Hope in an Age of Despair

The Gospel and the Future of Life on Earth

Jonathan Moo, Robert S White

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781844748778
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783590162
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

In the face of climate change and other environmental trends, it is easy to be pessimistic about the future. Philosophers, film-makers, environmentalists, politicians and even senior scientists increasingly resort to apocalyptic rhetoric to warn us that a so-called 'perfect storm' of factors is coming together in a way that threatens the future of life on earth. Do these dire predictions amount to nothing more than ideological scaremongering, perhaps hyped up for political or personal ends? Or are there good reasons for thinking that we may indeed be facing a crisis unprecedented in its scale and in the severity of its effects? Jonathan Moo and Robert White encourage us to assess the evidence for ourselves. Their own conclusion is that there is in fact plenty of cause for concern.

1. APOCALYPSE NOW? LIVING IN THE LAST DAYS

It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine).

R.E.M.1

Celebrating the end

North Idaho is a thinly settled region of forests, lakes and mountains narrowly separating the states of Washington and Montana in the north-western United States. Known mostly for logging, mining and outdoor recreation, it is a beautiful place and I (Jonathan) am grateful to live not far away in Spokane, Washington. But the wilds of North Idaho have an unfortunate reputation for attracting radical sects and fringe groups of all sorts, ranging from religious cults to militias to white supremacists. Most infamously, it was the site of the 1992 Ruby Ridge siege, where the combination of an apocalyptically minded family fearful of government conspiracy and heavily armed federal agents led to a shoot-out and several deaths. The stereotype is sufficiently strong that when I came across a New York Times Magazine article provocatively titled ‘The End is Near (Yay!)’ and featuring a group based in the North Idaho town of Sandpoint, I assumed that I was about to read about yet another religious cult heralding the impending ‘end of the world’.2

As it turned out, however, the group highlighted in the article is not nearly so far from the mainstream as you might expect. It does indeed anticipate the end of civilization as we know it, but it is not a narrow religious sect – or even religious at all in the traditional sense – and its beliefs about the future mirror those of many in our society. The movement of which it is a part, the Transition Network, was started by a teacher called Rob Hopkins in Cornwall, England. It has followers in towns and cities all around the world, including places like Sandpoint, Idaho but also Bologna, Italy; Los Angeles, California; São Paulo, Brazil; Houston, Texas; Tokyo, Japan; Portland, Maine; Sydney, Australia; and Cambridge, England.3 The mix of science, economics, politics and social analysis that grabs the attention of its followers is regularly the subject of newspaper and magazine articles and features in popular books and films. But what is perhaps most worrying for those of us tempted to dismiss groups like the Transition Network is that many of today’s leading scientists share their rather bleak assessment of our civilization’s future. When no less a figure than Martin Rees (formerly President of the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s national academy of science) suggests that there is only a 50% chance that civilization as we know it will make it through the present century,4 it is probably time that the rest of us sat up and took notice.

This book is written to help readers understand why scientists are making such apparently radical claims. More importantly, it is written to help readers consider how Christians might respond if we take seriously what the Bible has to say about the gospel and the future of life on earth. In a world increasingly tempted to despair in the face of dysfunctional politics and economic and ecological crises, we need now more than ever to be able to articulate clearly the hope we have in Christ – and to embody that hope in our lives and actions.

Compared to some other recent movements, the Transition Network actually adopts a relatively optimistic stance towards the future: ‘engaged optimism’ is how its founder, Hopkins, describes it. Its followers embrace the changes that are thought necessary to ‘transition’ from our present unsustainable way of life to a more sustainable one as they seek to mitigate the effects of climate change and to strengthen the resilience of local communities. There are many other thinkers and scientists, however, who are much more pessimistic about the future, and their numbers are growing.

