Gathered in my Name

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climate change, climate justice, Faith and Leadership, Gathered in My Name, pandemic, peace, sustainability, William T. Cavanaugh, World Council of Churches, World Environment Day

I contributed a chapter to a new book, Gathered in my Name: Ecumenism in the World Church (Studies in World Catholicism) edited by William T. Cavanaugh

Gathered in My Name

My chapter in the new book, Gathered in my Name, is “Climate Justice is for All: Making Peace with the Earth”.

As we live in climate crisis, we need to be mindful of our lifestyles, eating habits, and daily ethical living. Our choices all impact the earth.

Book Description:

This volume differs from many quincentennial discussions of the Protestant Reformation—and ecumenical scholarship more generally—in that it shifts the focus from Europe and the West to the global South, where ecumenism’s promises and challenges are quite different. In postcolonial and post-missionary Africa, the churches continue to expand, competition among denominations is lively, and Christian rivalry with Islam is often a reality. In Latin America, Protestants have severely eroded the Catholic Church’s hegemony, originally forged in the zeal of the Counter-Reformation to combat the perceived errors of Luther and Calvin. In India, the Christian churches are a tiny, beleaguered minority facing an increasingly militant Hindu nationalism. These essays pay close attention to the different contexts of intra-Christian relationships worldwide—the actual situation on the ground. If ecumenism will succeed, it cannot be simply a matter of experts at a conference attempting to agree about doctrines abstracted from the contexts in which they were forged, the contexts in which doctrinal disagreements caused ecclesial ruptures, or the contexts in which Christians continue to live out our divided existence. This volume attempts to be sensitive to the lived experience of divided Christians in whatever part of the world they find themselves.

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June 5, 2021 was World Environment Day.

Read my latest piece on climate change and the pandemic for Faith and Leadership at Duke Divinity School.

Grace Ji-Sun Kim: Our climate practices must change post-pandemic

A rare snowstorm dusts the cacti of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Weather changes will be exacerbated by climate change. Unsplash / NOAA

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The inequalities of the world have been highlighted by the pandemic, and climate change will continue to threaten all of us, starting with the most vulnerable, says an author and professor.TUESDAY, MAY 4, 2021

We have now gone for over a year without regular tourism, and global carbon emissions have dropped dramatically as a result.

In 2020, with almost everyone around the world forced to stay home, global emissions(link is external) fell by more than 6%, and U.S. emissions by nearly 13%.

Yet that good news is not wholly positive. A New York Times article recently argued(link is external) that the pandemic’s impact on climate change cannot be disentangled from the tourism industry’s impact on wildlife, the environment and local communities — particularly in developing regions of the world already affected by climate change and climate migration.

According to the article, authorities in many such areas had been funding conservation and enforcement efforts through revenue generated from tourism, but as tourism profits dwindled, budgets were cut — and illegal hunting, logging and fishing began to rise.

In Africa and parts of Asia, for example, safari tours and exotic animal excursions that normally maintained strict wildlife protection laws were overwhelmed with poachers who took advantage of the gaps in tourism. But it wasn’t just professional poachers; according to the article, hungry villagers also poured into protected areas to hunt and fish in order to feed their families.

As the pandemic has highlighted, it is often “the least of these” who experience most acutely the cascading effects of natural and human-induced disaster. For this reason if no other, decisive action to address climate change should be a priority for faith leaders.

The evidence is mounting that as climate change causes more catastrophic storms and extreme droughts, the poor around the world are being impacted in unimaginable ways.

A mother in Afghanistan made the excruciating choice to sell(link is external) her daughter during a severe drought to feed her family. Typhoon Goni in the Philippines fractured(link is external) families as rushing water and a volcanic mudflow tore loved ones from one another. When Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti, children who were separated(link is external) from or lost their parents were preyed upon by human traffickers.

Climate change affects everyone, but its impact on the poor is seismic.

The privileged have the ability to flee to a safe place and start again, or at least to reposition themselves until the threat subsides. The poor do not have the resources for swift relocation and often lose their homes, their livelihood and their families.

While no nation is immune to the effects of climate change, the uneven distribution of its impact is weighted heavily against the majority of the world’s poorest regions, which possess the weakest economic, institutional, scientific and technical ability to cope and evolve.

Even within America, climate change and its ecological devastation have already uprooted many. Indeed, forced relocation is no longer viewed as a remote possibility but rather a looming certainty for those whose homes and communities are becoming uninhabitable.

In the past year alone, raging wildfires in California plagued the summer and fall, droughts endangered food crops in the West, ruinous floods engulfed towns from the Dakotas to Maryland, and violent hurricanes rendered thousands of miles of our shoreline almost unlivable.

In February, Texas got hit by a winter storm that caused massive power blackouts and more than 100 deaths.(link is external) Countless lives were upended by damaged homes, failed infrastructure, and exacerbated health and financial difficulties.

But for the privileged, the circumstances were different; Americans saw this firsthand in the spectacle of a U.S. senator and his family boarding a plane to Cancun to escape the power loss, water scarcity and bitter cold in Texas after the storm.

The pandemic has highlighted how deeply economic and global divisions run in the world, and any new “normal” post-pandemic that does not aim to correct the environmental injustices facing the poor in the present and future will be a missed opportunity.

For decades, Americans have evaded the profound threat of climate change, despite the accumulating evidence of crisis in our own backyards. The choices we make about where to live are manipulated and contoured, not just by the politics that minimize climate insecurity, but also by the pricey incentives targeted at resisting nature.

American policymakers have left the country unprepared for what is to come and are now facing devastating moral decisions about which communities to protect and which to sacrifice.

The wrong choices will fracture the country even more, with the less fortunate relegated to a nightmarish future that leaves them, unequipped, to fend for themselves.

The crisis in vulnerable communities will not wait for the worst environmental extremes to appear — it is already here. As people of faith, we must work mightily to correct this injustice.

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Grace Ji-Sun Kim

PROFESSOR, EARLHAM SCHOOL OF RELIGION

Grace Ji-Sun Kim is a professor of theology at Earlham School of Religion and a prolific writer and editor. Her most recent books are “Reimagining Spirit,” “Keeping Hope Alive,” and “Intersectional Theology.” An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), she has an M.Div. from Knox College, University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in systematic theology from the University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto.