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RELIGIONin the Anthropoceneedited by

Celia Deane-DrummondSigurd BergmannMarkus Vogt

Foreword by

Heinrich Bedford-Strohm

�is book charts a new direction in humanities scholarship through serious engagement with the geopolitical concept of the Anthropocene. Drawing on religious studies, theology, social science, history, philosophy, and what can be broadly termed the environmental humanities, this collection represents a groundbreaking critical analysis of diverse narratives on the Anthropocene. �e contributors to this volume recognize that the Anthropocene began as a geological concept, the age of the humans, but that its implications are much wider than this. Will the Anthropocene have good or bad ethical outcomes? Does the Anthropocene debate trigger the emergence of a new ecological humanism? Does the Anthropocene idea challenge the possibility of a sacred Nature, which shores up many religious approaches to environmental ethics? Or is the Anthropocene a secularized theological anthropology more properly dealt with through traditional concepts from Catholic social teaching on human ecology? Do theological traditions, such as Christology, reinforce negative aspects of the Anthropocene? Not all contributors in this volume agree with the answers to these different questions. Readers will be challenged, provoked, and stimulated by this book.

“Interpreting what it means to live in a time characterized by pervasive human in�uence through-out Earth’s systems involves questions and narratives that appear religious in scope, even while they also challenge conventional religious thought. �e essays in this collection, edited well so that they are both coherent and helpfully contradictory with one another, o�er readers multiple ways into the con�icts and possibilities in the idea of the Anthropocene.”

—WILLIS JENKINS, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia

“�is timely book takes the notion of the Anthropocene literally by providing historical, theological, philosophical, and ethical elaborations on what it actually means that humanity has become a dominant force of the earth system. It is a scholarly account of the deeper human dimensions of the Anthropocene, moving beyond its predominating framing as a natural science phenomenon.”

—DIETER GERTEN, Earth System Scientist, Postdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Professor in the Department of Geography, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin

“Religion in the Anthropocene marks the �rst thorough treatment of religious and quasi-religious dimensions of the Anthropocene from perspectives as diverse as philosophy, theology, anthropology, and history, among others. �is impressive collection of international scholarly voices aims not at consensus or easy answers, but fully explores the Anthropocene’s profoundly ambivalent implications for humanity’s place in nature and deep time, and our responsibilities for nonhuman others. Readers new to the topic, as well as scholars in the �eld, will come away with fresh—and sometimes disconcerting—insights into what it means to be human in the Age of Humans.”

—LISA H. SIDERIS, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

Celia Deane-Drummond is Professor of �eology and Director of the Center for �eology, Science and Human Flourishing at the University of Notre Dame. Her recent books include �e Wisdom of the Liminal (2014), Technofutures, Nature, and the Sacred (coeditor, 2015) and Ecology in Jürgen Moltmann’s �eology (Wipf & Stock, 2016). Sigurd Bergmann is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His recent books include Religion, Space, and the Environment (2014) and Technofutures, Nature, and the Sacred (coeditor, 2015). Markus Vogt is Professor of Christian Social Ethics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. His recent books include Prinzip Nachhaltigkeit (3rd ed. 2013) Wo steht die Umweltethik? (coeditor 2013), and Die Welt des Anthropozän (coeditor 2016).

ISBN: 978-1-4982-9191-0 | 362 pp. | $42 | paper

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Religion in the

Anthropocene

Edite d by

CeliA DeAne-DRummonD SiguRD BeRgmAnn

& mARkuS Vo gt

Fore word by

HeinRiCH BeDfoRD-StRoHm

RELIGION IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Copyright © 2017 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade BooksAn Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-4982-9191-0hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-9193-4ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-9192-7

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Deane-Drummond, Celia, editor | Bergmann, Sigurd, editor | Vogt, Markus, editor | Strohm, Heinrich Bedford, foreword.

Title: Religion in the anthropocene / edited by Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Berg-mann, and Markus Vogt ; foreword by Heinrich Bedford Strohm.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: ISBN: 978-1-4982-9191-0 (paperback) | ISBN: 978-1-4982-9193-4 (hardcover) | ISBN: 978-1-4982-9192-7 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology | Nature—Effect of human beings on | Global environmental change | Ecotheology.