Paul Kingsnorth, the leader of a UK-based group calling itself Dark Mountain, claims that there is no longer any hope that we can prevent catastrophic climate change and environmental collapse. He urges us essentially to give up on the present and to focus on getting ready for the sort of world that might emerge after the environ­mental apocalypse that he expects in the relatively near future. Dark Mountain garnered publicity shortly after its founding in 2009 when the Guardian newspaper published a debate between Kingsnorth and the well-known political and environmental journalist George Monbiot.5 Monbiot argued strongly against what he saw as Kingsnorth’s defeatism, observing that movements like Dark Mountain serve only to allow those who exploit the earth for their own ends to go on doing so and thus to hasten the realization of their own apocalyptic predictions (predictions that, Monbiot pointed out, would see billions of people condemned to a ruinous future). But what was most striking about the debate between Monbiot and Kingsnorth was the extent to which they basically agreed about how the future is likely to turn out. Although they call for very different responses to the threats facing life on earth – and Monbiot clings tenaciously to the hope that we might still avert catastrophe (the hope that also motivates Hopkins and his Transition Network) – even Monbiot concedes that, given the way things are going, the outlook for our future is dark and foreboding.

A perfect storm...and other forecasts

The notion that a so-called ‘perfect storm’ of factors are coming together in a way that threatens the future of life on earth is no longer the unique preserve of bearded prophets, street preachers and religious fundamentalists. John Beddington, the UK’s chief scientist, provoked debate a few years ago when he suggested that we might begin witnessing the catastrophic effects of just such a ‘perfect storm’ as soon as 2030. The accusations of scaremongering that ensued suggest that 2030 was perhaps just a little too close for comfort even for a public that has grown used to terrifying pre­dictions about events fifty or a hundred years down the road.6 The natural history presenter David Attenborough recently admitted that, in his view, ‘the world is in terrible trouble...Am I optimistic about the future? No, not at all. But that’s irrelevant. It’s imperative that you do something, even if you don’t think it’s going to do any good.’ 7

The surest sign of the popularity of apocalyptic rhetoric about the environment, however, is that even politicians occasionally get into the act. In the run-up to the Copenhagen Summit on climate change in late 2009, the UK’s then prime minister, Gordon Brown, warned of the danger of impending ‘climate catastrophe’.8 And of course former US vice-president Al Gore’s controversial film An Inconvenient Truth frightened plenty of people with its computer-generated images of rising sea levels inundating New York City (despite the fact that few scientists expect anything like that to happen for centuries), and unfortunately also further politicized what was already a deeply polarizing issue.

The film industry unsurprisingly has taken advantage of the cinematic potential of our fears about the future. A few movies explicitly reflect contemporary concerns about the environment or climate change (The Day After Tomorrow, 2004; The Age of Stupid, 2009), whereas many more invent their own apocalyptic scenarios (Children of Men, 2006; I Am Legend, 2007; The Book of Eli, 2010; Melancholia, 2011), or leave undetermined the causes of civilization’s end (The Road, 2009, based on Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel of the same name). A recent National Geographic ‘reality’ television show in the United States, Doomsday Preppers, reveals just how serious are some people’s fears, featuring a variety of Americans preparing for disaster and the breakdown of civilization that they expect in the not-so-distant future. (Their preparations generally seem to involve growing their own produce and storing food, water and lots of guns and ammunition.) Meanwhile, in the more rarefied realm of philosophy, the popular Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has written a book about our age appropriately entitled Living in the End Times.9

Sociologists can no doubt come up with their own explanations for the popularity of this recent talk of impending apocalypse; such language has been around for millennia, even if the causes of the predicted catastrophes have varied.10 What we are concerned with in this book, however, is first to assess the scientific data that provides the fuel upon which today’s rhetoric burns. Do all of these dire predictions, as many pundits suggest, amount to nothing more than ideological scaremongering, perhaps hyped up for political or personal ends? Or are there good reasons for thinking that we may indeed be facing a crisis unprecedented in its scale and in the severity of its effects on life on earth?

We encourage readers to assess the evidence for themselves. We have tried to help by summarizing what seems to us to be the most relevant data in the following two chapters. As you will discover, our own assessment leads us to conclude that there is in fact plenty of cause for concern – and that is part of the reason why we have written this book. Climate change, we will suggest, is only the most publicized (and, admittedly, potentially the most far-reaching) threat that our planet faces in the coming decades. There is a wide range of much more obvious, interrelated and damaging impacts that an ever-growing number of people consuming more and more are having on the planet upon which we all depend.

