Kari Martin

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

• How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

• What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

• Where is there reason for hope?

Dr. Janet Soskice, professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinity, was the sixth guest for the Facing the Anthropocene series. Her talk and subsequent conversation with Dr. Norman Wirzba helped draw together the problems facing the Anthropocene and the disciplines and perspectives of the series’ speakers. Her own theological work on creation, she said, has implications that stretch far beyond the religious sphere; it links to an anthropology of creation, economic discussions of “nature’s gifts,” damaging technological structures, and creation myths – themes addressed previously in the series. Soskice argued that because the divine is near to creation and creatures in holy love, the world is “fundamentally good” and thus worthy of attention and protection.

She began by describing the rise of the Enlightenment concept of nature as opposed to creation. Nature, according to Soskice, hinges on a deistic view of God as clockmaker and the world as a clock. With this analogy in mind, thinkers like Isaac Newton could, after devoting enough time to scientific discoveries, “see into the very heart of nature and manipulate it.” The “doctrine of nature” distances God from the natural order; human beings rise in significance as a creator God declines. In contrast, a doctrine of creation implies a creator, in the same way that a gift implies a giver. Tim Ingold, the first speaker in the series, noted that God is central to the creation process; indeed, God makes existence itself.

This distinction has profound implications for human beings. Soskice noted that the shift from creation to nature led to “the subsequent loss of the human place in the world,” resulting from an over-confidence in “human capacities and wisdom.” When we attempt to place ourselves on the side of God, in opposition to nature, Soskice argued that “we soon find ourselves orphans… inhabiting a disenchanted universe, without meaning or purpose.” This loss of place contributed to the controversy Darwin’s theories of evolution stirred up: according to Darwin and contrary to Newton’s deism, the human being is not in fact on the side of God, but on the side of nature, the latest development in a chain of ever-evolving animals. In an adaption of a popular line from Augustine’s Confessions, Soskice stated: “We have begun to be a problem to ourselves.” We have created a cosmology that has no place in it for us.

Soskice moved from the Darwinian worldview to the doctrine of creation, in which “God made everything that is” ex nihilo, out of nothing. This doctrine has three important implications for the place of humanity in the created world. First, because God creates what is visible and invisible, we must reject any dualism between matter and spirit. Soskice said simply, “Angels and the human soul are no less creatures than kangaroos and kumquats.” Second, God is intimately near to all creatures, indeed there is no place or time where God is not. Again, Soskice emphasized that this involves all creatures. “It is true of all creatures that God is present in this intimacy to them…to rodents and fungi and even to oceans.” Finally, “God is creating now,” and never leaves the “clock” to tick independently. God is continually giving being to all creation, both sentient and not. Thus, as creatures evolving from and intimately intertwined with the created world, human beings cannot stand at a distance from creation or from God. Instead, according to Soskice, we are all held in the being and love of God, fungi and kumquats and humanity together.

During the conversation, Wirzba asked why the doctrine of creation is often relegated to minority status amongst doctrines of eschatology (of end times, last things) or soteriology (of salvation). Soskice did not see these doctrines as independent of one another: how one thinks about the end of one’s life or one’s justification in view of the divine reflects back on one’s view of creation and vice versa. For example, if the church moved away from a doctrine of salvation focused on damnation and instead leaned on the idea that salvation is health (as we find in Thomas Aquinas), one can easily integrate salvation with creation. Salvation becomes “all things naturally seek[ing] the good,” like a sunflower following the sun, and creation is part of that good. Similarly, if eschatology moved from a form of escapism to a kind of continuity, we would begin to understand that we are presently growing toward an ultimate flourishing life with creation. Soskice said, “Coming into the fullness of life doesn’t just happen when you die…This joy, this life that I know here, is constant, everlasting… and it will continue.” She likens it, in the words of Gregory of Nyssa, with going from glory to glory.

Both Wirzba and Soskice noted that “going from glory to glory” requires one to have eyes to see glory and goodness in creation. For Soskice, this can happen in very simple ways, like watching a daffodil bloom in one’s window. The desire to pay attention to the daffodil begins with something even more basic: creation must be regarded as “fundamentally good.” Only with this assumption can creation’s goodness on a microlevel teach us about a creature’s goodness on an interpersonal, inter-societal, and even international level. The act of recognizing the goodness of the daffodil primes us to pay attention to the goodness of other creatures.

