Climate change

Bill McKibben 11-30-2020
Three large cold coins are lined up, each shaped like Pac Man. They are facing a small globe that looks like Earth, as if they are going to consume it.

Illustration by Matt Chase

WHEN WE SAY that “humans are heating up the planet,” we are technically correct, and yet misleading. Humans are indubitably driving climate change—but only some of us.

An Oxfam study released this fall showed that between 1990 and 2015—a period when we poured more carbon into the atmosphere than in all of history before that time—the richest 1 percent of humanity accounted for more of that damage than the entire bottom 50 percent of the species. In case you think that the top 1 percent is Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, remind yourself that in fact it’s anyone whose income tops $109,000 a year—that includes plenty of readers of this magazine. The richest 10 percent of humanity accounts for half of total emissions—that’s everyone whose income is above $38,000. That’s quite likely you; it’s certainly me.

These people are scattered around the world, though the biggest concentrations are in the U.S., the EU, China, and the Middle East; India is appearing in the league tables too, a reminder that inequality is as much a problem within nations as between them. But what’s really sad, of course, is that anyone with a decent income is able to insulate themselves from most of the problems they’re causing. It’s people in poverty—whether in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans or along the delta of the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh—who get hit first and hardest.

Cody J. Sanders 5-14-2020

Image via Pip R. Lagenta/Flickr 

Speculative futurism isn’t mentally escaping into a future that is either far more dystopic than our present or far more utopic than we should expect — nihilistically leaning into our sense of dread and doom, or engaging an escapist fantasy that all will be better someday and calling this ungrounded vision “hope” can both be momentarily comforting. A speculative futurist ecclesiology looks at every fault line exposed by this pandemic alongside every gift and grace it illuminates. 

Christina Colón 4-21-2020

Photo by Harrison Moore on Unsplash.

It’s the first time that a majority of Protestant pastors have according to a new survey by LifeWay Research.

Rishika Pardikar 4-16-2020

The One Trillion Trees Initiative, launched by the World Economic Forum and led by led by the U.N. Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, is, as its name implies, an afforestation/reforestation effort. It was designed to support the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021-2030 announced in March 2019, offered as a “proven measure to fight the climate crisis and enhance food security, water supply and biodiversity.”

Jim Antal 3-26-2020

German energy supplier and utility RWE is reflected in a puddle in Neurath, north-west of Cologne, Germany, Feb. 5, 2020. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

We can make radical change more quickly than we imagined. COVID-19 and climate change demand nothing less. 

The religious community shares a moral responsibility to protect others from the harms of methane pollution and the devastation of climate change. it is our moral responsibility to act now. We must stand for the health of all humanity and work to limit methane pollution in our communities, especially among the most vulnerable.

Andrew J. Wight 3-06-2020

Indigenous women leaders gather at FENAMAD headquarters in Puerto Maldonado, Peru on Sept. 3, 2019. Photo by Andrew J Wight for Sojourners

Across the globe, women are on the front lines of protecting traditional and Indigenous land from threats like mining, ranching, and a range of other challenges – but they often struggle to have their own rights to these lands recognized and respected. But in some places, the church is stepping in.

Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash

A report today released by the United Church of Christ identifies the nation’s “Toxic 100” super polluters, naming the factories and facilities responsible for nearly half the toxic air emissions in hundreds of neighborhoods across 28 states. Alongside the report, Breath to the People: Sacred Air and Toxic Pollution, the UCC provides an interactive map, because they believe parents have the right know where these polluters operate. Like toxic water, toxic air is irreversibly harming children across our nation.

Melody Zhang 2-19-2020

Photo by Alvin Engler on Unsplash

On-the-ground solutions to environmental challenges are becoming the most effective and practical strategy. Cities today are leading the way on climate resilience strategies, which are specific to the city’s infrastructural, geographic, spatial and topographic makeup, through initiatives like 100 Resilience Cities and Climate Ready programs, which help cities prepare for the long-term impacts of climate change.