Classification: BR115 N3 2017 (print) | BR115 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 03/16/17

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) come from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.®Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (RSV) come from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, and 1971 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Contents

List of Figures | ixForeword: The Anthropocene as a Challenge for Public Theology | xi

—Heinrich Bedford-Strohm

Acknowledgments | xvContributors | xvii

The Future of Religion in the Anthropocene Era | 1—Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann, and Markus Vogt

Part 1: Setting the Stage1 On Going Gently into the Anthropocene | 19

—Michael Northcott

2 From the Anthropocene Epoch to a New Axial Age: Using Theory-Fictions to Explore Geo-Spiritual Futures | 35

—Bronislaw Szerszynski

3 Transformations of Stewardship in the Anthropocene | 53—Christoph Baumgartner

4 Religion at Work within Climate Change: Eight Perceptions about Its Where and How | 67

—Sigurd Bergmann

Part 2: Historical matters5 Bridging the Great Divide: The Anthropocene as a Challenge

to the Social Sciences and Humanities | 87—Franz Mauelshagen

6 Becoming Human in the Anthropocene | 103—Agustín Fuentes

vi

Part 3: Philosophical Analyses7 De-moralizing and Re-moralizing the Anthropocene | 121

—Maria Antonaccio

8 Anthropocene Fever: Memory and the Planetary Archive | 138—Stefan Skrimshire

9 Reconsidering the Anthropocene as Milieu: William Desmond and the Originary Goodness of Being | 155

—Francis Van den Noortgaete

Part 4: Theological trajectories10 Performing the Beginning in the End: A Theological Anthropology

for the Anthropocene | 173—Celia Deane-Drummond

11 Cooled Down Love and an Overheated Atmosphere: René Girard on Ecology and Apocalypticism in the Anthropocene | 188—Petra Steinmair-Pösel

12 Beyond Human Exceptionalism: Christology in the Anthropocene | 202—Matthew Eaton

13 American Evangelicalism, Apocalypticism, and the Anthropocene | 218—Marisa Ronan

Part 5: ethical Deliberations14 Human Ecology as a Key Discipline of Environmental Ethics

in the Anthropocene | 235—Markus Vogt

15 Protection of Threatened Species in the Anthropocene: A Theological-Ethical Perspective | 253—Anders Melin

Part 6: Sociopolitical transformations16 Contesting the Good Life of Technological Modernity

in the Anthropocene | 269—Ian Barns

vii

17 The Anthropocene and the Future of Diplomacy: Religion, Ecology, and Transnational Relations in the Age of Human Responsibility | 283—David Joseph Wellman

Bibliography | 301General Index | 331

ix

figures

Figure 1. Friedrich Georg Weitsch. Humboldt and Aime Bonpland in the val-ley of Tapia on the foot of the vulcano Chimborazo. 1810. Oil on canvas, 100 x 71 cm. Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin. From: © bpk / Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten Berlin-Brandenburg. Photo: Hermann Buresch.

Figure 2. Wassily Kandinsky. Composition VII. 1913. Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. From: http://uploads8.wikiart.org/images/wassily-kandinsky/composition-vii-1913.jpg. Public domain.

Figure 3. J. M. W. Turner. The Deluge. 1805. Oil on canvas, 142.9 x 235.6 cm. Tate Britain, London. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c4/Turner-deluge.jpg. Public domain.

Figure 4. Matthias Grünewald. Isenheim altarpiece. 1512–1516. Oil on wood, 298.45 x 304.8 cm. Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isenheim_Altarpiece#/media/File:Mathis_Gothart_Gr%C3%BCnewald_019.jpg.

Figure 5. Jacopo Tintoretto. The Crucifixion of Christ. 1568. Oil on canvas, 341 x 371 cm. San Cassiano, Venice. From: http://www.wikiart.org/en/tintoretto/the-crucifixion-of-christ-1568. Public domain.

Figure 6. The Crucifixion. 1849. Currier & Ives colored print lithography. https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.03628/. Public domain.