Attending to the goodness of a daffodil leads ultimately to a greater awareness of love as the hinge on which all creation hangs. Soskice noted that “God being the source of being is totally active and generating, [which means] we are active too, continually generating new ways of love.” Quoting from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “God’s Grandeur,” Soskice noted that although creation “is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil,” we need not despair, for still “The Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods,” not leaving this damaged world alone. Perhaps, Soskice concluded, the world is beyond repair – seared, bleared, and smeared – but we are, as created beings, still speaking of it, still tending to it, still brooding along with Holy Love.

Join us on March 4, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Reader in Literature and the Geohumanities in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, Robert Macfarlane. To register for this webinar and learn more about the series, click here.

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

• How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

• What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

• Where is there reason for hope?

Why are we here? What are we good for? What is our purpose?

These are the existential questions that send human beings to stories – particularly to stories of beginnings, like the creation myth in Genesis 1. Dr. Kate Rigby, a professor of environmental history at Bath Spa University who joined Dr. Norman Wirzba for the most recent Facing the Anthropocene conversation, studies the meditations that emerge from the creation myth of the Hebrew Bible. These meditations, known as hexamerons, speak to humanity’s engagement with the natural world. Rigby suggests that the Age of the Anthropocene demands a new kind of hexameron, one that reflects our current created world, damaged as it is by our own hands. She is currently writing such a hexameron herself. During the conversation, she shared some of the hexamerons unearthed in her research, stories that reflect the immensity of the damage humanity has done and point to an empathetic hope.

Rigby began by describing the theological tradition of the hexameron. Beginning in the Torah and continuing to the modern day, the hexameron appears in prose, poetry, essay, and sermon. In perhaps the most famous example, Basil of Caesarea wrote of the “universal choir of creation,” and at length on the splendor and abundance of the created world. Prior to Basil, Philo of Alexandria wrote a hexameron entitled “On the Account of the World’s Creation Given by Moses.” Milton slid a hexameron into Paradise Lost; Geoffrey Hill and James McAuley used the concept in poetry; and Ruth Valerio’s book Saying Yes to Life is a modern hexameron (and earned the commendation of Pope Francis in 2020). Rigby identified one important feature shared by all these examples: the hexameron, and the creation stories that inspire it, “imagine human beings brought into a world that was not of their own making.” They pay homage to something for which they cannot take credit.

Rigby described the pain of reading historic hexamerons now, as we face the Anthropocene, when air, earth, and water have been marred by humanity’s presence and technology. “Where these earlier commentators celebrate the incredible abundance and variety of living beings…, we look out upon depletion, diminishment, and unspeakable suffering.” Already in these early examples, theological justifications for silencing the “universal choir of creation” were emerging; humankind became “king” and the earth his “royal lodging” (Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Making of Man”). Employed in favor of mass industrialization and fossil capitalism, this language had devastating consequences. To counteract it and to engage with a world filled with environmental devastation, Rigby called for a new hexameron for the Anthropocene, one that “confront[s] this toxic legacy and advance[s] a more democratic and…decolonizing – account of the human vocation.”

Rigby argued that the key to a decolonizing account is to link experience with story, which begins with intercultural dialogue. In a particularly chilling moment, Rigby spoke of the double death amongst First Nations peoples, which stands in contradistinction to good death. Among many First Nations peoples, good death and the subsequent afterlife is dependent on one’s descendants taking good care of the land. Rigby recounted, “You can only retain your place in country after death if it is being kept open.” By contrast, “where your descendants are being removed from country and where country has been damaged…there is no place for you. You lose your afterlife.” This is double death, a death which “prevents new life from coming up.” The damage to land goes well beyond earth and soil; it disrupts generational cycles, uproots family ties, and creates fissures in timelines. In this way, a decolonial hexameron must consider the stories of those often overlooked, even if it means revealing harm that runs deeper than physical properties.

Poetry too has a place in the hexameral story. Rigby shared with the audience her interpretation of the first day of creation, when light appears though there are not stars, sun or moon. This light creates an uncertain space, where the cosmos is still emerging and is as yet unfinished. Poetry and the contemplative thinking that accompanies it cultivate uncertainty by creating unusual linkages between words that leave readers unsure of the intended meaning. This unsettling (or “unselfing” as Wirzba suggested) allows for new habits of perception and action, making poetic contemplation (thinking) a necessary counterpart to environmental activism (doing). Contemplation builds an activism that is open to others, listening to the authority of indigenous people groups and the natural order.

