic epoch: the Age of the Human, or the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene reality leaves Christian ethics nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide because unprecedented cumulative human powers doubled down on planet-spanning changes that launched the first geological epoch created by human choice and action. The fact that human choice and action has done this means that everything, including extinction, turns on ethics. As Christians, we can look away and abdicate our responsibility, but we cannot escape the massive human presence that lines out our lives — and all life. We’ve become totalizing creatures. We humans are, for the first time, both ark and flood.

This extraordinary power has been recognized for a while. In 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the unprecedented powers of modern science and technology led to a world in which “it all comes down to the human being,” a world where “everything turns upon humanity.” He thus set out to reconceive human responsibility for a world that had come of age. For Bonhoeffer, “world come of age” was not a statement of moral maturity. It was a statement of moral accountability. People who legally come of age at 18 or 21 are accountable, whether they exercise their agency maturely or not. When everything turns on humanity, Bonhoeffer said, the whole human world has arrived at that point of accountability.

A current term for human powers and their collective impact is “assisted evolution.” But the phrase is deceptive because it hides the depth, breadth, and temporal reach of those powers. Does the phrase “assisted evolution” reveal that the carbon people produce has the ability to alter marine chemistry, flood coastlines, strip glaciers “to bare bones,” embolden deserts, warp the circulation of ocean currents, “supercharge extreme weather events,” and rearrange “the distribution of animal, plant, and microbial species across the globe,” as author David Farrier puts it? This isn’t evolution “assisted”; it’s evolution hacked and hijacked.

Liuan Huska 2-21-2023
A painting of hands with various skin tones reaching up to a heart swirling with purple and yellow brush strokes.

stellalevi / iStock

AS SOMEONE WHO has lived with chronic pain and come to terms with being a body with limits, I struggle to square a theology of limits with a theology of abundance.

I have limits on my time, energy, and what my body can do. I’ve made peace with and even come to appreciate God’s elegant design of bounded human bodies and an Earth with limited, depletable resources. And yet, our faith speaks of a God who can do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20, NIV), the same God who led the Israelites into a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8) and pours oil over the psalmist’s head until his cup overflows (Psalm 23:5).

In a world rapidly running out of arable land, fossil fuels, and healthy soil and water, how do we rightly interpret a theology of abundance?

Sally Monroe 10-31-2022

A local fire chief and his daughter drop off goods for a neighbor in July near Drushal Memorial Brethren Church in Lost Creek, Ky. At least 39 people died due to floods in eastern Kentucky. / Seth Herald / AFP via Getty Images

Sally Monroe is an elder at First Presbyterian Church of Hazard, Ky. With her husband Lawrence, she spoke with Sojourners’ Mitchell Atencio.

OUR HOUSE IS completely gutted. All the Sheetrock is gone, the flooring’s gone. It’s just a shell. The water came very quickly. Our neighbor who had a house on River Caney got about two and a half feet of water in his house, but it came very rapidly, and their house was washed away. Our situation is different. We live in the valley a half-mile from the river. We had no idea how high the water could get. We didn’t get the current, and the water came up rapidly ... some pictures from this flood where buildings were just washed off their foundations — it’s horrible to see those homes like that.

Adam Russell Taylor 10-27-2022
An illustration of a fan with ribbons waving about in the shape of an American flag, with some of the red lines blowing off.

Illustration by Pete Ryan

IN AUGUST, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the most significant legislation ever passed by Congress to address climate change. But what happens now? After all, the days aren’t getting any cooler — a recent study by the First Street Foundation suggests that in 30 years more than 100 million Americans could experience heat index temperatures over 125 degrees Fahrenheit. In our polarized politics, there is already a great deal of confusion and obfuscation about what this historic bill will do. A related question: How will the IRA affect what people of faith do about the existential threat of climate change?

The IRA invests $369 billion over the next 10 years into tax incentives for renewable energy and electric vehicles, domestic manufacture of batteries and solar panels, and pollution reduction. The idea is to make renewable energy and electric vehicles more affordable, both to manufacture and to buy, thus encouraging more consumers to adopt them. The IRA also targets methane pollution by imposing an escalating fee on some oil and gas companies that emit too much methane in their operations and increasing royalty rates paid to the government on methane extraction from public lands. The IRA includes an unprecedented investment of $60 billion into environmental justice initiatives, including clean energy and emission reduction for low-income and disadvantaged communities, block grants for community-led projects in disadvantaged communities to “address disproportionate environmental and public health harms related to pollution and climate change,” and funding to reconnect communities divided by highways.

