I think I have my story worked out at least. It's tempting, when reading Anthropocene stories, to conclude that our shift out of the steady regularity of the Holocene into the spiraling unpredictability of the Anthropocene makes all previous human thought obsolete, including of course religions. But that's too quick. While relatively stable compared to what preceded and is following it, the Holocene was no picnic, and our forebears knew disruptions and displacements; their imaginations were full of world-destroying events in past (the flood?) and future (yugas?).
The sense that the world is in fact stable enough to be taken for granted is an artifact of a much more recent experience, modern science and industrialization, primed perhaps by late developments of western Christianity and turbocharged by capitalism, but subsidized by the vast uncompensated labor and resources of enslaved and colonized non-western peoples and lands - and the life force of the ancient forests that became fossil fuels. Oblivious or reconciled to the worlds being destroyed to make its spread possible, moderns imagined endless progress and prosperity, a world where nature presented no limits to human ingenuity and expansion. (Their ecomodernist progeny aren't the only ones to continue to see things this way.)
All this was never sustainable, and critics were aware of at least some of its costs from the start, but we need to understand that much of modern western culture was fueled by the rush of power and control of this moment. This includes modern understandings of "religion," and it is this understanding and experience of religion that the Anthropocene renders obsolete. Setting things up this way allows us to expect to find ways of living sustainably with the rest of nature in most of human history. It aligns with Jan Zalasiewics and Julia Adeney Thomas's call:
The planetary constraints are new - Zalasiewics and Thomas have the influential and urgent essay "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene" in mind - but thinking in terms of constraints, and in relation with the more than human community, is not. Still, getting (back) to these ways of thinking isn't easy. My argument is that one way to do so is to liberate our religious thinking from the "problem of evil." What's the connection?
As the natural world came to seem more stable and usable, and as humans seemed more able to have their way with it, religion lost the world. It was about the universe ("absolute dependence") and the individual soul. It wasn't about order and purpose in the world but opened up in moments when things didn't work out, on large scales and small, and pointed, well, beyond the world. To the ultimate, to emptiness, to the infinite depths of the individual human soul. In religious studies we call this "Protestant," and in other settings "secular" - it's just the kind of religiosity which allows the modern nation state to do its thing undisturbed and unchallenged. In Charles Taylor's influential account of A Secular Age, this is the world of the "buffered self," which can imagine itself separate from all this-worldly dependence and entanglement, though I think this analysis needs supplementing with the experience of urbanites and settlers.
In any case, the widening gyre of the Anthropocene might seem like a bonanza for the problem of evil. The reservoir of moral and natural evils seems to be growing, qualitatively as well as quantitatively - not least because climate-provoked calamities have in turn been affected by human agency. That these are rarely the humans suffering the calamity adds another datum. All this may help explain why religion seems resurgent - and perhaps why the forms this resurgence takes are not those of modern religion. But the "problem of evil" has never been about particular evils which, of course, require particular remedies. It's from the lofty perspective of the buffered self. Anthropocene woes happen at many scales at once, though diffusely.
My argument is abut the concurrent, Anthropocene-facilitated rediscovery of what I call the problem of good. What is the problem of good? It's not the mirror image of the problem of evil, though influential formulations have presented them in parallel. The existence of good isn't a problem in the way evil is, which needs to be responded to. We want more, not less good - though the more we have, as folk tales from around the globe tell us, the more we take it for granted. The problem is that good is so good for us (I mean this in a simple and also a profound way) that when it is destroyed we don't know what hit us, we wonder how we can go on. In fact, the problem of evil, once you come down from 30,000 feet, is the problem of good. Why and how was this good compromised? How could it hurt so? How could it have been so fragile? One problem with good is that we often become aware of it only in heartbroken retrospect. What if we worked to become and remain aware of it all the time, as indigenous practices of gratitude and reciprocity do?
The Anthropocene is one episode after another of finding something we thought we could take for granted - something, that is, that we did take for granted - no longer there, from seasons to landscapes to species. We know more losses are on their way. Approaching this through the problem of evil seems unhelpful, especially because human agency is one of the causes of the chaos - and can let things get worse or try to slow down and even restore things. Better to come at it from the problem of good, where we can mourn and mitigate, and face the chastening planetary constraints together.
So that's where I want to end up, but I'm not sure this is the way to get there. I'm also not sure quite what level argument I'm making. I'm used to describing other people's ideas and experiences, historical and contemporary and even conjectural, but this comes a bit closer to a normative argument. This is what we ought to do, because this is what we are as human denizens of this planet. That is, this is what I think life demands of us. It's an argument and a plea, not just a description, an analysis. I'm not sure how to do that...