Figure 7. Northern Sami groups in Haga. Sami knife with sheath. 1948. Iron and horn craft. Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden. The Na-tional Museums of World Culture (Världskulturmuseerna) in Sweden. No. 1948.21.0010a-b, © photo: Ferenc Schwetz, reproduced with kind permis-sion from “Världskulturmuseerna.”

Fig ure sx

Figure 8. Evelyn De Morgan. The Worship of Mammon. 1909. Oil on canvas, 60.3 x 50.2 cm. De Morgan Centre, London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_worship_of_Mammon.jpg/. Public domain.

Figure 9. Giovanni Bellini. Sacred Allegory. Ca. 1485. 73 x 119 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giovanni_Bellini_001.jpg. Public domain.

Figure 10: Primary energy consumption, CO2 emissions and energy mix for selected countries (China, USA, India & the United Kingdom), 1965–2014. The graphs were created by the author, with data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015.

Figure 11: South Reading Room. Mural with quotation from Thomas Jef-ferson about the living generation, by Ezra Winter. Library of Congress John Adams Building, Washington, D.C]. 2007. Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007687053/. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith.

xi

forewordThe Anthropocene as a Challenge

for Public Theology

Is there something like an Anthropocene? We have good reasons for re-flecting upon this question. One thing is clear: human beings now have

the power to change the shape of the earth to a degree that once took many thousands, or even millions, of years. There is, therefore, a growing ten-dency to speak of a new and distinct age, even though we are talking about a relatively short period of time that has brought about these changes.

How fundamental the changes are, and how recently they have devel-oped, Larry Rasmussen impressively shows with a metaphor in his book Earth Community, Earth Ethics. He writes of a ten-volume encyclopedia in which the history of the cosmos is written. Even if we skip the first two-thirds of the development of the universe, we still have five billion years in ten volumes. If each volume is 500 pages, each page tells the story of one million years. The most amazing insight of this metaphor concerns the place of humankind and its activities in the development of the universe: humankind arrives on page 499 of the last volume. The last two words of the last page tell the story of human civilization, and the story of the human destruction of nature begins with the last syllable of the last word of the last volume.1

It is difficult to assess, since we are living in it, whether there is some-thing like an Anthropocene. There are good reasons that the names used to describe a certain age so far have been given afterwards, in looking back. Perhaps we must leave the question unanswered and instead direct our at-tention to how we should act in a time in which the power of humankind over non-human nature has reached an enormous scale and in which hu-man beings are in the process of destroying the ecological balance which

1. Rasmussen, Earth Community, 27–28.

Fore wordxii

has been the basis of life so far. Politics plays a key role in dealing with this situation. In the future, political decisions must be directed towards transforming the economy from the destruction of non-human nature, with extreme inequalities in the distribution of wealth, towards an ecologically sustainable source of prosperity for all human beings. Politics seems to be incapable, on its own, of achieving this huge but fundamentally necessary reorientation. This is because political decision-making—at least in democ-racies—tends to be oriented towards and limited by the next election and, as a result, always seeks to secure the consent of the electorate. This is why civil society is so crucial. Civil society paves the way for necessary politi-cal change by generating a political climate that is the basis for courageous political decisions.

One should not underestimate what civil society can achieve, espe-cially given the recent rise of an ecological consciousness. Big corporations now pay for expensive whole-page ads in national newspapers to highlight their sustainability scores. Even if one is skeptical of the credibility of such ecological promotion efforts, it is remarkable that big economic players seem to think a good ecological record increases their ability to do business. Compared with a few decades ago when ecological advocacy was hardly more than a niche phenomenon in the public debate, this diagnosis is a big success story of civil society, despite what might still need to be achieved.

