Love, activism, and the foundation of our continued existence
When the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report came out last year, I was on my way to Concord, Massachusetts, home of the Transcendentalists, to help lead a pilgrimage based around Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. I read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay Nature on the plane — his way in to feeling through his rational Unitarianism for the extra dimension he found in his relationship with the natural world. It felt uncomfortable taking that transatlantic flight, to be with people flying in from all over the US; all that airfuel weighing heavy against the countdown of having 12 (now 11) years to keep the earth’s temperature rise below 1.5C, and against Emerson’s essay on the holy beauty of the natural world.
As part of the pilgrimage, after our walk around Walden Pond, we held a ritual that explored our love of nature and our place in it, and (inspired by Emerson’s Self-reliance) our individual agency to act. I’m not sure it counts as carbon off-setting, but it felt essential, and I think was felt by everyone as more than just a gesture.
This individual agency of course can be used to switch to renewable energy providers, and choose food that limits environmental damage, and put on a jumper before putting on the heating. And it can be used to influence more widely — by switching energy providers at our place of work or in our communities, or by writing to our MP to call for action on the carbon emissions of corporations, or by making a placard and taking to the streets.
All good choices we can make to tend to the interconnected life we are part of.
There’s another layer of complexity to look at though. Though Emerson was a progressive and abolitionist, he was also a white supremacist. Alongside his visionary thinking, teaching, and writing, he held views that seem unacceptably at odds with what we celebrate him for. (Judy Ryde, of the Bath Unitarian Fellowship, writes about the discomfort in uncovering his racist views in his diaries while researching her book White Privilege Unmasked: How to be Part of the Solution.) Those views may be less common in polite company today than they were 150 years ago, but the echoes of them and plenty of other social prejudices still shape our culture today. The socioeconomic fabric that is heating up the world beyond breaking point is also perpetuating division and inequality between people. The inequality that is resulting in a drop in life expectancy in the UK and US is bound up with the relentless striving for growth that is core to climate change.
This is old news to Unitarians, who in their 1994 annual meeting passed a resolution stating:
“That this General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches recognises that the natural environment is the foundation of our continued existence and all our human comforts, and also that current human behaviour is endangering that environment in a manner that is unique in the whole history of the planet.
The General Assembly therefore calls upon the British Government together with the European Union to commit themselves to the principle of environmental sustainability as the basis of economic and social policy, recognising that this has far-reaching implications for our way of life and for the patterns of production, distribution and consumption of goods.
The General Assembly also asserts that present patterns of trade and consumption are damaging to under-privileged and poor sectors and countries and that sustainability and equity must go together as we strive to create a fairer world in which the needs of all are met, and that this General Assembly urges Headquarters staff, congregations and individual Unitarians to act in all possible ways to create a fairer world.”
When I discovered this resolution, I was struck by its resonance with the position of Extinction Rebellion (XR), the activist movement that has made waves in the last year, using non-violent direct action to demand that climate change is acted upon seriously, including by setting up citizens’ assemblies to navigate the challenges collectively. The XR activists are in step with the Unitarian call to ‘act in all possible ways to create a fairer world’. (And I wasn’t surprised to find out how many XR groups around the country have connections to Unitarian chapels — there is resonance with the issues, the means, the values, and the decentralised, non-hierarchical structure.)
The thing that strikes me most, however, about XR is the way that it is offering a lot of the things that have traditionally been offered by churches. Those involved in XR have a sense of purpose and belonging, are part of ‘affinity groups’ committed to taking care of each other, are singing together, praying together, eating together, and uncovering their individual way to contribute their gifts to the collective. I’m fascinated (but not surprised) that so many people from all walks of life have got involved and found such fulfillment and belonging — we know there is a hunger for this stuff.
I went to Greenbelt festival a few weeks ago, where the ‘Hot House’ was a venue dedicated to events and talks about climate change, and Christian Climate Action had a big presence there. Several people talked about the need for churches to be active in the issues around climate change in order to be credible; carrying on as normal and ignoring such a clear threat to so much that we hold dear would mean not being taken seriously. This action might be in campaigning, or it might be in following initiatives like Eco-Church to improve their environmental impact.
But I see that there is much more beyond this that Unitarian congregations (and others) can offer in this time of climate crisis.
