Video: Examining the Religious and Spiritual Implications of Climate Change
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SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Examining the Religious and Spiritual Implications of Climate Change, May 11, 2023.
DIANE MOORE: Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our webinar entitled Examining the Spiritual and Religious Implications of Climate Change. This webinar is part of the Harvard Climate Action Week. And we here at Harvard Divinity School are delighted to participate in this important interdisciplinary week of events. My name is Diane Moore, and I am the Associate Dean of Religion and Public Life here at Harvard Divinity School.
And it is my great pleasure to moderate this panel conversation this afternoon. Many Thanks to our colleagues at the Salata Institute for organizing this multidisciplinary week of programming, to our colleagues here at HDS and Communications and the Religion and Public Life Program who have worked behind the scenes to promote and orchestrate this event. And a special thanks to our students here at Harvard Divinity School and those across the University who are boldly leading the way into their futures with creative and urgent responses to global climate collapse.
By way of introduction to this panel, I want to invoke the words of my colleague, our colleague here at Harvard Divinity School, Mayra Rivera, who was the recent past president of our scholarly association, the American Academy of Religion. And in her presidential address, just this last November, Mayra asked the question, what is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe, when the present becomes overwhelming and the future unimaginable?
Those of us in the study of religion know that the academic study of religion compels us to interrogate the normative epistemological frameworks that shape both our interpretation of catastrophes and our responses to them. And for Mayra, that's exactly what she did in this presidential address in the sense that she interrogated and raised concern about the grand narratives that often shape history itself and our understanding of history and the ways that those grand narratives, including grand religious narratives, obscure and hide the voices of so many, particularly those marginalized communities and peoples who have themselves suffered from the injustices that different forms of hierarchies have perpetuated.
And so in her address, she was asking and calling us to be attentive to particularity and attentive to context. And we, in the study of religion, are well-versed in precisely that exercise. And so returning to quote Mayra, she says that when we engage in this work, the academic study of religion, it requires, she says, remaining involved in the ongoing process of revising our language, being mindful of how many of the terms we use to describe the world, hide hierarchies of power under the veil of universality, words like America, planet, humanity.
We need language and concepts that help us perceive the specificities of places and the communities entangled with them, and to relearn how projects of decolonization, dismantling racism, and environmentalism are all tangled like an [? Incan ?] tubist. In times of climate change, this is still Mayra, it's easy to turn to readily available homogenizing visions of the world at the expense of the particularity of places. It is tempting to rush past the long history of catastrophe to focus on present threats."
But, she says, we need a more capacious sense of collectivity that can only emerge when we are willing to honor our stories and tell the truth about injustices that have shaped both environmental devastation and our responses to it, a world of our many worlds. So returning again to Mayra's question, what is the role of the study of religion in times of catastrophe, when the present becomes overwhelming and the future unimaginable?
I'm so excited to introduce our panelists today, who will be engaging broadly in response to that question. So I'll begin with my friend and colleague Janet Gyatso. Janet is the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs here at Harvard Divinity School. Janet is a specialist in Buddhist studies with a concentration on Tibetan and South Asian cultural and intellectual history.
She's the author of several books, including her most recent book published by Columbia University Press, "Being Human in a Buddhist World, an Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet." Also, author of "Apparitions of the Self, the Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary" and the "Mirror of Memory," Reflections on Mindfulness and Remembrance in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, and finally, "Women of Tibet," along with many other scholarly articles.
She also writes on sex and gender in Buddhist monasticism and on the current female ordination movement within Buddhism. Her current writing, and very relevant to our conversation today, concerns the phenomenology of living well with animals and related ethical issues and practices. Welcome, Janet. I'm turning now also to my friend and colleague, Matthew Ichihashi Potts. Matthew is the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church.
He was appointed the Pusey Minister and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in 2021, and has served on the faculty at Harvard Divinity School since 2013. He has focused his teaching on sacramental and moral theology, ministry and pastoral theology, religion and literature, and preaching. He's a wonderful preacher. He is the author of two books, "Cormac McCarthy and the Signs of Sacrament, Literature, Theology and the Moral of Stories," published by Bloomsbury in 2015, and "Forgiveness, an Alternative Account," recently published last year by Yale University Press.
He has also published scholarly essays in several leading journals and invited collections. And he sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Literature and Theology. He's also co-host of the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. Welcome, Matt. And finally, our guest member and respondent today is joining us. George Sarrinikolaou is the first Executive Director of the Salata Institute for Climate Sustainability and the Assistant Provost for Climate and Sustainability here at Harvard University.
He brings deep knowledge of climate change and sustainability issues to these positions, as well as an extensive experience in management and administration. He began his sustainability career at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey just before 9/11, where he became the authority's first sustainability manager and developed the authority sustainability policy.
His achievements in that position include conducting the Authority's first greenhouse gas emissions inventory, which included the vehicles, ships, and airplanes using the Authority's facilities, leading the first climate risk assessment of the Authority's infrastructure and making a $1 million purchase of high-quality carbon offsets. He's the author of "Facing Athens," Encounters with the Modern City." And he's also written for the "New York Times," NY1, and reported for CNN and Public Radio International. Welcome, George.
