There's No Place to Hide in the Anthropocene

This article is adapted from Larry Rasmussen's 2022 presentation at the Society of Christian Ethics.

PHILIP JENKINS' REMARKABLE Climate, Catastrophe, and Faith: How Changes in Climate Drive Religious Upheaval leads off with Voltaire: “Three things exercise a constant influence over the minds of [humankind] — climate, government, and religion ... That is the only way of explaining the enigma of this world.”

Climate and geology are now the new prisms for our shared discernment of how we are to live in our own time and place as followers of Christ. We’re driven to centering climate because we can no longer live with the expectation of the balanced climate of the last 12,000 years, the geologic epoch called the late Holocene. We are now in a new geologic epoch: the Age of the Human, or the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene reality leaves Christian ethics nowhere to hide. Nowhere to hide because unprecedented cumulative human powers doubled down on planet-spanning changes that launched the first geological epoch created by human choice and action. The fact that human choice and action has done this means that everything, including extinction, turns on ethics. As Christians, we can look away and abdicate our responsibility, but we cannot escape the massive human presence that lines out our lives — and all life. We’ve become totalizing creatures. We humans are, for the first time, both ark and flood.

This extraordinary power has been recognized for a while. In 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that the unprecedented powers of modern science and technology led to a world in which “it all comes down to the human being,” a world where “everything turns upon humanity.” He thus set out to reconceive human responsibility for a world that had come of age. For Bonhoeffer, “world come of age” was not a statement of moral maturity. It was a statement of moral accountability. People who legally come of age at 18 or 21 are accountable, whether they exercise their agency maturely or not. When everything turns on humanity, Bonhoeffer said, the whole human world has arrived at that point of accountability.

A current term for human powers and their collective impact is “assisted evolution.” But the phrase is deceptive because it hides the depth, breadth, and temporal reach of those powers. Does the phrase “assisted evolution” reveal that the carbon people produce has the ability to alter marine chemistry, flood coastlines, strip glaciers “to bare bones,” embolden deserts, warp the circulation of ocean currents, “supercharge extreme weather events,” and rearrange “the distribution of animal, plant, and microbial species across the globe,” as author David Farrier puts it? This isn’t evolution “assisted”; it’s evolution hacked and hijacked.

To be clear: Human life has always been inseparable from the rest of nature. It’s just that, in previous eras, humanity could get away with its demeanor of unconscious sovereignty because there were seemingly unlimited resources, weaker powers, more room for error, and far fewer people. Yet climate has always been the driver, with government and religion riding sidecar. Ironic, isn’t it, that just when we realize we’re major players in a no-analog world, we discover we’re a lot less important than we thought. God’s earth has gotten along just fine without us for all but a very tiny fraction of its life. So, let’s not be thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought (see Romans 12:3).

The beliefs that we are separate from the rest of nature, and yet somehow also its center, and that we control what we create — these are all myths; they are false. We have enough power to spin our version of earth out of control, and we have. But we don’t have enough power to corral wild earth, or to dial it back to how it was in the epoch we brought to an end.

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So, if “the only period as stable as our own is our own” as Elizabeth Kolbert said in Under a White Sky, and if climate stability has been a prerequisite for organized society, then what do we do now, when climate volatility and planetary uncertainty is the surest thing? How do we exercise that Christian responsibility in a world that’s become, as William Sloane Coffin put it, “too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love?” That seems to translate as “love your neighbor or else,” with “neighbor” as both human and other-than-human.

Is this bar set too high for us? And is Bonhoeffer right that recourse to a God to whom we look to bail us out (a deus ex machina) and a God who is the explanation for what we do not yet know (the God of the gaps) is a path that sidesteps our responsibility? When everything turns on humanity, even the old theodicy question points the wrong direction. The question is not, “Why does a good God permit evil?” The question is, “Why do we?”

How does our changing planet alter human responsibility in this era? The norms of the natural world have been upended by the fossil-fueled way of life over the past two centuries, and especially since 1950, which reset the earth’s thermostat and altered the climate system itself. Care was not given to what earth (soil), air, fire (energy), and water required for their own renewal on their own terms.

Still, the agents were not human beings acting as a single tribe. The agents were those who fashioned the modern world on the basis of slavery, conquest, colonization, Christianity, and consumerism through an extractive, profit-driven mode of living. “Domination” was domination of nature and peoples together.

This means that not all people are equally responsible. So, who’s responsible for what?

While all humans — in fact, the full community of life and the whole of the environment — suffer climate consequences, and all are forced to respond in some manner, not all are responsible in the same way. All in the same storm doesn’t mean all in the same boat. Some owe more than others, because their footprint and presence are far greater, as are their powers to repair. In a word, justice requires “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities,” as it’s stated in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Those who have more, and have taken more, owe those who have less and have taken less.

“I have set before you life and death ...”

WE MUST START with an unforgiving element of responsibility in this epoch. It’s clear as desert air after a rain that greenhouse gases must not exceed the planet’s “sinks” — the earth’s capacity for dealing with them. If emissions exceed what earth sequesters, as they do now, then we will continue on the track that will render the earth largely uninhabitable for human beings. It’s imperative that we stay at or below earth’s sequestrations of greenhouse gases. For everyone, no more important measure of responsibility exists than holding the sequestration line.

What about differentiated responsibilities? From the Industrial Revolution onward, most people — many Indigenous peoples excepted — conceived responsibility in human-to-human terms: Sharing human burdens and benefits fairly, in the interest of human well-being, defined responsibility. The reigning norms in Christian ethics — love and justice — gave noble voice to this. But these norms were intrahuman only, and we (wrongly) assumed that what was good for us was also good for the world. It wasn’t.

