An environmentalist martyr? Some Christian reflections

Honduran indigenous and environmental organizer Berta Cáceres, winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize, has been assassinated in her home. She was one of the leading organizers for indigenous land rights in Honduras, which Global Witness says has become the deadliest country in the world for environmentalists.

- Democracy Now, 3rd March 2016.

This crime is part of a broader pattern of indigenous leaders being assassinated and repressed in Honduras since the coup in 2009.

It is also part of a broader pattern (especially in Central and South America) of environmental activists being murdered. Hundreds are killed each year.

What is different here is that Berta Cáceres had more global prominence than most indigenous leaders and global south environmentalists, partially due to having received the Goldman Prize.

Persecution of environmentalists and indigenous people in (some) western nations, generally takes more subtle forms: designation as terrorists, surveillance, restrictions of legal rights, demonisation in the corporate press for environmentalists and dispossession, marginalisation, racism (overt and systemic), elevated incarceration, and demonisation in the corporate press for indigenous peoples.

Christians who follow the crucified and risen Messiah are discipled into a narrative that often places us in conflict with empire (even if some Christians haven't realised that yet or suppress it). If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar's claims to universal jurisdiction are idolatrous and false. Failure to recognise and submit to imperial claims can be bad for your health. This is why so many Christians have been killed through the ages (and today!) for following Christ.

Today, empire takes various forms: aggressive militarism, economic exploitation, corporate hegemony, individualist consumerism, neo-colonialism and what Karl Barth called the "almost completely demonic" force of capitalism (CD III/4, 531).

But empires are empires because they become adept at wielding the sword (in its various guises) against all opponents, not just Christians. That environmentalists and indigenous leaders (and in this case, both) are being persecuted and killed for standing against corporate profits and corrupt governments ought to lead followers of a crucified man into a measure of solidarity with them.

Christians bear witness to the truth of Christ's victory through words and lives that conform to a different logic of grace and peace. This will lead us into a variety of responses to the contexts in which we find ourselves; there is no one-size-fits-all Christian response to empire. However, the Nazarene will not let us make any lasting peace with empire. If we don't at times find ourselves in (at times) dangerous contradiction to the powers of this age, then perhaps we've grown a little too used to seeing through the eyes of our dominant culture and may need to be awakened once again to the call of the one who bid his first disciples leave their nets, their tax booths, their swords and take up their cross.

Berta Cáceres was very likely killed for her work bearing witness to certain truths. Are there any truths that you believe are important enough to risk doing the same?
Image from online search. Photographer unknown.

Killed for crossing a corporation?

Environmental activists in the developed world risk being added to no-fly lists or infiltrated by undercover police who break rules prohibiting sexual relations with those they are monitoring, illegally act as agents provocateurs and even lie under oath.

Environmental activists in the developing world risk assassination. According to a recent report from Global Witness, over the last decade there have been 711 recorded cases of activists being murdered, and that is likely to be the tip of the iceberg, given the poor level of reporting for most of the world. In Brazil alone, where stronger monitoring institutions exist, 365 deaths were recorded, yet less than 10% of case were brought to trial and barely 1% resulted in a conviction.

Journalists who report on such matters become targets of harassment and violence.

Anyone who has studied Christian history or the experience of the global church just in the last 100 years knows that being killed for standing up for justice and the truth is hardly unusual.

Keeping people in the dark is profitable.

Waking the Green Tiger

Here's a documentary I'd really like to see. A home-grown Chinese environmental movement is one of those important developments the world needs right now. Even better would be for it to make good connexions with the Christian church in China, which has all kinds of excellent reasons for being concerned about how we treat God's good creation

Rio +20

Much can be said about this conference, and I'm sure plenty will be over the next few days. For the moment, I will confine myself to this quote and link:

"To see Obama backtracking on the commitments made by Bush the elder 20 years ago is to see the extent to which a tiny group of plutocrats has asserted its grip on policy."

- George Monbiot, Rio 2012: it's a make-or-break summit.
Just like they told us at Rio 1992.