So I'm going to just turn this over. The plan for our remaining time is to hear from each of our two presenters, Matt and Janet. We'll begin with you, Janet. We'll have a little bit of a discussion among us. George will also be responding to the presentations. And we'll perhaps have further questions and answers among the panelists, but we will absolutely be saving time at the end for those in the audience to please post your questions in the Q&A. And we will get to as many of them as we're able.
We just welcome all of you to this conversation and look forward to engaging with you. So I'll turn it over to you, Janet. And thanks again for being part of this conversation.
JANET GYATSO: Well, thank you, Diane, so much for organizing this. It's great. And really happy that we have a chance to participate in this conversation today. And I wish I could see all the people who were watching online, but welcome to all of you as well. What I'm going to talk about is this academic study of religion. And of course, the distinction between the academic study of religion and religion itself needs to be kept in mind, although, of course, they overlap in major ways.
But the way that we understand the academic study of religion is really a kind of field primarily within the humanities, although it also does a fair amount in the social sciences as well. In fact, religious studies is a very interdisciplinary field. So we certainly do history. History is a lot of what we do, textual history, political history, cultural history. We also do a lot of philosophy. And of course, philosophy and theology are very closely linked to each other historically in terms of their content.
We do psychology of religion. And I'll actually speak a tiny little bit about that. We do the study of literature. So we are literary critics. And analysis of literary rhetoric is a big part of religious studies. And certainly, in the field of anthropology, the anthropology of religion is a big thing that we do and increasingly all over the world.
What I'm going to say is going to overlap really with all of those fields, but maybe focus a little bit on, in that mix of all those various disciplines, what the particular perspective coming out of people who study religion can offer to the many conversations and the many challenges that are facing us in this very dangerous era of climate change and all of the associated environmental degradation.
And the first thing I just wanted to say briefly is that being primarily on the side of the humanities, religion probably focuses more on certain individualistic responses to the climate as opposed to, for example, structural or legislative or institutional large scale responses. So I just said that we do do anthropology, we do do sociology of religion, but, also, there's a great deal within the study of religion which is about individual, what I would really put under the heading of ethics.
And I think that ethics is a very important area that religious studies shares, especially with philosophy, which has a very developed literature on that, but maybe religious studies has something special to offer. I'll just say that right now, I'm actually on sabbatical. And in fact, the new project, which Diane was kind enough to mention, which is actually something I've been wanting to do for a very long time is in field of animal ethics. And in the course of writing. I'm writing about it from a Buddhist perspective.
That's my field is Buddhist studies, but I'm also doing it very much from a contemporary, philosophical perspective. And I've just been reading a lot in the sort of contemporary philosophical sort of professional study of ethics, which is a very deep and complicated field. I'm just reading an excellent book by Simon Blackburn who's a very well-known British philosopher.
One of the things that he mentions, which is definitely true, is that within the domain of ethics, one of the big problems that we have is the distinction between what we can rationally admit or recognize as our duty or our obligation or what we need to do in terms of what is right as opposed to the problems with the implementation of those very values. It's not unknown.
And I'm sure everyone knows this, that you can have the best of intentions, but whether you actually carry out those intentions and whether even you know how to fully carry out those intentions in the real and the material world is a very, very big issue. And just to highlight something out of my own project very briefly, I'm working on animal ethics. And in some ways, I myself am and sort of the ideal sort of example to a certain extent of the problem I'm trying to attack.
Namely, that so I'm a person who I've lived my whole life as a-- I love animals. I adore animals, every single animal, ever since I was one years old. It was only at the age of maybe 20 that I actually put together the beautiful cows in the field with the steak, the delicious steak on my plate that I eat. And I said, ew, I didn't actually-- I knew it, but I didn't really-- and actually, even to this day, I have been on a very gradual plane.
I am decreasing my meat eating and I'm getting closer to the point of really giving it up for the first time, but it is very hard. And it's really interesting to see a person such as myself, who, on the one hand, I could never kill an animal myself and I'm really disturbed about the contemporary agricultural animal industrial complex, which is just unbelievably horrific. And yet, on occasion, I'll just turn my head and say, oh, I won't think about that right now, I'm going to order this meat plate.
What is the disconnect between what our intentions are and what we really can commit to? And I do believe that with respect to climate change and, of course, animal ethics is connected to that, although there's many other dimensions of climate change, I think that's a really huge problem for us today too. And it feels to me that it's especially a problem for the First World.
So in terms of thinking about climate justice, I think this is an issue for those of us who are in the First World in a very elite and privileged position, who are actually responsible for a lot of the climate problems and environmental problems that we are now facing, have a special duty and a special responsibility. And also what goes along with, actually, I think as time goes on, it's going to be very clear that everywhere on the planet, we are going to have to ratchet back our expectations, our use of material resources on the planet.