Bill McKibben 9-27-2022
Aerial view of a group of people holdings hands and spiraling out; the cluster is to the center left of the image. Background is light tan with blobs of darker tan, salmon, and pink overlaid.

melitas / iStock

I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT immigration in these pages before, so forgive me if I seem to be repeating myself. However, any of us who spend time with the Bible know that repetition is among its most important characteristics. We get the same message over and over, until it sinks in. Here’s Leviticus 19:34: “You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And here’s Leviticus five chapters later: “You shall have the same rule for the sojourner and for the native.” Everyone knows Matthew 25:35: “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” But sometimes we forget the wonderfully hopeful verse from the letter to the Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” Bottom line: This is clearly important work for Christians, or at least it was 2,000 years ago.

A member of the Puerto Rico National Guard wades through water in search for people to be rescued from flooded streets in the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona in Salinas, Puerto Rico Sept. 19, 2022. REUTERS/Ricardo Arduengo

O God of all creation, as ocean waters warm, / we grieve the devastation that comes with violent storms. / We pray for people struggling— who need your help and grace / on every flooded island and in each flooded place.

Iris M. Crawford 5-09-2022

Trainees Claude Ridley, Coulee Luger, Jimmy Mote, Trace Harrison, and Red Rock Perkins, under the supervision of instructor Daniel East, work on a project of the Indigenized Energy Initiative on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. / Photo Credit: Sarah Arnoff Yeoman

IN 1876, LAKOTA SIOUX rode on horseback from South Dakota to Montana Territory to help the Northern Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in one of the most important actions of the Great Sioux War.

The battle was inevitable. The rights promised through the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie, which gave the Sioux and Arapaho possession of the Dakota Territory, were being ignored. White miners had come to settle on part of the land that was sacred to the Lakota Sioux. The U.S. government ordered the Indigenous communities to return to their designated reservations. Instead of complying, they banded together as an act of resistance. Led by Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, the Indigenous resistance grew several thousand in number and ultimately defeated Lt. Colonel George Custer and the 7th Calvary—one of the worst U.S. army defeats during the Plains Wars.

Nearly 150 years later, members of the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne have joined forces once again to defend themselves against a new threat to their communal life: fossil fuels.

Bill McKibben 5-09-2022
Post-it note that says "To-Do: Laundry, Groceries, Save Planet"

Illustration by Matt Chase

IN PERHAPS THE most honest prayer in the history of Christendom, a young Augustine (at this point far from a saint) asked the Lord to “make me chaste—but not yet.”

Timing is always the trouble—we put off till tomorrow what we know we should do today, and trouble results. In our lives, and also in our lives as nations and as a world. What is the tragic and hideous war in Ukraine but the result of changes left too long? For instance, we’ve known for many years that Putin’s regime was brutish and careening toward something truly ugly. There’s little doubt that his henchmen assassinated Russian dissidents in the streets outside the Kremlin and Russian exiles in the streets of Britain; they tried (and very nearly succeeded) to kill his main political opponent by poisoning his underwear. But there were luxury apartments to be sold to his apparatchiks (the British capital has been nicknamed Londongrad; Trump’s son boasted that “we have all the funding we need out of Russia”).

And, of course, we’d long known that we needed to do something about climate change—after all, the Arctic is melting, which seems like the kind of sign that doesn’t require much interpretation. But we’re used to the world we live in; doing the work to change our lives was rarely a priority.

Mallory McDuff 3-28-2022

A wicker casket is placed in the soil. / Larkspur Conservation

A relationship with God means our bodies and the earth are not separate.

Members of Indigenous groups from Brazil speak on the stage in George Square as part of the Fridays for Future Scotland march during COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland on Nov. 5, 2021. PA via Reuters Connect

Colonial logic, when applied to political systems, protects power and controls the public narrative. When world leaders use generic terms like “humanity” or phrases like “all humans are responsible for the crisis,” it conceals the responsibility of governments and large corporations. By pointing to humanity in general, they imply that we are all equally responsible for the climate crisis and invisibilize the efforts of Indigenous leaders in the fight for climate justice.

