Fr. Gabriel Lamug-Nañawa SJ
There was a time when people talked a lot about climate change, when it was a new phenomenon that scientists warned would have disastrous consequences for the earth and for human civilization as we knew it. We were caught-up for a while. However, in popular media nowadays, it seems that the topic of climate change is stale news, nothing special, nothing new, nothing to worry about.
The article by Nathaniel Rich published in The New York Times Magazine last August 1, 2018 entitled, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change”, talks about the years of 1979-1989, the decade when scientists and environmental activists in the US, such as James Hansen and Rafe Pomerance, sounded the alarm, engaged industry and politicians to initiate changes in policy. It was the decade that we could have acted in time, but didn’t.
One of Rich’s main points is that, in general, everything we know now about climate change, we already knew in 1979, 40 years ago. At first we began in earnest, imagining ways of implementing a carbon tax and other ways to curb global emissions. In fact, there were a couple of times when agreeing and passing policy in the US almost became a reality. However, something like the fall of Adam and Eve, we listened to the evil spirit within, and started to prioritize short-sighted self-interests over the far-reaching common good. As Rich writes, “When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians.”
Who then is to blame for humanity’s inaction? Is it the big oil companies whose businesses would be seriously affected by a shift in energy sources? Is it the politicians who focus on what would make their constituents happy during their 4 or 5-year terms? Rich says, everyone is responsible, “Everyone knew — and we all still know.” He continues—
We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.”
Why then, knowing the scientific correlation between increased carbon and trapped heat, and its destructive ramifications on the entire planet, did we fail to do anything to prevent climate change? I have come to believe that one of the main challenges we face in addressing climate change is due to a great difference in scale between human beings and the world around us.
First, is about our sense of time. Our usual purview rarely goes beyond our own lifetimes. But what really is a ‘lifetime’? For humans in developed countries, a lifetime of 80 years or more can be expected. However, it can be as long as 400 years as it is for Greenland sharks, or as short as 24 hours for the average Mayfly. Since climate change operates on a geological timescale, we are confused by the long lag between its cause and effect. The full brunt of a changing climate will not be felt in our own generation but in the generation of our children and our grandchildren’s children, in the next centuries to come. Thus, we find those times sitting so far away and so far removed from our own that they are actually beyond what concerns us, far beyond what we can be held responsible for.
Second, is about our sense of space. We understand climate change as something that, if it did occur, would affect other people who are surely far away from us and our neighborhood. We say something like, Climate change happens to polar bears and penguins in the polar regions. It causes sea level rise in some remote tropical islands, totally unrelated to the sea beside my city. The phenomenon is somewhat similar to when we dispose our trash: we leave it behind and it exits our circle of concern, beyond what I can be held responsible for. Thus, our sense of ‘self’, the space we care for, is really very narrow and limited, and we do not take much notice of the very real consequences that our own actions create, just because they happen outside our sense of personal space. Out of sight, out of mind, none of my business.
Third, is about the limits of our heart and the scope of our compassion. The parable of the Good Samaritan is Jesus’ response to the lawyer who asks, “And who is my neighbor?” The lawyer understands, and answers his own question, “The one who showed mercy on him.” If it is already a struggle for many of us to show mercy and compassion to those in need who we can see in the here and now, how much more to those of future generations who will live in times and places beyond our own? Can our compassion stretch that far? Why should we feel concerned at all with what happens to them? Why bother with intergenerational justice? ‘Neighbor’ could also include God’s other creatures, especially those that we are pushing to extinction at an alarming rate. Do we have room in our hearts to embrace fellow members of the natural world whose suffering we are causing?
Unfortunately, it is most probable that governments will eventually take decisive action not out of compassion for future generations or because of concern for the global good, but in frantic reaction to disastrous changes that have already arrived. As Rich says, “Like most human questions, the carbon-dioxide question will come down to fear. At some point, the fears of young people will overwhelm the fears of the old. Some time after that, the young will amass enough power to act. It will be too late to avoid some catastrophes, but perhaps not others.” Thus, it may well be our fate that the fire to press us to action will actually be our own suffering. Rich mentions that chlorofluorocarbons, which caused the thinning of the ozone layer, were banned rather swiftly in the 1970s, mainly because of the proven correlation between increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation and skin cancer of caucasians in the global north.
So, what is God’s call for us in our present situation? Given that significant changes in climate and in how we know our world to be are already locked-in, what is there to hope for? Surely no new information is needed to confirm the mechanism of climate change. I believe the locus where growth and activity are needed is not on the level of scientific or economic knowledge, but of spiritual values. Like Jesus responding to the lawyer through the parable of the Good Samaritan, God calls us and offers us the power to overcome the challenge of scale, to accept Jesus’s perennial call to go beyond our usual sense of time and space, to always push wider our circle of concern, to have mercy on our neighbor, including all creation, even as they may live lifetimes beyond our own.
Fr. Gabriel Lamug-Nañawa SJ is the Country Coordinator of Jesuit Service Cambodia. Be our mission partner in Cambodia, click here.