Introducing his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut recounts a conversation in which someone scoffed at the idea of an “anti-war book,” asking him, “Why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?” Vonnegut follows with a straightforward interpretation: “What he meant, of course was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.”1
In the 1960s Vonnegut and his critic both assumed that glaciers were inexorable forces of nature beyond human influence. In a world increasingly shaped by climate change, we know that this is not true. Near where I write these words, the glaciers of Mount Rainier shrank by 25 percent in the twentieth century and are shrinking even more rapidly in the twenty-first. This means a less predictable water supply for millions of people, raising doubts for the region’s growing population.2 A more dramatic case of glacial decline is occurring in Antarctica, where—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration predicts—the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a continental mass that feeds numerous glaciers, will likely disappear in coming centuries because of warming global temperatures. This will result in rising sea levels all over the world, posing a profound long-term threat to coastal communities everywhere.3
This book is about climate change, inspired partly by the fact that glaciers—symbols of constancy and inevitability in Vonnegut’s conversation—are now rapidly shrinking because of industrial human activity.4 This is also a book about war, asking what concerned people in the twenty-first century can learn from the examples of five particular Christians in the United States who responded to the violence of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries with nonviolent resistance. Using this tradition of nonviolence as an inspiration for a response to climate change, this book seeks to stand up for glaciers and against violence.
My premise is that climate change is a problem of structural violence. Atmospheric changes are structural because they are the result of countless small decisions and developments in politics, economics, and technology. Climate change is not caused by any one person’s decision, and no individual can stop it. The structural nature of this problem too often makes it seem invisible, an abstraction that public discourse suggests may or may not be real, may or may not be caused by human beings, and may or may not be related to the latest extreme weather events. But climate change is very real, very much caused by human beings, and very much connected to hurricanes, droughts, and floods.5
These structural changes to the atmosphere are violent because they are harming life on Earth and its future. Species die off, glaciers disappear, and forests dry up. The ecosystems upon which future generations of humanity depend are endangered. Today, refugees flee their homes as sea levels rise, people fight over ever-scarcer water supplies, and farmers work ever harder to feed their families, their communities, and the world. This is violence, a product of human actions that hurts others.
Climate change has been created by generations of decisions from privileged people who seek to make themselves safe and comfortable, who contribute disproportionately to the problem of climate change while tending to avoid its worst effects. This is well demonstrated by my own community: economically secure persons in the United States. The average US citizen is responsible for emitting about 17 tons of carbon dioxide and other climate-changing gases each year; the average global citizen is responsible for about 5 tons.6 But even in a country like the United States, the per capita emissions of the very poor tend to be well under 5 tons each year, while the very wealthiest are responsible for upward of 70 tons a year.7 Climate change is mostly caused by wealthy people.
I hope that many different audiences can learn from this book, but every reference to “we” or “our” or “concerned people” is directed at privileged people in the industrialized world with relatively extensive resources, who bear guilt for and a responsibility to oppose the violence of climate change. As a member of this group, I am writing about a personal struggle. I drive a car most days, I fly on planes a half dozen times a year, and I eat food shipped from around the world. All these activities release climate-changing gases into the atmosphere. I write these words on a computer with both a smartphone and tablet nearby; and these are just a few examples of the technologies that support my lifestyle and require substantial resources for their construction, use, and disposal. I am part of, complicit in, and dependent upon the systems that cause climate change.
And yet, in a dark irony, climate change does not threaten me in the ways it threatens others. I live near but well above the ocean, in a city prosperous enough to ensure that people like me will have regular access to clean and abundant water and energy even as melting glaciers change the flow of rivers that support life and provide hydroelectric power. I am a white, middle-class citizen of a nation that has proven it will go to great lengths to rescue middle-class and wealthy white people who suffer from natural disasters. I live in a fertile place that is likely to remain fertile for the foreseeable future, even as weather patterns shift. Of course, all of us are threatened by the changing climate, but it is unjust that I am less threatened than many others around the world.
