climate crisis

THE IRRITATING THING about the Bible—well, one irritating thing about it—is that it keeps instructing us, in unambiguous terms, to do things we don’t want to.

On the first page it tells us to take care of the earth, which is quite embarrassing now that we’re fiddling with the thermostat and killing off large numbers of the creatures that we are supposed to look after.

Of course, it gets much worse once we reach the gospels and we’re told to take care of the poor and—well, I mean, come on, stop the steal. Nastiest of all is the quite specific demand to welcome the stranger. Clearly, we’re not into that—nearly three-quarters of white Christians voted for the candidate whose senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, once said, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil.”

These various unreasonable demands become even more unreasonable as time goes on, because they start to converge. Because we failed to take care of the earth, instead burning massive amounts of coal and gas and oil, we raised the temperature, and because hurricanes draw their power from the heat in the ocean, we now have more of them—this past season we set a record in the Atlantic, with a nonstop procession of storms that exhausted the regular alphabet and drove us deep into the Greek one. Hence, it was storms Eta and Iota that crashed into Central America in November, causing incredible wreckage: By some early estimates, Honduras saw damage equivalent to 40 percent of its GDP. (Katrina, one of America’s worst storms, cost us 1 percent of our GDP.) Not surprisingly, Honduras is now an even more difficult place to live—indeed, for many people an impossible one, given that food and shelter, which are actually necessary for survival, can’t be found.

WHILE THE CLIMATE crisis has reconfigured our relationships with each other, other creatures, and our places, fiction has not. It remains focused on the human’s internal, moral journey, as if human life is something circumscribed from the rest of creaturely life. Gun Island is a much-needed antidote to the anthropocentric ideal of the novel, one that meets the age of climate change with stories that are true to the new dimensions of relationships unfolding around us.

In his first novel since his nonfiction masterpiece The Great Derangement, in which he laid out a vision for a climate-changed literature, Ghosh illustrates the agency of nature: how in this Anthropocene age, shaped by human activity, our porous lives are intertwined with those of our nonhuman interlocutors, who become increasingly present in our lives through climate-change-driven typhoons, fires, and species migration. He tells a story of stories, not recasting the tales of modernity, but reaching back into Bengali folklore to guide us through this uncanny age. For, as one of Gun Island’s characters says, “Only through stories can invisible or inarticulate or silent beings speak to us; it is they who allow the past to reach out to us.”

Before we run head first into 2020 and all of the stressors of the coming election season, we wanted first to reflect on last year — to take a look at the top 10 stories that shaped our coverage, the commentary that spurred conversations, and the reflections that stirred the soul — and how the work will continue in the new year.

No matter where we are, the climate crisis is not far from home.

For some time it has largely been the world’s most vulnerable, in the global south, bearing the brunt of suffering and climate-induced devastation. Those who have the power to change things have so far all but ignored “the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth,” as Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical a little over a year ago.

But just this past month in the United States — one of the world’s wealthiest nations — we have seen historic droughts, unprecedented floods in Louisiana, and wildfires in California, killing many and displacing tens of thousands.

Expressing her opinion that climate change is no longer about energy efficient behavior but rather about national policy, spiritual leader Marilyn Sewell argues the importance of what it takes to preserve the Earth’s atmosphere. Expressing her concerns about the lack of community and church involvement, Sewell insists policy immersion is crucial toward resolving future matters surrounding climate change. The Huffington Post reports:

So where is the parish church in all of this? Mostly silent, it seems. Churches continue to be concerned with individual sin as opposed to systemic sin, even in regard to climate change. Congregants may be admonished to recycle and change their light bulbs, but not to become politically active. The fact is we're way beyond changing our light bulbs. We need to bring that unhappy, startling truth to the pulpits of our land.

Read more here.

Good news: Evangelical Christians are stepping back up to overcome the climate crisis.  

After months of careful preparation, a new national advocacy initiative called Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (Y.E.C.A.) has just gone live. 

In seeking to live as Christ’s disciples, Y.E.C.A. has come to see the climate crisis not only as a pressing challenge to justice and freedom, but also as a profound threat to “the least of these” with whom Jesus identifies in Matthew 25. The early effects of climate change are already impacting many of our neighbors, both in the U.S. and around the world, and our time to act is running short.