A Winter That Barely Was, An Unhealthy World, and Great Lent
A Winter That Barely Was, An Unhealthy World, and Great Lent
Climate Change From Several Angles
i. the winter that barely was
I've been observing spring ephemeral wildflowers in the Southern Appalachians for over thirty years now (it is a bit of shock to tabulate the years); somewhere in my personal archive still is the little notebook I started keeping in the early '90s recording plants and animals I encountered and observed in nature, mostly on and around Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau. In an early entry carefully noted the mid-February emergence of hepaticas, which, along with other ephemerals like spring beauties and chickweed, launch into bloom even before winter has cleared into early spring. It has yet to cease being quietly exhilirating, the promise of the grand array of spring bloomers in the coves and ridgelines to come. Watching for the first emergence and bloom of spring ephemerals has also been a helpful way to observe the ebb and flow of weather and climatic changes and trends over time, not that I had such concerns in mind as a child climbing around mountainsides looking for the first spring blooms.
This year the hepaticas started blooming here in the far northwest corner of Georgia, about fifty miles south of my childhood haunts, not in mid-February, but in the third week of January, at an elevation of 1100 feet above sea level, far from urban heat island effect and the like. This is a month earlier compared to the norm from just the 1990s, which, admittedly, subjectively feels further and further away, but even in human terms is not that long ago; in climatic and biological terms it's the blink of an eye. This winter has been unusually warm, even by the standards of the last decade, and perhaps next winter the beginning of the bloom-out will be a bit later. Regardless, the extreme shortness of proper winter this year and the response of the green kingdom (including native plants, not just invasives still genetically attuned to different climatic patterns) have underlined the climatic reality that we are facing.
It’s become a bit cliché to note, but it remains true that climate change is no longer something that we observe through high-order statistics or through news reports from some other place. If you have been paying close enough attention to the natural world over the last couple of decades you can see the effects for yourself, in a regular and repeatable manner (which is crucial—every unusual or unseasonable weather event cannot be chalked up to global climate change, it’s worth underlining). It is in things like consistently earlier and earlier bloom-outs in which we can see the most serious impacts of our situation, even if they are generally not yet obvious. At the risk of contributing yet more proverbial hot air to the already heated discourse on climate change (I’m sorry), what follows are some of my reflections on how we ought to understand what is happening and what a better shape of response might look like compared to much of what is presently in circulation.
ii. climate change in context
Climatic change by itself is, of course, nothing new to our planet. The climate has changed many times during human history alone, in some cases even more dramatically than what we are facing at present (though that statement should be asterisked—we do not yet know what this current period of change will ultimately look like). Over the long history of life on earth, some bouts of intense climatic change have indeed led to large-scale extinction and ecological loss, but, conversely, others saw little to no evident outsized extinction or enduring damage to ecological functioning. The dramatic ups and downs of the Pleistocene, which famously featured successive periods of intense cold and warmth, saw many localized extinctions—plants and animals pushed out of one area to others to the north or south (or higher or lower within a mountain range)—but relatively few global ones, at least not until the final cycle of cooling and warming. While the verdict is still out, and the case may never be satisfactorily solved, it does seem likely that our own species had something to do with late and end Pleistocene extinctions, probably combined with the dramatic climatic changes that marked the advent of the Holocene, that (relatively speaking) gloriously equitable climatic period in which humans have so abundantly flourished.
It would be easy enough to look at and take solace from those Pleistocene climatic intervals, or from even more spectacular examples such as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, in which earth’s climate grew hotter by several degrees celsius practically overnight, going from the hothouse world of the late Paleocene to the even hotter hothouse world of the early Eocene. While there was some degree of species loss in certain environments—the deep ocean, for instance—by and large there were no remarkable pulses of extinction, so far as can be ascertained. One might argue—and certainly iterations of this argument are becoming increasingly common as the sheer reality of anthropogenic climate change becomes harder to ignore—that because periods of global warming have been benign in the past, we should expect the same today.
What such a line of reasoning overlooks is that while it is true that organisms and whole ecosystem assemblies have adjusted just fine to climatic changes, the world has changed substantially over the last few centuries, in ways that fundamentally affect the adaptability of living things to the high-level changes we have generated. We do not live in a healthy world, simply put. Climate change might be thought of as akin to many pathogens that can infect our bodies and whose effects might be minor or absent altogether in the presence of overall bodily health, causing sickness and even death in the absence of such health. While—generally—less often in the headlines, the causes and symptoms of our biosphere’s poor health are easy enough to see. Among the most far-reaching effects of modern globalization has been the rapid and seemingly unstoppable spread of debilitating pathogens into natural environments far, far from their points of origin; here in the American South, for instance, it has become easier to reckon up tree species which are not affected by some introduced insect or fungal blight or virus, and our situation is not unique. Alongside the pathogens humans have inadvertently spread in the era of rapid global travel are the other organisms we have introduced, also usually inadvertently, creating an ecological situation simply unprecedented in the entire history of life on earth, with generally deleterious effects.
