Gaia and Climate Change

A Theology of Gift Events

Anne Primavesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415471572
• eBook ISBN: 9781134029570
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

James Lovelock's Gaia theory revolutionized the understanding of our place and role in the global environment. It is now accepted that our activities over the past two hundred years have contributed to and accelerated the extreme weather events associated with climate change. The fact that those activities materialized, for the most part, from within Western Christian communities makes it imperative to assess and to change their theological climate: one characterized by routine use of violent, imperialist images of God.

The basis for change explored here is that of gift events, particularly as evidenced in Jesus's life and sayings. Its legacy of love of enemies and forgiveness offers a basis for nonviolent theological and practical approaches to our situatedness within the community of life. These are also Gaian responses, as they include foregoing a perception of ourselves as belonging to an elect group given power by God over earth's life-support systems and over all those dependent on them, whether human or more-than-human. The degree to which we change this self-perception will determine how we affect, for good or ill, not only the givenness of the climate in future but the givenness of all future life on earth.

1 The Context of Climate Change

The ‘inconvenient truth’ of the troubling realities of climate change ought to alert theologians to the ‘inconvenient truth’ that certain readings of sacred texts, and traditional images based on them, have both provided and sanctioned images of God that have in turn sanctioned the violence of Christians.

(Nelson-Pallmeyer 2007:7)

The present context

Climate change is the term used by scientists to describe the above-normal variations in present global weather patterns and temperature ranges caused by human activity. These variations and their effects are manifest in a measured increase in carbon emissions, the rate of ice cap melting, growing quantities of toxic waste, desertification, loss of biodiversity and alarming deficits in life support resource systems such as fresh water supplies. But the problems discerned by scientists are not theirs to solve alone: climate change is too important, too multi-causal for its effects to be dealt with by any one body of people or interests. Neither can the issues it raises be properly attended to by ignoring the role science has played in creating them; nor by simply tinkering with existing industrial technologies, economic systems or political strategies. Paraphrasing Einstein, we shall not solve climate change problems using the same sort of thinking that caused them in the first place.

There are various approaches to solving these problems being worked out, written about and implemented at present, many of them in response to an increasing number of authoritative reports that can be found on the Internet. These include the ones compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations to make scientific assessments of relevant information on human-induced climate change. Accounts of the phenomena associated with it and their effects range from the Amsterdam Declaration of 2001, ‘Challenges of a Changing Earth: Global Change Open Science Conference’, to recent reports from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on the role played by climate change in the conflict in Darfur. A massive European Union project called PRUDENCE has produced specific projections of future temperature rises and drawn attention to their effects on the Paris region of a jump by the end of this century to temperatures of 30°C for 50 days per year compared to the current 6–9 days (Henson 2006:53).

Such detection and attribution studies have the most lasting impact on public consciousness when set within the history of changes in the earth’s atmosphere and climate, where present variations from norms set over millennia are graphically represented. The process of historicizing the earth that Martin Rudwick calls the ‘reconstruction of geohistory’ has been (and remains) a collaborative and broad-based enterprise. He traces its beginnings from the eighteenth century, when ‘natural history’, dealing with the description and classification of natural phenomena, natural objects and their diversity, was complemented by ‘natural philosophy’, dealing with the causal and mathematical relations between them (Rudwick 2005:49–55).

A similar search for the most comprehensive possible knowledge of the earth’s ecology informs the scientific body of work and ideas generated today by Gaia theory. Its approach is linked directly to the reconstruction of geohistory – the Greek name ‘Gaia’ given to the goddess Earth by Hesiod is echoed in the suffix ‘geo’. Lovelock’s theory has also helped move scientists and the general public toward a new understanding of earth history and, crucially now, of our place within it. This understanding is presupposed in the IPCC and other reports and in the routine professional and general use of the terms ‘organism’, ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’. And, subliminally at least, in their now commonplace use within popular culture.

Such studies indicate that what is now happening to the climate is seen to affect us all, no matter where its immediate effect is detected – whether it be desertification in Africa, floods in Europe, migration of species northward or the melting of the Greenland ice cap. An implicitly and, now more often explicitly, inclusive world view is presented to us and reinforced through a globalized media, generating a globalized discourse that is used to express our common participation in a shared, ecologically understood life-world.