Rigby offered examples of such activism. She spoke of A Rocha International which serves coastal communities, Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC) which works with First Nations peoples, Beautiful Burial Grounds and Living Church Yards which endeavor to make church yards a refuge for birds, insects, and small creatures, and Bees for Peace which protects pollinators. These faith-based groups are rooted in the belief that the cosmos and the people in it are capable of singing “a harmonious hymn” (to use the language of Basil’s hexameron), in symphony rather than discord. They see their vocation as one of cooperation, to promote the flourishing of life in all creation.

Listeners had an opportunity to hear part of Rigby’s hexameron when Wirzba read an excerpt from her “day three” meditation – the creation of land and plants. Rigby wrote:

“Pondering this day of creation, the day of the burgeoning of vegetable life, its primordial goodness in Elohim’s eyes and how it is being undone in our own days, has made me realize that when the outlook for what Pope Francis calls ‘our common home’ seems most bleak, it is not, in the end, hope, not even faith, but love that gets me out of bed in the morning. Love, that is, in all its colors.”

She goes on to explain that love, cosmically understood, sees all things in companionship. It is not mere abstraction but instead holds many valences, each related to the other: creaturely love, companionable love, erotic love, attentive love, empathetic love, resolute love, etc. The question in the Age of the Anthropocene is not, “How do we hope?” but, “How do we love?” If we turn to the hexameral tradition, reimagined by Rigby, we may learn a new kind of love for creation, one that tells the story of damage and healing. This kind of love – in all its colors – may be just enough to get us out of bed in the morning and to reunite us with our common home.

Join us on February 25, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Duke Professor of Catholic Theology Janet Soskice. To register for this webinar and learn more about the series, click here.

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

• How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

• What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

• Where is there reason for hope?

“I hope she knows I am a gentle giant.”

Douglas Kysar, Yale Professor of Law, recounted his 4-year-old daughter saying these words as she held a small, red-spotted newt in her cupped hands. Kysar, whose work focuses on climate change law and the relationship between human and non-human animals, spoke with Dr. Norman Wirzba for the Facing the Anthropocene series. Their conversation addressed the immensity of the climate change crisis and the need to change the systems that brought us to that crisis. Woven too, throughout the conversation, was a thread of hope: hope in communal action, despite its complexity and unpredictability, and hope in a gentler way of relating to the world, a way akin to holding a newt in our cupped hands.

Kysar began by describing the enormity of the threat of climate change. His statistics were dizzying. Placing the current environmental situation in the context of earth’s history, he demonstrated that we are not in an unprecedented time, but rather, in a time that has not occurred in many, many years – 3 million years, in fact. 2050, Kysar noted, will be comparable to 50 million years ago, when “palm trees grew in Alaska.” Two or three centuries from now, we will be on par with the End-Permian (or Permian-Triassic) mass extinction, when 96 percent of marine life and 70 percent of terrestrial life were destroyed. We are, in fact, barreling toward the sixth mass extinction, and any efforts to brake have been futile.

Kysar went on to outline the potential “tipping elements” which would make the current environmental crisis a point of no return. He cited two main events, the Amazon rainforest’s deterioration (and resultant, massive carbon emission) and rapidly warming Arctic temperatures, as examples of these tipping elements. “We are,” Kysar said, “entering unchartered territory no matter what choices we make from now. We are sledding on melting ice and for the foreseeable future we must live knowing the ice may break beneath us.” Such unchartered territory has trapped humanity in a kind of existential dissonance, where each daily act seems to unwittingly accelerate the earth’s trajectory toward disaster, no matter one’s intention to do otherwise.

With this existential dissonance in full view, Kysar recalled his daughter’s words: “I hope she knows I am a gentle giant.” His daughter’s words reflected a child’s way of being in the world, one built on wonder and communion, a way Kysar suggests we all need to adopt. “I hope” denotes a way of thinking that goes beyond mere reason and instead relies on faith and belief. The characterization of the newt as a “she” speaks to the inherent dignity of a non-human, non-thinking creature. “Giant” testifies to the immense power humanity holds, and “gentle” hints at an ethical obligation in the relationship between the giant and the newt. Kysar leveled his daughter’s words as a challenge to listeners, a logic that runs counter to that which brought us to the current environmental crisis.