Change must happen on a global scale. More than any other political issue, ecological problems do not stop at national borders and can therefore only be responded to through international political action. The months leading up to the climate conference in Paris in December 2015 were an encouraging example of the power of global civil society. The conference’s success was widely attributed by its key political actors to the long-term efforts of global civil society. Among the actors of civil society, churches played an important role. In the weeks before the conference, Christians from all over the world, together with people of other religious traditions, walked thousands of miles to Paris in a pilgrimage for justice and peace. In a moving multi-religious ceremony, which I myself participated in, religious leaders from across the globe came together with the pilgrims to hand over 1.7 million signatures to the conveners of the conference. It was a ceremony of joy and hope ending in a dance involving the Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, and the U.N. climate office director, Christina Figueres, who were then joined by all the participants of the ceremony. Churches are especially important actors in global civil society because they represent a network of locally rooted parishes all over the world with a common univer-sal horizon. This common universal horizon is based on the belief that the earth is God’s creation and, therefore, not our possession as human beings

Fore word xiii

but entrusted to us by God to take good care of. Having “dominion” over the earth as mandated in Genesis 1:26 does not mean exploitation of the earth; it should be understood, rather, as analogous to the governing task of the king in Old Testament texts, which was to care for the poor and vulnerable. Modern thought has perverted the biblical theme of “dominion,” making it into a justification of unlimited human power over non-human nature. What has been misinterpreted as something like a Magna Carta of human power in the Anthropocene is in reality a call to responsibility in the age of human misuse of power.

The role of religions in global civil society in the age of the Anthro-pocene is especially important for another reason. Religions reach not only the minds of people but also their hearts and, even more, their souls. Since ecological reorientation fundamentally includes (besides political and eco-nomic structural changes) a change in lifestyle patterns, the success of the intended transformation is dependent on the input of institutions that reach people at the deep levels of their existence.

A public theology is needed to equip the church with a theological basis to enable her to fulfill this task. Public theology helps societies to un-derstand themselves, to read the signs of the times, to interpret culture, and to provide orientation in a situation of disorientation. Thus, churches have a hermeneutical task. Reading the signs of the times in the Anthropocene, for example, could mean showing the imbalance between two possible un-derstandings of the human being that have always been part of human exis-tence. Human being as shaper of its destiny has always been a key dimension of humankind’s self-understanding. The biblical call to till and care for the earth (Gen 2:15) is an example of this. The Bible, however, also warns of making the human being as shaper into an absolute. The story of the Tower of Babel is an impressive example of this absolutizing; building the tower in order to become as great as God (i.e., wanting to be God) leads to division and destructive consequences for culture.

Human being as receiver marks the opposite pole. Humankind has always seen its own limits. Religion has pointed toward something greater than humankind and has helped us to accept human limitedness. However, there is a danger in this conception as well. If human being as receiver is made into an absolute, if it is perverted as a blind subordination to some fate, it pacifies human protest against injustice. Critics of religion like Karl Marx, therefore, have rightly criticized this form of religion as the “opium of the people.” Movements like Latin American liberation theologies have recognized these consequences and, in response, developed theological concepts to understand the Christian faith as a driving force for changing history.

Fore wordxiv

In this interplay between human being as a shaper and human being as a receiver, an interplay which has characterized human history, we must rec-ognize that in the age of the Anthropocene the balance has unduly shifted towards human being as a shaper exerting power over non-human nature. We have unlearned the acceptance of our limits in our relationship with non-human nature. What we need now is an ethic of human self-limitation.

Churches and other religious communities not only have a herme-neutical task, they also have a political task in society. They must advocate political and sociocultural change to regain an appropriate power balance between humankind and non-human nature. They can fulfill this task by issuing public statements, such as the call of religious leaders at the climate summit in Paris in 2015. They can intervene directly in political decisions to make their positions known to decision-makers. Furthermore, church lead-ers can privately or publicly talk with politicians to share their views and argue for change. Finally, churches, through their international networks, can listen to the stories of experiences of injustice and vulnerability from the margins, hand them on to the global centers of power, and hold decision-makers accountable.

The task is enormous. Consequently, churches need to cooperate with other agents of civil society to address the challenges of our times. Drawing on rigorous academic reflection across the disciplines is an important fruit of such cooperation, and so, I wholeheartedly welcome the contributions of this volume. If the time we live in will indeed be named “Anthropocene” by later generations, these contributions will turn out to have been pathfinders for understanding its deep intellectual, cultural, and spiritual grounding.