The scientific context

This discourse signals a transition from a postmodern perspective (in which the presumption of a ‘grand narrative’ of human history, or ‘metalanguage’, was discarded) to a scientifically grounded and shared story about the planet and its responses over time to our presence and actions. Global climate change (as the name infers) is recognized and chronicled as a universal story: told and retold in scientific language and then translated into common everyday speech and concerns (Myerson 2001:18–37).

However, the danger with an exclusive use of this scientific narrative is, as we shall see, that it has presupposed our entitlement to handle global resources as though they are nothing but an inexhaustible supply of material for gratifying our desires – or indeed our curiosity. It has also presupposed that we have the competence to do so without damaging our future. Both these presuppositions underpin, to a large extent, the modern understanding of ‘progress’. We are acclimatized to hearing and accepting the overall importance of ‘growing’ economic structures and institutions; of satisfaction at an expected rise in GDP and GNP and gloom at a fall; of welcoming expansions in travel and communications systems that keep us (potentially) in touch with a global clientele. Any threat to this growth, and the anxiety it arouses, is countered by government regulations, defence systems, border controls and tariffs that rely on surveillance techniques and, ultimately, on weapons whose lethal impact is sufficient to wipe out whole communities.

All the major elements in this world view rely on considering our future in purely human terms rather than as one common to all life on earth. Therefore, any real or perceived ‘threat’ to growth, to this ideology of continuous progress, is seen as a threat to both individual and collective self-interest. Against this background, an understandable, if unrealistic, reaction to the events of climate change and a growing understanding of their inevitable impact on lifestyles is denial. In a culture dominated by ‘markets’ and alienated from the natural environment, any notion of setting limits to their growth is seen as hostile to our progress as a species rather than as a proper reaction to their effects.

This results, in part at least, from the fact that over the past two centuries, without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand – for we are still bound to the earth through the human condition – scientists appear to have found a way of acting upon the earth and within terrestrial boundaries as though from an Archimedean point outside it. So at the risk of endangering natural life processes, we have exposed the earth to forces alien to nature’s household (Arendt 1958:262) and have come, to some extent, to see ourselves as aliens there.

Both Arendt and her contemporary, Rachel Carson, were keenly aware of the ‘fallout’ from the use of atomic bombs in 1945. Carson linked this, and the release of the forces behind it, to the ‘fallout’ from pesticides and their enduring physical effects on the environment. Within the moment of time represented by the 20th century, she said, one species – man – has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world:

The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable … In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world – the very nature of its life.

(Carson 1962:23)

This stands as testament to the potency inherent in events and to the truth of Arendt’s comment on the character of that potency. Both despair and triumph, she said, are inherent in such scientific events as the release of energy processes formerly beyond human power or the production of elements not occurring naturally in the environment (Arendt 1958:262).

The Christian context

Nevertheless, in spite of these and other concerns about the hegemony of science within Western culture it has, to a large extent, retained our trust in its ability to deal with those aspects of climate change for which it now openly accepts responsibility – such as the development and growth of fossil fuel usage, soil contamination, species loss and desertification. This public accountability (however flawed) is one reason why it enjoys the status of grand narrative formerly enjoyed by that of Christendom. This latter narrative, for reasons to be discussed at some length – such as its anthropocentric character, its legitimation of violence against the natural world and its emphasis on an otherworldly life that implicitly denies the value of this one – is generally viewed as no longer capable of meeting the multidimensional challenges posed by climate change. At this moment of transition and crisis within Western consciousness, religious language appears to have lost meaning or, even worse, to have inherited meanings that have grown perverse in the wake of a long list of modern atrocities that include world wars, genocides and nuclear armament (Robbins 2007:3).

