This Planet Can’t Breathe

IN 2018, CLIMATE SCIENTISTS reached a consensus that, based on current global emissions, we have roughly 12 years to dramatically reverse course before we cause irreparable harm to our planet and our way of life. These and other predictions cause me to lose sleep at night, particularly when I think about the world that my two sons will inherit.

But this alarming trend is not inevitable, nor are we powerless to change course. Preventing the worst consequences and putting the planet on a zero-carbon trajectory will require a revolution of social and political will. Catalyzing this revolution will require new language, new metaphors, and new messengers.

“I can’t breathe.” These were the prophetic words said by my pastor, Rev. Howard John-Wesley, in a sermon in which he made the case that we are on the brink of ecological destruction. He preached about the thousands of species that go extinct every year. He emphasized that Americans constitute 5 percent of the world’s population but burn 25 percent of the world’s fossil fuels. These and other trends of conspicuous consumption and abuse are driving us toward global catastrophe.

Based on these sobering trends, he lifted up the tragic last words of Eric Garner, an African American man who was viciously asphyxiated by police using an illegal choke hold, alluding to how our planet, too, is exclaiming, “I can’t breathe.” Through floods such as Katrina and Harvey, we hear the planet gasping, “I can’t breathe.” Amid out of control wildfires in California and Australia, our planet is hollering, “I can’t breathe.” The tragedy is that the church is too often unresponsive to the earth’s desperate cry.

Despite all the scientific evidence, our nation and the church remain far too complacent amid this climatic revolution, in part due to the tranquilizing influence of bad dominion theology and longstanding disinformation campaigns by big oil and coal. But another key factor is that the ways we talk about climate change often fail to resonate with the daily concerns of most people, particularly people of color. While there has been some progress, the environmental movement remains predominantly white and affluent. We must do better to lift up voices such as the courageous African farmers who have been on the frontlines of fighting climate change as a matter of survival or the people of color across the U.S. South and in major cities who have for decades been standing against environmental racism in the form of air pollution, undrinkable water, and toxic waste in their communities.

Eric Garner’s killing at the hands of police has a visceral and existential impact, because it reminds black and brown people that our very lives are under threat due to racialized policing and police violence. In a similar vein, the climate crisis increasingly poses an existential threat to all our lives and livelihoods, and yet we know the impacts will disproportionately hurt the already marginalized and disinherited. Yes, all creation is crying, “I can’t breathe.” The question is whether we are willing to break the stranglehold and hold those most responsible accountable.