While teaching and writing about environmental issues for the last decade, I have become convinced that the degradation of the planet’s ecosystem is best understood as violence and that I am guilty of this violence. I have written this book in order to wrestle with this troubling fact. But I share the book in hopes that this struggle will be not merely personal—that the book might help others who are similarly troubled and that it might spur some people who are not yet troubled to become so.
All living beings are affected by climate change. This book is written for those who, like me, are causing this suffering through our everyday lives and who want to do something about it. Therefore, it argues that concerned people must face the violence of climate change with the resources of nonviolence.
The definition of nonviolence used in this book has two dimensions: Nonviolence is (1) a commitment to actively oppose violence (2) without the use of violence. The emphasis through most of the book is on the first dimension, not because the second is unimportant but because it is less relevant to contemporary struggles against climate change. Few privileged people have been tempted to use violence in response to a changing climate. Even those willing to break the law for this problem have made great efforts to do so without endangering human lives. Because there is little chance of widespread violent activism against climate change, this book does not focus on the importance of avoiding violence in the course of our protests. Rather, the central claim here is that the tradition of nonviolence calls for creative and active resistance against the violence of climate change, that it is time to act in an organized, thoughtful, and faithful way. The problem facing people of privilege in a world of climate change is the temptation to do nothing—to deny violence, ignore it, or trust that others will solve it.
To see climate change as violence is to see it as the product of a destructive system that degrades human lives, other species, and the world upon which all living beings depend. To live nonviolently is to seek ways to engage in political debate, shape culture, feed oneself, build transportation systems, and gather energy without causing suffering or harm. This is a wildly idealistic goal, but the chapters that follow demonstrate that some of the most effective and influential people in US history have been wildly idealistic. The best way to resist the systems of violence that grip US society and the world is to imagine a future of justice and then pull the world in that direction.
This book argues that privileged people in the twenty-first century are called to oppose the violence of climate change and that we can find resources for doing so in nonviolent social movements. This argument is informed and guided by four commitments: (1) to seek climate justice, (2) to learn from social movements, (3) to draw from Christian exemplars as a contribution to an inclusive conversation, and (4) to combine abstract and concrete thinking in hopes of arriving at creative responses to a complex problem.
The first commitment is to seek the most just response to climate change rather than a solution to it. Climate change is a reality with which the human race will be living for many generations. As is further explained in the next chapter, the atmosphere has fundamentally changed because of human activity, and these changes are already harming human beings. It is no longer possible to talk about preventing or ending climate change.
In response, the environmental activist Tim DeChristopher writes that concerned people are called to build “a movement for climate justice” that seeks “to defend the right of all people, and not only people of all races and nationalities but people of all generations, to live healthy lives and have both the agency and the environment necessary to create the lives they want. We are building a movement to hold onto the things about our civilization that are worth keeping. We are building a movement to navigate that period of intense change in a way that maintains our humanity.”8 Climate justice means accepting the fact that climate change is a reality but refusing to accept the mistakes that created it or the inequities and violence it causes.9
This book seeks to contribute to the movement for climate justice by bringing into the conversation witnesses from the past who maintained humanity in the face of grave injustice. It also seeks to extend the witness of such people by considering how their ideas are relevant to the very real and immediate challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century, hoping to extend the goal of justice beyond even the human species, to all creatures.
Climate justice calls us to understand environmental issues as fundamentally linked to other moral challenges, such as racism, sexism, and economic injustice. As the ethicist James Nash writes: “There can be no social justice without ecological justice! There can be no peace among nations in the absence of peace with nature!”10 This book seeks to show that the movement for climate justice is, ultimately, a movement for peace between human beings, human communities, and all other creatures.