We have overstepped the boundary of what it is tenable for a person to enjoy and to use as part of their life, often at the expense of others. And so many people in the third world are actually already living at a minimal level, but we are going to be forced back into that place as well. And it seems to me that on the one hand, it's our obligation to begin this now and to really monitor. And this is where I say that the individual side of the equation.
I don't think it's only institutional and legislative action that needs to happen, but all of that is very, very important. But also on the individual consumer side, we need to change our habits, we need to change our expectation of what it means to live a good life, we need to change our expectation about what it is that we deserve, and we need to change our habits dramatically. We are overconsuming. We are overproducing. And then what does it take to actually give us the discipline and the strength to actually do that and make those changes now?
Because I do believe they're inevitable. And sooner or later, we are going to be forced in that position anyway, in which case, these skills and this capacity is only going to serve us well. And this is the place where I think religion has an enormous amount to contribute because one of the major things that religions, and I think you can really well saying this across the board in all of the major religious world traditions, the things that religion teaches is indeed self-discipline.
Religion teaches us how to live that moral life and, actually, probably, and I would assert this, has more to say about how to implement philosophical ethics in their daily life and their daily practice than secular philosophy does itself. And in that domain, I think that religion has a very, very huge array of rich resources of how we can, as a first world culture, as a world culture more generally, how we can begin to shift the cultural values that are currently being propagated in our world in terms of consumptions.
You look at your average television ad, and the way that we use things and the way that we live our lives, and what is going to be the discipline? And what makes for the willpower to actually realize, no, I need to stop my consumption. I need to ratchet it down. I need to be self-conscious of that. You could say that the army also teaches discipline. I would say religion and the army are probably two main places where discipline as such, discipline as a bodily practice is taught.
And what are the things that we can learn from long-standing religious reflection and experience with what goes into the process of self-discipline, self-restraint, self-awareness, self-realization, living a life of responsibility? What are the factors? I think there's an enormous amount to say on that topic. Obviously, from this perspective of Buddhism, what does it mean to be a monastic? What a meditation techniques? Other kinds of practices? Which are things that are actually very, very difficult to do, and difficult to do in a kind of effective way that it's actually going to change us.
How do we change our habits? Religious theologies have a great deal to say about the nature of habit, the psychological status of habit, how it connects to our ego, our sense of ourselves. These are a broad range of topics. Again, religion is not the only font or resource for these types of issues, but it's one of the most focused on those sorts of questions.
How do we understand our bodily presence on the planet as opposed to our mental, our intellectual conception of what we think that we're doing and who we think we are, and then what we're actually doing in terms of appropriating resources for ourselves and using them in a certain kind of way? This is the topic that I myself am working on, which is compassion. In my animal project, I'm trying to write a book that's going to encourage all of us to look more closely at our fellow animals on this planet and realize the sort of worse than Holocaust that we are inflicting on them today and recognize their brilliance, their deserving of rights and protections to flourish on this planet.
How do we develop compassion? That's where a place like Buddhism and certainly many other religious traditions have a great great deal to say about such things. And ultimately, I see what we can offer is, on the one hand, how to contribute to those efforts that are going on right now to mitigate climate change. So what do we do as consumers to help change the culture, to help change what we're producing, to help change how we manage our resources now, immediately, which is very much part of the larger project that we're all involved in across all of the disciplines?
And then secondly, how are we going to survive? How are we going to have the strength once we won't have a choice, actually, I don't believe? I don't think we're going to have a choice that it's going to be possible to sustain the lifestyle that we have now. How do we manage in those new circumstances? What can we contribute? And I feel that there's a great deal that religion has to say to that.
And maybe my final point would be how to cultivate a sense of obligation and responsibility as opposed to others, to the entire planet and our fellow creatures, as opposed to living our life in terms of who's got the most power, who's got the most strength, and I'm just going to take whatever I can vilely and using my power. Those are two very, very different ways of living on the planet. And I'm sure everyone knows we're at a dangerous turning point, tipping point at this point.
So anyway, those are the sorts of things that I hope in the study of religion we bring out in all of our scholarship and also as we sit around the table with our colleagues in business, in public policy, in science, in medicine, and in various types of technology as well as we try to solve or at least address this looming catastrophe that we're looking at. So thank you.
DIANE MOORE: Great. Thank you, Janet. Thank you so much. And I think your language of the resources within religious studies to think about discipline, self-discipline, moral obligation, I think, are just really, really appropriate and really true. I'm also struck listening to you and thinking also again about the ways that religion has contributed, particularly in this particular conversation with this particular context, the ways that Christianity has helped create an assumption and to reify assumptions of the autonomous self, which is a contested category and a contested idea.
And so both religion can construct this rigid understanding of even what we termed to be the self, but it also gives us different entry points, different religious traditions,. Different worldviews help us then also challenge the normativity of that notion of the autonomous self. And I'm just struck by two things in your comment. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this, especially as a Buddhist study scholar, the idea that I was reminded of Oren Lyons, Chief Oren Lyons, who has this great phrase relevant to-- he was talking about reflecting on the Constitution.
And he had a reflection on the US Bill of Rights. And he said it really should have been a bill of responsibility because of not the fact that, actually, the autonomous self is a fiction and that we are profoundly interdependent with other life forms and with one another, and that the notion of our separation is one of the classic, philosophical, and normative problems with what has led to the challenges we face.
And I'm also then reminded then of feminist, historian of science Donna Haraway, who also challenges the notion of the autonomous self and says our work really is to live and to stay radically present and recognize our complete dependence with a host of the webs of connections that sustain us, and that creates the capacity for responsibility because we are responsible with and for those who are part of who we are.
So like godkin, like being related to an individual, you are caring more for the closer circles in your lives. The idea is to really spread out the notion of recognizing our interdependence with others. And I just wonder, does that make sense to you? How does that resonate with your own work in Buddhist studies and religious studies more broadly?
JANET GYATSO: Well, I certainly would agree that religion is both part of the problem and part of the solution. When we're talking about religion, first of all, all the different religions of the world and within any particular religion, it's so deconstructable. So we have to be very cautious in saying that. I don't know that I would blame one religion more than another at this particular point in time, but it precisely speaks to-- so it's not the case.
I completely agree with you about the autonomous self and that's a fundamental idea in Buddhism, Buddhism 101. The first day, or maybe the second day, that's what you learn. And that's what you grapple with for the rest of your life after you've heard it. And so I'm absolutely all for that. But once again, even in the history of Buddhism, it's not as though Buddhism is totally guiltless in terms of doing things which we might find socially reprehensible today.
My question is, what is the connection between the idea of the non-autonomous self and the actual practice of it? And that's what I'm trying to highlight. And I do think that Buddhism has some interesting insights on how you translate a kind of doctrine or an idea into how you-- but I think that's the $64 million question right now for philosophy, for all of us. And certainly, I love Donna Haraway very much, but once you talk about interdependence, what exactly does that mean?
What are its implications? What does it mean to be interdependent? And then in what context, if I have an ethically very difficult problem to solve, ambivalent in terms of who's rights supersedes who else's rights? To live on the planet is to eat, to use some resources. So how do you adjudicate these? These are these really, really huge issues right now. And I think we need, as they say, all hands on deck. And I think that's been a phrase used too often these days, but that's absolutely the case.
Those are the kind of questions. What does it look like to live in-- but I'll just say this is all what my whole book is about. But one of the things that I'm interested in, of course, is our interdependence and our ability to live with animals, so.
DIANE MOORE: Right. Well, and again, you're absolutely right. And I think that's what I both appreciate, both our religious studies and somebody like Haraway who literally says we have to stay with the trouble, with the complexity of these questions and not try to find easy answers. And just to be very clear, the really fundamental premise of the Religion and Public Life Program is that religions are not monolithic, they're internally diverse. Religions are complex. They evolve and change, and they're embedded in experience across all of human experience.
So thank you. Just be very careful not to try to paint a religious tradition broadly. I was just speaking about the power of Christianity and the nature of how that power of Christianity coupled with Empire and colonization has created these languages, these frameworks and categories of understanding that many within Christian traditions themselves challenge. So again, it's a question of power that I was trying to highlight here, but I really appreciate your comment.
Speaking of all hands on deck, one of the things I forgot to mention or chose not to in the interest of time, is that among Matt Potts' of many achievements, he was also a Navy Officer. So all hands on deck, we're going to turn it to you, Matt, to pick up the conversation. So thank you.
MATTHEW POTTS: Thanks, Diana. Thanks, Janet. Yeah, and maybe I can say more about that, actually. Because it might be related. And it's a helpful transition, because I actually do want to talk about the internal diversity of Christianity. And I am going to blame Christianity. I think I'm a Christian, a scholar of Christianity, but also a Christian myself.
And although there is internal diversity within the Christian tradition, I do think that a particular narrative within Christianity is one of the primary causes of our current climate catastrophe and current climate crisis. And I want to diagnose that. Because if it's the cause and if there's diversity within the Christian tradition, I want to see if there's a way that undoing that narrative and telling a different story might contribute to some solutions.
I mean, I've cared about climate change for a long time, just because I'm a person that believes in science and understands the news. And so this has been a personal issue with me. It's only become a scholarly issue more recently. In my early work, I thought a lot about contemporary postapocalyptic fiction. And that just got me thinking about the apocalypse and the moral and ethical problems and challenges of apocalyptic-- how moral and ethical questions are raised within apocalyptic fiction.
And that got me thinking about the prospect of catastrophe before us. I mean, I think apocalypse is not necessarily a-- it's a loaded term. But when we listen closely to scientists about what the future may hold, it's not necessarily an inappropriate term to use.
And so that's what I'm thinking about now. And the Christian tradition itself arrives in this moment of apocalypse. And I say that for a couple of reasons. It's first because the literary genre of apocalypse is one that arises in maybe the second or third century before Jesus and stays really prominent within Near Eastern writing until the second century after Jesus.
