Reflection: Tyler

As a History Major, I registered for this course, Religion and the Anthropocene as an elective. Especially with this semester taking place online, I wanted to take a class which was very different from the rest of my course load in the History department, and I was drawn to the idea of a new epoch: the Anthropocene, a chance to watch as history unfolds before my eyes. While the readings and discussions did in fact feel very different, I was surprised by how often ideas from this class would come up in my history classes, and vice versa. So much of the Anthropocene is looking ahead to the current epoch, but by taking a historical approach, grounded in the study of religion, the connections between religion, imperialism and the environmental crisis we now face become clear, and have been my focus over the semester. I first made this connection when reading about the Orbis Spike. 

“White Utopia/ Black Inferno: Life on a Geological Spike” was my first exposure to the Orbis Spike, but it was not the end of my study of this particular moment. “White Utopia/ Black Inferno” did a great job of explaining this connection, by introducing what the Orbis Spike is: 

The invasion of Europeans in the Americas resulted in a massive genocide of the indigenous population, leading to a decline from 54 million people in the Americas in 1492 to approximately 6 million in 1650, a result of murder, enslavement, famine, and disease. This led to a massive reduction in farming and the regeneration of forests and carbon uptake or sequestration by forests, leading to an observed decline in Antarctic ice cores of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This decline in CO2 is known as the Orbis Spike, and it is proof that slavery and imperialism literally changed the composition of our planet. As white powers made life a living hell for the people of color they viewed as non-human they were actually making the planet inhospitable for everyon

In a History course I took this semester, titled “Development and Humanitarianism in the Global South,” we also covered the Orbis Spike. This course focused on how we got to the Orbis Spike, and what the motivating factors behind colonialism were. This took the form of questioning how colonizers viewed human beings, and who exactly qualified as a human being to these people. This view of people was very tied to their religion, particularly for the Spaniards, as Patricia Seed explains in "‘Are These Not Also Men?': The Indians' Humanity and Capacity for Spanish Civilization" because the Spaniards needed to define the Indians as human to some degree, because their dominion over them depended on the Pope giving them the land to Christianize the population. So, the Spanish could not call the people beasts, as beasts are not receptive, nor even capable of religion. Their intense belief in their religion made the Spaniards believe if an indigenous person did not immediately agree with their Christian views, that they were incapable of reason. Christianity was a “Natural Law” and “obvious” to all humans. Seed writes, 

Defining Indians by virtue of their response to European ideology signified the focus of Spanish thinking upon their 'capacity' for assimilation of Hispanic culture. It separated Indians from Spaniards as those Others - those not like us - who did not respond by becoming like us (Christians).

Through this quote, we can see how religion was a major factor in Spanish colonization of the Americas, and behind colonization in general. Locating the emergence of the Anthropocene in 1610, the year of the Orbis Spike, allows us to see the impact this view of humanity, or lack thereof, has had on our planet. 

If indigenous populations are not human, then they must be some form of “non-human.” We have talked a lot about the relationship between humans and non-humans, and the idea of human exceptionalism in this class, which I think shed light on why people like the Spaniards Seed described felt so comfortable committing near-genocide against the indigenous people. Our discussion of what’s known as the "dominion clause" in Religion and the Anthropocene was particularly illuminating on this subject. We spoke about how a clause in the book of Genesis may be partly to blame for today’s ecological crisis. The verse is as follows: 

God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. (Gen 1:26) 

Unfortunately for indigenous people, they would most likely fall for the colonizers into the category of, “creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth,” which means that the colonizers believed they had complete dominion over their colonized subjects. 

We cannot continue to view people as resources to be exploited. Historically, religion has been a major factor in encouraging these thoughts of western superiority, or more specifically Christian superiority. How that has led to the Orbis Spike through the forced relocations of peoples has providesd the proof that western imperialism, religion, and climate change are all intimately connected, and have been for centuries. Perhaps this is why I found it difficult to separate my thinking on these two classes throughout the semester. 

(TM)

Image Source: https://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2015/03/24/the-orbis-spike/