Communicating Hope: Hope in an age of environmental crisis

"What relevance does the Christian message of hope have in our world that seems increasingly hopeless? It is noticeable that the Christian scene has changed, from the Christian tours of 2008/9 entitled, ‘Hope for Planet Earth’, to a recent (2011) Faraday Institute conference entitled, ‘Sustainability in Crisis’. A key turning point for the environmental movement in general was the Copenhagen Summit, which delivered so little, despite all the focus leading up to it. A grim and sober realism now seems appropriate, rather than a sense of, ‘if we all pull together we can do it’. What role, therefore, does a Christian theology of hope play in this? Is there any hope, humanly speaking, or are we beyond that? What role should a message of Christian hope play in our ecological message to churches and individual Christians? Are we just encouraging a 'pie in the sky' theology by peddling hope where there is none? Can a message of hope actually become de-motivating when the reality seems so different? It is this cluster of questions that we see as representing what we are calling, ‘the hope gap’. This is the focus of the present meeting."

Sometimes, things come along that are right up my street. This is part of the advertising blurb for a 24 hour conference in May organised by A Rocha UK and the John Ray Initiative (two Christian ecological organisations). Doing a PhD can be a lonely and isolating process and discovering that others are asking similar questions is like stumbling upon an oasis.

For others in the UK who might be interested, full details are here. Keynote speakers include Richard Bauckham (NT scholar and theologian), Andy Atkins (director of Friends of the Earth UK), Martin Hodson (environmental biologist), Margot Hodson (director of John Ray Initiative) and Ruth Valerio (A Rocha UK).

These questions I think are critical for Christians today who wish to think about what it will mean to communicate the good news of Jesus in a world increasingly suffering from ecological bad news. If we are to speak of hope, and those who follow a crucified and risen king cannot do otherwise, then how do we do so in ways that open up possibilities for human action and perseverance? How do we avoid giving false hopes? How do we avoid encouraging a quietism that abandons the neighbour in their distress and yet simultaneously avoids implying that we save ourselves? And in the face of increasingly dire scientific projections, what kind of penultimate hopes may a Christian hold today?

UPDATE: Richard Bauckham's talk is now available online.

Is environmentalism failing?

Is Environmentalism Failing? from Australian Broadcasting Corporation on FORA.tv.
A fascinating debate held in Melbourne and broadcast by the ABC last year. It is 90 minutes long but worth watching in full as each speaker has important points to make. Speakers include: Clive Hamilton, David Suzuki, Christine Milne, Ian Lowe, Anna Rose and Philip Sutton. A number of the older speakers highlight just how far social attitudes, behaviours and policies have come in the last fifty years (i.e. since the birth of the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962). All of them emphasise the size of the task ahead, particularly in the face of climate change.

Apologies for the ad at the start.

Australian Christian environmentalism

A simple question: are there any Australian Christian organisations with a particular focus on ecological issues? I know that TEAR Australia has been developing a climate change initiative in recent years and that some are talking about starting an A Rocha group. Any others?

Disasterbation turns you blind

Why "disaster porn" films blur our moral vision
Our predicament is crucially different from, say, being ten minutes after the launch of mutually assured nuclear destruction, where human society really has only minutes or hours left and hugging loved ones is almost the only expression of humanity left. Instead, we are in the (in some ways worse) situation of having a disaster (or series of interlocking crises) that will unfold across decades and even centuries and millennia (the effects of our injection of CO₂ into the atmosphere will be felt for hundreds of thousands of years, species extinctions are forever and could well lead to ecosystems that are radically different - and for a very long time much simpler). What this means is while some shocks could be quite sudden (as we saw in 2008, banks can (almost) collapse within 24 hours if conditions are right, or rather, wrong), industrial civilisation will not go down in an afternoon (barring global nuclear exchange). Such an outcome is likely to take decades and a whole series of crises.

Many "catastrophe porn" films like 2012 (which I haven't seen) only further corrupt our moral imaginations by asking us to imagine ourselves in pure survival mode, which is a form of ethical laziness, since it is much more likely the real crises will bring moral challenges considerably more complex than "will I resort to cannibalism to stay alive?" (The Road). Neither Mad Max or Star Trek are particularly likely in the coming decades, but I expect something more in the ballpark of (the background scenes of) Children of Men.