So it's apocalyptic writing is a dominant literary form around the time of Jesus. And one could reasonably interpret many, if not most of the early Christian writings as falling within or very closely related to apocalyptic genres. So that's one of the things I mean when I say that the early Christian texts do arise in this moment of apocalypse. The other reason is because they arise in this moment of catastrophe. And in many ways, of world collapse.
So the first Christian gospel, the first record of Jesus that we have, was written right around the year 70. And the year 70, the reason we know this is because some of the things that happened in the gospel in the year 70, the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. All right, and that's an understatement when we put it this way, when we say the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. What has happened is Jerusalem is destroyed. Jerusalem is the center of Jewish, of Judean culture. Of ancient culture and the religious center, the cultural center, the political center.
And the Romans come in and devastate it. I mean, they burn the whole place to the ground. They burn the temple to the ground. Contemporary historians at the time, who are in general are pretty reliable. We don't know how reliable these numbers are now, but Josephus writes that as many as several hundred thousand were killed. And another 700,000 people captured as slaves and taken to Rome.
The whole city turned into a camp ground for the military. Josephus also says that during the siege of Jerusalem, as many as 500 people a day were being crucified outside the city walls. So this is like for these people living in this place, especially because Jerusalem had the temple there and this cultural religious center, the world ended. It was an apocalyptic moment. I mean, so we're not just talking about literary genre. We're also talking about imagine the experience of a person living in a city about the size of Boston where hundreds of thousands of people are crucified and 100,000 people are killed, 100,000 people are enslaved.
The whole city is burned to the ground, and hundreds of people a day are crucified. The world is ending, right? And this gospel, the story of Jesus, the first story of Jesus, the Gospel of Mark arises. And the story is about this man who is crucified and dies and claims some things about himself, his relationship to God. But also chooses very deliberately not to exercise power and dies at the end of the book.
And in the original ending to the Gospel of Mark, the women go to his tomb and find it empty. And after they find it empty, they run away terrified. And the last word of the original ending of the Gospel of Mark is, they were terrified. Now that's not the last Christian gospel. About five or 10 years later, there's another gospel written. And that gospel tells a similar story. But then there are some more appearances of Jesus. And Jesus is walking around. There's more good news.
And then, after that, another gospel arises. And there are more appearances of Jesus, and the ending is a little bit happier. It's certainly not that they were terrified, indeed. And then another gospel shows up, and it's even more. And then they add a new ending to the Gospel of Mark. Which says, oh, and by the way, Jesus did all these other things, too. And we don't just have to end with fear and terror and emptiness. We don't have to face this the same way.
Now, the first version of the Gospel of Mark ends with fear and emptiness and terror in its final words. But the first words of the gospel are still, this is the good news of Jesus Christ. So something about the story is-- something in the wake of this utter catastrophe, this apocalyptic moment, this gospel is saying, there is some good news here. Even though the final moment, the concluding moment, is one of loss and death and fear.
And I think what the first gospel is trying to do is it's trying to invite its readers to reckon with the fact of finitude, the fact of loss. Trying to say even though these things have happened, there are ways to move forward into the future meaningfully, morally, responsibly. And indeed, that's what you see the early Christian community doing in those years, trying to move forward into the future meaningfully, morally, responsibly.
What we also see happening, though, I think a few years later is Christianity maybe losing its nerve a little bit. Retreating away from that and resorting to a triumphalistic narrative. Which says, no, we don't have to deal with that stuff. Actually, Jesus will come back in this very literal way. And we'll restore all things. If we're just patient and we have faith, then all this pain and suffering will be erased, and we will have everything that was taken from us restored to us, right?
So within the tradition, you have these two strands. One strand within the tradition that wants to say, we can look at finitude, we can accept finitude, we can accept loss and suffering. But even when those things happen to us, there is a way to move forward in the future. And another trajectory which says, no, we refuse those things. That if we have faith, we don't have to accept finitude. We don't have to accept loss. We don't have to accept these other things.
We can aspire to and arrive at some triumphant place of mastery over ourselves and over all creation. And those are the two rival ideologies. And what you were just saying, Diane, I think is absolutely true, especially as Christianity becomes politically involved with empire, both in the fourth century, but also later on among the European nations. During the colonial period as empire and Christianity come together, the other narrative, which is we are masters of creation. We do not have to suffer. We can keep ourselves safe and changeless all the time. All we have to do is have enough faith.
And if we have to sacrifice some other parts of creation to preserve the fantasy of our own infinity, our own perpetuity, then we will do so. And we see this happening throughout Christian history when that narrative is dominant. And we see it in places like colonialism. Right, where you see European powers saying, oh, our people are the people. We should be able to live our lives the way we want to live our lives. We do not need to change it. So we're perfectly willing to exploit the labor of others and to exploit the resources of others in order to build ourselves up.
Right? I have a PhD student who's writing a dissertation now on how 20th century fascism and Christian nationalism are deeply tied to this idea that we will be pure, we will preserve ourselves, we will not allow the state, the nation, to be changed by immigrants or by others who are coming in. And so because we deserve to never change and be the same forever, we will destroy everything which is not us to preserve the fantasy of our own changes [? and ?] the fantasy of our own perpetuity.
