Climate change

THE EARTH SEEMS ablaze. Each year, flames appear more savage, more far-ranging, and more inescapable. The prophecy of Ezekiel is coming to pass: “They shall go out from one fire, and another fire shall devour them” (15:7). The planet is, as some see it, careening toward a secular apocalypse.

To be caught between two fires is an old notion. But a lot has changed since Ezekiel’s warning. Today, we do not have to cope with two fires but with three. The first is the fire that has burned as long as terrestrial vegetation has existed. The second is the fire that humans tamed from the first. The third involves burning fossil fuels. The three fires together are shaping our world, which makes humanity uniquely suited to serve as a steward, for we are Earth’s fire creature, the only one with the systematic capacity to start and stop flame.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION HAS a long heritage of fire myth, lore, religion, and science. Early Indo-Europeans seem to have worshiped a fire deity. Of the 12 ancient Olympians, two were gods of fire — Vesta for the hearth, Vulcan for the forge. Ritual fire became a fundamental practice of Zoroastrians, among the first of the monotheisms. New colonies or dislocated peoples would take fire from their mother city to literally “rekindle” its offspring. The hearth fire, most famously in Rome, stood for both family and state. Pyromancy, the practice of divining meaning in flames, is an old practice.

The June release of a Climate Vigil The Porter’s Gate Worship Project aims to nudge Christians toward climate action, but it isn’t alone among contenders to inspire the climate movement. For over 20 years, Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, a Presbyterian minister from New York, has written hymns for the times, including one for the 2021 UN climate talks held in Scotland and several to recognize increasing natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, and floods. Fossil Free PCUSA, a campaign within the Presbyterian Church (USA) has used hymns in protests, including songs by Christian artist Matthew Black.

One hundred- and eight-degrees Fahrenheit. According to the University of Washington, that June day in 2021 was the hottest day ever recorded in the city of Seattle. And my fourth-floor apartment did not have air conditioning.

“MOMMY, WHY DON'T people care about the trees?”

I lay on the floor feeling the weight in my chest. I can hear a constellation of starlings gathering in the silver maple out my window. Every breath takes work to keep the airways open against the anxiety that has grasped my body. My youngest’s question was haunting me.

How on earth are we supposed to parent in this moment? Climate catastrophe is upon us. We will know its touch, if we haven’t already, and our children will certainly know it. How do we keep grounded as we move from one crisis to the next?

I reach for a cassette labeled “Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann workshop, 1991.” I blow off the dust and stick it in the tape player. Out comes a voice that was once as common as daily bread: my mother’s voice. Sixteen years after her death, I hear her, clear and steady.

She reads Revelation 12: “A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, with 12 stars on her head for a crown. She was pregnant and in labor, crying out in pain as she was about to give birth.” I listen as my belly, still etched with the stretch marks from when my own body groaned with creation, rises off the floor. “The dragon stood before the woman about to deliver, to devour her child the moment she gave birth.”

I keep breathing; yes, I know this old dragon. And I cry out with this woman and hunger for her company.

Due to climate change, people — entire tribes and cultures — are losing their homes and are being displaced from their lands. Indeed, the United States military needs to be held accountable for polluting the planet. For example, if preventive measures and legislation like the Green New Deal are not enacted to curb U.S. imperialism, more Indigenous peoples will perish due to climate disasters.

In the new apocalyptic movie, religious expression reveals what really matters to people when the world is ending. As a planet-killing comet comes hurtling toward Earth, some characters, like Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), a Ph.D candidate studying astronomy at Michigan State, and her professor, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) take action; others turn toward denial. But all of them, at some point in the movie, pray. How they pray on their final days on Earth says a lot about what they value.

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.

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.