The second commitment is to be led as much as possible by the voices of the poor, the marginalized, and the oppressed and by those who have sought to resist poverty, marginalization, and oppression. Too much of the moral discussion about climate change has been what the theologian James Cone calls a “monological” conversation—“a dominant group talking to itself.” Privileged white people have drawn on one another’s ideas to ponder the mistakes made by privileged white people. Cone notes that it should be clear by now that such monological conversations do not pay adequate attention to either the Earth’s systems or the poor and marginalized peoples who depend most immediately upon these systems. Cone calls on privileged people to “look outside of their dominating culture for ethical and cultural resources for the Earth’s salvation.”11
In 2004 the ethicist Larry Rasmussen echoed this call, suggesting a basic reassessment of the methods, hopes, and goals of ethics. He borrowed a line from James Baldwin in asking scholars to “do our first works over,” reassessing and relearning what it means to think ethically in light of the environmental justice movement. This movement includes and advocates for people whom environmental degradation makes sick, thirsty, and homeless, who share “the collective experience of injustice.”12 If ethicists want to seek a more sustainable future, they should learn first and foremost from those who have sustained communities in the face of systems designed to destroy them, such as poor people and people of color. If concerned people seek to extend moral consideration beyond the merely human world, we have much to learn from those communities that have been dismissed as less than human in the past, including women and indigenous communities.
Rasmussen modeled and suggested a discourse with contemporary environmental justice activists. This book extends his suggestion temporally backward, attempting to learn about justice from movements of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Two of the five witnesses whose lives are explored in this book were persons of color who struggled against racism, two were women who struggled against sexism, and all were willing to “do their first works over” when they encountered violent injustice.
The third commitment is to draw inspiration and guidance from Christians, but to do so in a way open to inclusive conversation with people of diverse faiths and no faith. As a Christian trained in the academic field of Christian ecological ethics, I am particularly interested in moral ideas emerging from my religious tradition.13 However, I do not intend to suggest that this tradition is universally or unquestionably an exemplar of environmental and social virtue. Many Christians have done terrible things, have had destructive ideas, and continue to exacerbate injustices and environmental destruction. For this reason, I make no attempt to apologize for, defend, or even learn from “the Christian tradition” as a whole. It is too broad, too diverse, and too flawed to teach anything in its singularity. Instead, I focus on a particular line of thought within Christianity—nonviolent resistance—and seek to learn from five exemplars. This is not a book about a generic “Christian” response to climate change, but instead an argument that a particular aspect of Christianity has something to teach about climate justice.
Much Christian ecological ethics has been written primarily for Christians, advocating a particular kind of faith, worship, and community in response to environmental problems. For example, Laura Yordy argues that churches are called to be a “witnessing body to the Kingdom of Heaven which, as promised by God, encompasses the redemption of all God’s creation.” For Yordy, such “witness” is for Christians, and this allows her to make a very specific argument that all Christians should dedicate their lives to worshipping God, whom she asserts has already redeemed the world and thus calls Christians to live at peace with creation.14
The witness called for in this book is different because it is directed not at Christians but at all privileged people, who are called to resist the violence of climate change whether they share a belief in God or not. This book is for everyone concerned about climate change, everyone open to learning from the lives and works of five Christians who resisted violence. Although I make an argument in chapter 5 that the movement for climate justice should take faith and religion seriously, I neither assert nor assume that everyone should share a common faith or adhere to a single religious tradition. I understand the movement for climate justice as a broad and diverse phenomenon, and though I argue that Christian voices can inform this movement, I see them as part of a much broader conversation.
The final methodological commitment of this book is for moral attention to both concrete action and abstract cosmological worldviews. Most environmental ethics to date has looked to religion primarily for broad cosmological vision. For example, in her book A New Climate for Theology, Sallie McFague calls for religious ethics because it determines people’s “deeply held and often largely unconscious assumptions about who we are in the scheme of things and how we should act” (emphasis in the original).15 She presents the moral response to climate change as a theological choice between the hierarchical, individualistic worldview of neoclassical economics and the integrated, communal worldview of ecological economics. This is a vitally important cognitive shift; but it is incomplete on its own.
