"Religion and the Anthropocene" has devoted two weeks and a paper to The Shock of the Anthropocene, even though it barely mentions religion, but it's been time well spent. I don't have time to give a blow by blow, but here are two highlights of our final discussion, bringing the book into conversation with religion.
Religion appears explicitly in Shock of the Anthropocene only as a polemical concept. "Anthropocenology," the shibboleth the book critiques, is likened to a religious master narrative. Humanity has gone unwittingly wrong, the "Anthropocenologists" tell us, but there is time - just - for conversion. If we repent and have faith we may yet be redeemed. Luckily, saviors are at hand: the earth systems scientists and geoengineers who alone can understand the nature of the problem, and who alone can save us from ourselves. Absolution is offered by their narrative, "They knew not what they did" (72), they tell us of our forebears, and if most of us "still don't know what to do" (83), the Anthropocenologists do. Altar call?
Bonneuil and Fressoz are historians, and their aim, brilliantly achieved, is to challenge every part of this narrative, starting with the uncomfortable fact that people have been aware of anthropogenic climate change for more than two centuries, their warnings unheeded. Where the Anthropocenologist story has us stumbling ignorantly but perhaps invietably into being a disruptive "planetary agent," Bonneuil and Fressoz confront us with myriad decisions, choices, risks, failure taken over the past two and a half centuries. Initially it's deeply depressing to learn about missed opportunity after missed opportunity, the myth of our exculpatory ignorance dissipating. But the more human-scaled stories they tell instead (all those other -cenes) somehow end up restoring a sense of empowerment which the more-than-human scale of Anthropocenology has devastated.
Part of the way they restore this sense of agency is by describing the forms of ecological awareness which have been displaced in the past quarter millennium by the juggernauts of the economization of nature, the ecological devastations of colonialism, neoliberal globalization, the vast demands of wasteful consumerism, the havoc wreaked by militarization and war, all undergirded by abstract conceptions of limitless resources and growth. They call these "grammars of environmental reflexivity" and in several of them we find religion again - a religion attuned to the more harmonious ways Europeans once lived in their environment. In Christian terms, it was a natural theology accepting the diversity and interconnectedness of life as divinely mandated, itself doubtless grounded in the greater environmental awareness of agricultural societies.
Anthropocene-religion discussions tend to think of the religious teachings of "indigenous ecological knowledge" which might lead us back into truer relationship with the earth in terms of the non-Western cultures destroyed or undermined by western colonialism. Bonneuil and Fressoz remind us that there was indigenous ecological knowledge destroyed or undermined in the colonial metropole, too. And contrary to those who think Christianity was the original destroyer and underminer, the drum to which western colonialism was marching as it devastated cultures and natures across the glove, western indigenous knowledge isn't just ancient paganism. Much of it is Christian.
This is not an argument Bonneuil and Fressoz make. Perhaps they think most Christianity is like Anthropocenology - and you can see why. Time to tell the story of how an ecological Christianity of stewardship was displaced by an extractionist theology of dominion and doom! Carbon Christianity?
Just in time for Holy Week...!
Religion appears explicitly in Shock of the Anthropocene only as a polemical concept. "Anthropocenology," the shibboleth the book critiques, is likened to a religious master narrative. Humanity has gone unwittingly wrong, the "Anthropocenologists" tell us, but there is time - just - for conversion. If we repent and have faith we may yet be redeemed. Luckily, saviors are at hand: the earth systems scientists and geoengineers who alone can understand the nature of the problem, and who alone can save us from ourselves. Absolution is offered by their narrative, "They knew not what they did" (72), they tell us of our forebears, and if most of us "still don't know what to do" (83), the Anthropocenologists do. Altar call?
Bonneuil and Fressoz are historians, and their aim, brilliantly achieved, is to challenge every part of this narrative, starting with the uncomfortable fact that people have been aware of anthropogenic climate change for more than two centuries, their warnings unheeded. Where the Anthropocenologist story has us stumbling ignorantly but perhaps invietably into being a disruptive "planetary agent," Bonneuil and Fressoz confront us with myriad decisions, choices, risks, failure taken over the past two and a half centuries. Initially it's deeply depressing to learn about missed opportunity after missed opportunity, the myth of our exculpatory ignorance dissipating. But the more human-scaled stories they tell instead (all those other -cenes) somehow end up restoring a sense of empowerment which the more-than-human scale of Anthropocenology has devastated.
Part of the way they restore this sense of agency is by describing the forms of ecological awareness which have been displaced in the past quarter millennium by the juggernauts of the economization of nature, the ecological devastations of colonialism, neoliberal globalization, the vast demands of wasteful consumerism, the havoc wreaked by militarization and war, all undergirded by abstract conceptions of limitless resources and growth. They call these "grammars of environmental reflexivity" and in several of them we find religion again - a religion attuned to the more harmonious ways Europeans once lived in their environment. In Christian terms, it was a natural theology accepting the diversity and interconnectedness of life as divinely mandated, itself doubtless grounded in the greater environmental awareness of agricultural societies.
Anthropocene-religion discussions tend to think of the religious teachings of "indigenous ecological knowledge" which might lead us back into truer relationship with the earth in terms of the non-Western cultures destroyed or undermined by western colonialism. Bonneuil and Fressoz remind us that there was indigenous ecological knowledge destroyed or undermined in the colonial metropole, too. And contrary to those who think Christianity was the original destroyer and underminer, the drum to which western colonialism was marching as it devastated cultures and natures across the glove, western indigenous knowledge isn't just ancient paganism. Much of it is Christian.
This is not an argument Bonneuil and Fressoz make. Perhaps they think most Christianity is like Anthropocenology - and you can see why. Time to tell the story of how an ecological Christianity of stewardship was displaced by an extractionist theology of dominion and doom! Carbon Christianity?
Just in time for Holy Week...!