Liuan Huska 11-17-2021
The outline of a gift box made from twigs, vines, and leaves

Illustration by Matt Chase

IN JULY, my children and I crouched at the edge of the continent along a trail spitting hikers onto Kalaloch Beach 1 in Olympic National Park. Eyes at dirt level, we marveled at a hidden-in-sight banana slug, oozing exquisite slime and swiveling its tentacles. Off Interstate 90 in Montana, we held our breath as a bald eagle swooped over a deer grazing just across the fence from our car. Throughout our epic road trip from Illinois to the Pacific Northwest, I kept saying, “Wow, but ...”

My wonder was tinged with a sense of impending loss. With fires devouring unthinkable amounts of forest just over the next mountain range and smoke clouding the skies for 1,500 miles, the beauty in front of me seemed to be slipping away. In the end, I took home more pain than joy.

Many of us live with this bone-deep grief over what we have lost in the natural world, and with anticipatory grief over what is about to be lost. It is right to feel this deeply, to lament and give voice to our pain in community. And then what? Grief, pain, and anger can move us to action, but they only carry us so far. To sustain our work, we need joy.

Bill McKibben 10-19-2021
An illustration of open theater curtains with a globe pattern on them

Illustration by Matt Chase. 

WHO SHOULD CARE about the future? Young people, obviously, because they have to live in it. And they have done their job. I spent the ’80s and the ’90s and much of the ’00s listening to my peers complain about “kids today” and how they were apathetic and how it wasn’t like the ’60s and on and on. I don’t know if it was ever true, but it clearly hasn’t been in recent years: On issues from civil rights to prison reform to the one I know best—climate change—young people have been firmly in the forefront.

When I founded 350.org, the first iteration of a global climate movement, it was alongside seven college students—and it was their generation that built that movement out, from the divestment campaigners on college campuses to the Sunrise Movement that spurred the Green New Deal to Greta Thunberg and the many like her who built the powerhouse Fridays for Future coalition.

But they cannot do it alone. They need, in particular, their grandparents and great-grandparents—the boomers and the silent generation above them. Those of us in those categories are the fastest-growing demographic in the country—we add 10,000 to our ranks each day (though, of course, we subtract some too). We vote in huge numbers, and we have ended up with most of the assets, fairly or not.

Illustration of a blue hand holding a farmland scene in its palm

Illustration by Michael George Haddad

THE COVID-19 CRISIS has intensified food insecurity and hunger globally and exposed the failings of a profit-driven, industrialized agriculture and food system.

In August, an alliance of more than 500 African faith leaders and smallholder farmers delivered a strong message to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: “The Gates Foundation’s support for the expansion of intensive industrial scale agriculture is deepening the humanitarian crisis.”

Faith communities and farmers want the Gates Foundation to stop funding the so-called “green revolution technologies” through the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). African faith leaders are witnessing the negative impact of industrialized farming to the land and the well-being of their communities. They are calling for a shift to sustainable and agroecological farming that works in local contexts for people and does not harm the land.

Liuan Huska 9-23-2021

Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World, by Katharine Hayhoe. Atria/One Signal Publishers

AMONG THE MANY postures toward climate change, I am in the “alarmed” camp. I see indicators of a planet on the verge of widespread ecosystem collapse and want to sound the bells for everyone else to wake up and do something. Unfortunately, writes climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, some of the ways we try to wake people up can have the opposite effect.

Saving Us expands on Hayhoe’s popular TED Talk on the most important thing you can do about climate change: talk about it. The book explores why piling on sobering facts and predictions can make someone dismissive about climate change even more antagonistic, and even make those who are concerned and alarmed check out in despair. Though Hayhoe includes plenty of climate science, what makes this book worth reading are the insights she shares from social science.

Gina Ciliberto 9-08-2021

Coat of arms of the Holy See and Vatican City, the Emblem of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I, and coat of arms for the Diocese of Canterbury. 

For the first time, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion came together to issue a joint statement.

In “A Joint Message for the Protection of Creation,” Pope Francis, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury stressed that Christians need to take part in mitigating climate change. The statement urged individuals and public leaders to play their part in “choosing life” for the future of the planet, and warned of the urgency of environmental sustainability, its impact on poverty, and the importance of global cooperation.

