Imagine, if you dare, being forcibly parachuted into Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the world’s current hell-hole du jour.
Suddenly you’re forced to shelter and feed your family and you’re at a loss as to how..
Now consider how the increasingly dramatic consequences of human-accelerated climate change might make your already dire situation worse.
A recent New York Times piece attempted to paint this picture. It was not pretty. Here’s its opening graphs.
Parts of Afghanistan have warmed twice as much as the global average. Spring rains have declined, most worryingly in some of the country’s most important farmland. Droughts are more frequent in vast swaths of the country, including a punishing dry spell now in the north and west, the second in three years.
Afghanistan embodies a new breed of international crisis, where the hazards of war collide with the hazards of climate change, creating a nightmarish feedback loop that punishes some of the world’s most vulnerable people and destroys their countries’ ability to cope.
And while it would be facile to attribute the conflict in Afghanistan to climate change, the effects of warming act as what military analysts call threat multipliers, amplifying conflicts over water, putting people out of work in a nation whose people largely live off agriculture, while the conflict itself consumes attention and resources.
Just like that, a regional hell hole turns into a global tragedy generating global headlines. Powerful nations half-a-world away scramble to deal with the situation — or should I say scramble to look like they’re dealing with it.
Nor is Afghanistan the only failed state suffering from ongoing political violence complicated by climate change’s frightening uncertainties. “Of the world’s 25 nations most vulnerable to climate change, more than a dozen are affected by conflict or civil unrest, according to an index developed by the University of Notre Dame,” The Times article reported.
They include Somalia, Syria, and Mali — all nations, like Afghanistan, where radical Islamists are key mischief makers. All three nations have suffered years of violent insurgencies and prolonged droughts, the latter made worse by man-made climate change, the former fueled by dwindling food, water and other critical resources.
The surge of Central American refugees toward the United States border — a major political dilemma for our nation’s southern border, not to mention for the White House — is also in part related to climate change-related crop failures in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
The scientific consensus is that climate change is real. Very real. Of this I have no doubt, as report after international scientific report has attested. Common sense seems to dictate that homo sapiens have pushed the fossil fuel-envelope way further than we should have.
Where does this leave us? And what if anything at this point, can religious leaders and religion-beat journalists do to call attention to the crisis?
Hold this thought. I’ll return to it a bit further along.
Humanity’s military conflicts have long been fueled by the need, both real and imagined, for natural resources, obviously including those critical for food. Imagine the degree to which panicky desperation is likely to grow among already calorie-challenged populations as increasingly unpredictable weather events — flooding, heat waves, wildfires — render food production more difficult.
Imagine how this will prompt untold additional numbers of people to become climate change refugees as they seek access to the parts of the world — primarily the wealthier Western nations of the northern latitudes — where food supplies are likely to remain strongest for the longest as climate change conditions intensify.
Again, not a pretty scenario. And one that will surely further stress the awkward global relationships between the have and have-not nations that have already resulted in, in recent years, anti-refugee steps as varied as those taken by Hungry, the United Kingdom (remember Brexit?) and Australia.
This summer’s catastrophic climate events and an upcoming United Nations climate meeting have prompted religious leaders, of late, to increasingly vocalize their concerns. However, you might not know this as their comments largely, but not unsurprisingly, received minimum coverage from journalism’s elite platforms.
Why is it that politicians, economists and the masters of industry and commerce seem always to have greater sway over society’s climate change choices? It’s not that leading religious leaders from a broad variety of faith traditions have been silent on the issue. Theological and social progressives and traditionalists have both increasingly spoken up since before 1970’s initial Earth Day.
Is the media disinterest just another sign of organized religion’s waning societal influence?
Or is this nothing new? Have society’s short term material wants always bested what I regard as society’s longterm practical and ethical concerns? My reading of history leads me to this conclusion. There’s just something about us — a major psychological and spiritual (in the broadest sense) flaw — that leads us into temptation time and again.
There’s not a major religion in the world that does not acknowledge this human limitation, whether it’s labeled “sin” by the Abrahamic traditions, or “merit, ” as in some Buddhist or Hindu schools.
Among those leaders who have recently addressed climate change are the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope Francis, Orthodox Christianity’s Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, and the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, spiritual head of the global Anglican Communion.
The three leaders issued a joint appeal urging delegates at an upcoming U.N. climate summit set for Glasgow, Scotland, to “listen to the cry of the Earth” and make sacrifices to save the planet.
In their first-ever joint statement on the issue, the three Christian clerics said the coronavirus pandemic gave political leaders an unprecedented opportunity to rethink the global economy and make it more sustainable and socially just for the poor.
“We must decide what kind of world we want to leave to future generations,” said their joint statement.
Meanwhile, in the liberal Protestant journal The Christian Century, one writer wondered whether:
Just like the reality of our own deaths, the reality of climate change is not a question of if but of how and why and when. Facing reality will mean facing what it means to adapt to a changing climate, whether now or in generations to come.
Adaptation, by which I mean changing to fit new climatic circumstances, can happen one of two ways. We can adapt intentionally and wisely, in ways that ensure justice and well-being for as many as possible, both human and nonhuman. Or we can just let things be, continue life as usual, and allow death and chaos to do the work of forcing adaptation.
And writing for JTA (the Jewish Telegraphic Agency), two leaders of the liberal Jewish environmental organization Hazon (Hebrew for “vision”) said:
Confronting this crisis seems monumental — because it is. So much so that individuals might believe there is nothing they can do in the face of forces that have transformed life on the planet so quickly and negatively.
This crisis is so enormous, so global, so existential, many of us wonder how much our individual, institutional and/or communal actions can help turn the tide against such a tidal wave of climate disasters.
Their vision is a harsh one. Sadly, I happen to agree with them; we either act now or we face still unknown consequences that are likely to be terribly ugly.
So back to our larger question: What now? What can religious leaders, and religion journalists do about this increasingly acute situation?
I’d say it’s past time for faith groups and their leaders to attempt to shock their followers — and most significantly the recalcitrant who seem to populate too many church, synagogue, mosque and temple spaces — into more radical actions.
By radical I mean actions that truly challenge the sort of everyday lifestyle, economic and political decisions that have gotten us into the mess we’re in. Because simple recycling does not cut it.
People don’t take kindly to being pushed to do what others tell them is best for them over the long haul. They squirm when a doctor tells them to alter their diet, when a police officer tells them to replace a dead automobile headlight, or when a minister says you need to do better in so many ways.
But isn’t that their role? To make congregants squirm for the betterment of themselves and others? And isn’t the role of religion-beat journalists and commentators, at least in part, to hold the clergy’s feet to the fire, to push them on the day’s most difficult issues?
If not now, when? Because if not now we’ll only be facing more frightening stories such as this one.
FIRST IMAGE: Illustration posted at the University of Colorado Environmental Center.