Climate Change And The Re-Enlightenment
What I read: Climate Change and Our Emerging Cultural Shift by Andrew J. Hoffman in Behavioral Scientist. Published September 30, 2019.
Climate change is the issue of our time. Yes, our tipping toward populist and authoritarian tendencies is certainly of concern. Yes, our inequitable capitalist economy run amok is something we must fix. I could list a bunch of pressing issues of the day, and they are all important.
However, climate change has the potential to wipe out millions, shift entire mass populations geographically, cause monumental destruction, and disrupt daily life for centuries to come. Without dismissing the importance of the many urgent maladies with which we must contend, I have suggested for quite some time that climate change is the overarching problem the entire world must focus on if we and future generations are going to have a livable planet.
Well, not so fast. Professor Andrew J. Hoffman has made me see that climate change is but one ingredient in the stew that is the damage caused by humanmade factors. It’s the challenge that’s front and center in the news, as it should be. But Hoffman points out that it must be seen as just one part of the harmful concoction that humanity has cooked up that’s poised to drastically upend life on our planet.
Despite the rise in media attention on climate change, there are still people who don’t believe it. I find it mind boggling that anyone could see the clear evidence and consensus among esteemed scientists from around the world that climate change is real, hurtling toward us at ever increasing speed, and not believe it. But sadly, there are those who hold fast to their anti-science, anti-reality stance. I’m never quite sure what to do with such people. Do we gently coax them to sensibility? Do we simply ignore them? I’m not sure. It seems we must at least to some extent ignore them and move ahead with the arduous tasks of mitigation of the damage humanity has done to the planet. Coddling naysayers seems like a waste of time.
As I write this post, the Northwest portion of the United States is experiencing record breaking heat. Records are being broken around the world. Climate change must be part of why this is happening. Yes, I know it’s impossible to easily directly correlate certain weather events to climate change, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and state it’s a primary factor. If I’m proven wrong later, I’ll eat my words. I think I’m correct. Climate change is real and “the” issue of our time.
Well, hold on. Maybe I need to reframe all this. Hoffman gave me a lot to chew on and it’s shifting how I view what needs to be done to course correct the planet and the environment in which its inhabitants live. Let’s start with the climate deniers though.
Hoffman starts his article with some of the hateful messages he receives as a reaction to his writings on climate change. Even God is invoked in such messages.
Yet another category of hate mail is religious in orientation. One critic wrote, “You think you are doing good, but you are working for Satan” while another speculated “you are a secular evolutionist, right?” A recognition of climate change comes from the devil? If I believe in climate change, I must not believe in God and evolution? This is a vibrant strand of the climate debate. Rush Limbaugh devoted an entire episode of his show to make the argument that climate change and a belief in God are mutually exclusive. The very thought that humans have become so powerful that we can alter the global climate is, to some, complete hubris. In their eyes, we are not that important. God is in charge out there, we are not, and we live as the beneficiaries of His divine providence.
These attacks aren’t limited to mail, though. I have faced them in person. After one of my talks, an angry man held up a Bible and informed me that God promised Noah he would not flood the earth again. Therefore, “the seas cannot be rising.” After another talk, a young woman approached me, clearly upset. She said she believed in climate change, but she came from a deeply fundamentalist family and the science of the former did not mesh with the theology of the latter. Her family saw climate change through the lens of the Book of Revelations. In short, if the world would come to an end through fire, and climate change will bring higher temperatures, maybe climate change is the fulfillment of that prophecy. “So why resist it if it’s God’s will?”
It’s no secret I’m an atheist. It’s also no secret that I’m entirely fine with people of faith believing whatever they wish if it uplifts them in some way. Totally cool. I am not, however, fine with people using their belief to justify anti-science efforts that could help usher in worldwide destruction and decimation without any attempts to blunt such impacts. That I won’t tolerate. Facts are facts. Science is science. When a preponderance of scientists say something is true, it’s folly to deny it. Even though we know science is something that evolves and adjusts over time, there is no sensible approach to the climate change train bearing down on us at breakneck speed but to accept the overwhelming science and respond accordingly.