And I think you can see it, too, in extractive capitalism. Right? Where we look at the creation itself and say, oh, the world exists to build us up. Creation exists. The natural world exists so that we can maintain the fantasy of our infinity, of our perpetuity. And if that means assuming that the world is infinite, that resources are infinite, and extracting them to build ourselves up and to convince ourselves of that, then we will do it, right? And that's what we have done. If we look at the way we have treated national resources in the world.
And I think the first Christian gospels, the Gospel of Mark knows is that this is a fantasy, actually. We are finite. We will suffer loss. And the moral and religious response to that is not to convince ourselves that we need not do it, but to actually figure out how to do it meaningfully, morally, responsibly. All the things that you were saying, Diane, when you talked about Myra's address and all the things you were saying. And Janet as well about what it means to actually reckon with the fact of our limitedness and the fact that we can't have everything all the time that we want, right?
These are the two trajectories I see. And so I see Christianity both as a real ideological cause of our relationship to the natural world, which is structured. Some of the continuing violences that we visit upon the natural world. But I also see it within the tradition of critique of that trajectory and another possibility. And just to be a little bit more concrete about it, I think there are two places where I think this is especially interesting or relevant or important.
The first is as we move into the future, I think it's OK for us to think about apocalypse and to take a posture of facing apocalypse. I think that's scary language, but I think that's OK to have scary language. Because if we listen carefully to what is possible/probable/likely about our future, especially if we do not make drastic changes, we are facing catastrophic loss and apocalyptic loss.
And we don't the exact details of that. But we know that there is already incredible change and crisis built, baked into the system with the amount of carbon that's in the atmosphere. And you hear a lot among scientists and activists, especially maybe among scientists who the facts of our future, especially if we don't make any changes, and who sometimes express-- I used to live down on Cape Cod near the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where there are a lot of scientists working on these questions, and became friends with them.
And sometimes they say, you're hesitant. One is hesitant to tell the truth about the future, because you're afraid it will lead people to throw up their hands and despair. And if folks throw up their hands in despair, then they won't do all they need to do to try to make a change. We need to give people some hope, and we can't just fill them with despair. These scientists would say, this is where I feel. I can't give them that, because then they won't do anything.
I think we should trust ourselves as humans to have a little bit more moral courage than that. I think that we are capable of hearing really bad news, even catastrophic news. And we can feel despair, but still take action and still do things. I mean, one of the things you mentioned that I do is I'm also a pastor in addition to being a scholar of Christianity. And this is a smaller scale. And it's not exactly analogous.
But I've been with lots of folks when they have received their own versions of world ending news. Terminal diagnoses or that kind of thing, right? And in those cases, people often despair at first or throw up their hands at first. And it's a small sample scale. But in every case-- the sample size. But in every case in my experience among people who have had this news, what people get down to is the work of trying to do what they can to save what they can and to honor and cherish that which they can't save.
For as long as they can as well as they can. People get to work. They don't throw up their hands in despair. They do all they can for the ones they love. And I think that we're capable of this. And I think part of this apocalyptic posture where we acknowledge that we may lose something, we acknowledge that we can't have everything forever, speaking honestly about that actually crystallizes our moral vision, refines our moral vision so we know what is at stake and what is worth doing with the time and the energy that we have left.
So I think being really honest about the future and making the stakes clear and trusting folks to have the right moral response is a correct moral response, because I do think that folks can do that. Now not everyone can, because I think we can see in our culture, sometimes we say this. And the response among many folks is to say, no, I don't believe it. That's not true. I am going to deny it, right?
But I think for those giving in to that denial or fighting that denial with platitudes of maybe unfounded optimism is insufficient. I think we have to be just as forthright and respond to that denial with meaningful action. Even if that action can't guarantee that we will be as triumphant or as masterful as we hope that we can be with our actions. The other thing, the other practical implication that I think is interesting about this is that I think as we as a culture or society, whatever, imagine and develop technologies and systems by which we try to counter and mitigate the harmful effects of climate change, I think we need to be careful lest they replicate the problem that we started with.
Which is the problem of extractive capitalism in the first place is that we imagine ourselves from the Christian tradition as the human lords over all creation. And creation exists to serve our own needs, right? It's all about this idea of mastery over the natural world so the natural world can preserve us the way we want to be, because we should be this way forever because that's what God wants for us. And that we use the natural world that way.
And if the solutions we come up with perpetuate or replicate that relationship to the natural world, where the natural world is an instrument for our use, where the natural world is a tool to be used to perpetuate our idea of ourselves as masters of creation, we may mitigate some really harmful things, but again, are we just delaying the problem? Or postponing it or replicating the problem.
Now, I'm not naive and I'm not an ideologue. If someone comes up with this wonderful solution that would save millions of people and has the wrong viewpoint, do it. I'm not trying to say-- right? I'm not trying to say that we should not do all we can and use every technology we can to try to protect as many people and as much of creation, as much of the natural world as we can.
