The Violence of Climate Change

1 The Wicked Problem of Climate Change

In December 2015, 196 nations reached an agreement on climate change in Paris. They committed to limit global temperature increase “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.”1 Political leaders and analysts viewed the agreement as a historic success, with US president Barack Obama calling it “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.” Former vice president and longtime climate activist Al Gore was similarly excited: “The transformation of our global economy from one fueled by dirty energy to one fueled by sustainable economic growth is now firmly and inevitably under way.”2

Others viewed the Paris Agreement as a failure that fell pitifully short of what is really required to responsibly address climate change. The journalist and activist Naomi Klein called the agreement “scientifically inadequate” because it lacks binding requirements to actually meet its goals. James Hansen, one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world, whose research informed the targets of 2°C and 1.5°C, called the agreement “just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.”3

Both sets of commentaries are correct. From a political perspective, the Paris Agreement was a dramatic success because it secured widespread, public, and international commitment. From scientific and practical perspectives, however, the agreement is inadequate because it lays out no clear path to meet its own goals; and these goals, even if reached, would leave many of the world’s people and species victimized by the rising seas and unpredictable storms of a changed climate. Paris was both a success and a failure, and which way one sees it depends on what kind of problem one thinks climate change is.

This same ambiguity is true of any conversation about climate change; there is always a great deal up for interpretation. Some facts are clear and incontrovertible—average global temperatures are higher than they used to be, there is less ice and snow at the poles, the sea is rising, and the ocean is increasingly acidic. These are real trends, and their rates are increasing. But the meaning of these facts and what should be done about them can be understood variously through natural science, environmentalism, activism for human justice, economics, politics, and religious traditions. As reactions to the Paris Agreement demonstrate, the same event can be an exciting development for climate politics while it is a disturbing sign for climate justice.

This chapter explores six common perspectives on climate change, assuming that each is valid and has something to offer to an understanding of this challenge. I then suggest a seventh approach, arguing that the privileged citizens of the industrialized world should also learn to see climate change as a case of structural violence. This seventh perspective, which frames the remainder of the book, suggests the potential of calling upon nonviolence to develop a thoughtful, long-term, and faithful response to this problem.

SIX WAYS TO UNDERSTAND CLIMATE CHANGE

Everyone responding to the Paris Agreement in 2015 agreed on one thing: It is not a solution to climate change. Current international policies are, at best, a start along a path in the right direction, and no one pretends that they will reverse the rise of the oceans or undo the damage already done to the atmosphere. Climate change is, in fact, not the kind of problem that can have a simple solution. It is, instead, a “wicked” problem.

In 1973 Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, scholars of urban planning, distinguished between two kinds of problems. “Tame” problems “are definable and may have solutions that are findable.” By contrast, “wicked” problems “are ill-defined” and can never be solved. “At best, they are only re-solved—over and over again.”4 Rittel and Weber emphasized that urban planning in the late twentieth century was full of wicked problems. When one is negotiating space and relationships for diverse communities that struggle with unrest and inequity and must adapt to changing values and institutions, one does not finally solve any problem. The challenges are ambiguous, and there are never clear or final solutions.

Climate change is a similarly wicked problem. There is no solution; the climate will be changing because of human activity for many centuries to come. Human beings will be wrestling with and disagreeing about how to respond to this issue for the foreseeable future. That is the nature of a wicked problem.5

Wicked problems are also characteristically difficult to define. This aspect of climate change has become clear during the last two decades as scientists, activists, politicians, and academics have developed diverse perspectives and proposals. There is no one definition. Climate change is a scientific problem, an environmental problem, a human problem, an economic problem, a political problem, and a religious problem. Each perspective is important, and none is sufficient by itself. And yet they provide very distinct views of what is happening to the Earth’s atmosphere, what the repercussions will be, and what should be done about it.

A Scientific Problem

From one perspective, climate change is a physical phenomenon that has an impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems. As such, it should be understood scientifically. Scientific measurement is essential to quantify the human impact on the climate. This includes, for example, 9.7 billion metric tons of carbon emitted in 2012, most of it from burning fossil fuels. Careful measurement of contemporary and historical air samples has shown that these emissions change the composition of the atmosphere, which contained approximately 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in 1750 and 400 parts per million in 2015.6 Thus, science helps us to understand that we change the climate when we burn fossil fuels to produce electricity, to transport ourselves around the world, and to manufacture the products that make our lives possible.

Scientific analysis also shows the industrialized food system as another driver of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that agriculture is responsible for one-quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.7 Modern farming depends upon fossil fuels to make fertilizer, process food, and ship it long distances. Forest land cleared to grow food is another part of the problem, as trees essential to the carbon cycle are cut and burned down so that crops can be grown instead. Industrial meat production has vastly increased the number of cows in the world, and cows release enormous amounts of methane, another climate-changing gas. These are problems that require rigorous scientific analysis to understand.