Regardless of whether it’s faith, religion, or some other factor that encourages some to deny climate change, Hoffman points out that the true cause of such resistance to science is that it butts up against many of our long-held values about who we are and how we should live. These changes don’t just need to take place among right-wing or anti-science climate change deniers. It’s something we must all face, even us avowed liberals who admittedly claim the moral high ground on this issue, perhaps prematurely.
This point is not just for those who deny the science. Even the most liberal among us, those who contend most strongly for action on climate change, have lived our entire lives steeped in values that are increasingly at odds with a sustainable world. Building a livable world requires a new understanding of our species’ role on Earth. Reorienting this sense of self is something that all of us must confront.
So, there it is. Hoffman’s words slap me in the face and counter my desire to simply ignore climate change deniers. Part of me wants to dig in my heels and entirely ignore those who use religion or other justifications for their entrenched anti-science beliefs. That would be easier. But if the end result we want is a better world not ravaged by the destruction of climate change’s worst effects, we must foster an all hands on deck mentality among even the most ardent deniers of today. Change is hard work. So be it.
We must do whatever it takes to convince the vast majority of people that climate change is the urgent catastrophe of our era. And we must do so not by putting forth simple, minor adjustments to our day-to-day lives like recycling and solar energy (although both are good) as the sum of change needed. We must ultimately wrestle with the difficult notion of changing entire value systems.
We have made climate change trivial by making its solutions easy, looking for simple answers that are palatable, generally framing it in the language of commerce. We count carbon emissions and look to the decreasing price of solar cells and the increasing market value of Tesla as measures that we are making progress. But making the “business case” to address climate change is as absurd as making the business case to not commit suicide. And yet, that is how we are trying to change our culture, one consumer transaction at a time.
Then Hoffman gets to the hard-hitting gist of his article, the tough choices we’re going to have to make as human beings walking upon a threatened planet.
The source of the climate problem is not just our technology or economy. The source of the problem is our beliefs and values that define their purpose and form. If we continue to desire perpetual economic expansion, endless population growth, more material stuff to buy and throw away, plastics in any form and purpose, and an environment that will never cease to provide the resources we want and accept the waste we dump into it, then we will fall back into the convenient and lazy mindset that technology and policy will fix the problem for us. But without systemic changes in our culture and values, we will never recover from the destructive path on which we are embarked. This warning becomes even more urgent as we find ourselves facing a new scale of environmental problems in what scientists are calling the Anthropocene.
For those reading this who have never heard the word Anthropocene before, clicking on the link above and reading the Wikipedia entry would be helpful, but Hoffman offers a great explanation of what it is in the article and why it’s a vital component to the overall discussion about climate change.
Getting more people on board the climate truth bus isn’t the only thing we need to do though. It’s not just our economy or technological advances that are fueling climate change. It goes deeper than that. Our values and beliefs must be dramatically altered. Assumptions that we can continue endless economic expansion, population growth, and a consumer throwaway marketplace are cornerstones to our values and beliefs. Most of us, especially in the more industrialized parts of the world, contribute to those assumptions. We must change.
But without systemic changes in our culture and values, we will never recover from the destructive path on which we are embarked.
Hoffman goes on to more fully explain that we’re in a period of time on the planet scientists have dubbed the Anthropocene. When that span of time began depends on the starting point agreed upon, but let’s say it includes the last 50-200 years starting with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
While the Anthropocene has ushered in dire effects to climate change, it extends well beyond climate change itself to the integration and interactions between various planetary ecosystems, with a group of scientists having identified nine “planetary boundaries” that represent “thresholds below which humanity can safely operate and beyond which the stability of planetary-scale systems cannot be relied upon.”
The climate crisis is one of those boundaries, but so are ocean acidification, ozone depletion, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, freshwater use, deforestation and other land changes, biodiversity loss, particle pollution of the atmosphere, and chemical pollution. Taken together, the crossing of the thresholds for these boundaries represent humanmade changes to our planet’s environment, much of it fueled by rampant capitalism, that are impacting the overall environment in catastrophic ways.
