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Introduction: Grounding Theory—Earth in Religion and Philosophy
- Fordham University Press
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Introduction: Grounding Theory—Earth in Religion and Philosophy C AT H E R I N E K E L L E R A N D L A U R E L K E A R N S A New Yorker magazine cartoon displays a sporty little flying saucer flitting away from the earth. One extraterrestrial is commenting to the other: ‘‘The food’s OK, but the atmosphere is terrible.’’ Of course a lot of us terrestrials (not only New Yorkers) zip about tasting the aesthetic variety of our gifted planet. We relish our global interconnectedness amid the sheer abundance of available options. But occasionally we recall the shadow side of that interconnectedness: the atmospheric changes our cosmopolitan species is inadvertently cooking up, the mounting concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere that is turning the planet into a pressure cooker, with nowhere for us to flit away to. With a mere three-, at most nine-, degree rise in our atmospheric temperature anticipated by midcentury—a range smaller than most days’ temperature swings—the proverbial flap of the butterfly’s wing might quite soon tip the earth into conditions unprecedented in the past two million years. How can we bear such information? How can we even think such eerie possibilities? Compared to what interests us day by day, climate change seems at once too flat in its realism and too dramatic in its rhetoric, too factual and too speculative, too complex and too immense to bear in mind. The model seems to wax season by season with a negative grandiosity, quietly unifying us all in a metanarrative of mounting futility. Such dystopic probability emits its own apocalyptic heat. It wilts the edges of our imagination, desiccating subtler distinctions . It gathers everyone, every creature, into a rough collectivity that mocks all our differences, even difference itself. And yet at the same time 2 兩 e c os p i ri t it demands a care for difference wildly exceeding recent discourses of difference, of the Other, of the others. Ecological difference pushes the encounter with the Other over the edge, into the infinity of nonhumans, into the engulfing differences of biodiversity. We may be accustomed in our philosophy or theology to an ancient stretch beyond the human, indeed beyond the earth’s atmosphere . Nonetheless the present stretch, this self-extension into the full terrestrial spectrum of pressing, vulnerable life: this feels inhuman. We defer. We despair. We deny. We return to thought as usual. At any rate, this climate change and everything it touches—imprecisely called ‘‘nature’’—is not only aggressively ignored across the policy spectrum , but oddly undertheorized across the academic disciplines. ‘‘The environment? . . . Not my issue.’’ Ecological crisis gets relegated to the vulnerable subdisciplines of ‘‘environmental studies,’’ at risk in every budget cut or change in leadership.1 An odd coincidence: just as the science about climate change and other anthropogenic threats to the biosphere becomes indisputable—and the role of organized religion, even evangelical Christians, in calling for a response splashes occasionally into the news—support for grassroots-activist environmental networks, denominational and academic programs, and projects related to religion and ecology seems in many contexts to be sinking in arguments about priorities.2 But there are many exceptions, including the fecund microatmosphere in which this volume was able to take root. These various exceptions are gaining strength, the roots have become rhizomes, the ground activates a future that may yet have a chance to elude the dour trends. We hope, if we hope, for a common terrestrial future. But does the very notion of a common future, of ‘‘the common’’ or of what is ‘‘to come,’’ not have a hard time mattering in late-capitalist culture? Among those economically privileged earthlings primarily responsible for climate change, the thought of the future appears increasingly reducible to an individual life-span, projected ahead, if at all, through a child or two, and measured by an accumulation of wealth and private heritage. Ecologically sensitive theologians will rightly diagnose an inadequate eschatology . Yet most Christians care little more about the planetary future of the earth—at least of this earth—than do the most voracious secular corporations. If standard Christian eschatology does extend the individual [54.226.242.26] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:12 GMT) c a th e r in e k el l e r a n d la u r el k e ar ns 兩 3 life-span into an endless future, its trajectory at death...