Scientific models are also essential to determine the atmospheric effects of the gases released by human food, energy, and transportation systems. Chemists explain that these gases all trap heat inside the Earth’s atmosphere, creating a “greenhouse effect” that raises the quantity of the sun’s radiation retained and reduces the amount reflected back into space. Atmospheric scientists measure temperatures and weather patterns and model future trends to determine how the climate will continue to change. According to the IPCC, which aggregates thousands of scientific studies, there has already been an increase in average global temperatures of at least 0.6°C, and, if current consumption trends continue, this could climb as high as 4.8°C by 2100. Alongside such an increase would be more extremes, with longer and more intense heat waves, and more rain in places that already tend to be wet and less in places that tend to be dry. The ocean will become more acidic while also continuing to rise up to 0.98 meter. Glaciers and ice packs will continue to shrink.8

Chemistry explains that climate-changing gases do not leave the atmosphere quickly. Atmospheric methane takes more than ten years to degrade. Nitrous oxide takes more than a century. Some of the CO₂ released today will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, contemporary emissions will be changing the climate far into the future. Further emissions of these gases will increase the rate of such change.

We depend upon scientists to quantify and to predict climatic changes. For some, this leads to a hope that scientific research and engineering can also help us begin to solve, or at least address, this problem. For example, the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting temperature increases to 2°C came from scientific research, which also suggests that this limit would only be possible if atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ are lowered to 350 parts per million and kept there. The original source for this number is a scientific article by James Hansen and his colleagues, who used paleoclimatological analysis and models to argue that anything above 350 parts per million would be “too high to maintain the climate to which humanity, wildlife, and the rest of the biosphere are adapted.” With characteristic caution, these scientists note that this target should be adjusted “as scientific understanding and empirical evidence of climate effects accumulate.”9 This is a scientifically determined goal, which continues to change as science develops and conditions change.

Some activists place even more faith in science by hoping for a technological path to reverse climate change. This could mean research to expand existing technologies, with the increased efficiency of solar, wind, and perhaps nuclear power fueling electricity and transportation infrastructures that could maintain the current standard of living in the developed world without fossil fuels. Other scientific solutions are even more revolutionary, such as proposals for “climate engineering,” which would seek to recalibrate the atmosphere and the Earth’s temperature by altering the amount of sunlight absorbed by the Earth or capturing CO₂ before it reaches the atmosphere. Most such proposals involve large-scale, global technologies. This requires trust that scientific experts can intentionally manage the atmosphere as a counterbalance to the careless and unintentional changes that have been made so far.

However, no single perspective is sufficient for understanding or responding to the wicked problem of climate change. No one suggests that science and technology can solve the problem of climate change alone, because the questions raised by it are not solely scientific. Any indictment of the industrial world’s lifestyle has moral, socioeconomic, and cultural implications, as also does any decision about transitioning to new energy sources or deliberately changing the atmosphere.10

An Environmental Problem

Although technological proposals about climate change are increasingly popular, others argue that the problem is most basically about consumption rather than engineering, and so call for fundamental moral and behavioral change. This has been the dominant approach of environmental activists, who see the changing climate as a sign of the faulty relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. In so doing, they present it as an environmental problem, connecting greenhouse gas emissions to other issues of pollution, overconsumption, and the endangerment of other species.

The first popular book about climate change, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, put the issue in such terms. McKibben noted the dire effects that climate change poses for human communities, but he began with a more impressionistic reflection on the ways human beings are reshaping the atmosphere, noting that “the air around us, even where it is clean, and smells like spring, and is filled with birds, is different, significantly changed.”11 He carefully summarized scientific analyses of atmospheric conditions, but his focus was primarily on lamenting and decrying human carelessness. Understood environmentally, climate change is a problem because human beings are making the rest of the world less healthy, less beautiful, and less natural.

The iconic argument along these lines has been about polar bears, the charismatic megafauna most famously endangered by a warming planet. Visual representations of climate change by environmental organizations like the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and the World Wildlife Federation frequently focus on the destruction of the polar habitat, depicting an iconic white bear on a tiny ice floe in the middle of the ocean. These evocative pictures are based upon scientific research about the damage of climate change; polar bears hunt on Arctic Sea ice, which is appearing later in the fall and disappearing earlier in the summer each year. Their hunting season and their food supplies are both shrinking. As a specialized species that breeds slowly, polar bears are not well equipped to adapt to change, and so they face the very real threat of extinction in a warming world.12

Climate change is not only destroying the habitat of endangered species but also expanding the habitats of invasive species. Consider kudzu, a climbing vine that has grown to dominate much of the landscape of the southern United States since it was imported from Japan in the late nineteenth century. Kudzu thrives in edge habitats, boundaries between two different ecosystems. The vine is particularly prominent along roadsides, where it strangles trees and crowds out all other vegetation. The expansion of kudzu is currently only limited by the weather; it cannot survive cold winters and so does not grow in the northern or western United States. However, projections now suggest that as the climate warms, the range of this invasive species will increase. What is more, a 2014 study suggests that kudzu releases carbon from soils as it grows, and so increases atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.13 Climate change thus creates a positive feedback loop, increasing the range of an invasive species that, in turn, increases the rate of climate change.