In our contemporary situation, there are still plenty of good ends to pursue, even if it is increasingly unlikely that our actions are going to "save" civilisation as we know it. Whether we conceive ourselves as offering societal palliative care or building arks for the coming storm, there are more options than trying to plug the hole in the Titanic as it goes down (to mix three metaphors in as many lines). If we are offering palliative care for industrial society as a terminal patient, then perhaps that patient is a pregnant woman and our care may yet save the baby. That is, the choices we collectively make now will significantly influence the basic conditions under which any future society will exist, including (through the climate, health of biodiversity, soils, oceanic chemistry and so on) the carrying capacity of the planet and its regions. So it may actually now be impossible to keep things going as we've known them for the last few decades (let alone with continued growth) for too much longer, but it is certainly possible for us to bequeath a better or worse world to our children.

The perception of being "too late" will only increase in the next few years and this could well lead to all kinds of hopeless responses (nihilistic hedonism ("eat, drink and be merry..."); populist quick techno-fixes; authoritarian paternalism; scapegoating of outsiders). Our concern is not to say ahead of time what ought to be done (though many of the things that ought to be done now are more or less clear), but to focus on the formation of human beings who will not respond to such perceptions out of fear, guilt or impotence, but from faith, hope and love.
I took the title of this post from this helpful article. Other good posts on a similar theme include this reflection on the motives on doomers from one who has experienced them and this piece on collapse porn.

Ecology, fascism and democracy: imagination and advertising

"The future of environmentalism is in liberating humanity from the compulsion to consume. Rampant, earth-destroying consumption is the norm in the west largely because our imaginations are pillaged by any corporation with an advertising budget."

- Micah White, "An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism".

This is the kind of debate that we need more of. The irony of political agents who fight any ecological protection legislation on principle is that they are likely setting up conditions for more authoritarian regimes in the future when desperation gains a strong hold on the public imagination.

In short, this piece argues that the corruption of desire performed by the dominant strand of contemporary liberal (hyper)capitalism will undermine the conditions of possibility for liberalism. And so only a renewal of the imagination can lead to true reduction of the consumption levels that are choking the life out of the earth. We need a compelling and attractive picture of human life and flourishing that is not predicated on endless acquisition and consumption.

Where on earth can we find the sources for such a renewal of the imagination? I doubt it will be simply be through reclaiming billboards (though the usefulness of creative acts of civil disobedience cannot be ruled out). Perhaps our good news for new times may come from old sources.

Why climate change is not an environmental problem

An interesting article by David Roberts in which he argues that the association of climate change with a narrow and partisan interest group (at least in US politics) has framed the discussion in unhelpful ways, and has failed to communicate the true scope of the issue, which is bigger than the environmental lobby, bigger than the preservation of particular species or ecosystems, bigger even than climate change itself.

"Humanity has passed, or will soon pass, what we understand to be the safe boundary conditions of a number of global biophysical systems. Our trajectory amounts to an extraordinary, even existential roll of the dice. Can we survive in conditions that humanity has literally never faced? Can we bring our species in line with the long-term sustainable carrying capacity of the earth before earth does it for us? Can we make the shift while still growing in learning, prosperity, and freedom? The stakes could not be higher.

"If we meet the challenge of sustainability -- and it's a big if -- it will be a tidal shift in human history on par with the [rise of] agriculture, industrialization, or democracy itself.

"'Environmentalism' is simply not equipped to transform the basis of human culture. It grew up to address a specific, bounded set of issues."

Speaking of framing, I have said before that "environmentalism" is not the best choice of term for a movement concerned about ecological issues. It is not about an environment that is external to us and might be of interest to those who study biology or natural history, or who enjoy beautiful landscapes, bushwalking or birdwatching. Ecology is the logos of our oikos, the logic of our house. And as such it is intimately related to the economy, the nomos of our oikos, the human laws or management of our house. If we don't base our management on the underlying logic of the living systems in which we participate then we are fouling our own nest, destroying our own home and dismantling our own prosperity.

How inevitable is decline?

Have we passed the point of no return?
Our contemporary industrial society is sick. But how bad is our diagnosis? Do we have a mild illness requiring a brief lie down and an aspirin, a major problem requiring emergency surgery, or a terminal illness beyond curative treatment, leaving only better or worse palliative care?

Dark Mountain
There has been an interesting debate on this question upfolding recently on the Guardian website between what may be viewed as different branches of environmentalism. To understand the debate, you first need to get a bit of a handle on a new movement in the UK called The Dark Mountain Project (DMP). Launched just over a year ago by Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine, DMP is a literary and cultural project exploring new stories for an age of collapse and transition. Their manifesto can be found here, though this quote might give you a taste of their perspective:

"This project starts with our sense that civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the ongoing mass destruction of the non-human world. But it is driven by our belief that this age of collapse – which is already beginning – could also offer a new start, if we are careful in our choices. The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop."