But I really think that we need to start thinking about that religion should help us and our responses to climate change should help us reposition ourselves within the order of creation. So we can think of ourselves as part of the natural world, that we must end up-- we must be responsive to the natural world rather than as suzerains and rulers over the natural world. A world that exists for our own benefit.
And when we come into some relationship of-- when we understand ourselves not as the entitled rulers over the natural world but actually as part of it and as a finite part of it-- humans haven't always been here and won't always be here-- then we can start to have different kinds of ethical and moral considerations about, what is the right thing to do? How should we relate to one another and the world? What role do we have to play in this? What can we not have for ourselves? As Janet was saying, what must we give up or what must be decline? Because all those things only serve the fantasy of my own-- feeling all my wants.
One of my students has this great analogy about, I like avocados. Right now, I eat avocados. There's no good reason why I should have ripe avocados in New England in January. And I do, right? And I enjoy them in January, just like Janet eats meat, right? But this is because I'm operating out of this fantasy where the world should provide me everything I want rather than thinking of myself as part of national creation where I don't get everything that I want, where I have to give up some of this.
Now I don't think my stopping eating avocados is the solution, right? I know there is something more complicated to that than this. However, I, along Janet's lines, there's a Christian-- well, not a Christian thinker, but a thinker who writes about the Christian tradition from the 20th century named Simon Weil. And she talks about some of these practices. And she says, even doing things like individual recycling, which arguably has a limited effect on environmental catastrophe, or driving an electric vehicle, which again, when you look at like how much I as an individual person and how much carbon I'm saving, it doesn't actually move the needle very much.
Even those kinds of behaviors, especially when I'm aware that they may not move the needle very much, are ways in which I am practicing inhabiting this understanding of myself as not the center of the world, as not the master of all things. And so it becomes a spiritual practice where I start to inhabit what is very difficult to inhabit, which is this idea that, oh, I am a small part of something greater. My influence is not that significant. And what we need to do is inculturate and embrace this habit of giving up and giving over some of these entitlements for the sake of others.
So I guess I'll stop there to make sure we allow other people to ask questions and George to respond.
DIANE MOORE: Great. Oh man, thank you. I had a lot of responses, but I don't want to I don't want to take up more time because we're pushing against our limited time here. But rich conversation. I want to highlight just two things you said. One is that a common misunderstanding of religion is that religious influences are always positive or they're always negative. And I really appreciate your recognition and representation of the complexity of religion.
Religion's just powerful. It's by definition neither positive nor negative. It's all and both and everything in between. And also what will be the inspiration, the religious inspiration to be able to imagine things outside of what we feel like are probabilities? And I think that's another role that religion plays. So be able to imagine the possible outside of the probable with all the complexity you just offered. And really just grateful for that rich representation.
George, we're going to turn it over to you. Someone outside of religious studies, from your own admission, and just wonder, how does this land on you? What questions might you have for Matt or Janet? Or responses might you have.
GEORGE SARRINIKOLAOU: And I'm mindful of time so I'll be brief. But the first thing to say is that the issues that Janet and Matt touched upon are very much part of the realm in which I operate, which I guess you could call technocratic or managerial or organizational. These are the issues that come to the surface every single day.
Having said that, let me also say that the Salata Institute, of which I'm the executive director, and the University at large and its Harvard [? and dense ?] climate initiative is very much focused on making connections across disciplines and across departments and schools so that the views of my colleagues here, Janet and Matt, can inform very different discussions that are taking place in science or business or other realms.
OK. So Janet began by saying that religion stems out of the humanities, and therefore tends to focus largely on individualistic responses or approaches to climate. And not so much the institutional or the structural. I want to complicate that dichotomy a little bit by saying that in my experience, the structures or these institutions are run by people. And their worldviews, including their religions or their ideologies, very much shape the directions that these institutions take. So that's the first thing to say.
The other side of the coin or another complication in this dichotomy is that it can be disorienting, even paralyzing to the individual, I think, to think of things as either individualistic or based on the individual or the structure, right? It's distracting in some ways to say to the individual, recycle, or don't eat meat, or don't drive your car.
Because we run the risk of losing sight of the power structures that are getting us to do all of those things and limiting how much we can change. And we are all perhaps-- we have greater capacity to make these changes because of who we are and where we live. There are people in this country, in other places and in other countries, who can't make those individual choices as easily, right?
I was listening to a political debate in my home country of Greece last night. And I heard it at the Harvard Climate Symposium earlier in this week about workers working in fossil fuel industries, right, whose jobs are at risk. And it's very difficult for those people to say, OK, I'm not going to work for a fossil fuel company, or I'm not going to work in a coal mine.
OK. Then I want to come to Matt, who talked about these two narratives and talked initially about this sense of strength or fortitude in the face of apocalypse or catastrophe. And talked about how people-- he has seen a small sample, he said, of people who, when they hear bad news, they can still take meaningful action. Matt, all of us who work in this field or a lot of us who work in this field are part of your sample. Right?
This fortitude is extremely important when day in and day out, you're faced with the prospects of climate change. And so this is all to say that religion has many of the answers to the key questions that people and institutions, individuals, climate practitioners like me, need, right? I ask myself, who am I? How should I be? What is the right thing to do?