Environmental discourse assumes that the extinction of a speices is a tragic loss and invasive species are a sign of degradation. The most common response is to call on people to change their attitudes and behaviors. Environmental organizations educate the public about the plight of the polar bear and the dangers of warming ecosystems in order to teach people that the problem is important, worthy of political action and personal sacrifice. When convinced, people are asked to eat less or no meat, to drive less or not at all, and to vote for policies that will slow or prevent the consumption of fossil fuels. Whereas those advocating technological solutions tend to focus on the ways climate change can be solved with ingenuity, environmentalists are more likely to stress that people must learn to care about the problem and the ecosystems it threatens.14

A Human Problem

Many climate activists have recently distinguished themselves from the environmental movement, emphasizing the ways climate change is a threat to human communities rather than to other species and ecosystems. This, too, is based upon scientific research. According to the IPCC, climate change is likely to increase violent conflicts over resources, to reduce food supplies, to increase the uncertainty created by extreme weather events, to change the vectors of diseases and pests that threaten human beings, and to disrupt centuries-old agricultural traditions.15

The journalist David Roberts coined the term “climate hawk” in 2010 to name those who work to slow greenhouse gas emissions on behalf of humanity. This term incorporates those who “understand climate change and support clean energy but do not share the rest of the ideological and sociocultural commitments that define environmentalism as historically understood in the US.” Four years later, a group in California formed a political action committee called Climate Hawks Vote, which is committed to electing candidates from any political party who prioritize this issue, emphasizing that “climate change is the greatest threat facing the next few generations of humanity, not just another Democratic issue.”16

Climate hawks also call attention to the unjust distribution of the damage caused by climate change. Of course, all human lives are changed and threatened by a changing climate, but the harm is not evenly or justly shared. Instead, climate change is most harmful to those who are already the poorest and most marginalized, those who have emitted the fewest greenhouse gases because they tend not to travel broadly, use extensive amounts of power, or consume large quantities of meat.

The political analyst Richard Matthew demonstrates the injustice of climate change with the examples of Bangladesh and Sudan. Both countries are poor by global standards, with average annual incomes below $3,000 per person. Both have developed industrial activity only recently and in relatively small ways. Thus, they have contributed few of the greenhouse gases that are changing the global atmosphere. However, these two countries are nevertheless disproportionately suffering the consequences of human emissions. A low-lying coastal nation in South Asia, Bangladesh has 20 million citizens who live within 1 meter of elevation from current high tide levels. This means that rising sea levels, increasingly strong hurricanes, and flooding pose profound threats to Bangladeshis. By contrast, the North African nation of Sudan, which has been ravaged by civil war, is facing increasingly dry conditions, and growing deserts increase the risk of famine. Such resource scarcity then increases the chances of further violent conflicts. Mathews summarizes the trends of these two cases: “The costs of change are displaced onto the poor and weak, and the benefits of change are seized, often violently, by the rich and the powerful—whose unsustainable practices and values usually provided the rationale for change in the first place.”17 Climate change is a problem of justice because those who contributed the most to it are not those who suffer the most from it.18

As a wicked problem, climate change poses both environmental and human challenges; these are undeniably interconnected. However, the difference in emphasis is important. Traditional environmental rhetoric about climate change stresses that it harms ecosystems and creatures, having an impact on the entire world. Climate hawks instead stress that atmospheric changes hurt people and exacerbate existing injustices. Presenting climate change as an environmental problem calls primarily for increased concern about the interconnected systems of the Earth, while presenting climate change as a human problem calls primarily for outrage at the unfair risks facing human beings.

A Political Problem

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate hawks assume that the only way to address the immediate and dire threat of climate change is to change political structures and institutions. For example, the organization 350.org takes its name from scientific data but focuses its work on political change.19 It organizes rallies around international climate summits, encourages citizens to lobby their national leaders to legislate limits on carbon emissions, and energizes local communities to divest from fossil fuels. This activist approach characterizes climate change as a challenge of democracy, leadership, and governance—in other words, a political problem.

Many activists assume that because climate change is a global problem, it requires a global political solution. In this view, the peoples of the world should unite around a joint effort to restrict the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and to create a new, more sustainable future. The most prominent step along these lines at the time of this writing has been the 2015 Paris Agreement, which created a common set of standards to measure political efforts aimed at reducing emissions. The fact that every country signed on creates a sense of global political community, putting pressure on every leader to do as much as possible. However, part of the success of this agreement came from the fact that it allows each nation to set its own goals. This made it possible for previously reluctant countries like the United States to sign but could also suggest that the true enforcement and motivation to politically address climate change must bubble up from somewhere lower than the entire global community.

As this book goes to press at the end of 2016, the Paris Agreement remains a key symbol of progress for many in the climate movement. However, its future is uncertain as the president-elect of the United States has suggested he does not believe that climate change is a problem and has discussed pulling out of this and many other international agreements. The US has considerable international clout and is a considerable source of climate-changing gasses, so it remains to be seen whether other nations’ commitments to Paris would hold without it. For some advocates of climate justice, this is a reason to focus even more attention on the international scale, advocating for renewed attention to climate change as a global problem and seeking to inspire leadership in other nations. Others in the US have a renewed domestic focus, seeking to use whatever tools are at their disposal to protect existing national policies and continue fighting climate change with or despite a new presidential administration.