Avery Davis Lamb 6-23-2021
The cover of 'The Ministry for the Future' shows a person walking through a tunnel that leads to the sky.

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

IT BEGINS IN the way the 2020s could end: with a climate change-driven heat wave that kills 20 million people in India. Kim Stanley Robinson’s work of science fiction is heavy on the science and light on the fiction. Indeed, the “fiction” of this novel reads more prophetic than futuristic. Just like biblical prophets, Robinson is less interested in predicting a far-off world than seeing our current world for what it is. The words of the prophet Jeremiah would fit snugly in this book: “Disaster overtakes disaster, the whole land is laid waste” (4:20).

Robinson’s vision of a response to climate change veers on the edge of technological utopianism without ever falling into the abyss. The airships, cryptocurrencies, and drones of Robinson’s novel are not simply fantastic simulations of a utopian (or dystopian) world. They are pragmatic responses to a world that is burning and melting under our feet. While the need for technological solutions is so apparent in Ministry (and in our own world), Robinson’s hope is not located in technology. Rather, the tentative hope of Ministry is found in the unwavering humanity of its many heroes.

Randy Woodley 3-23-2021
An illustration of an Aristotle bust among a machine used for deforestation.

Illustration by Eduardo Ramón Trejo

CHANGE IS DIFFICULT, great change even more so. Yet some things change naturally over time with seemingly little effort—the course of a river, the shore of an ocean, the direction a tree decides to grow. When humans interfere with the course of nature in an unnatural and thoughtless manner—such as by damming a river or clear-cutting a forest—we are bound to experience unknown and often unwanted consequences. But perhaps reverting to more natural systems of change will not be as difficult as we imagine.

Western civilization is just beginning to realize that nature is wiser and more powerful than we are and will, without a doubt, outlive us. She knows her mind, and she understands what keeps life in balance. Because today we seldom see nature in her unmolested glory, we rarely consider the degree to which Western civilization has changed that which is natural to what is now unnatural. Since time immemorial, Indigenous people have learned to observe natural change and tried to flow with it, or bend it to their benefit.

Now, like never before, we need people with keen observational skills to help us recover and retain the truths in nature. Indigenous wisdom’s long relationship with creation is based on an ethic of harmony, humility, and respect. Such efforts need not always contradict Western notions of science. Modern scientific methods often confirm the truths that our Indigenous teachers have always known. Science verifies what scientists observe. In more than one sense, our Indigenous elders have always been scientifically aware. Western scientists use tools that tell them the hydrological cycles have changed. Our elders know the huckleberries are ripening a month later than they always have. I have heard from elders in the past few years that our medicine plants are not nearly as potent as they used to be. They say the earth is weakening; an unnatural change has occurred. Western science has come to the same realization by explaining that as more carbon is released into the atmosphere, plants are less able to develop the nutrients needed. Both observe verifiable knowledge. But one is abstract while the other is personal. What modern science tells Western society about creation, our Indigenous “scientists” have been observing for millennia. What we can agree upon together is that the earth is changing, unnaturally, and it is not a good change.

Néstor Medina 12-01-2020
A surrealistic illustration of plants with human legs, dancing in a circle around a fire, birds and flowers above them.

Illustration by Soma

I GREW UP IN Guatemala, a country where the Indigenous people make up more than 50 percent of the population. I was told growing up that my ancestors were Europeans (Spaniards and Italians). Even though I was identified as ladino (not Indigenous) by Guatemalan official nomenclature, I was attracted to Mayan languages and communities (K’iche’, Kaqchikel, and Q’eqchi’, among others).

I felt a resonance with their orientation toward the earth, their deep sense of communal cohesion, and their mystical world of ancestral spirits. After doing some genealogical work, I learned that one of my grandfathers was Mayan.

I began to notice practices and attitudes in my family that I was certain were of Indigenous origins: my dad’s idiosyncratic disregard for manufactured material goods in favor of plants; my uncle’s pouring of alcohol on the floor before serving a drink; my mom’s smoking of cigars as an invitation to the spirits and San Simón to be with us in our gatherings. All have an Indigenous provenance.

As I learned more, I recognized those familial practices as part of a millennia-old cosmovision and mindset, a way of viewing the cosmic order of a civilization through which Indigenous peoples organize everyday activities, even today. Each is a theo-ethical gesture for safeguarding their relationship with life itself, in all life’s diversity.