—Heinrich Bedford-Strohm

xvii

Contributors

Maria Antonaccio, Professor of Religious Studies and affiliated faculty with the Environmental Studies Program, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, USA

Maria Antonaccio received her MA and PhD from the University of Chi-cago Divinity School. In addition to her research on the ethics of climate change and sustainability, Antonaccio has published on Iris Murdoch, moral psychology, ancient models of askesis in contemporary ethics, the ethics of consumption, and the role of technology in the humanization of nature. She has recently received a two-year fellowship with the Enhancing Life Project (John Templeton Foundation) for a book project entitled Imag-ined Futures: Climate Change, Counter-worlds, and the Cultural Meanings of Sustainability.

Ian Barns, Emeritus Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Sustainability Poli-cy, Murdoch University, Western Australia

Until his retirement in 2011, Ian Barns was a member of the School of Sus-tainability at Murdoch University for twenty-three years and before that a member of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Royal Mel-bourne Institute of Technology. With a PhD in the social studies of science, his interdisciplinary research and teaching has focused on the challenge of sustainability and on the nexus between ethics, theology, technology, and sustainability. He has published articles in journals, including Science, Tech-nology and Human Values, Theology and Science, Pacifica, and Zadok Per-spectives, as well as edited or co-authored books, including The Theology of the Human Person; Challenges for Einstein’s Children; God Down Under; and Poststructuralism, Citizenship and Social Policy. As a member of the General Synod’s Social Responsibility Commission of the Anglican Church in Aus-tralia, he was a delegate at the 1990 World Council of Churches meeting in Seoul on Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation.

C ontr ibutor sxviii

Christoph Baumgartner, Associate Professor of Ethics, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Christoph Baumgartner’s principal topics of current research and teaching include environmental ethics, intergenerational justice, religion in the pub-lic sphere, freedom of religion and freedom of expression, secularism and post-secularism, and citizenship. His publications include Umweltethik—Umwelthandeln: Ein Beitrag zur Lösung des Motivationsproblems and chapter contributions to Was heißt Natur? Philosophischer Ort und Begründungs-funktion des Naturbegriffs and Transformations of Religion and the Public Sphere. Postsecular Publics.

Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Presiding Bishop of the German Protes-tant Churches, Honorary Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Bamberg, Germany, Extraordinary Professor of Systematic Theology University of Stellenbosch, South Africa

Heinrich Bedford-Strohm is Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church in Bavaria and Chairman of the Council of Evangelical Churches in Germany. From 2004 until 2011, he held the Chair of Systematic Theology and Contemporary Theological Issues at the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg. He was Founding Director of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Research Centre for Public Theology, President of the Society of Protestant Theology in Germany, deputy Chairman of the Chamber for Social Responsibility of the German Protestant Churches, and the main editor of the journal Evange-lische Theologie until 2011. His publications include Vorrang für die Armen: Auf dem Weg zu einer theologischen Theorie der Gerechtigkeit; Gemeinschaft aus kommunkativer Freiheit; Schöpfung; and Positon beziehen: Perspektiven öffentlicher Theologie.

Sigurd Bergmann, Professor in Religious Studies, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

Sigurd Bergmann serves on the executive committee of the European Fo-rum on the Study of Religion and Environment. His research has inves-tigated the relationship between the image of God and views of nature in late antiquity, methodologies of contextual theology, the visual arts in the indigenous Arctic and Australia, the relation between space/place and reli-gion, and religion in climatic change. His publications include Creation Set Free; God in Context; Theology in Built Environments; In the Beginning Is the Icon; and Religion, Space and the Environment. Bergmann was co-project

C ontr ibutor s xix

leader of the interdisciplinary program “Technical Spaces of Mobility” and co-editor of The Ethics of Mobilities; Religion in Environmental and Climate Change; Christian Faith and the Earth; and Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred.