Of course that is just the start of it, though we should probably underline these less immediately visible factors of unhealthiness, since they are so pervasive: even as much of Western Europe and North America are reverting to a state of semi-wildness with the local retreat of agriculture and declining population levels, the after-effects remain, and in some cases become more pervasive as human attention retreats. As the unfolding situation with avian flu reminds us, there are no sharp boundaries between ‘our’ world and the ‘natural world’; pathogens and pollutants and invasive organisms and atmospheric inputs respect no boundaries. And then there are the more obvious interventions we have made, some going far back—agriculture, domesticated animals and their managed habitats—but the most pressing of more recent vintage, from the vast web of impermeable surfaces that connect our built environments to vast agro-industrial landscapes managed only for a narrow range of human consumption, from pine plantations to palm oil plantations to unending soy bean fields.
If our biosphere were the body of an organism, it would be riddled with diseases, weakened by over-exertion, and starved of nutrition. Climate change in such a setting threatens to be a proverbial last straw, the turn of the biological wrench that sets off a cascade of failures and collapses, albeit long building. It is not in fact unrelated that covid has acted in such a manner, with mortality clustering among those already in poor health or of advanced age. To be sure there are many causes for poor health that can facilitate covid-related mortality, but much general bad health—poor nutrition, lack of exercise, social isolation—are directly tied into the crisis of ecological health. And while as with covid we were collectively presented—and rejected—an opportunity to address the web of underlying factors that made the pandemic so deadly and disruptive, responses to climate change could address the constellation of factors, not just carbon release, but the wider ecological disarray of our biosphere.
iii. you must change your life
It would be an understatement to say that there are many, many proposed ways to deal with climate change—both in terms of arresting its further unfolding and in mitigating its effects. As is generally the case, to recognize the problem is not enough: there is a constant risk that a real problem will be used to advance existing systems of power or to replace those systems of power and economy with even worse ones. To use a rather extreme example, the authoritarians and totalitarians of the twentieth century very often identified real problems, sometimes more clearly and accurately than their liberal opponents: but their solutions were either not solutions at all or simply replaced one social evil with something far worse. Reactive responses, even if they come from a place of genuine concern and enlightened observation, might not end up replicating the policies of fascists and communists, but can at best create contrary effects, at worst entrench regressive and unjust relationships of power, even if in the service of what are overall positive agendas for climatic care and restoration.
In lieu of identifying what I see as negative or dangerous policies and inclinations, I’d rather like to propose two fundamental ways of being the world that we very much need to recover and realize on a global scale, starting, as such things must, at the level of individual persons, small communities, and local politics, even as they need also to be built out at scale, as possible. First—not that it’s a matter of priority, both are essential—we need to recognize that humans are fundamentally ‘ecological engineers’1 par excellance, and that we very much are continually being presented with choices as to how (not whether or not) we will manage the living systems of which we are a part and which we, alone of all creatures on this planet, have a guiding charge in. This role of ours can be ascertained theologically, historically, and scientifically: humans, going back almost certainly to even before H. sapiens, have been consciously modifying our natural environments in ways no other creature can. The ecologies of both the Old and New Worlds were deeply shaped by humans during the Paleolithic, a role that exploded once the ice sheets retreated and humans traveled out alongside other creatures to fill the Holocene earth, whether as cultivators, arborists, hunter-gatherers, or what have you. Many entire ecosystems across the planet that we tend to imagine as ‘wild’ and ‘pristine,’ it is increasingly clear, have depended upon tens of thousands of years of human interaction for their sustenance. I will go out on a limb and suggest that much of the biodiversity of the last twelve thousand years, and perhaps well prior, can be traced to human ecological interactions.
Theologically we can look to the very beginning of Holy Scripture, as it exists in the order we now have of course, for recognition of this reality, rooted in God’s command to human beings and His placing them in a particular relationship to the wider creation. The ‘dominion’ of Genesis is a charge to tend and to care, to be in a position of dominance, to be sure, but one that is intended towards the making of a Garden, not a wasteland. To be sure, elsewhere in Scripture there is a definite sense that human dominion has its limits, that the purely wild and untamed must always exist up alongside and even within our gardens; and crucially, humans are not presented with a blank check as it were. Almost immediately a tension is introduced: while the divine command to human beings to tend and to cultivate the earth is not superseded by humans’ sinful response, things grow more complicated. Human sin disorders, though it does not destroy, our relationship with the rest of the created order, with one another, and with God. If the evidence of both the deep past and of the Scriptural narrative suggests that this complicated relationship has always been present, it also presents something unmistakable: that with the advent of settled agriculture and especially of urban life and the rise of states, we have as often as not become the cause of destruction and violence, of gardens gone wrong, to the detriment of ourselves and of the wider created order.
