IF YOU’RE LIKE me, your first response to the title of Eduardo Sasso’s book was “What?!” But, as unusual as the pairing of climate change and sex is, Sasso proves that their association is fitting. A Climate of Desire argues that the challenge of today’s climate crisis is ultimately not about technology, science, or political will. Rather, like sex, it’s “about desire: about what we long for and about the consequences of our longings.”
Our longings have always been ripe for co-optation. Sasso’s book shows how, throughout history, from the tower of Babel to the tech frontier of modern California, people have been tempted to forsake their God-given humanity for an artificial substitute. Our problem today, though, is that our refusal to learn from the past comes with an exorbitant price tag. Fossil fuels have enabled the unrestrained indulgence of our misplaced desires, transforming our cities into engines of unprecedented ecological devastation.
In A Climate of Desire, Sasso reminds us that the Spirit-inspired imagination of ancient truth-tellers such as Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Jesus himself has a great deal to offer us in our current predicament. Calling their contemporaries to repentance, these holy dreamers denounced the harlotry of cities and nations that were running after false gods of wealth and power. They proclaimed visions of the holy that bordered on the psychedelic and grasped that at the heart of injustice and violence is misplaced desire.
Sasso finds tremendous strength in these ancient voices. But he also gains inspiration from recent campaigns for civil rights and contemporary initiatives for ecological renewal, such as the Transition Network and the fossil-free divestment movement.
A Climate of Desire is part autobiography, part history, part biblical exegesis, and part social change handbook. Where the imagination of modern Western culture has been colonized by a materialistic, industrialized vision of a desacralized cosmos, Sasso invites us to liberate our hearts and minds to dream ancient dreams again.
“We can orient our cities toward sacred relationships of ecological romance, even as our climate of apathy changes into one of faith, hope, and love,” he writes. Amen to that.
All in all, A Climate of Desire offers a compelling revisioning of humanity and our place in the divine ecosystem of creation. While Sasso’s metaphoric, evocative language at times risks exaggeration and can be hard to follow, he understands something critical: We are ultimately moved to act not by argument and statistics, but by story, vision, and love.
It is Sasso’s love for the living Source who invites all creation into a sacred romance that saturates this book. And it is this sort of love that will give readers the courage to break with the destructive systems of the modern-day Babylon in which we are enmeshed, to once again be agents of transformation within creation. Such love spurs us on with hope, at a time when a healthy ecological future for this planet never looked so bleak.
We cannot simply think our way into a new way of being in the world. For a healthier climate and world, we must be swept off our feet.
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