Celia Deane-Drummond, Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Celia Deane-Drummond is founding Director of the Center for Theol-ogy, Science and Human Flourishing at the University of Notre Dame and current Chair of the European Forum for the Study of Religion and Envi-ronment. Deane-Drummond holds doctorates in plant physiology and in systematic theology. Her research focuses on the engagement of systematic and moral theology and the biological and social sciences. She is the author of two-hundred scholarly articles or book chapters, thirty of which are in peer-reviewed scientific journals, and author or editor of twenty-five books, including Creation through Wisdom; The Ethics of Nature; Genetics and Christian Ethics; Future Perfect (with Peter Scott); Ecotheology; Christ and Evolution; Religion and Ecology in the Public Sphere (with Heinrich Bedford-Strohm); Animals as Religious Subjects (with David Clough and Rebecca Artinian-Kaiser); The Wisdom of the Liminal; Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred (with Sigurd Bergmann and Bronislaw Szerszynski).

Matthew Eaton, Faculty of Theology, St. Michael’s College, Toronto, Canada

Matthew Eaton earned his PhD in theology at the University of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto in 2016. His dissertation, “Enfleshing Cos-mos and Earth: An Ecological Christology of Deep Incarnation in Dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas’ Ethics of Infinity” explored the expanded relevance of incarnation theologies for life and ethics within the Anthropocene. He has published articles on eco-theology, Christology, and Emmanuel Lévinas and is currently co-editing a volume entitled Encountering Earth: Thinking Theologically with a More-Than Human World. He is interested in posthu-manist and affect theories as well as feminist materialisms as ways of explor-ing subjectivity, ethics, and theology beyond humanism. Eaton has lectured at the University of St. Michael’s College, Virginia Theological Seminary, and currently serves as an adjunct assistant professor at St. John’s University and Sacred Heart University.

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Agustín Fuentes, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

Agustín Fuentes has a BA in zoology and anthropology and an MA and PhD in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His cur-rent research includes cooperation and community in human evolution, ethnoprimatology and multispecies anthropology, evolutionary theory, public perceptions of evolutionary theory, and interdisciplinary approach-es to human nature(s). His recent books include Evolution of Human Behavior;Biological Anthropology: Concepts and Connections; Monkeys on the Edge: Ecology and Management of Long-tailed Macaques and their Inter-face with Humans; Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths about Human Nature; and Conversations on Human Nature.

Franz Mauelshagen, Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Postdam, Germany

Franz Mauelshagen is an environmental historian focusing on the history of great transformations, the Anthropocene, climate change, and natural disasters. He has an MA in philosophy, history, and law from the Rhein-ische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn and a PhD in history from the University of Zurich. He has served as coordinator of the program Climate & Culture at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen and as a member of the institute’s executive board. His publications include Palgrave Handbook of Climate History and Klimageschichte der Neuzeit 1500–1900.

Anders Melin, Associate Professor in Ethics, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, Sweden

Anders Melin’s main field of study is environmental ethics and he has pub-lished articles and book chapters on genetic engineering and ethics, the Buddhist-Christian dialogue and environmental ethics, mobility ethics, and biodiversity and ethics. Melin’s main recent publication is Living with Other Beings: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to the Ethics of Species Protection (2013). He is currently the leader of the research project Energy and Justice: An Ethical Analysis of Swedish Energy Politics Based on the Capability Ap-proach, funded by the Swedish Research Council.

C ontr ibutor s xxi

Michael Northcott, Professor of Ethics, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Michael Northcott conducts research in the environmental humanities, and especially how political theology, religious ethics, economics, and technol-ogy shape human agency in relation to the nonhuman. He has published twelve books and over seventy academic papers. His most recent books include Place, Ecology, and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities; Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Per-spectives; and A Political Theology of Climate Change. He has been visiting professor at the Claremont School of Theology, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Flinders University, and the University of Malaya. He led a large Arts and Humanities Research Council grant on faith-based ecological activism in the United Kingdom, entitled “Caring for the Future Through Ancestral Time” (http://ancestraltime.org.uk) in 2013-16.

Marisa Ronan, Research Fellow, Environmental Humanities Research Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Ronan received her PhD in American Studies from University College Dub-lin in 2009. Her dissertation, “Evangelical Cultural Appropriation: Christian Fiction and the Pursuit of a New Evangelical Christianity” provides an intel-lectual and literary history of American evangelicalism from the Puritan era to postmodernism. As a Research Fellow at the Centre for Environmental Humanities, Ronan explores how the humanities can be drawn upon to ad-dress climate change, for example the relationship between religion and the environment and how faith impacts perceptions of climate change, human agency, and scientific intervention. Other research interests include inter-vention points and best practice for managing marine heritage and tackling environmental challenges to coastal cultural landscapes.