The ethicist Willis Jenkins calls for a counterbalance to such abstract ethics, advocating a pragmatic approach that begins not by rethinking basic assumptions but rather with “concrete problems and doing ethics with imperfect concepts and incompetent communities.” In other words, ethics should not be about determining the right view of the world and then applying it to problems; rather, it should be about wrestling with real problems in conversation with broad claims about the nature of reality. From this perspective, ethics creates new ways of thinking but only in dialogue with communities whose members seek to “create new possibilities from their inherited traditions.”16
Jenkins calls for this approach in direct response to climate change, which he characterizes as an “unprecedented” moral challenge.17 Given the complexity of this problem, he argues, it is vital to learn from concrete action as well as broad worldviews. Whereas McFague proposes a new way of thinking that will undo the damage of climate change, Jenkins argues that the only realistic way forward is accepting the reality of climate change and learning from those who are dealing with it day by day. This is not a rejection of abstract thought—careful examination of big ideas remains essential—but rather an insistence that concrete and grounded analysis is a vital complement and counterbalance to broad claims about how the world works.
Thus, this book begins not with an abstract claim but with a concrete challenge, seeking first to properly understand climate change and then to learn from inherited traditions about how to engage it realistically while striving to act on our highest ideals.
This book’s argument for climate justice seeks to balance the practical and the ideal in conversation with social movements, using the Christian tradition to shed light on the contemporary challenge of climate justice. Its primary sources are the lives and writings of five nonviolent activists from the history of Christianity in the United States: John Woolman, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar Chavez.
A community is strongest when it understands its traditions. The earliest Christians helpfully expressed this idea in the biblical Letter to the Hebrews, which recounts the stories of Noah, Abraham, and Moses to remind its readers that they have generations of Jewish history from which to learn. The letter then offers an inspirational call to action: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (12:1).18 This book turns to the tradition of nonviolent activism in order to summon a cloud of witnesses that will help twenty-first-century people to face climate change with perseverance, to run the long and challenging race of making the world more just.19
John Woolman (1720–72), a Quaker abolitionist, offers a lesson about the importance of transforming oneself. He sought not only to make the moral case against slavery but also to cleanse his life of all the privileges that slavery afforded to white men, leading him to give up his business and refuse to dye his clothes. His attempt to purify himself is an example to concerned people in the twenty-first century, who must decide how to deal with our own complicity in climate change.
Jane Addams (1860–1935) was a reformer and social worker who inspired national and global engagement as she built Chicago’s Hull House. Her witness teaches a lesson about the scales of activism. Serving the poor and immigrant population of her neighborhood throughout her life, she had a direct impact on the people all around her, but she also traveled the world to advocate global peace and lobbied the US government to create a social safety net. Those who are tempted to rush to conclusions without carefully considering the diversity and complexity of climate change have much to learn from her work, which stressed the importance of mutuality and common ground across local, national, and global scales.
Dorothy Day (1887–1980), an activist and author who helped to found and to run the Catholic Worker movement, demonstrates the power of faith and love in activist work. Because of her deep religious commitments, she chose voluntary poverty and dedicated her life to the poor, and she repeatedly insisted that she could only remain faithful in community with others who shared her beliefs and who would regularly remind her of their implications. Her example calls twenty-first-century activists to consider the various ways that both organized and individual faith commitments can fuel the struggle for climate justice.
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–68), a Baptist preacher who became the most famous voice in the civil rights movement, is a model of hope in troubling times. King stood up against racism and endured the frustrations of long protests because he trusted that the universe is ultimately on the side of justice and peace. Avoiding both cynical despair and blind optimism, his hope is a vital example for anyone who works toward justice in a world of uncertainties.
