As "Religion and Ecology" wends to a close - next week is for student presentations and the final class for closing syntheses - we experience the way two of our main texts wrap things up. Wednesday we'll reach the soaring conclusion of Braiding Sweetgrass; today we saw how Whitney Bauman and Kevin O'Brien send readers of Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology on their way. "As authors and editors," they start, "we are worried, that this book might be a bit of a bummer."I have the same worry about our class - but also the worry that it might have not been bummer enough. So we spent today's class discussing Bauman and O'Brien's three proposals for responding to the despair that haunts ecological engagement: (1) to accept that the world we know is lost, (2) to focus on the local, (3) to work for a new global ethic to respond to global challenges. I tasked students with writing a reflection on flimate despair and hope in pairs, which we then read together and discussed. Consensus there was not, but all felt that "despair" is the wrong framing. We need to own the grief and anger, sadness and anxiety we feel (one pair proposed "sitting in it" as a practice, a phrase I borrowed for our discussion), if they are not to lead to numbness. We are worried about the complacency that "despair" ratifies, its disavowal of accountability.
What about hope, then? We repurposed despair as a sign of heart-broken but still living hope, a stage in cycles of feeling. But how not to get stuck in it? "Community," someone suggested, though she felt most people don't have that kind of community any more. "Only human community," I asked, "or also with other-than-human kin?"