Most of us simply accept this reality in which we now live. Humans are an adaptive species and we’ve shifted our view of normal to sync with the damaged world in which we must navigate. But such desensitization needs to be reversed. As Professor Neil Everden wrote in this book, The Natural Alien,
The [environmental] crisis is not simply something we can examine and resolve. We are the environmental crisis. The crisis is a visible manifestation of our very being, like territory revealing the self at its center. The environmental crisis is inherent in everything we believe and do; it is inherent in the context of our lives.
Phew. That’s a lot to take in. We are, I am, the environmental crisis. As I read that I was awash in significant guilt and shame. I know my own values and beliefs have contributed to the state we now find our environment.
Hoffman is not bogged down in a dark, fatalistic view of the future. He has hope. Even while much of the environmental damage has been done that will not adequately reverse in our lifetimes, Hoffman is clear we must do what we can to reverse the course on which we’ve embarked. We owe it to those younger than us and to future generations. It’s the moral thing to do. It’s the compassionate thing to do.
Then Hoffman invokes religion and philosophy as two vehicles by which we can perhaps instill in enough people a shared sense of purpose and values that will serve as the foundation for improving the environment.
Maybe the religions of the world can deliver messaging to its followers that we must all adopt the cause of improving the environment as a moral imperative. We must “connect concern for the environment with our deepest sense of what we love and what we hold as sacred.” That would be a great use of religion.
For people who are not of faith like me, Hoffman references philosophy as another mechanism by which we can perhaps convince the masses to embrace a better caretaker attitude about the environment.
In the end, if the collective responsibility we need in the Anthropocene is connected to the teachings of the Bible, Torah, Quran, Bhagavad-gītā, Tripitaka, and oral traditions of indigenous peoples, or the philosophies of Aurelius, Locke, Voltaire, Madison, Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Russell, then the world can change on its axis. It has happened before and with great upheaval, and it can happen again. But it will involve a culture shift as grand and sweeping as the Enlightenment, Reformation, or Scientific Revolution.
Hoffman believes what we need is a Re-Enlightenment, a correction of the path on which the era of the Enlightenment has taken us. While the Enlightenment brought about the age of reason and the view that humans essentially own and can control nature and the world around us to bend it to our needs, a Re-Enlightenment will hopefully reverse that mindset.
To adopt such a bold, new, and unintended role as stewards of life’s continuity on earth, we are embarking on what University of Alberta professor Dev Jennings and I have described as a “Re-Enlightenment.” Recognizing that the term Enlightenment carries some cultural baggage (not the least of which is whether the period accelerated colonialism and exploitation), the comparison is useful in capturing the scale and scope of the culture shift before us.
In the Enlightenment, we disconnected ourselves from “nature,” viewing it as something separate from ourselves. In the Re-Enlightenment, we will reconnect those two worlds. Instead of viewing nature as simply a resource or waste sink for our own benefit, we will find ways to see the value it possesses beyond human utility and efficiency. We will see value in all life and appreciate inter-dependencies that cannot be detected in a laboratory or calculated in a market exchange. The fact that we can’t measure or price this value does not mean that it doesn’t exist. It simply needs to be examined and expressed in different ways. Just as the Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries countered scientific rationalism with knowledge that was expressed most profoundly in art, literature, and music, we will reengage with all the ways of knowing the world and appreciate the entirety of nature with humans as an integral piece of the whole.
Hoffman concludes his article with hope. In his view, the Re-Enlightenment has already begun. Citing examples from religion, philosophy, and eco-friendly innovation, Hoffman sees inklings of a growing realization that something like the Re-Enlightenment is beginning to happen to fix our broken environment. Those fixes won’t come about without massive shifts in our individual and collective thinking, but Hoffman sees the start of that shift already occurring and finds it heartening.
This article has changed my life. That’s not an exaggeration. This one article has broadened how I see this topic considerably, and from a new vantage point. It also validated my recent interest in philosophy. I’ve felt philosophy could change not only individuals but the entire world. I feel more that way now than ever before.
I was so impressed by the article that I plan to read Hoffman’s book, How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate.
If you haven’t read the article in its entirety yet, I strongly advise you do so. You might be changed, and those changes might percolate throughout humanity and change the planet for the better. We really don’t have a choice, do we? We change, or we leave a dystopian world behind for future generations. Let’s not do that. Let’s all help the planet recover and thrive again.