Former US vice president Al Gore tends to treat climate change as a national issue. He changed the conversation about the issue with his film and book, both titled An Inconvenient Truth, arguing that the United States must lead the world’s action on climate change. Gore patriotically insists that the country that created a democratic Constitution and landed on the moon has the best chance of decisively addressing the twenty-first century’s greatest challenge. Near the end of his book, he writes, “Now it is up to us to use our democracy and our God-given ability to reason with one another about our future and make moral choices to change policies and behaviors.”20 This is a call to national political action, and Gore has since advocated congressional legislation that would cap greenhouse gas emissions and increase support and subsidies for renewable energy sources. Of course, Gore also celebrated the 2015 Paris Agreement and advocated ratification of its predecessor, the Kyoto Accord, but his primary interest is inspiring US citizens to lead the way with a national response to climate change.

Still, others emphasize that climate change is a local political issue. In 2005 Seattle mayor Greg Nickels asked other mayors to commit to lowering their emissions by changing municipal land-use policies, informing their citizens, restoring urban forests, and limiting greenhouse gas emissions. By 2009 a thousand mayors had signed on, and Nickels argued that “a successful plan in this country for reducing our energy consumption begins in cities and local communities. We are leading by example in the fight against global warming and representing America to the world.”21 Seattle continues to work at leading by example, and in 2013 it adopted a Climate Action Plan that predicted some of the Paris goals by committing the city to zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.22

Although they work on different scales, these efforts share a common assumption that climate change is a political problem, and so they organize citizens and leaders to take action—locally, nationally, or globally. A political problem calls for laws and treaties that discourage greenhouse gas emissions and promote alternative energy and conservation.

An Economic Problem

Political proposals have their critics, and the most vocal of these tend to instead advocate a market-based, economic approach. The British philosopher Roger Scruton worries that most political responses to climate identify “unreal targets, pursued in ignorance of the means to achieve them, and without any conception of how the attempt to do so will impinge on popular sentiment, on competing goals and on the many other factors that wise government must consider.” Scruton worries that political proposals are “too often made without being priced,” and he insists that any attempt to control and limit human behavior without a clear analysis of costs and benefits is doomed to failure.23 Thus, he argues, climate change should be understood as an economic rather than political problem.

Fred Smith, founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank, takes a similar approach, assuming that policies restricting fossil fuels and subsidizing other energy sources will limit innovation and increase human suffering by slowing economic growth. So, he argues, “We should remove regulatory barriers that limit innovation and technological advance. . . . The policies that are best for the ecology of the earth are those that are best for the economy of the earth. No policy that harms people can help our planet.”24

Others agree that climate change is an economic problem but seek to solve it with drastic changes that require more rather than less political regulation. The activist Naomi Klein argues that capitalists like Scruton and Smith are right to see climate politics as an attack against existing economies, but she insists that this attack is right and necessary. She calls progressive climate activists to embrace the economic argument “that the real solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more enlightened economic system—one that closes deep inequalities, strengthens and transforms the public sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work and radically reins in corporate power.” For Klein, climate change is an economic problem caused by “the reckless form of ‘free trade’ and ‘the growth imperative’ that define contemporary capitalist economies.” The solution is a different kind of economics—with higher taxes on polluters, higher charges for those who extract fossil fuels, and huge investments in cleaner energy.25

Another progressive economic argument came from the heads of state of Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in 2009, when they asserted that “capitalism is leading humanity and the planet to extinction,” with climate change as a key example. They emphasized the unjust distribution of climate change’s effects on those who have done the least to cause it and insisted that this creates an economic responsibility: “Developed countries should pay off their debt to humankind and the planet; they should provide significant resources to a fund so that developing countries can embark upon a growth model which does not repeat serious impacts of the capitalist industrialization.”26 This assertion of “climate debt” is prominent in Latin America and Africa, but has yet to be validated by leaders in the developed nations of Europe or North America.

Whether calling for less regulation or a stronger governmental role in distributing the risks of climate change, these arguments all share a view of the problem as fundamentally economic.

A Religious Problem

For communities of faith, climate change is not just scientific, environmental, human, political, and economic; it is also a religious problem. The Western monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam share strong doctrines of creation, asserting that God made the world and declared it good. In light of such teaching, the careless and unintentional altering of climatic balance is disrespectful at best and blasphemous at worst. The Eastern traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism are less likely to emphasize creation, but they share a sense that everything is interconnected and any harm done to any part of the world has negative consequences for all. From this perspective, the degradation of ecosystems and communities is not only irresponsible but also self-destructive.