Cesar Chavez (1927–93), a union organizer who led a nonviolent campaign of farmworkers for more than thirty years, offers a lesson about the strategic use of sacrifice. Chavez disciplined himself by taking low wages and frequently fasting throughout his life, securing moral authority with the liberating power that he found in self-surrender. He also demanded sacrifices of his movement, recruiting volunteers rather than salaried employees to run his union and insisting that members contribute dues and go on strike in spite of financial hardships. These moves helped to create a unified community. Chavez has much to teach privileged people who recognize that climate change calls for both personal and political sacrifices.
In a 1954 speech, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about the importance of individuals “who have the insight to look beyond the inadequacies of the old order and see the necessity for the new. These are the persons with a sort of divine discontent.”20 King himself was a person of divine discontent, as were Chavez, Day, Addams, and Woolman. These five witnesses offer resources for those who are discontented with the violence of climate change and who want to work toward a more just world where people can live in harmony with one another and all other creatures.
Of course, the five witnesses discussed in this book do not entirely capture the tradition of nonviolent protest in the United States, and none by herself or himself encompassed an entire movement. All were supported and challenged by colleagues and communities, and they are only one small part of the cloud of witnesses available to contemporary activists. However, these witnesses each played a key role in an important movement, and the life of each one offers an exemplary record of struggle for those of us who resist violence today.
These witnesses were human beings, and as such they were imperfect. This is best demonstrated by those who lived most recently: Chavez was a flawed leader who was not always able to hear dissent and seemed uncomfortable distinguishing the movement from his own personality.21 King was also limited, and the intense scrutiny he received throughout and after his life revealed a series of adulterous affairs and a pattern of plagiarism in both academic and public writing.22 Although their lives are less fully chronicled, Day, Addams, and Woolman were also fully human, and so flawed. No one becomes a witness for justice and peace by being perfect. Rather, we can learn from these real people who struggled to be good.
None of these witnesses was concerned about climate change, and none offers an answer to it. Only Chavez would ever have even heard of this problem, and while he was active in protesting environmental degradation and social injustice, he had nothing to say about the climate. The value of these witnesses is not that they offer answers to the present challenge but instead that they model a thoughtful moral response to other cases of structural violence. They offer guides—but not a plan—for a twenty-first-century movement seeking climate justice.
The treatment each figure receives in this book is also limited. Each one deserves and has had many books devoted to analyzing their writings, their lives, and the communities that made both possible. However, each has only a chapter here, which will, I hope, inspire further investigation into their work alongside further engagement with the work of resisting violence.
Before turning to each witness, chapter 1 offers an introduction to some of the basic facts about climate change and argues that it is helpfully understood as a “wicked” problem—that is, a problem that is multifaceted and has no clear solution—of structural violence. Chapter 2 then defines nonviolence by introducing the broad tradition and some of its expressions in Christianity.
Chapters 3 through 7 focus in turn on each of the five witnesses, who are covered in chronological order to demonstrate the developing legacy of nonviolence in the United States. In each case, the focus is on the witness’s own writings. Each chapter draws a broad lesson about one particular topic relevant to climate justice—self-purification, the scale of action, faithful love as motivation, hope for the future, and sacrifice for climate justice. In addition, each chapter applies this lesson to a more concrete issue: personal austerity, balancing the rhetoric of social justice against the good of all species, considering the role of religion in the climate justice movement, assessing proposals to technologically engineer the climate, and judging demands that the industrialized world owes a “climate debt” to the global poor.
The conclusion to this book then draws on the common themes from these discussions to argue that privileged peoples must resist the violence of climate change even as we recognize how far our current practices, worldviews, and structures are from the ideal of climate justice. Recognizing that this ideal is distant from today’s reality gives us all the more reason to push toward it and to learn from the cloud of witnesses who have done such work in the past.
1.Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 3–4.
2.“Mt. Rainier National Park,” www.glaciers.pdx.edu/Projects/LearnAboutGlaciers/
MRNP/Chg00.html.