Yet because of its diversity of traditions, stemming from deep roots within the religious and secular histories of Eurasian and African countries and its transmission within and beyond Western culture generally, Christianity cannot simply be dismissed as incapable of revision without losing rich resources to help us face the challenge of climate change. Instead it can and must be re-envisioned in the light of present understandings of its history and of earth’s history. A defining feature of that re-envisioning is a distinction between Christendom and a Christianity potentially based on a theology of nonviolence. For, to anticipate a little, the former refers to almost two millennia of the imperial power, authority and triumph of the Church. The latter, as we shall see, re-envisions the (almost) forgotten witness of Jesus to the nonviolent nature of the kingdom of God and his rejection of the kingdoms of this world and their glory (Matthew 4:8–10).

The term ‘Christendom’ refers specifically to the imperial Christian religion that began when Constantine’s Edict of Toleration in 312 CE ended nearly three centuries of sporadic, though at times quite severe, state-sanctioned persecution of Christians. By the end of the fourth century Christianity had become the dominant official religion of the Roman Empire and, with the exception of a few desert monks and later monastic settlements, the Christian Church became fully allied with the power of the state. This established a pattern of relations between Church, state and society that, for the next fifteen hundred years, ensured that most Christians learnt and practised their faith in the context of ‘Christendom’ (Robbins 2007:4–10).

This has left us with a Christian theology that, in Catherine Keller’s phrase, ‘suffers from an imperial condition’. This is not, as she points out (and I associate myself with her statement), a denunciation lobbed from some indignant outsider, nor is it another hand-wringing confession or liberal hairshirt to be worn by theologians. It is first of all descriptive, indicating an organizational illness of history, deadly but not necessarily terminal.

Empire is a recurrent condition, an extraordinarily adaptive one that grows rapidly in each new manifestation, voraciously consuming the space it occupies, mixing together otherwise separated cultures and ramming populations into relations extrinsic to their indigenous integrities.

(Keller 2005:113–14)

As I quote her, I can feel the nascent violence of the language she rightly uses in order to describe the event and effects of empire – it grows rapidly, consumes voraciously, rams cultures together. She concludes that the force of this imperialism has, from the start, made the work of theology global. Therefore, we need to consider the postcolonial potential of theology and the theological potential of postcolonial theory in our constructive projects that situate spiritual discourse within an irreducible sense of context. Then ‘Christian globalism also and from the start translates into a counter-imperial ecology of love’ (Keller 2005:116).

A constructive theological approach

In this constructive frame of mind, the task of re-envisioning imperial Christian theology will necessarily concentrate on two focal points linked to its deeprootedness in empire. The first is both an event and an idea within that culture: the creation and presumption of a single civilization under a single government. This connects with the contemporary globalization of culture and, in a time of climate change, to international government bodies (such as IPCC and UNEP) that enable worldwide research to be carried out aimed at the good of the whole. That this is being done in spite of a diversity of views and interests echoes the situation in Christendom where the Church was forced to admit into membership those who were not ‘true’ Christians and to condone contemporary values and customs that were unchristian.

The second constructive focus is on an important, inherently fricative element in imperial Christianity. This was (and is) the notion that there exists a small section of humanity specially chosen and loved by God. ‘Choose’ and ‘elect’ are translations of the same verb in the original Hebrew and Greek of the Bible. For the Jews, Israel was chosen to be God’s people. In the Pauline writings the Church is called and chosen by God as the new Israel. But which Church? Claims by the present Pope that he leads the only true Church are characteristic of the tension between the faith of Christianity in the all-embracing love of God and the belief within Christendom that God has chosen an elect few.

Since the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century this has led to a steady dismantling of Christendom itself. It came to a head in the first half of the twentieth century when supposedly civilized, and nominally Christian nations turned against one another in total warfare. The shadow cast by this moral failure has greatly determined not only Christian theology but the very practice of contemporary religion.

Nevertheless, from beneath the shadow of this event there has emerged a prophetic voice whose words and observations are epitomized by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his link to an

emergent religious and cultural sensibility that was now forced to pick up the broken pieces and to imagine, if not craft, an alternative future – a future in the wake of the death of God and after the collapse of Christendom.

(Robbins 2007:8)

This is the religious sensibility that now has to craft that alternative future not only in the wake of the ‘death’ of a God of imperial power, but also beneath the shadow cast by the moral failure of our species to take responsibility for the effect of our actions on the future of all known life on the planet. One way to do this, I believe, is to build on a contemporary re-envisioning of what it meant, and means, to be a disciple of Jesus – rather than an imperial Christian or a self-styled member of the elect.