Furthermore, we assumed that the basic unit of human survival is human society. It is not — rather, it’s the planet our kids will inherit. We acted as if essential aspects of the ecosphere were outside the realm of our responsibility. Earth, air, fire, and water, together with other-than-human lives, were considered to be moral externalities.

All of this means that our concept of responsibility must be reformed so as to conform to Thomas Berry’s axiom: “Planetary well-being is primary; human well-being is derivative.” To make this plain: Because human well-being is always derivative, planetary well-being is always primary. That means that — in addition to differentiated responsibilities within the human family — there are differentiated responsibilities between humans and the rest of life. The claims of earth, air, fire, and water for their health on their own (non-human-centered) terms are intrinsic aspects of responsibility in this epoch.

What choices do we have for the way the future unfolds in this epoch of the human, the Anthropocene era? In The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin outline three. The first is to continue developing our consumer capitalist mode of living in “eco-Promethean” style — treating the earth as a resource for human exploitation, somehow hoping that people will innovate our way out of the problems that result. This is the default as millions still march behind the crucifix of “capitalist progress.”

Suffering widespread civilizational collapse is a second possible future. Making our dogged way to a new mode of living is the third.

Earth can’t afford more black belts in shopping and using things up. Lewis and Maslin’s first option — ever-expanding consumerism — thus portends the second: Collapse. The forced option, then, is the third, an altered way of life. It’s forced because it cannot be avoided. Yet, it’s truly an option because it must be consciously chosen.

Unconditional love for the ages

MEANWHILE, LET'S CONSIDER how we think about responsibility, since how we think largely determines what we think and subsequently do. This was Bonhoeffer’s point: In the new epoch brought on by unprecedented human powers, epistemology (how we think) and ethics go hand in hand.

Start with this. We can’t bear responsibility for the way we live unless our responsibility matches the planetary boundaries (space) and temporal boundaries (time) of our impact. What sense can responsibility make, Willis Jenkins asks in The Future of Ethics, if it falls short of the actual outcome of human powers as these powers move through ecological systems, across generational time, and deep into evolutionary futures? No sense at all.

This leaves us with a conundrum. How do we love human and other-than-human neighbors whom we can’t see, don’t see, and won’t see? Their living conditions and needs are out of sight, yet their fate rides on our actions.

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Does this not render obsolete the morality we most rely upon? Namely, making decisions and choosing actions by weighing their consequences. How can we be accountable to future generations when they are beyond “seeable” horizons yet in the storm track of our collective impact? And what virtues do we cultivate? How do we approach moral formation — of people and institutions — for times and conditions so distant they elude moral imagination?

Conundrums like these don’t mean we can do no more than fall on our knees in prayer. Some ecological virtues can be cultivated for an indefinite future. Humility, from the same root — humus — as human, is the first. Christian love of neighbor like that prominent in Buddhism is another — having compassion for all beings and relieving their suffering as a state of mind and heart whether we see those beings or not, know them or not, and whether they are here yet or not. As religion professor Kusumita P. Pedersen has pointed out, this unconfined love in Buddhism can align with Christian notions of unconditional love.

In any event, we know what brought on this epoch and what can and should be done. Chief among these is dismantling white-originated institutions as they play out in high-carbon lifestyles. This means putting an end to an extractive earth economy running on ecological deficits and putting an end to wealth and privilege that trickle up rather than down. If trickle it must, it should trickle across, from social justice to creation justice and creation justice to social justice. “Social justice is climate justice,” writes Melanie Harris, and vice versa. They merge to outline human responsibility in this age.

All flourishing is mutual

WHERE DO WE go for wisdom? We live in self-made apocalyptic times, so wisdom should send us to communities that have already known apocalypse and survived it through stunning creativity, adaptability, and resilience, not to mention sheer grit — those who learned to sing a new song in a strange land and learned to find their way in a new world. The world did not end — earth carried on — but their worlds did. All that was sacred to them was lost, stolen, or forbidden. They were robbed of their cultures, languages, lifeways, even their children. They had to take on a pilgrimage they did not choose so as to fashion a way of life that could sustain them on patches of the planet they had not previously known.

Now, when you and I are both the exiled and the exilers on an earth we have changed, we do well to look to the wisdom of those forced, as we now are, to found or re-found a different way of life. This is the faith pilgrimage we walk in a time of biological and cultural collapse.

Consider responsibility as understood in one set of these communities, Indigenous peoples. They connect epistemology and ethics differently than others do, differently enough to affect a different human-nature relationship. What would that look like? What would its cosmology be, and how would it feel?

I’ll pass along the Indigenous understanding in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer captures our changed context and overall responsibility as succinctly as anyone. “From the very beginning of the world,” Kimmerer writes, “the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs.” But what would it mean to be the lifeboat for other species as well as ourselves, to be Noah’s Ark as Earth’s Ark? Two sentences from Kimmerer are probably all we need: “It’s all in the pronouns” and “All flourishing is mutual.”

All flourishing as “mutual” and as life lived by “personal pronouns” (I, not it, and we, not they) — whether for human life, other life, or the nonliving essentials for all life — this is the place to launch the task of revamping Christian ethical responsibility for both the present and the far future. Perhaps surprisingly, our new geologic epoch now requires what Christian ethics has always claimed as its aim: a dramatically transformed way of life.

There is scant room for despair. There is room only for pilgrimage, a pilgrimage on which we carry all our care with us — joy and sorrow, grief and anticipation, hope and community, belief and doubt, steadiness and determination. A pilgrimage with a readiness for surprise, discovery, and joy, too. A pilgrimage that lives from a faith and a hope that says yes to life in spite of everything.