[New post] Is accepting the end of humanity the key to climate action? This scholar thinks so.
Fernando Kaskais posted: " Grist / Getty Images "This is not another 'before it's too late' book. This is a 'what if it's already too late?' book." by Diana Kruzman There's a part at the end of "Don't Look Up," last year's wildly popular Netflix film about a comet hu" WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais
There's a part at the end of "Don't Look Up," last year's wildly popular Netflix film about a comet hurtling toward Earth, when a group of people have dinner together on the eve of the planet's destruction. As the television blares news about the impending impact and the walls begin to shake, a scientist, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, poses a wistful question to his wife, kids, friends, and colleagues: "We really did have everything, didn't we?"
This scene stood out to Timothy Beal, a religious studies professor at Case Western Reserve University who teaches a class on religion and ecology. Faced with certain death-by-comet (a thinly veiled metaphor for climate change), the characters were left with neither optimism nor denial, but a heightened sense of gratitude. The scene lined up with a question Beal was already pondering: Most modern religions promote the idea that humanity will go on forever. Would we treat the planet better if we assumed that our species' time on it is limited?
Beal expands upon this thought experiment in his new book, When Time Is Short: Finding Our Way in the Anthropocene, which came out in July. "This is not another 'before it's too late' book," he writes on the very first page. "This is a 'what if it's already too late?' book. Maybe it's not. But what if it is? What if we, along with many other plants and animals, have fifty years, or two hundred years, or maybe even several hundred more years left?"
On first glance, this framing seems deeply antithetical to anyone who cares about the climate. After all, the scientific consensus is that it is still possible to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, assuming we take drastic and immediate action to reform our societies and economies. Wouldn't convincing yourself that the world is ending lead people to do the opposite — to throw up their hands and go on with their lives as usual?
Beal argues the reverse. Reducing emissions and conserving natural resources are all things we should be doing anyway, he told Grist, but it's hard to break out of the systems (say, capitalism) that got us into this mess in the first place. Accepting that human civilization is finite, he says, will challenge us to change our priorities, from worshiping extraction and growth to uplifting the most marginalized in society.
"Most people, when they find they have a year to live or two years to live, they don't just become assholes," Beal said.
Beal's thesis draws heavily on the works of scholars like cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, whose book The Denial of Death made the case that humans survive by refusing to accept their own mortality. The human-centric mythology of many religions, Beal writes, has convinced people that society will persist forever, no matter what damage we do to our habitat. Some Christians, for example, have used a passage from the biblical book of Genesis that instructs humans to "subdue" the Earth and have "dominion" over other living beings as proof that natural resources like oil and trees were made to be mined with abandon, without fear of the consequences.
But just as religion has helped get us into this mess, Beal believes it can get us out of it. He points out that other parts of the Bible put animals on equal footing with humans, and assign inherent value to the land itself, rather than just as a tool for humanity to exploit — an interpretation shared by some evangelical Christians who view "creation care" as a sacred duty. Beal also argues that spiritually minded people should embrace "dark green religion," belief systems that emphasize the ways humans are interconnected with all other living things.
Again, this philosophical shift is intended to foster mercy, not hope. Beal envisions humanity adopting a "palliative" approach to the future, one modeled on end-of-life care administered to terminally ill patients. By positing that the end is coming (as a result of our consumerist ideals, no less), this palliative approach neatly shuts down policies that promise prosperity through infinite growth. Even climate solutions touted by Biden and the Democratic Party miss the mark in this case; he argues they frame climate action in the language of job creation and benefits to the economy.
Similarly, Beal criticizes the space-oriented ambitions of billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. He echoes thinkers like feminist scholar Donna Haraway and French philosopher Bruno Latour, who suggested in 2018 that addressing the multiple political and social crises we face today will require coming back "down to Earth" rather than retreating into escapist fantasies like creating a civilization on Mars...
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