Stefan Skrimshire, Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies, The University of Leeds, UK

Stefan Skrimshire is a lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. In addition to several chapters and journal articles, he is the author of Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope and editor of Future Eth-ics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. His teaching and research combine continental philosophy, political theology, and environmental humanities.

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Petra Steinmair-Pösel, Institute for Social Ethics, University of Vi-enna, Austria

Petra Steinmair-Pösel is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Vienna. Her current research (Habilitation) in social ethics concerns the relation-ship between mystical experience and sociopolitical commitment. She is especially interested in social ethical questions regarding gender issues, ecology, and sustainability. Another of her primary fields of research is René Girard’s mimetic theory, with a special focus on questions relating to positive/peaceful mimesis and the application of Girard’s work in the realm of Catholic theology/spirituality and social ethics. She was editor with Ingeborg Gabriel of the volume Gerechtigkeit in einer endlichen Welt: Ökologie-Wirtschaft-Ethik.

Bronislaw Szerszynski, Reader in Sociology, Lancaster University, UK

Bronislaw Szerszynski has a BA in independent studies in the environmental humanities and a PhD in sociology. He researches across the social sciences, natural sciences, arts, and humanities to situate the changing relationship between humans, environment, and technology within the perspective of human and planetary history. His recent work explores themes such as the Anthropocene, geoengineering, and planetary evolution. He is author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred; co-editor of Risk, Environment and Mo-dernity; Re-Ordering Nature: Theology, Society and the New Genetics; Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance; Technofutures, Nature and the Sacred. He was co-organizer of the conference “Between Nature: Explorations in Ecology and Performance,” “Experimentality,” a research program on experimentation in the sciences, arts, and society, and “Anthro-pocene Monument,” with Bruno Latour and Olivier Michelon.

Francis Van den Noortgaete, KU Leuven, Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, Research Unit of Theological and Comparative Ethics, Belgium

Francis Van den Noortgaete holds master degrees in chemistry, environ-mental sciences, and world religions. He is currently a doctoral researcher at KU Leuven in the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. His main research interests lie at the interdisciplinary boundary between religious studies, environmental ethics, and motivational psychology.

C ontr ibutor s xxiii

Markus Vogt, Professor of Christian Social Ethics, Ludwig Maximil-ian University of Munich, Germany

Markus Vogt is the chair for Christian Social Ethics at the Catholic faculty of Ludwig Maximilian University and dean of the Catholic faculty. He has served as coordinator for the working group on environmental issues of the European Council of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, as head of the Community of Christian Social Ethics in the German speaking counties, as a scientific research professor at the Rachel Carson Center for environment and society, as a member of the executive board of the Munich Competence Center for Ethics, and as a speaker of the council board for bioeconomy with the Bavarian government. His publications include: Prinzip Nach-haltigkeit. Ein Entwurf aus theologisch-ethischer Perspektive; (ed.) Wo steht die Umweltethik? Argumentationsmuster im Wandel; (ed.) Die Moral der Energiewende; (ed.) Gliederungssysteme angewandter Ethik; (ed.) Die Welt im Anthropozän. Erkundungen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Ökologie und Humanität.

David Joseph Wellman, DePaul University, Illinois, USA

David Joseph Wellman’s work focuses on the relationship between religion and diplomacy, ecological ethics, and interreligious engagement. He is the author of Sustainable Diplomacy: Ecology, Religion and Ethics in Muslim-Christian Relations and Sustainable Communities. Wellman’s writing on diplomacy was used as the basis of an international conference, which culminated in the collaborative volume edited by Costas Constantinou and James Der Derian entitled Sustainable Diplomacies. His most recent research, focusing on interreligious engagement in Paris, is reflected in his current book project, Abrahamic Paris: Building Bridges Among Jews, Chris-tians, Muslims and Atheists in the City of Light.