In January 2014, a group of Buddhist teachers from all over the world released a statement on climate change titled “The Earth as Witness.” They used the foundational four noble truths of Buddhism to frame the issue and its solution. The first noble truth, acknowledging the reality of suffering, offers a way to recognize the risks, injustices, and present harm caused by a changing climate. The second noble truth, that suffering arises from desire, leads to an argument that “craving, aversion, and delusion” are the root causes of the consumption that changes the climate. The third noble truth, that human beings can learn to overcome desire, offers hope that “we can create more equitable, compassionate, and mindful societies that generate greater individual and collective well-being while reducing climate change to manageable levels.” Finally, the fourth noble truth presents a path away from destructive desire and consumption. The statement concludes that the work of restoring balance to the Earth honors “the great legacy of the Dharma and fulfill our heart’s deepest wish to serve and protect life.”27

A Hindu statement released during the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne similarly links climate change to core ideas within a religious tradition. Hinduism has deep roots in sacrificial rituals that attune practitioners to the ultimate unity of the cosmos, and so it is no surprise that the statement emphasizes the need for sacrificial action: “As one-sixth of the human family, Hindus can have a tremendous impact. We can and should take the lead in Earth-friendly living, personal frugality, lower power consumption, alternative energy, sustainable food production and vegetarianism.” Such sacrifices offer a path toward “a global consciousness that replaces the present fractured and fragmented consciousness of the human race.”28

Islamic faith tends to emphasize sacred texts much more than Hinduism or Buddhism, and so it makes sense that Muslim responses to climate change frequently focus on the teachings of the Qur’an. For example, the British Muslim Fazlun Khalid draws upon the thirtieth surah of the Qur’an to articulate his understanding of the problem:

Corruption has appeared in both land and sea

Because of what people’s own hands have brought about

So that they may taste something of what they have done

So that hopefully they will turn back.29

Inspired by this verse and by his faith more broadly, Khalid founded the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences and calls other Muslims to avoid corrupting the Earth and instead become the stewards that he believes their faith calls them to be.

Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism are, respectively, the second-, third-, and fourth-most-populous religions in the world. The largest global religion is Christianity, and this book proposes a set of resources from this tradition. More relevant here is the broader point that every religious community offers responses to climate change. Every religious community adds another set of perspectives from which to understand this multifaceted, wicked problem facing twenty-first-century human beings.30

Wicked Thinking

The point of presenting these diverse perspectives is not to force a choice between them but rather to see that climate change is the kind of problem that cannot be fully understood from one vantage point. Science is essential to grasp what is happening to the atmosphere, but it is incomplete without the moral arguments of environmentalists and social justice advocates. These arguments require careful economic and political analysis if they are to have practical effects. All these perspectives have much to learn from the ancient wisdom of the world’s religious traditions, but these traditions must also be open to learning about this contemporary, evolving challenge. As a wicked problem, climate change can never be fully understood from one perspective.31

To wrestle with a wicked problem is to encounter hard questions that will never have clear answers. After the argument of this chapter and the next, the remaining chapters use the witnesses of nonviolent Christians to wrestle with a series of questions suggested above: How should wealthy people in the industrialized world respond to the fact that our actions are changing the climate (chapter 3)? How should concerned people prioritize between environmental advocacy for the Earth’s ecosystems and the particular injustices afflicting marginalized human communities (chapter 4)? In a pluralistic society and world, how can religion inform and enhance a moral response to climate change and the questions it raises about global economics (chapter 5)? Should environmentalists and social justice advocates support proposals to intentionally engineer the climate on a large scale (chapter 6)? How should privileged persons in the industrialized world respond to the argument that we owe a “climate debt” to the developing world (chapter 7)?

None of these questions will be finally answered—as explained above, a wicked problem does not lend itself to such closure—but each is explored in the chapters that follow in an attempt to advance moral consideration, engaged debate, and meaningful witness. Before moving on to this analysis, however, it is necessary to first explore the seventh perspective on the wicked problem of climate change, which guides the rest of this book.

A PROBLEM OF STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

Climate change is not only a scientific, environmental, human, political, economic, and religious problem. It is also a problem of structural violence.

To understand this claim first requires an understanding of violence. A useful, if abstract, definition comes from the French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, who writes, “Violence is to be found in any action in which one acts as if one were alone to act: as if the rest of the universe were there only to receive the action; violence is consequently any action which we endure without at every point collaborating in it.”32 Thus, for Lévinas, violence occurs when anyone behaves as if they are the only one who matters—ignoring other people, other creatures, and the rest of the world. From the perspective of a perpetrator, violence is an act of selfishness, doing something to someone or something else without considering its effects upon them. From the perspective of the victims, violence is something done to them without their consent.

This is a useful perspective, but it is also quite broad—Lévinas himself points out that “nearly every causality is in this sense violent.”33 Therefore, I refine the definition slightly to say that violence is an act undertaken by a human being who behaves as if they were alone and therefore causes harm to another creature. This includes behaviors that one tends to think of as violent—hitting or shooting another person, shouting abuse—but also others that might not as intuitively fall into this category—dumping toxic pollution into a river, mistreating a nonhuman animal, neglecting to consider another person’s feelings. Violence is selfish action that causes harm. According to this definition, climate change is violence.