How do we become “gentle giants?” Kysar first proposed a rethinking of the systems that got us here, particularly the laws emerging from Enlightenment thinking. He pointedly asked, “How can we surpass those Enlightenment values that enabled, in less than three centuries, a mode and scale of human existence that now threatens the survivability of all life on Earth?” When Wirzba pushed Kysar on the usefulness of “rights” language inherited from this Enlightenment worldview, Kysar asserted that he would rather focus on obligations than rights. The logic of rights is dependent on the rights-holder being a “self-possessed, individual, reliant, autonomous being,” which, according to Kysar, is “not what we are. We are interdependent, socially constituted beings.” The logic of rights, among the logics of capitalism, materialism, individualism, secularism, etc., helped shape a world that is barreling toward non-existence. It has taught us to be giants, but it has no mechanism for teaching us to be gentle.

Kysar did not rule out the power of law to institute change. He cited the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and other foundational environmental acts from the 1970s as examples of laws that “deliberately [and] knowingly eschewed cost-benefit optimization.” These laws purposely set up aspirational, even unachievable aims, not because they were unaware of the economic limitations that rendered them unrealistic, but because they wanted to set up a vision of what ought to be. When we fall short of that vision, these laws provide language for lamenting that shortcoming, which Kysar named as a tragedy rather than an economic cost. Regret over such tragedies becomes “the moral remainder,” an affirmation of the sacredness of all human and non-human life.

Alongside all his evidence of environmental disaster, Kysar also cited evidence of hope: human beings are in fact learning something about gentle communion. When a listener asked how to realistically teach children and students about the current environmental crisis, Kysar spoke of the power of “showing up with hope.” He argued that young people are often desperate to simply act – somehow, some way. Kysar pointed to Greta Thunberg as an example: “Greta Thunberg shows up outside her Parliament one Friday on a school strike and then a year later tens of millions of young people the world over are striking in solidarity with her.” While nine times out of ten, Greta’s act might have gone unnoticed, making a few ripples in an easily stilled pond, this one time, Greta’s actions were cataclysmic. “Something happened,” Kysar stated, “Something magical happened.” By showing up with hope, Greta’s actions had “an outsized influence,” a testimony to the unpredictable, risky, and yet so very promising nature of social relationships.

There is no denying the vast destruction humanity has wrought on the world; we are giants with fragile newts resting in our cupped hands. But alongside our unprecedented capacity to destroy, there is a capacity to hope too. This hope is fragile, risky even, but it is enough to spark the imagination and to inspire ways of relating that are contrary to the systems that brought us here, ways that are softer, gentler, and kinder.

“We can fashion ways of relating both to each other and to the more-than-human world that are… softer,” Kysar concluded. “And become gentle giants, maybe,” Wirzba added. May it be so.

Join us on February 18, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Professor of Environmental Studies Kate Rigby. To register for this webinar and learn more about the series, click here.

Facing the Anthropocene: a webinar series hosted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics, with Professor Norman Wirzba of Duke Divinity School

Faced with climate change, species extinction, and sea level rise, we are compelled to rethink humanity’s place in the world, as many of the built environments designed for human flourishing now imperil the lives of countless fellow creatures and the places they inhabit. Join leading scholars in political economy, history, anthropology, theology, philosophy, environmental science, and law, as they address these and other questions (including those from the audience):

• How shall we evaluate and correct the economies and institutions that undermine the bases and flows of life?

• What can we learn from the past as we look toward the future?

• Where is there reason for hope?

“A professional disaster tourist.” This is how Dr. Kate Brown describes herself. Brown is a Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the most recent guest in the Facing the Anthropocene series. In her conversation with Dr. Norman Wirzba, she became a disaster tour guide, leading listeners to contested borders, the Chernobyl disaster zone, and radioactive waste sites in Siberia and Washington. As she went, she demonstrated the importance of both faithfully telling the stories of disasters and learning from the “experts of survival” living in their aftermath.

Take, for example, the Chernobyl Zone, which Brown addresses in her most recent book Manual of Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future. Located officially in the northern part of Ukraine, the Chernobyl Zone is multi-ethnic borderland that was forcibly depopulated because of the radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster in 1986. The consequences of improper handling of radioactive waste, both in the Chernobyl Zone and around other nuclear powerplants in Siberia and Northwest America, have spread far and wide – into food, water, air, and human bodies. This damage, according to Brown, is “a lesson about what happens in the wake of progress and modernity.” The rapid spread of radioactive contamination became ominous, irrefutable evidence of the vast communicative power of an ecosystem.