It is not too much of a stretch to say that anthropogenic climate change is, ultimately, the fruit of human sin, of a refusal to be the priest-gardeners, the wise ecological engineers, indeed the representatives of God on earth, that our species has been called to be, and for which divine providence acting within vast evolutionary dynamics shaped us to be. The ultimate solution—the redemptive transformation of human beings in Christ—lies far beyond any momentary political action, but there are other things that we can and should do in light of the above, to reorient ourselves and our communities towards that which God has called us, a calling that is expressed very concretely in our own evolutionary and ecological history and that of the organisms around us. Humans are not in ourselves the problem. Rather, if we are to confront not just the effects of climate change but the vast unhealthiness which we have all visited upon one another and upon the earth as a whole, we must recover to some extent or another our calling as wise gardeners, as engineers and managers of the ecosystems we inhabit. There is a lot more to unpack on that front, but I will leave it alone for the time being, and hopefully revisit this theme in the near future.
Second, if we are to confront climate change and our wider collective impact upon our biosphere, we will need an awakening of asceticism, an asceticism that is rooted not in moralism or compulsion or guilt, but in an ethic of love. In the Orthodox world we are on the cusp of Great Lent, a period in which—ideally at least!—we practice what can appear to be quite strict bodily asceticism, foregoing many of the food staples that in our rich world are pervasive: meats of all kinds, cheeses, alcohol. We are encouraged instead to turn our resources that would be devoted to luxurious (relatively speaking!) eating to the care of others, and to the amendment of our own desires and the strengthening of our inner lives. Detachment from things is not a goal in itself, or at least it should not be: the goal is a deepening of love, of looking away from one’s own needs to the needs of others, of dispelling the haze of self-concern in which we normally operate. Of course it is easy enough to get wrong or to abuse: asceticism only really ‘works’ when it is basically invisible, when the given actions open one out to God and to others and do not turn the focus on one’s self. But such asceticism remains a potent tool, a powerful form of exercise and shaping of the will, and, I would suggest, such an ‘ascetical’ understanding will be necessary if we are to truly deal with the world we have built these last two centuries.
Of course, at present, any connection of climate change and asceticism is made negatively: the idea that environmentalists want us all to become the equivalent of joyless monks subsisting on gruel, or something. But more deeply, it is indeed the case that at least in the Western world, the overwhelming ethic of our age is one of self-realization and self-creation, apart from any concern for others or for future repercussions, even in one’s own self. This ethic is rarely taken to its full extent by any of the sides in our roiling culture war, instead, the various factions express different iterations. Perhaps the trick, as it were, in shaping discourse and thus practice is to build out from where we are culturally: after all while self-denial is certainly a key part of Christian asceticism, it is not the end goal. In realizing in ourselves and our daily lives an ethic of love and of self-giving we in fact discover our ‘true self,’ we realize an identity that we did not even know we could possess.
An ethic of love that includes an asceticism of self-limitation, of rejection of endless consumption, of thoughtless consumption and use, and which judges all acts of consumption through a lens of care and a concern not just for one’s own health but for the health of all, is absolutely essential. But such a ‘negative’ asceticism is not enough: as with Great Lent, the emphasis must be on active works of good and care, and in the context of climate and ecology a recovery of human work as gardener-priests, as stewards and cultivators of the earth, ought to go hand-in-hand with things like changing resource use and rejection of excessive consumption. We will not obtain an ecological utopia, not this side of the Eschaton: there will always be a tension in our relationship with the land and with one another, of course. But our call at the moment is rather more modest: to restore enough ecological and socio-cultural health as to advert, or at least mitigate, terrible and deadly effects at multiple levels, not just the strictly human bodily. There are certainly large-scale political, infrastructural, and other changes that need to take place; but we must start from a place of changing our way of being in the world, of understanding ourselves and our relationship to our neighbor and to our shared biosphere. In such a case transformation and response is far more likely to flow upwards, not downward from reactive centers of power.
iv. conclusion
The reader who has made it to the end might be thinking that the above sounds all well and good but neither likely nor practical. As to the likelihood, well, perhaps not, but then many things that would have seemed highly unlikely or impossible in human history have come to pass, and just as climatic feedback loops can shift rapidly, human cultural and social patterns can as well, sometimes in quite unpredictable ways. Divine providence works in mysterious ways—a bit cliché, but true nonetheless.
In terms of practical steps, if you’ve been reading my scribblings for long you’ll have a sense of what I encourage practically-speaking, and which I’m trying to live out on multiple fronts these days. At some point during Great Lent I’ll need to sit down and give a report, so stay tuned for that, as well as some other general news and items of interest—hopefully I’ll find the time and energy to get back in the habit of monthly dispatches again, so stay tuned!
Perhaps the most notable examples of non-human ‘ecological engineers’ are beavers and elephants, though there are many others of course: creatures whose everyday actions reshape the overall environment at macro and micro levels, either through building bodies of water and wetlands where there were none before (beavers) or through reducing tree canopy cover and ensuring that savannah conditions remain (elephants). Humans have historically been more akin to elephants, maintaining certain large-scale ecological conditions through the use of fire, deliberate plantings, cycles of hunting and gathering, and the like, ancient populations of humans often maintaining vast landscapes as semi-wild gardens at scale.