Climate change

THERE IS A reasonable argument, I suppose, that Christians should eschew insurance — after all, the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, and letting tomorrow be anxious for itself. But almost all of us have it, and it is one of the most interesting parts of our economy: In essence, we’ve asked insurers to be the people who understand the concept of risk for us.

So, we should probably pay some attention when — as happened this spring — State Farm and Allstate both announced they would no longer be writing new homeowners policies in California. Why? In a word, fire — or, as that good neighbor State Farm put it, “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.” There’s simply too much chance that any given home in the Golden State will burn to the ground in any given year, and when it does it costs too much to replace. Something of the same is happening along the Gulf Coast, where increasingly state governments are becoming insurers of last resort — and where, when a hurricane approaches, economists now have models to show if the destruction is likely to bankrupt any companies.

You would think that this experience would be enough to convince insurers to become activists in the climate fight. After all, their basic tool — the actuarial table, which lets them predict and thus hedge risk — depends on the world working in the future as it has in the past, something that’s increasingly a sucker’s bet. But truth be told, insurers go on investing vast sums in the fossil fuel industry, and even underwriting new pipelines or coal mines. (One is reminded of the Leninist dictum that capitalists will sell you the rope with which to hang them.)

Some insurance companies still use the phrase “act of God” to describe fires or other natural disasters for which no human agent can be held responsible. But we need to stop putting God on the hook: These disasters are happening because governments are drunk on the fossil fuel industry’s deadly Kool-Aid.

Can blowing up a pipeline be a form of nonviolent protest? Director Daniel Goldhaber’s new film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, makes a strong case in the affirmative — even if the activists at its center could care less about being called “terrorists” by the American empire.

I NODDED ALONG with everything in the holistic permaculture course until day four, when things went off the rails. My family and I were at a farm in Bolivia, volunteering and learning about land design, groundwater recharging, alternative energy technologies, and returning fertility to the earth. Day four’s topic was community-building, which sounded innocuous enough.

Our host and instructor was a man from New Zealand who has farmed two acres in a remote Bolivian valley for nearly a decade. He talked about the importance of local decision-making, how focusing on global problems over which we have little influence can leave us feeling disempowered. Human-induced climate change, he added, is another story the oligarchs at the top are telling to stoke our fears and get us to surrender our freedoms. That and the pandemic.

Our host’s views are extreme. But he is among a growing group of back-to-the-land conservatives who don’t fit my categories. He disbelieves mainstream climate science, yet he is installing solar ovens, composting toilets, and bioconstructed buildings on his property. He scoffs at “wokeism,” which he sees as another form of top-down control, yet he deeply respects the local Indigenous community and attends the Quechua-only neighborhood meetings with surrounding farmers.

When most people consider the holy month of Ramadan, the 30 days of fasting and reflection for Muslims, they may not picture a millennial in a hijab connecting the Qur’an with environmental justice through Instagram hashtags like #greenramadan and #ecomuslim. But Saarah Yasmin Latif is on a mission to help people of all religious traditions connect their faith with individual and collective acts to sustain the earth.

What does it look like to parent children in line with the radical values of restorative justice and communal care in a world of injustice, where safety and community are not equally available to all? As the threats of fascism and climate change make parenting seem dangerous or even unethical to many people, what principles can guide us in the radical risk of making new life?

WHEN I SPEAK on the phone with Anne Symens-Bucher, she tells me about the end of St. Francis of Assisi’s life. Francis “was losing sight, suffering from the pain of the stigmata, and on the margins of the community that had grown up to follow him,” Symens-Bucher explains. “This is the moment he writes the ‘Canticle of Creation.’” Symens-Bucher is one of the founders of Canticle Farm in Oakland, Calif., a community of eight households where the fences are taken down, giving access to a large garden in the middle. Canticle Farm is made up of people who, in Symens-Bucher’s words, are “experimenting at the intersections of faith-based, social justice-based, and Earth-based nonviolent activism.” In his canticle, after which this community is named, Francis praises God from a deep sense of kinship with all creation. He sings of “brother fire,” “sister water,” “brother wind,” “mother earth.” Birthed as Francis approaches his own death, it is a vivid, sober-minded song of the interconnectedness of all life.