Meredith Wade 2-12-2020

Of course, dirt also tells stories of human triumph and transgression. With one scan from an X-ray fluorescence gun, you can tell whether a soil sample came from Cambridge or Dorchester, based on the amount of lead particulates present. A Ziploc bag full of dirt is also a history of redlining, white flight, and devastating arson, committed by property owners for whom the cost of maintaining the land surpassed the worth of those who called it home. Dirt is an archive of human attitudes toward the nonhuman world — our hubris in thinking ourselves separate from it, though we arose from it, and will inevitably return to it.

Participants enter the U.N. climate change conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain, Dec. 3, 2019. REUTERS/Susana Vera

The past decade is almost certain to be the hottest on record, weather experts warned on Tuesday, painting a bleak picture of vanishing sea ice, devastating heatwaves, and encroaching seas in a report launched at a climate summit in Spain.

Pope Francis receives a flower after giving a speech at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan Nov. 26, 2019. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/Pool

Pope Francis wrapped up a four-day trip to Japan on Tuesday by turning from the anti-nuclear message that was the backbone of his visit to other key campaigns of his, urging students to defend the earth and show greater compassion.

Holly-Anna Peterson 11-22-2019

Extinction Rebellion protest in New York, October 2019. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

Being baptized at the Trafalgar Square protest site was not a publicity stunt for me. I had been Christened as a child, but still, receiving adult baptism was a choice I didn’t make lightly. I reaffirmed my baptismal vows at Extinction Rebellion because I needed God right beside me.

People make their way through heavy smog on an extremely polluted day with red alert issued, in Shengfang, Hebei province, China Dec. 19, 2016. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj/File Photo

The Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations that it will withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, the first formal step in a one-year process to exit the global pact to fight climate change, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed on Monday.

Photo by Kyle Ellefson on Unsplash

How do we maintain hope when our earth is brutalized daily by the climate disasters brought on by human greed, denial, and consumption?

 Feb. 15, 2019: Protestors with banners at a Youth strike for climate march in central London. Credit: Shutterstock. 

On Friday, Sept. 20, driven by our faith and by our profound concern about climate change, we will be joining young people from around the world in a climate strike. We will join with youth who, frightened by the impact that a hotter planet will have on their lives and angry that adults have done so little in response, are demanding that world leaders take transformative action to address the emergency that we face. Millions of us will take to the streets to demand a right to a future for generations to come.

Bruce R. Krawisz 8-09-2019

70 U.S. healthcare organizations endorsed a report about public health and climate change.

Melody Zhang 8-06-2019

THIS YEAR, THE seasonal rains in Kenya came two months late. “Even the weatherman can’t forecast the weather,” Stephen Katama, a local shopkeeper in Nairobi, told me when I traveled to East Africa in June. “We can’t tell the difference between the summer and winter here anymore.”

During the past two decades, rain in sub-Saharan Africa has increased in frequency and intensity, creating dangerously erratic patterns of rainfall and drought. A single day’s downpour may bring the amount of rainfall normally expected over a period of eight months, wreaking havoc on the livelihoods of countless subsistence farming families across Kenya and Uganda.

Sub-Saharan Africa is among the regions projected to see the worst of climate change in the coming decades. I traveled with the Climate Witness Project, hosted by the Christian Reformed Church in the U.S., to Nakuru, Kenya, and North Teso and Soroti, Uganda, to visit farming communities facing extreme shifts in weather patterns.

Melody Zhang 8-02-2019

Photo taken by Melody Zhang

Thousands of activists gathered in Detroit to perform mass demonstrations on Tuesday afternoon, just hours before the opening of the second presidential primary debate. The effort, spearheaded by Frontline Detroit, a coalition of organizations made up of members deeply impacted by pollution and environmental racism, produced demands for addressing the pervasive environmental and economic injustices that have plagued Detroiters for decades.

Melody Zhang 7-29-2019

Farmer-pastor Samuel Kinuthia tending to his crops. The maize is typically at waist height this time in May, in non-drought-ridden climates.

As the climate crisis intensifies and crystallizes, the tangible effects of climate change today are disproportionately dispersed on both the national and global scale. Communities and entire nations who do the least to contribute to rising greenhouse gas emissions bear the enormous burden of climate disaster first and worst on their bodies and their livelihoods.