To give you a quick idea of the sort of things that we have in mind, here is one way of understanding our situation as it has been summarized recently in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals:

[A] group of leading academics argue that humanity must stay within defined boundaries for a range of essential Earth-system processes to avoid catastrophic environmental change...They propose that for three of these – the nitrogen cycle, the rate of loss of species and anthropogenic climate change – the maximum acceptable limit has already been transgressed. In addition, they say that humanity is fast approaching the boundaries for freshwater use, for converting forests and other natural ecosystems to cropland and urban areas, and for acidification of the oceans. Crossing even one of these planetary boundaries would risk triggering abrupt or irreversible environmental changes that would be very damaging or even catastrophic for society.11

Consider what these scientists are claiming: crossing even one of these so-called planetary boundaries ‘would risk triggering abrupt or irreversible environmental changes that would be very damaging or even catastrophic for society’ – and we have already crossed three of them and are rapidly approaching three more. The basis for such claims and their reliability are discussed in the following chapter, and there you will also have the chance to examine the hard data more closely for yourself. We urge readers to take some time to consider what some of the best biologists, earth scientists and climat­ologists have to report to us as they monitor and study our incredible planet. We recognize that many of us have grown cynical and weary in the face of the deluge of apocalyptic rhetoric with which politicians, the press and all manner of special interest groups inundate us. Nevertheless, it will not do for us simply to ignore what is going on in the world around us. Above all, as we will argue later in this book, Christians have a particular responsibility to seek to understand the world in which we live.

How to respond?

If, as we have been forced to conclude ourselves, consideration of the scientific data does give cause for serious concern, that is not to say that the next step for us all is simply to jump on the bandwagon of secular environmentalists or ‘climate change Cassandras’ (as some activists have recently been called). As Christians, our vision of the future (and hence our view of the present too) is necessarily going to be different from those who do not share our biblical hope. Our task in the second half of this book is to reflect on just what difference it makes to how we respond to the environmental challenges facing us if we take seriously the picture of the future that Scripture paints for us. What does the Bible say about the future of the earth, and what difference does that make to how we live now? What should be distinctive about how Christians engage with the sort of issues that are summarized in the next two chapters?

Most of us, Christian or not, have probably not entirely bought into the apocalyptic rhetoric that marks many of today’s discussions of climate change and the environment. Many of us, however, might find ourselves vaguely identifying with one or more of the categories of response that we catalogue below. Do you find yourself in any of these groups?