Furthermore, the violence of climate change is distinctly structural. The idea of “structural violence” has been widely used to characterize the problems of patriarchy, racism, and classism. Introducing the term in a 1969 essay, the peace researcher Johan Galtung explains structural sexism and classism: “When one husband beats his wife, there is a clear case of personal violence; but when one million husbands keep one million wives in ignorance, there is structural violence. Correspondingly, in a society where life expectancy is twice as high in the upper as in the lower classes, violence is exercised even if there are no concrete actors one can point to directly attacking others.”34 This same dynamic exists in expressions of racism. A Ku Klux Klan member who burns a cross and a police officer who is prejudicially forceful toward an African American are committing acts of direct violence. But racism is also structural; it is discriminately harder for people of color in the United States to become educated and employed and to establish multigenerational wealth because of centuries of slavery, segregation, and prejudice.35 In contrast to the direct violence of abuse, assault, or murder, structural violence is caused indirectly by social systems; it is no one person’s responsibility and so no one person’s fault. It has no single architect and no direct cause, but it is nevertheless violence—a selfish expression of power that harms others.

To identify climate change as a problem of structural violence, then, is to observe that some human beings are selfishly altering the atmosphere, and these changes are causing pain and suffering. This complements many of the perspectives named above; climate change is a human problem because it is about structural violence against people. With a broader awareness of suffering among all creatures, climate change can also be seen as a problem of environmental violence because it hurts other species and ecosystems. And yet the structural violence of climate change can only be understood scientifically because the types of harm it causes are often far distant from their causes. Furthermore, existing socioeconomic and political structures do not require those who emit CO₂ or eat industrially raised meat to pay for the expansion of kudzu or droughts in the Sudan; this could only be changed with new structures.

The Christian ethicist Cynthia Moe-Lobeda insightfully explores climate change as a form of structural violence in her book Resisting Structural Evil. Climate change, she writes, “degrades, dehumanizes, damages, and kills people by limiting or preventing their access to the necessities for life or for its flourishing.”36 She further notes an “insidious characteristic” of structural violence: “its tendency to remain invisible to those not suffering from it.”37 Wealthy people in the industrialized world can still deny the problem, and thus can still ignore the violence of climate change. The literary scholar Rob Nixon captures this reality when he identifies climate change as a form of “slow violence”—pain and harm that is “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales.”38 The habitats of polar bears shrink gradually; the waters on the Bangladeshi coast rise slowly. Those of us who are disproportionately causing climate change are far away enough from the worst consequences that we can ignore them, at least for now.

Repenting of Climate Change

In response to the structural violence of climate change, Moe-Lobeda calls her readers to learn to “ ‘see’ the structural sin of which we are a part, in order that we might repent of it, renounce it, and resist it.”39 This move to repentance is crucial, as privileged people must learn to think and behave differently, to remake social systems, and to turn away from violence.

Repenting of the structural violence of climate change requires concerted moral action. Those complicit in the violence must first acknowledge their complicity. Despite the fact that no one intends to cause climate change, everyone is part of the problem. When I drive my car or drink milk produced on a factory farm, I am not thinking about climate change, but my actions lead to the release of CO₂ and methane into the atmosphere. When energy executives prioritize the security of jobs and the financial value of fossil fuels, they may intend only to help their employees and investors, but they are nevertheless degrading ecosystems and human lives. When politicians refuse to restrict emissions, they may be responding to the short-term needs of their constituents, but they are nevertheless causing long-term harm to the planet’s ecosystems.

Admitting this complicity in climate change can be empowering. When those of us who contribute the most to climate change realize that we have particular influence over the structures that cause the problem, we also learn that we have the capacity to change them for the better. Moe-Lobeda emphasizes that such agency is vital; people must understand that we can change our lives and the structures in which we live. When facing political and economic systems that seem to make continued climate change inevitable, people need to recognize that these systems “were constructed by human beings and therefore can be changed by them. The neoliberal global economy—including its manifestation in national economies—was constructed by people. It can therefore be replaced.”40 If those who benefit disproportionately from the forces changing the climate acknowledge our power, we can begin to use it for the sake of other people and the whole Earth community, we can begin to share our power and to learn from those who have been excluded. We can stop acting as though we were alone in the world and can begin cooperating with others.

Along these lines, the theologian Ernst Conradie proposes that everyone concerned about climate change can learn from the South African response to apartheid, in which the creation of a new society was made possible partly because many of those guilty of deep structural racism confessed that guilt. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission was by no means perfect, and the problem of structural racism is by no means solved in that nation. However, new relationships and new kinds of relationships have been formed because the guilty confessed and everyone shared a willingness to create new systems. Conradie hopes that, “like the beneficiaries of apartheid, it may be possible, by God’s grace alone, to accept and specify one’s responsibility towards causing climate change, to recognise one’s guilt and show remorse.”41 Such confession and remorse may open the path to imagining a new set of structures that heal rather than degrade the planet.

A New and Familiar Problem

This book is based on a hope that echoes Conradie’s, a hope that the strategies people have used to repent of racism, sexism, classism, and other problems of structural violence will also be useful in repenting of climate change. For this reason, I disagree with one aspect of Cynthia Moe-Lobeda’s account of climate change. She stresses the ways in which this is a brand new and unprecedented problem, while I believe it is important to focus on the continuity between climate change and other examples of structural violence.

Moe-Lobeda writes that “climate change presents new theological problems for our young and dangerous species” and that the moral challenge we face is one “the likes of which the world has never before known.”42 Never before, she insists, has the entire global system of life been so fundamentally changed and threatened by the consumption of some members of one species. Never before have human beings been so urgently required to rethink their economic, political, and social structures, and their attitudes toward one another and the rest of the world.