How can I continue to work in the face of what scientists tell us is coming? And those are questions that religions of the world have pretty good answers to. So I'll end with that.
DIANE MOORE: Wonderful. Thank you so much, George, and thank you for those moving comments at the end. I think those are the human questions I think we all face. And religions do have real contributions to make, for sure. In our very limited time, five more minutes, there are several excellent questions. And I'm just going to apologize that we're not going to be able to get to them.
Several are pointing to the power of what it means to limit our dietary-- to change our dietary practices, especially here in the Global North, which I want to just acknowledge and appreciate. And grateful for Janet for raising that set of questions for us. But I'm going to turn to an anonymous attendee. So I don't know who you are, but it's just a basic question and a challenging one.
So she's saying, what would you-- I'm going to focus, Matt and Janet. Relevant to everything we've talked about, what would you suggest that at a minimum scientists, policymakers, business people outside of religious studies should know about or think about religion in order for them to address climate collapse effectively? So we've been talking around this, but just in an age of soundbytes, what do we need to know?
JANET GYATSO: You want me to go first?
DIANE MOORE: Sure. Either one of you, but go ahead, Janet. Thank you.
JANET GYATSO: We just have a couple of minutes. I agree very much with what George said, is that the people who make decisions, those are at the individual level. And so it's very, very important for them to have the kind of development of the very skills and resilience and insights and all of the ethical issues that both I was trying to talk about and then Matt was talking about is extremely important.
And I completely agree. It's not as though the individual's on one side and the structures on the other side. It's just that they're two sides of a larger coin, let's say, that need to work together. And there certainly is power in collective action. Maybe one person putting out avocado is not going to help. But if all of us do and it does affect the market, supply and demand does affect the market, there is enormous consumer power. So these things must be connected to each other.
What do people need to know? People need to know, I think, that we have to think about our place on the planet in terms of our responsibility as citizens of the planet and including all the other life on the planet and what is reasonable as opposed to only going after our selfish interests as maybe a small group or even an individual. And yes, that's what I think that we need to know. I'll hand it over to Matt.
MATTHEW POTTS: Yeah, thanks. I think what I would say is so at least within the US context, where many climate change, climate crisis deniers, are Christians of a particular sort, I think just to understand that there is a deep, deep cultural, theological, ideological resistance to that that comes out of a basic worldview and story. Which says that because we have faith, because we have something, we do not have to feel, we do not have to engage with loss in a serious way.
That means that, right, the conversation has to be handled some different way. Facts are now what changes a person's deep, deep cultural assumptions about the way the world is. Now that means maybe the conversation has to be different. We have to approach the conversation differently. But it may not be the conversation that scientists are used to having, where facts are what persuade. You're actually getting at something deeper.
On the other side of it, I would say that scientists, especially ones who are raised in this context, should reflect upon how those same assumptions maybe affect the way that they talk to people on the other side. So like George was saying, I think that on the left and people who do believe in climate change, the climate crisis and are trying to take individual actions to do it, I think often those folks end up at moments of despair, right?
I mean, this is an example, right? So I said I come back to the Navy. One of my jobs in the Navy was I was the person that signed-- we refuel underway. At sea, we get gas for the ship. And I would sign for our-- and we'd take tens and tens of thousands of gallons. More gas than I've ever used in my car for just one time signing. And we did this every three days, right? One time signing off on the invoice for the gas that we are buying in the Navy, right?
Or I worked at another university for-- I was at another university for a while. And the students held a conservation event where everyone tried to reduce energy usage, and everyone did it and students really got rallied behind it and did a great job. And then the data came out, and the one science building, which had a bunch of super cold refrigeration, they used as much energy as the rest of the university combined by three or four-fold. Right? And so the students were like, well, why did we do all this stuff, right?
I think there also is a way in which when we talk to folks on the left who are doing all these individual things, in order to save them from despair, you also have to be able to say things like, the fact that your individual actions still matter, doing these things still matter. Even if the Navy's still buying gas, even if we have the super cold refrigeration. Because that is you changing your relationship to the natural world, which is what we need everybody to do so we can start to make different decisions, right?
So it saves us from despair not because we trick ourselves into believing that those actions have right now the impact that we want, but because what's needed is this change of relationship, and those practices do change our relationship.
DIANE MOORE: That's a perfect way to end. And also to recognize that there isn't any purity in this. It's about a process, and it's about doing the best we can and that individual agency does make a big difference in the beautiful way you just articulated.
Thank you all. Thank you, Janet. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, George, for these thoughtful reflections on these incredibly complex issues. And thank you, Salata Institute, for bringing these conversations into a cross-disciplinary opportunity again. And thank you all for joining us, and we really look forward to staying in touch with you. So please don't hesitate to reach out to us for those of you, especially who wrote these excellent questions.
If you write to us at Religion Public Life, which is where you registered, we will get these comments and questions to our panelists so that you can be in conversation with them. Thanks again, everyone. Have a wonderful afternoon.
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