After keeping it at a low simmer for the last weeks, I think I have a syllabus for "Religion and the Anthropocene," 2020. I'm actually glad I left the nitty gritty until now. Accommodating students in various parts of the world has required thinking way outside the 100-minute seminar box, but their placement beyond this hemisphere has also affected the choices I've made as to what we read and do. Considering how to engage students where they are has helped me "provincialize" the American and North Atlantic focus of my class. The same has happened for "Theorizing Religion," too, but for a class exploring what it means for human beings to be a "planetary agent" it's especially relevant. I realize I've become persuaded that what needs to be confronted and replaced if anthropogenic calamity is to be contained is a set of cultural, economic and religious practices crafted in the North Atlantic and visited on the Americas over the past several centuries; the global reach of our online class community turns out to be an exciting opportunity. We'll be looking to religious ideas from Asia and the premodern West, among others, as ways of reimagining what it means to be the human part of the great tangled assemblage which is Earth.
Global heating is an acute crisis for the planet, but the particular hysteria of the Anthropocenologists now seems to me unhelpfully ahistorical. Yes, humanity has become a menace since releasing the carbon stored in fossil fuels into the atmosphere, and so turbocharging the human impact on the rest of nature. Yes, that was fed by and in turn feeds exploitative forms of racializing capitalism and conquest. But it's a mistake to see this as no different from earlier and other human ways of participating in the world, and foolishness to think this means that there's no (longer a) way for human beings to live at peace with the rest of our planet. As Vandana Shiva puts it, we need to reject the options the anthropocenologists think are the only ones left - extinction or escape (to another planet!). All human agency is not a menace. Those of us raised in the particular human formation which has messed things up need to learn about other formations, including formations within our own cultures which are sustainable, collaborative and caring.
Looking over what I came up with I noticed that my syllabus is a work of what folks in the biz call the hermeneutics of retrieval - though I'll be presenting it in terms from Parable of the Sower:
"Is there anything on your family bookshelves that might help ... ?”
We don't have time to reinvent humanity; desperate reinventions tend not to think very far beyond the circumstances they seek to escape. But if we look and listen we can learn from those (and not just humans!) who knew - and know - how to live in and with and for the Earth.