This claim of uniqueness is very common in writing about climate change. The Christian ethicist Willis Jenkins agrees that climate change is a new kind of ethical problem, involving “dimensions of human action without precedent in our traditions and institutions of justice.”43 The activist Naomi Klein’s 2014 book about climate change was titled This Changes Everything precisely to signal that industrialized societies must change their thinking and structures in basic ways.44 The journalist Wen Stephenson insists that the path to climate change requires the world to “wake up” to the crisis, “intellectually, morally, and spiritually, as the most fundamental and urgent threat humanity has ever faced.”45

I agree that climate change calls for innovative economic, political, moral, and religious thinking and action. However, this is a wicked problem, and so there is never just one way to understand it. The structural violence of an altered atmosphere is certainly new; but it is also very old. Meaningful response to climate change will come more helpfully from emphasizing the familiarity of this problem. Concerned people know that we face new challenges, but in order to face them well, we need reminders that we have resources from the past with which to do so.

One argument for the familiarity of climate change could be based on scientific precision. The climate has been changing as long as there has been an atmosphere on Earth. Climatic change billions of years ago created the relatively even temperatures that made life possible. Life then began to change the climate, as microorganisms altered atmospheric chemistry. Plants evolved the process of photosynthesis, which plays a central role in the carbon cycle, sustains the ozone layer, and makes animal life possible. As evolution continued, there were warm periods and ice ages. Although one species has never before altered the atmosphere on the scale at which humanity is now doing so, a changing climate is not a new phenomenon.

Even anthropogenic climate change can be understood as familiar. As a scientific problem, climate change requires the same tools that human beings have been using for centuries to understand the seasons and weather. As an environmental problem, climate change requires the same attention to natural systems and interconnection required by the hole in the ozone layer, industrial pollution, and species extinctions. As a social justice problem, climate change is inseparable from and therefore requires similar moral work as the challenges of colonialism, globalization, racism, and economic justice. As a political problem, climate change challenges systems of global, national, and local governance just like other forms of structural violence. As an economic problem, climate change requires careful attention to how resources and risks are and could be distributed. As a religious problem, climate change asks people of faith to think carefully about how what they hold sacred changes how they live in and care for the world, a question that is older than the Bible’s book of Genesis.

As a wicked problem of structural violence, climate change is not unprecedented. Racism, classism, sexism, ethnocentrism, and heterosexism are also wicked problems of structural violence, and human beings have been struggling with these problems for centuries—in at least some cases, for as long as humans have been a species. Climate injustice is a new addition to the list, but it fits into the preexisting category of structural violence. Furthermore, because the types of harm inflicted by climate change are primarily borne by the poor and marginalized while primarily being caused by the rich and powerful, climate change continues and exacerbates other forms of structural violence. As the ethicist Melanie Harris notes, “The crisis of climate change facing us all suggests that the logic of domination that has functioned to privilege white men and white communities over communities of color is not working.”46 In this sense, climate change is not new.

I emphasize the familiarity of climate change because it is empowering to know that those who came before us developed tools with which to respond to problems like climate change when they fought racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism. Of course, no resistance to structural violence is an unqualified victory. Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism still exist and continue to take new shapes as the world changes. But each case offers stories of development and growth that make room for hope. Racism still exists in the United States in many horrific forms, but segregation and slavery are illegal. Sexism remains pervasive in the predominant patriarchal society, but the rights of women to vote, control their own bodies, and direct their own lives are far more guaranteed than they were a hundred years ago. Heterosexuality still dominates the norms of most human cultures, but the past decades have seen drastic changes in recognizing diverse expressions of sexuality and gender. Economic inequality is a deeply destructive form of structural violence, but the twentieth century saw the creation of a basic social safety net in the United States, with more health care and food security extended to the poorest citizens. None of these is a success story; wicked problems do not allow solutions. But each offers examples of accomplishment.

A movement for climate justice requires good news from the past in order to look with realistic hope into the future. Climate change is a wicked problem, but good people have wrestled with wicked problems before, and people today have much to learn from them. The next chapter turns to one such legacy: nonviolent resistance.

NOTES

1.Conference of the Parties, “Paris Agreement.”

2.Suzanne Goldenberg et al., “Paris Climate Deal: Nearly 200 Nations Sign in End of Fossil Fuel Era,” Guardian, December 12, 2015.

3.“Paris Climate Deal Is Agreed—but Is It Really Good Enough?” New Scientist, December 12, 2015, www.newscientist.com/article/dn28663-paris-climate-deal-is-agreed-but-is-it-really-good-enough/; Anna Maria Termonti, “Naomi Klein Calls Paris Climate Agreement ‘Scientifically Inadequate,’ ” Current (CBC Radio), December 15, 2015, www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-december-15-2015-1.3365556/naomi-klein-calls-paris-climate-agreement-scientifically-inadequate-1.3365564.

4.Rittel and Webber, “General Theory of Planning,” 160.