As a result, the potential threats of modern technology reach well beyond any delineated “zone,” as demonstrated by discrepancies in mortality reports following the Chernobyl disaster. While the United Nation’s official fatality count is between thirty-three and fifty-four, Brown asserted that the death toll was much higher. If one goes to the communities surrounding the Chernobyl Zone, she said, “you’ll meet fifty-four people who will tell you about fifty-four family members who died from… Chernobyl causes.” Viewing these disasters as isolated and contained is a dangerous mistake. Brown put it into simpler terms: blueberries picked in radioactive wastelands will show up on cereal bowls in middle-class American households. Economies do not abide by national borders, and neither do disasters.  

In her discussion of the Chernobyl Zone, Brown highlighted the role of embodied knowledge.  She said, “There’s all kind of people who are experts. There are scientists, there are medical doctors, and there are also the people who have had to experience tragedy and trauma and the impact of the Anthropocene on their bodies themselves.” Citing the example of textile workers exposed to contaminated drinking water from Chernobyl, Brown described the way these women understood the spread of radiation in their bodies. Though most of them did not have even a high school education, they were able to pinpoint the presence of radioactive isotopes in their organs. Brown said, “their bodies become these very modern wastelands or landscapes which makes living that much harder.”

For Brown, embodied knowledge fuels the research questions: “Tak[e] cues from these villagers and these workers and believ[e] them,” she told Wirzba. In addition to believing them, Brown also substantiated their stories with archival evidence. She identified the systemic incentivization that often kept the truth of radioactive contamination from emerging, explaining that consultants at the United Nations profited from nuclear powerplants and needed protection against lawsuits. For Brown, disasters never “just happen;” there is a web of power structures, economic systems, and incentivized secrecy that augments them. But while managers, government officials, and corporations provided “expert” witnesses that minimized the impact of a radioactive disaster like Chernobyl, bodies, animals, and ecosystems also testify to harm done. From the conglomeration of scientific, historical, anthropological, and environmental evidence, a concrete account of the deleterious effects of disaster emerges.

The cues of villagers and workers are not only important when speaking of disastrous places, but also when speaking of healthy places. Brown spoke of her own neighborhood in Washington, D.C., Deanwood, once a predominantly Black neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Faced with minimal infrastructure, Deanwood residents grew accustomed to growing their own food, composting, and keeping chickens and pigs. Homeowner occupancy rates were on par with some of the wealthier areas of D.C. For Brown, Deanwood residents’ investment in the land creates a picture of a healthy place. “We could have more equity, more sustainability, better diets, healthier food. We’d have our hands in the ground so that we could join our lives with the microbial world arounds us.” Thus, Brown portrayed an urban environment that is also uniquely agricultural, a rarity when one considers the concrete jungle of the typical modern city.

A healthy place, according to Brown, is one that fosters an awareness of humanity’s interconnectivity with the world. From DNA to air to the tree outside an office window to neighbors, the world Brown described was not one in competition but instead, in communication. “Instead of thinking of separate entities, private properties, bounded nations, I think we need to think in terms of commons, in terms of cooperation, in terms of…the human as an extended organism,” she said. This idea is more than theoretical for Brown. She described a collaborative project to garden in any available green space in her neighborhood with the aim of creating an “edible forest.” This gardening effort renewed her connection with her neighbors—sheltered and unsheltered—and with the plants themselves. Brown argued that working the landscape makes us more attuned to and better gatherers of embodied knowledge. Strawberry plants or livestock can become “barometers or Geiger counters,” giving information normally reserved for the technically proficient to the one who is simply attuned to living things.

The Anthropocene epoch promises more disaster in the future. As a “professional disaster tourist,” Brown has become an expert on how we might navigate such disasters. The road is not an easy one. In many ways, the people living in the Chernobyl Zone and other disaster locales have faded from public memory. But by faithfully attending to their stories, Brown ensures that these “experts of survival” are not forgotten. The world needs them, perhaps now more than ever.

Join us on February 11, 2021 at 12:00 PM (EST) for the next installment in the Facing the Anthropocene series. Dr. Norman Wirzba will be joined by Yale Professor of Law, Douglas Kysar. To register for this webinar and learn more about the series, click here.