3.“The ‘Unstable’ Antarctic Ice Sheet: A Primer,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration, www.nasa.gov/jpl/news/antarctic-ice-sheet-20140512/#.U5B5CRaE5tc.
4.Vonnegut identified the theme of Slaughterhouse-Five as less about opposition to war than about “the inhumanity of man’s inventions to man,” a phrase that is profoundly relevant to the violence of climate change. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, xiii.
5.This book is not about the denial of climate change; it is directed to those concerned about the problem rather than those seeking to dismiss it. However, the basic premise that climate change is a problem of structural violence sheds light on the challenge of denial. To deny the reality of climate change despite scientific evidence and humane experience of degradation is to avoid a structural reality; to deny climate change is to deny that the systems in which we live and upon which we depend are contributing to violence and destruction. So, arguing against a climate change denier requires discussion not only of natural science but also of complicated social and cultural systems.
6.Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, “Fossil-Fuel CO2 Emissions,” http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/meth_reg.html.
7.Gough et al., “Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” These numbers come from a study of emissions in the United Kingdom, which is not exactly comparable but offers clarity about the importance of economic status in determining per capita emissions.
8.Quoted by Stephenson, What We’re Fighting for Now, 191.
9.For a philosophical discussion of this term, see Shue, Climate Justice. For a good set of resources and principles focused on international climate justice, see the work of the Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice at www.mrfcj.org/.
10.Nash, Loving Nature, 218.
11.Cone, “Whose Earth Is It, Anyway?” 31. George Zachariah makes a similar point: “The poor in their collectivity is an epistemic community that creates oppositional knowledge. It is the seeing from the vantage point of the collectivity of the subalterns that has the potential to create oppositional knowledge.” Zachariah, Alternatives Unincorporated, 101.
12.Rasmussen, “Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice,” 19.
13.The roots of Christian ecological ethics are in Christian social ethics, an academic discipline that emphasizes the importance of understanding moral life in the context of systems and institutions. Social ethics has a long history of working not only with Christian communities but also political leaders, other communities, and all people of goodwill, suggesting that to be human is to be called to take challenges like racism, sexism, inequality, and injustice seriously on personal and structural levels. Ecological ethics continues these claims and extends them outward to add the issue of environmental justice, the degradation of the nonhuman world, and the extinction of species. Christian ecological ethics emphasizes that these challenges intersect and interlink, and all must be taken seriously by anyone seeking to live well in the world.
14.Yordy, Green Witness, 42. I have learned an enormous amount from Yordy’s work, and in some ways this book has much in common with hers, particularly in its focus on peace and nonviolence as important environmental ideals. However, I have a fundamentally different audience than Yordy. She writes to the church; I write to the movement for climate justice. I suspect she would view my treatment of Christianity as she views Larry Rasmussen’s: “at bottom, sociological rather than theological: a moral community rather than the body of Christ” (p. 143). I would concede that I am not writing an ethics that only makes sense in light of the specifics of Christian eschatological teaching but would argue that this remains a vitally theological project.
15.McFague, New Climate for Theology, 85.
16.Jenkins, Future of Ethics, 4. Jenkins engages a broad range of “inherited traditions” in response to a long list of “unprecedented” problems. This book attempts a smaller project: to apply the inheritance of nonviolent activism to the problem of climate change.
17.Ibid., 17.
18.All biblical quotations in this book are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
19.Sallie McFague makes a similar turn to exemplary Christians in response to climate change. She calls her models “saints” and includes John Woolman and Dorothy Day alongside Simone Weil. She writes: “By following the clues in the lives of exceptional people—those called saints—one begins to understand, internalize, and perhaps to act in new ways. The saints ‘scream’ at us, the hard of hearing, and become living parables of a crazy, revolutionary, countercultural response to the reality they see before them: the world as radically interrelated and interdependent (an insight that contemporary science is also telling us).” McFague, Blessed Are the Consumers, 36.
20.King, “In a Single Garment of Destiny,” 6.
21.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez.
22.Sitkoff, King.