Western colonialist people have often failed — or refused — to recognize this interconnectedness. Earth, animals, plants, and people suffer from our (and I say “our” because I speak as a white U.S. citizen) denial of this oneness. Soils are depleted, waters and air are poisoned, and sea levels rise and temperatures warm, threatening the most vulnerable among us immediately, and all of us eventually. Perhaps in this time of environmental crisis, we might find a “canticle” moment, one that renews our kinship with creation.

Liz Carlisle explores these questions in Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming. As an environmental scientist looking for healthy soil, Carlisle interviews experts who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color — scientists and farmers engaged in work ranging from bringing buffalo back to the prairie ecosystems of Montana to growing mushrooms on ancestral forest land in North Carolina. Through the process, she realizes that if we’re serious about fighting climate change by rebuilding soil carbon, we’re going to have to address the very roots of the colonialist systems in which we live.

TUESDAY, MARCH 21, is the day for our big national action against the giant banks that are backing the fossil fuel industry.

Why March 21? Because it’s — if you think about it — 32123, simply too good a palindrome to pass up. It’s a countdown to the end of something (our economy’s blithe support for energy sources that scientists tell us we must now forego) and a count up to the real start of a possible transition.

We’ll be out in force across the country, picketing Citibank, Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo branches: Those four giants lead the world in lending to Big Oil. Their offices look like benign tenants of strip malls across America, but in truth each should have a giant smokestack coming out the top, to remind us just how much carbon they produce. (If you have $125,000 in one of these institutions, which lends it out to build pipelines and frack wells, then that money is producing more carbon in a year than all the heating, flying, driving, cooling, and cooking of an average American.)

THE IMAGE THAT first brought Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate to many people’s attention is one that doesn’t even include her.

In January 2020, Nakate was invited to join five other young activists in a climate demonstration during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. An Associated Press photographer snapped a photo of Nakate standing with European climate activists Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson, and Loukina Tille. But when the AP published the photo that afternoon, Nakate wasn’t in it.

“Even now, well over a year after being cropped out of that photograph, it’s hard for me to talk about what happened,” wrote Nakate in her 2021 book A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis. “By cutting me out of the photo they’d originally sent to global media organizations, the AP had denied an African activist a chance to be seen and, possibly, her message to be acknowledged.”

While the AP did some “soul-searching” following the incident, Nakate used the moment to ignite an overdue conversation about the whiteness that has long plagued the global environmental justice movement. “Being cropped out of the photo changed me,” she wrote. “I decided, from my perspective as a young African woman, that I would dedicate as much of my time as possible to addressing the many interlocking facets of the climate crisis, environmental justice, and gender discrimination — and to do so without apology or fear of erasure.”

Nakate founded the Rise Up Movement to amplify the voices of climate activists from Africa and launched a fundraising campaign for the Vash Green Schools Project to bring solar panels and cookstoves to schools across Uganda. At 25, she’s busy. And faced with a global climate emergency, it makes sense. “I don’t often get asked what recharges me,” Nakate told me when we spoke in early August. “But for me, it’s my relationship with the Holy Spirit.”

Raised in an Anglican family, Nakate became a born-again Christian as a teenager. “Activism can be very hard and prayer and attending services (or, in Covid times, watching online) have been extremely important sources of love, grace, and support,” she wrote in the acknowledgments of A Bigger Picture.

“If I feel distraught or disturbed by anything, I know the Holy Spirit will remind me of the peace that surpasses all human understanding,” she later told me. I spoke with Nakate via Zoom about her Christian faith, the role social media plays in her activism, and why we can’t eradicate poverty without addressing the climate crisis. — Christina Colón