1. Ignorance-is-blissers: The issues concerning environmental degradation, resource depletion, biodiversity loss and climate change are complicated and heavily disputed; many of us therefore simply cannot be bothered to try to understand them, or we find it too difficult and time consuming to assess the evidence for ourselves. The issues can also seem irrelevant to our day-to-day lives, and so – we think – they are best left to others.
2. Seekers: This group have a sincere interest in the issues but simply do not know what to make of all the debates over climate change and the environment. They need to be convinced that concerns about such things are well founded and based on facts before they will consider taking any action. Many in the USA in particular are suspicious of the motivations behind the relevant scientific research, and the media has often fed such suspicions (partly because of the effective work of the next group) and left them uncertain of what to make of it all.
3. Deniers: It is possible to be convinced to some degree about the severity of a threat but not be prepared seriously to face the consequences or be willing to do anything about it – especially when we think it might involve some sort of personal sacrifice. Our denial of the reality or the significance of environmental challenges often stems simply from our lack of clear information or our lack of interest in spending time worrying about it; but in a few cases, as in the well-documented campaign by a handful of oil companies to discredit climate science (a campaign deliberately modelled on the tobacco industry’s attempt to discredit medical findings about the effects of tobacco use),12 denial stems from an unwillingness to contemplate changing the way we do things and a blatant desire to prevent any new information from coming to light that might get in the way of ‘business as usual’.
4. Problem-solvers: This group represent quite a spectrum, from those who are convinced that there are quick, relatively painless technological fixes to most of the challenges that we face today, to those who think that radical economic and social restructuring is necessary if we are to prevent environmental catastrophe. Some in this group are progressive optimists who have faith in the ingenuity and potential of humankind; others might find themselves nearer despair about the future but nonetheless get on with trying to change things for the better.
5. Despairers: People who have despaired about the future of life on earth are often those who have spent years trying to change things but have seen little progress. Some are already suggesting that it is too late to prevent catastrophic climate change or catastrophic environmental collapse of one sort or another and that we would be better off at this point to focus our money and our efforts on adaptation.
6. Post-apocalypse hopers: The Dark Mountain group would fit in this category. For people in this group, collapse is inevitable, but they are intrigued by what might emerge afterwards – perhaps a smaller human community living more sustainably on the earth or, in radical versions, an earth without human beings at all (the sort of future envisioned in Alan Weisman’s creative thought experiment The World Without Us).13 There are few people who are likely to find themselves in this category at the moment, but it may grow in popularity if things in coming years do indeed begin to look as bad as some predict. There is a rather obvious parallel between this secular hope and certain popular versions of Christian hope, even if the nature of the ‘apocalypse’ and the ensuing future age envisaged are quite different.

As you might have guessed, we do not find any of these categories adequate for capturing what a distinctively Christian response should look like – although we do hope that a biblical perspective on the future will prompt many of us to enter into the difficult tasks taken on by those whom we have labelled ‘problem-solvers’. But if the Christian gospel fundamentally reorientates us in our relationship with God and his world, then there ought to be something fundamentally different in our approach and in our attitude towards how we engage with our fellow human beings and with the rest of creation.

Looking ahead

It might surprise some readers that we have decided to focus on what the Bible says about the future rather than on, for example, the doctrine of creation or the scope of Christian mission or the impli­cations of loving God and neighbour. These indeed can all serve as compelling, biblically rooted starting points in a discussion of how Christians might respond to environmental challenges. But – as is amply attested by some of the responses to environmental issues that we have summarized above – our view of the future can and does have a profound effect on how we engage with the present. This is no less true for Christians than it is for anyone else, and Christians have sometimes been accused precisely of letting our view of the future world affect our involvement (or lack of involvement) in the present world. The biblical view of creation is in any case directed towards the future promised us in Christ, and for Christians creation can hardly be considered apart from new creation. The scope and contours of biblical hope have important implications for how we express Christian love and charity. ‘The greatest of these is love,’ the apostle Paul reminds us; but of course he also tells us of the necessity of faith and hope for Christian living now.

In chapter 4 we discuss at greater length the importance of thinking carefully about what Scripture teaches about the future – and in particular about the future of the non-human creation. We also deal there with some criticisms of Christian eschatology (the doctrine of the ‘last things’) that have been made by those who find it more of a hindrance than a help when addressing environmental issues. Before we get there, however, the next two chapters attempt to summarize the results of an up-to-date ‘health check’ of our planet. What is the status of life on earth today according to the best insights that science can offer us? What is its future prognosis?

Chapter 2 treats a wide range of factors that are critical for the functioning of the earth’s ecosystems and for human life and well-being, many of them see...

Table of contents

• Hope in an Age of Despair
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1. APOCALYPSE NOW? LIVING IN THE LAST DAYS
• 2. LIFE ON EARTH TODAY
• 3. GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE
• 4. WHY HOPE? THE GOSPEL AND THE FUTURE
• 5. BRINGING NEW TESTAMENT HOPE DOWN TO EARTH
• 6. COSMIC CATASTROPHE?
• 7. JESUS, A THIEF IN THE NIGHT AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
• 8. REVELATION AND THE RENEWAL OF ALL THINGS
• 9. FINDING JOY IN AN ACTIVE AND LIVING HOPE
• AFTERWORD: PRACTICAL RESOURCES
• NOTES