Religion as Antidote to Climate Change, or Climate Change as Alternative Religion?
Few debates in contemporary Canadian society have such a "theological" quality as our current one over energy use and climate change. Accusations concerning the development of a global warming "alternative religion" abound on the one side; the claim that what is required is nothing less than a basic shift in human spirituality to check rapacious greed and the exploitation of nature are found on the other. Could the answer really lie in theology?
Energy Use, the Canadian Consumer and Public Life
While Canada's overall contribution to global warming and climate change may be small, Canadians have among the highest rates of total energy consumption per capita in the industrialized world. A report published in 2001 placed the country 27th among 29 OECD nations in per capita consumption of energy. Public perception of the need for change, however, is now a fact of political life and a major issue for government.
While theological advocacy exists, a record of fundamental theological reflection and research on the question of energy policy and climate change in Canada is hard to find. This may be, in part, because public perception of the need for change has been slower in coming in Canada than it has, for example, in the European setting, and Canadian theology has simply followed the domestic trend. With heightened public interest in the question, however, there is scope for theological re-examination of the question, in dialogue with scientists, economists, policymakers and concerned citizens.
Theology and the Future of Creation
Following the Second World War, and amid the ruins of Europe, a "theology of reconstruction" arose within which an attempt was made to knit together questions concerning hope with others concerning creation, politics with eschatology, and justice with the Spirit and with the life of the church. Its major representatives in figures such as Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann reconfigured Christian theology in the second half of the 20th century, giving rise to liberation theology and, among other things, a range of ecological perspectives that are still with us. Since the 1960s, feminist theology has, for its part, advocated less hierarchical relationships, not only in the human worlds of church and society, but also in the several relations of humanity to nature.
Is some new departure possible at this stage, though, given that we live at a time in which the call for concrete steps to ensure the future of creation against human-initiated environmental damage is no longer a protest movement, but has entered the mainstream? Could it even be that the sheer "progressiveness" of the varied reconstructions advanced in 20th century thought leaves us without adequate foundation for meaningful response to the threat of climate change in the 21st? An economy wedded to ceaseless growth rather than sustainability, a politics that marches to the same drumbeat, a science designed to deliver "freedom" over nature, and these together with a religious outlook also that constantly privileges the new over an ancient wisdom may, after all, represent a remarkably poor soil on which to nurture the kind of reconciliation with our limits that the ecological crisis demands of us.
Fundamental reflection on the question of climate change, on the nature of human life, and on theology's response to it all there needs to be. Consider attending our 2011 theological conference on Canadian energy policy and climate change!