5.In a way that has been influential upon and is hopefully compatible with the approach of this book, Willis Jenkins argues that understanding climate change as a wicked problem justifies a pragmatic approach to contemporary Christian ecological ethics. As discussed below, my approach differs from his emphasis on creativity over tradition, but my work nevertheless owes a debt to his methodological proposals. See Jenkins, Future of Ethics, chap. 4.

6.“Global Carbon Emissions,” http://co2now.org/.

7.IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” 2014, 25.

8.IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” 2013, 19–29.

9.Hansen et al., “Target Atmospheric CO₂,” 228–29.

10.See Robock, “Geoengineering May Be Bad”; British Royal Society, Geoengineering the Climate; and Clingerman and O’Brien, “Playing God.”

11.McKibben, End of Nature, 18, 72.

12.Scientific accounts of polar bears upon which such environmentalists’ claims are based include those by Stirling and Derocher, “Effects of Climate Warming”; and Derocher et al., “Rapid Ecosystem Change.”

13.“Clemson Scientist: Kudzu Can Release Soil Carbon, Accelerate Global Warming,” 2014, http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/clemson-scientists-kudzu-can-release-soil-carbon-accelerate-global-warming/; Bradley, Wilcove, and Oppenheimer, “Risk of Plant Invasion.”

14.For an account and analysis of the ways environmentalism emphasizes care about ecosystems, see Blanchard and O’Brien, Introduction to Christian Environmentalism, chap. 2.

15.IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” 2014, 4–8.

16.David Roberts, “Introducing ‘Climate Hawks,’ ” 2010, http://grist.org/article/2010-10-20-introducing-climate-hawks/; “Climate Hawks Vote,” www.climatehawksvote.com.

17.Matthew, “Climate Change and Security,” 273.

18.For more accounts of the impact climate change has upon cultures and nations that have relatively little responsibility for it, see especially Parenti, Tropic of Chaos.

19.The organization explains its name on a Web page titled “The Science,” which cites James Hanson as an authority; see http://350.org/about/science/.

20.Gore, Inconvenient Truth, 296. Writing about Gore and other climate activists, Eric Pooley notes that although rhetoric frequently balances personal as well as political actions in this way, “fighting climate change in an industrial society requires political action at the local and—especially—the national level.” Pooley, Climate War, x.

21.US Conference of Mayors, “1,000th Mayor—Mesa, AZ, Mayor Scott Smith—Signs the US Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement,” October 2, 2009, www.usmayors.org/pressreleases/uploads/1000signatory.pdf.

22.“Seattle Climate Action Plan,” 2013, www.seattle.gov/environment/climate-change/climate-action-plan. For an extensive ethical analysis of global, national, and local political efforts, see Martin-Schramm, Climate Justice.

23.Scruton, Think Seriously About the Planet, 58.

24.Smith, “Risk–Risk Approach,” 251.

25.Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” The Nation, November 9, 2011, www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate#. This argument is further developed by Klein, This Changes Everything.

26.“The Declaration of Cumaná,” April 29, 2009, http://nacla.org/news/declaration-cumaná,.

27.“The Earth as Witness: International Dharma Teachers’ Statement on Climate Change,” January 8, 2014, www.oneearthsangha.org/articles/dharma-teachers-statement-on-climate-change/.

28.“Hindu Declaration on Climate Change.”

29.Fazlun Khalid, “Global Warming: An Islamic Perspective,” 2007, www.ifees.org.uk/download.php?id=36.

30.For a helpful set of ecumenical perspectives on climate justice and accounts of diverse religious communities acting on the issue, see Kim, Making Peace with the Earth.

31.Mike Hulme expresses this argument well, suggesting that framing climate change as “a mega-problem in need of a mega-solution” creates “a log-jam of gigantic proportions.” He argues that we should instead learn to see climate change as a malleable idea that can be “used to rethink and renegotiate our wider social goals and how and why we live on this planet.” This is one way of understanding the task of this chapter and this book: understanding climate change as violence in order to imagine and nurture a more nonviolent world. Hulme, Why We Disagree, 333, 362.

32.Lévinas, Difficult Freedom, 6. I learned this definition from Robert Brimlow and recommend his discussion of it in What About Hitler? 133–36.

33.Lévinas, Difficult Freedom, 6.

34.Galtung, “Violence and Peace Research,” 171.

35.See especially Townes, Womanist Ethics and Evil.

36.Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil, 72.

37.Ibid., 61.

38.Nixon, Slow Violence and Environmentalism, 2.

39.Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil, 61.

40.Ibid., 230.

41.Conradie, Church and Climate Change, 88. Moe-Lobeda similarly hopes that churches will make genuine repentance possible: “Could it be that worship that empowers the people of God for social and ecological healing will include profound lament for the ways in which our lives unwittingly endanger Earth’s life-systems and vulnerable neighbors far and near?” Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil, 262.

42.Ibid., 54, 299.

43.Jenkins, Future of Ethics, 1.

44.Klein, This Changes Everything.

45.Stephenson, What We’re Fighting for Now, ix. Interestingly, Stephenson also calls the climate justice movement to model itself on the abolitionist movement; see pp. 30ff.

46.Harris, “Ecowomanism,” 7.