As the 1994 Unitarian resolution called out, a big challenge in taking action to limit environmental damage is “recognising that this has far-reaching implications for our way of life and for the patterns of production, distribution and consumption of goods”. The scale of change to our lives will be enormous — whether it is planned collectively along the lines of XR’s proposed citizens’ assemblies, whether it is imposed as regulation and rationing by a government, or whether it is unplanned as a result of failed harvests, extreme weather, erratic stock markets, and mass migration of environmental refugees.
I see that belonging to a supportive community that is not afraid to engage with difficult issues will be essential as these changes are happening in the socioeconomic system around us. We need to help each other learn how to navigate. Many will be grieving — for lost species and habitats, for ways of life that we will need to give up, as well perhaps for loved ones directly impacted by climate change (it feels a long way away for Britain’s clement weather, but is already happening in fires and floods elsewhere). There are few spaces to grieve well in our secular culture, though spaces and practices are emerging outside of mainstream religions. There will be conflict and challenge as we navigate whatever lies ahead; to do this skillfully, the practices of being loving that are developed in spiritual communities will be essential. And it’s likely that our nuclear families won’t be as self-sufficient as they have been in recent decades, and we will need to re-learn how to act in wider trust and collectivism. The relentless striving for growth that has been driving climate change and social inequality is hooked into our own individual and collective motivations for wealth and success, and there is careful inner work to be done to examine these. All these are skills that are in the kitbag of religious communities.
In XR’s book This Is Not A Drill, there is a chapter from Jem Bendell, the sustainability academic whose Deep Adaptation paper sketched a picture of these ‘far-reaching implications for our way of life’. His chapter expresses some of the emerging needs that I see the Unitarian church as being very well placed to help with:
“What do we need to let go of in order not to make matters worse? People and communities will need to relinquish certain assets, behaviours and beliefs: withdrawing from coastlines, shutting down vulnerable industrial facilities, giving up expectations for certain types of consumption. There will be the psychological challenge of how to help people who experience dread, grief and confusion. Many of us may be deeply affected by the falling away of our assumption of progress or stability. How do we plan our lives now? That will pose huge communications challenges if we want to enable compassionate and collaborative response from each other as much as possible. Helping people, with psychological support, to let go of some old attachments and aspirations will be important work.”
He goes on to talk about the need for reconciliation ‘with our mistakes, with death and, some would add, with God’ as well as between those who are different to us. “Without this inner deep adaptation to climate collapse, we risk tearing societies apart.” Imagining the future where we don’t manage to address the temperature rise doesn’t of course mean we should stop taking action now — but it may be helpful to hold the complexity of both scenarios. These imaginings have been deeply explored quietly and thoughtfully over the last ten years by Dark Mountain, and crossed with controversy into the mainstream last week in Jonathan Franzen’s article in the New Yorker.
Rather than feeling hopeless at the scale and complexity of the challenges that lie ahead of us, I see that many of the tools and structures and pieces of wisdom are there ready for us, having been tended carefully for centuries within religious traditions. And what I see Unitarians being in the position to do is to offer these gifts free of doctrine and dogma; we won’t make you sign up to a new set of beliefs if you want access to the good stuff.
At the Religion Media Festival that I took part in earlier this year, former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks spoke about the way that religious leaders had played an essential role in the Copenhagen climate summit because ‘it’s hard to explain in secular terms our responsibility to future generations’. Someone told me recently about their friend’s ‘200 year plan’ for the gardens of a stately home that they manage. With the scale of change we might be facing, and the sense of urgent anxiety in the here-and-now, it feels like these longer sighted lenses are useful to all of us.
These long-term big questions of how we live in a way that nourishes rather than damages the interconnectedness of life are inextricably weaved into the questions currently in my mind of what the future looks like for the Unitarian church. The questions mirror each other — how do we care for each other? how do we use our resources wisely? what do we give to others and what do we give up? what needs to be protected? what did we do in the past that is ripe for revival? how do we change when change is hard? how do we embrace a future that we can’t yet see? what do we let go of that we love? how do we grieve for what is lost? what new beauty can we create together? what is it like in the more loving culture where we all thrive?
Amongst the fears, the path that these questions form seems full of life and I’m excited to ask them together.