So while being deeply pessimistic about the chances of continuing life as we know it, they are searching for new (or renewed) cultural narratives to guide us through what they expect will be a period of widespread ecological, social, economic and political change. In particular, those at the DMP are quite critical of an optimistic environmentalism that sees us developing and implementing technological solutions to ecological crises based around a low-carbon economy that will enable the continued economic development of a social and cultural trajectory not too dissimilar to the one we're already on, that the future will be merely "an upgraded version of the present". Nicholas Stern's newish book is one example of this kind of thinking. In other words, DMP are questioning whether sustainable development is really sustainable if it assumes the necessity and desirability of ongoing industrial development in even the developed world. I have previously quoted John Michael Greer, who spoke about contemporary industrial society facing a predicament, not merely a series of problems. That is the basic idea: that we need to work out how to best cushion a now inevitable descent from our current level of social complexity, and Dark Mountain wants to explore cultural narratives other than the myth of progress.

Dark Mountain is gaining a bit of a following, and are holding their first festival in Wales in a few weeks' time. One of the keynote speakers at the festival is well-known Guardian journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot.

The Guardian debate
Monbiot started the Guardian conversation on Tuesday with an article titled "I share their despair, but I'm not quite ready to climb the Dark Mountain. He accused the DMP of "giving up" on industrial civilisation, being content to wait for its downfall, which will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if we ignore the real opportunities to reform the current system.

Kingsnorth and Hine, founders of Dark Mountain, came back yesterday with "The environmental movement needs to stop pretending". They rejected Monbiot's portrayal of their ideas and charged mainstream environmentalism (including Monbiot) with having been co-opted by capitalist dreams of endless growth, just with wind farms replacing coal.

And then today, Simon Lewis, Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds tried to find a mediating position in "Yes, we can change society before global crises overwhelm us". Lewis argues that Monbiot is too optimistic about the life expectancy of industrial civilisation while Kingsnorth and Hine are premature in issuing a terminal diagnosis. Instead, there is a rapidly closing window of opportunity.

A growing conversation
All three articles are contributions to an ethical and cultural debate that I think will only continue to grow in coming years. It is not a new debate, but it is likely to become increasingly mainstream as more people come to see the depth and breadth of ecological crises our industrial society has spawned. I think this exchange includes its fair share of misunderstandings and misrepresentations (for instance, it is clear that Kingsnorth and Hine are not advocating any kind of quietist despair, nor does Monbiot hope for endless growth. Nonetheless, these authors differ in their estimation of how deeply ecological crises cut into the arteries of our present way of life and how radically and rapidly things need to change as a result. Anyone who takes seriously our present crises will need to face these questions, and on our answers, new alliances and battlegrounds will be drawn.
Speaking of interesting Guardian articles, this one is also worth a read, pointing out that most of the current climate debate is way too simplistic and that scientific, economic, political and ethical questions are not be carefully enough distinguished.
Monbiot and Kingsnorth had an earlier run-in over these questions a little while back.

Environmentalism as idolatry: why we must repent of environmentalism to be green

Some Christians are quick to identify environmentalism as a contemporary form of idolatry.

If and when it is indeed so, then like all idolatries, environmentalism takes something good and treats it as though it were God. In doing so, by trying to make some created good into the centre, it ends up distorting all of life and ultimately, failing to love even that which it tries to worship.

But the solution is not to throw out the baby with the bathwater by rejecting the object of idolatrous attention. God is worshipped not by removing ourselves from the created order, but by rightly loving it. And so rather than rejecting ecological concerns because some have made them into an idol, loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength can give us a greater capacity to love our neighbour and to respect the beauty and integrity of the living spaces of the planet. Christians are free to be more humane than the humanists, more wealthy (in the things that matter) than the capitalists, more concerned about glory than the celebrities, more free than the liberals and more green than the greenies!
Image by Brennan Jacoby.

Environmentalism will ruin our economy

I agree with Colin Power. All this talk of renewable energy is a disgrace when there is so much coal left to burn.