Religion and the Anthropocene

    Reading a papal Encyclical is a trying experience, even if the Pope in question is Francis and the news has just broken that Francis supports the legal recognition of civil unions for gay people. In his concern for the environment, refugees and immigrants, and justice between the global north and south, Pope Francis is more progressive than any of us would ever expect a Pontiff to be, and the encyclical Laudato Si´: On Care for Our Common Home resonates with these urgent concerns. But if Francis and his church can come this far, why not further? We read a critique of Laudato Si´ by Beatrice Marovich which argued that, despite its successes, it remains a patriarchal text, committed to an unnatural heteronormativity and unable to acknowledge the "religious biodiversity" it uncovers. Still, the linkage of the "cry of the poor" and the "cry of the earth" in Laudato Si´ of broke important ground in international discourse around the climate crisis, open...

The creation narratives at the beginning of the book of Genesis are full of things people don't expect. For starters, most people don't expect to find two such narratives. We read only the first (1-2:3), trying to get a sense of the context of the "dominion clause" which Lynn White (in "The Historical Origins of Our Ecological Crisis") claimed was the seed of western Christian culture's unprecedented and lethal anthropocentrism.  And 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. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl ...

  Heather Davis and Zoe Todd worked together to write their essay, “ On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene ” in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies . This journal aims to provide a platform for critical work about “space and place” in the social sciences. Davis' collaboration with Todd was vital to the credibility of the entire article. In speaking about African slaves, Davis and Todd write, “We do not wish to appropriate these narratives.” As a white Canadian woman, Davis makes clear she doesn’t wish to appropriate the stories of black and indigenous people when writing about the subject. Todd can speak to her experiences as an Indigenous Canadian, but they both make clear the african experience is not their own.  Zoe Todd is of Métis descent. She learned about her Métis heritage through her father, and has gone on to include her ancestry in her studies.The central focus of her research is the relationship between humans and animal...

Françoise Vergès is a francophone political scientist, feminist, and historian whose expertise lies within the developing field of postcolonial studies. She holds a dual BA from UC San Diego and a PHD from UC Berkeley, and has published a great number of works in both French and English, which include the essay we read, “ Racial Capitalocene: Is the Anthropocene Racial? ” published by Verso in the 2017 collection The Futures of Black Radicalism . She has also produced several French documentaries, and often collaborates with artists through the workshop “ Cartographie de l’espace postcolonial " (Mapping of Postcolonial Space). Alongside her own scholarship, Vergès has taught as a professor at both the University of Sussex and the Goldsmiths College in the UK. She cites her interest in “racialized environmental politics” as being “partly biographical”: having grown up in the French colonial island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean within a family of “communist, anticolonial, and f...

  Octavia Butler was a groundbreaking science fiction writer, transcending the conventions of the genre by challenging issues such as empathy, social norms, conservation, and religion. Despite being one of the few women of color in science fiction writing, she managed to constantly push boundaries and receive unprecedented critical acclaim; she was the first science fiction writer to ever receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Butler wrote several novels and series, including Kindred (1979) and the Patternist series; however, she is most recognized for the Parable series. The Parable novels, Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), were the last works published by Butler and unfortunately she passed away before completing the last installment of the trilogy, Parable of the Trickster. The first in the series, Parable of the Sower , similar to many of her works, discusses topics such as human inequality, empathy, community, religion, gender, and change.   P...

Nicola Davison is a freelance journalist based out of London. She has written for The Guardian , The New York Times , Vice , and CNN. Her articles focus on technological innovation and its impact on China and the greater world. The article we read, “ The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history? ” appeared in The Guardian on May 30, 2019, and discusses the struggles of the scientific community, especially geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz, in labeling the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch distinct from the Holocene.  “The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?” is a piece of journalism that provides a timeline contextualizing the use of the term “Anthropocene.” Davison starts with Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s outburst in a meeting room in February 2000, claiming that scientists should “Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene anymore,” then moves us to the struggle among geologists to legitimize the term ...

Roy Scranton is an American writer, veteran, professor at the University of Notre Dame, and alumnus of the New School. Scranton has won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for short fiction in 2009, Mrs. Giles G. Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities in 2014, and Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2017. Scranton draws upon his time and knowledge of the US Army and his time deployed in Iraq when discussing climate change in his books such as We’re Doomed. Now What? (2018). The book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (2015) shares the title with the article we read; the 2013 essay on which the book was originally based was selected for The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014 . In the essay “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene,” first published in the Revealer in 2015 as “Climate Change and the Dharma of Failure” and reprinted in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle in 2018, Scranton provocatively writes as a “bad Buddhist” and “bad environmentalist.”  Scranton's main claim in t...

  “ Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene ” was written by an international coalition of scientists led by Will Steffen, an American chemist who specializes in the field of climatology. The coalition includes members with backgrounds in global sustainability, water resource management, oceanography, earth system science, environmental science, geography, development, and many more. The diverse backgrounds represented by this project create a product aimed at a general audience.. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America ( PNAS ), which describes itself as “one of the world's most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, publishing more than 3,300 research papers annually.” PNAS aims “to publish only the highest quality scientific research and to make that research accessible to a broad audience.” Accessibility is a large part of t...

Jill Schneiderman is an earth scientist, an environmental justice activist and a Buddhist. She’s a professor at Vassar and author of four books, including The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet (2003) and Liberation Science: Putting Science to Work for Social and Environmental Justice (2012). A pioneer in work at the intersection of science and activism, she’s also a committed meditator. In 2009 she was a fellow of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education , where she helped develop curriculum on geologic time and contemplative practice. The essay we read, “Awake in the Anthropocene,” touches on many of these concerns. It appeared in 2012 in Contemporary Buddhism , an interdisciplinary academic journal.  The main argument of “Awake in the Anthropocene” is that Buddhist thought has something important to offer those who seek to respond effectively to problems of violence and anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s ideas of “slow violence” a...

Join us as we make our way through works by Whitney Bauman, Nils Bubandt, Octavia Butler , Jeremy Davies, Heather Davis & Zoe Todd , Nicola Davison , Francis of Assisi, Pope Francis , Gandhi, Donna Haraway, Katharine Hayhoe, Winona LaDuke, Fabrice Monteiro, Sara Pike, Emily Raboteau, Deborah Bird Rose, Jill Schneiderman , Roy Scranton , Vandana Shiva , Will Steffen , Bronislaw Szerszynski, Françoise Vergès , Carol Wayne White, Lynn White, Kyle Powys Whyte and Kathryn Yusoff and explore religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita , the Bible , Dao De Jing and Earthseed .