The move from Christian narrative to geohistory

This re-envisioning is being facilitated by the fact that Christians today are being forced to imagine an alternative future, for themselves and for the global environment, within a moral landscape whose cultural references are derived from a different grand narrative and world view than that of Christendom. Christian history is now recounted, studied and shared in a milieu dominated by scientific, economic and political discourses that have, for the most part, developed outside the categories of Christian thought. This common language is used in the Amsterdam Declaration, in the Stern Report, the IPCC Reports and notably in the 2002 UNEP Report on the ‘Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity’.

The last mentioned highlights the need for a different moral landscape from one that would simply enshrine what scientific studies have discovered about biodiversity while neglecting to reveal its wonders. It questions a scientific method that still sees Nature as a collection of objects for human use, benefit and exploitation; that uses the banner of scientific ‘objectivity’ to mask the moral and ethical issues that emerge from a functionalist, anthropocentric philosophy; and that seldom embraces the values of local knowledge and traditions (Posey 1999:5).

The UNEP Report does not hesitate to warn us about the future consequences of our actions not only for our children but for the planet itself. Nor does it hesitate to provide moral imperatives and definite religious contexts for reassessing the impact of those actions. Within this framework, the status of different theological narratives is at least provisionally accepted; but their orientation has shifted. For they are increasingly read, heard, acted upon and perceived, by Christian and non-Christian alike, against the backdrop of the ‘grand’ narrative of geohistory and a global concern with our role in it. The notion of an ‘elect’ within humanity, specially loved by God, is unequivocally called into question. For this newly emerging world view refuses to separate our well-being, let alone that of any particular section of us, from that of the whole community of life on earth.

This calls for some participatory thinking from those of us who are theologians. We must venture beyond the usual theological norms by which our individual futures are presumed to be determined by God and our conduct justified only before God. That means we cannot leave unaltered or skate over what is presently recognized and proclaimed as Christian theology. We must confront the role that Christian violence-of-God traditions have played in causing the problems raised by climate change and in justifying our part in them. Awareness of and attention to this state of affairs is a prerequisite for remedying it.

This awareness – and consequent commitment to change – is highly inconvenient for theologians. For one thing, being honest about it may simply reinforce the prevalent perception of religion as a violent force in society. But that perception must be faced and an alternative one offered by consciously choosing and concentrating on what is also already within the tradition: religious texts and teaching that do not sanction violence. Both honesty about Christian violence, and the decision to consciously focus on texts and teaching within the tradition that do not sanction it, will be employed here not simply as a critical exercise – although that is necessarily part of it. That honesty and decisiveness is part of a ground-clearing exercise from which to build nonviolent relationships between us and the whole community of life on earth. The climate this creates sustains a different kind of theological environment from that which has evolved around a God of power, sovereignty and punitive violence.

For me, as will become clear, that has meant developing a way of thinking about God within the mystery of giving. This in turn changes our Christian self-perception to one that sees us as ineluctably situated within a comprehensive narrative of gift events and exchanges throughout earth’s history: a much larger scenario than the time-specific, separate and sectarian theological narratives of a personal salvation history.

Such a participatory, rather than an anthropocentric approach has the potential to transform our largely utilitarian theological world view into one shaped by concern for the welfare of all beings and attentiveness to their suffering. A utilitarian religious perspective habitually uses violent images of God from sacred texts to sanction oppressive relationships with the earth’s inhabitants and exploitative attitudes toward its life resource systems. Acknowledging that such violence has been, and is, perpetrated in the name of a transcendent, omnipotent and disembodied deity alerts us to the need for a nonviolent and embodied vi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Context of Climate Change
• 2 The Seminal Event
• 3 The First Historic Event
• 4 The Second Historic Event
• 5 The Third Historic Event
• 6 The Givenness of Events
• 7 The Economy of Gift Events
• 8 Changing God’s Image
• 9 The Gift Event of Jesus
• 10 The God of Jesus – or of Caesar?
• 11 What Jesus Said
• 12 Beginning Something New
• Bibliography