18 Christianity, Creation, and the Climate Crisis …
349
builds on this foundation and presents five bible-informed ‘green prisms’
4 that help to
explain faith-informed motivations behind differences in environmentally sustainable
practices. Thereafter, Sect. 6 offers analysis and synthesis on impediments that have
stymied environmental action within some faith communities (Orr 2005; Zaleha and
Szasz 2015). Finally, Sect. 7 concludes the discussion with a call for new conceptual
capital for a new era. The epistemologies, prisms and paradigms which are presented
in this chapter help explain Christian worldview-informed environmental action and
inaction and point the way to effective and sustainable climate-change adaptation in
the future.
The Great Acceleration and Anthropocene
In seeking to comprehend contemporary Christian environmental thought, it is
helpful to contextually ground the discussion in the period since the end of World
War II. In this era, known as the ‘Great Acceleration’, rapid global industrialisation
was marked by accelerating changes in population, conflict, resource usage, globalisation, consumerism and increasing economic inequities. Environmental historian
John McNeil argues that, if we take a long-range view of the past, we see that,
without intending to, humanity has “undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment”
in changing the global climate that has fundamentally altered our relationship with
the environment. It may turn out, he says, to be more important than any of the other
political, social or economic changes that occurred in the twentieth century (McNeil
2000, p. 4). These changes have been depicted in a series of graphs
5 produced by
the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in 2004 (Steffen et al. 2005),
showing a range of factors, including carbon and methane pollution, world population, consumerism, motor vehicle usage and so forth, that all spike after 1950 in a
way unprecedented in the Earth’s history. A study that updated the 2000–2010 data
found that, whilst there were some encouraging small corrections, the overwhelming
trend remains the same. The authors of the updated study conclude that “planetary
stewardship has yet to emerge” (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 94).
What is concerning about the Great Acceleration is that human-driven changes are
operating with unprecedented rapidity, magnitude, and at the same time. Often their
impacts are exceeding the range of natural variability observed in scientific records
for the past several millennia such that various Earth systems are starting to become
unstable in ways that have no precedent in the geological record (MEA 2005; IPBES
2019; UN 2019). We just do not know what will happen when these systems become
unstable enough to cross a planetary ecological threshold. Climatologists now can no
4 Peter Hay first used the idea of a ‘green prism’ to describe when people reframed how they
understood diverse political or economic issues within the context of environmental thought as
early as 1987 (Doyle 2000, p. 61).
5 A version of the 2004 graphs were published by NewScientist magazine in 2008 and available at:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14950-special-report-the-facts-about-overconsumption/.
349
builds on this foundation and presents five bible-informed ‘green prisms’
4 that help to
explain faith-informed motivations behind differences in environmentally sustainable
practices. Thereafter, Sect. 6 offers analysis and synthesis on impediments that have
stymied environmental action within some faith communities (Orr 2005; Zaleha and
Szasz 2015). Finally, Sect. 7 concludes the discussion with a call for new conceptual
capital for a new era. The epistemologies, prisms and paradigms which are presented
in this chapter help explain Christian worldview-informed environmental action and
inaction and point the way to effective and sustainable climate-change adaptation in
the future.
The Great Acceleration and Anthropocene
In seeking to comprehend contemporary Christian environmental thought, it is
helpful to contextually ground the discussion in the period since the end of World
War II. In this era, known as the ‘Great Acceleration’, rapid global industrialisation
was marked by accelerating changes in population, conflict, resource usage, globalisation, consumerism and increasing economic inequities. Environmental historian
John McNeil argues that, if we take a long-range view of the past, we see that,
without intending to, humanity has “undertaken a gigantic uncontrolled experiment”
in changing the global climate that has fundamentally altered our relationship with
the environment. It may turn out, he says, to be more important than any of the other
political, social or economic changes that occurred in the twentieth century (McNeil
2000, p. 4). These changes have been depicted in a series of graphs
5 produced by
the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in 2004 (Steffen et al. 2005),
showing a range of factors, including carbon and methane pollution, world population, consumerism, motor vehicle usage and so forth, that all spike after 1950 in a
way unprecedented in the Earth’s history. A study that updated the 2000–2010 data
found that, whilst there were some encouraging small corrections, the overwhelming
trend remains the same. The authors of the updated study conclude that “planetary
stewardship has yet to emerge” (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 94).
What is concerning about the Great Acceleration is that human-driven changes are
operating with unprecedented rapidity, magnitude, and at the same time. Often their
impacts are exceeding the range of natural variability observed in scientific records
for the past several millennia such that various Earth systems are starting to become
unstable in ways that have no precedent in the geological record (MEA 2005; IPBES
2019; UN 2019). We just do not know what will happen when these systems become
unstable enough to cross a planetary ecological threshold. Climatologists now can no
4 Peter Hay first used the idea of a ‘green prism’ to describe when people reframed how they
understood diverse political or economic issues within the context of environmental thought as
early as 1987 (Doyle 2000, p. 61).
5 A version of the 2004 graphs were published by NewScientist magazine in 2008 and available at:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14950-special-report-the-facts-about-overconsumption/.