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the future of Religion in the Anthropocene era

Celia Deane-Drummond, Sigurd Bergmann,

& Markus Vogt

The heated public intensity around the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris (COP 21) shows that the complex po-

litical, social, and religious issues surrounding questions of climate change continue to remain high on the agenda. Within the sciences, the term Anthropocene—the Age of Humans—is gradually moving into the discourse of climate change; so far, however, there has been relatively little critical engagement with this concept from the perspective of the environmental humanities. The Anthropocene poses a tremendous challenge for the hu-manities not least because the human sciences bring tools that can assess the diverse scientific and cultural narratives. For theology and religious studies this includes an assessment of implicit religious narratives, or whether there are social and ethical implications, especially for environmental ethics.

The geological notion of the Anthropocene is meant to denote the cur-rent geological era as a new geological epoch in which the collective imprint of human activities is so pervasive that the Earth System, most notably that associated with climate change, is destabilized. Related assessments suggest that humanity is now close to passing several other planetary boundaries and tipping points. These notions have stirred up vigorous discussions in the earth sciences, where research now focuses on a rigorous understand-ing of humanity’s interaction with the biophysical Earth System. Treating humanity as a whole in this way has also come under serious critique

The Future o f Re l ig ion in the Anthropocene Era 2

from social science, given the disparity of impact between different hu-man cultures and groups. Kathryn Yusoff, for example, has coined the term “Anthropogenesis” to suggest that Anthropocene narratives are mythic in content and are orientated towards the Anthropos as either world-maker or destroyer.1 Furthermore, nominating the Anthropocene fosters a material, evolutionary narrative of human origins and endings within a geological and not just biological time scale.

While the lively scientific debate mainly deals with the content of the geological concept and the lack of historical consensus about its beginning, the humanities and social sciences mine deeper into cultural and ethical di-mensions and reflect self-critically on the advantages, or potential damages, that various versions of this concept might produce. While scientists, for ex-ample, tend to neglect the skill of power accumulation among humans and might simply expand their worldview universally to global society, voices in the environmental humanities are able to explore a triangular reciprocal net of relations between society-culture-nature-subjectivity. Another criti-cal point of discussion emerges with regard to the future: can we think at all about the future in narratives of the Anthropocene? While Abrahamic religions always operate more or less strongly with images of the future, Anthropocene narratives, at least those born by geological sciences, seem to lack self-critical skills with regard to power, history, and ethics.

This collection of essays explores these and similar questions from dif-ferent disciplinary perspectives within the humanities and social sciences, taking critical account of the religious, philosophical, theological, and ethical challenges and opportunities different narrations about the Anthro-pocene pose. Not all of the authors agree with each other and, therefore, this volume provides an important framework for further discussion and analysis. Insofar as such discussion has not yet been incorporated into a serious multidisciplinary study, this book also represents cutting edge re-search on a theme that will be of increasing importance, given the ongoing and escalating effects of human induced climate change. So far, theological and ethical discussion has tended to focus on socio-political discussions on climate change, rather than viewing such changes as part of a broader systems narrative.

In the first section, Setting the Stage, Michael Northcott’s contribution “On Going Gently into the Anthropocene” argues for the particular rele-vance of theology. Drawing on an analysis of John Ruskin’s work, Northcott argues that those who advance the idea of the Anthropocene share with Ruskin a common apocalyptic perspective. However, he argues that the

1. Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis.”


global horizon of risk opened up by the Anthropocene carries an ethical and political challenge far beyond that posed by Ruskin. He believes that if the Copernican turn decentered humanity in relation to the destiny of the earth, now through science and technology humans are once again becom-ing aware that they are central to the earthly networks of agency and being which stretch from the rocky substrata to the skies. The Baconian mediation of the Anthropocene means that far from representing a new spiritual com-munion between humans and other life, Crutzen’s proposal represents an enhancement of a Baconian worldview in which humans now consciously take charge of the Earth System as a “vast machine.” Hence, it represents yet another refusal to accept the hybrid mixing of culture and nature which is intrinsic to human planetary existence and a refusal to take account of the intrinsic worth of other species. Northcott’s theological assessment is striking: we have replaced the Pantocrator image of Christ with the anti-christ—Homo industrialis. He argues political and theological communities are called to witness to an alternative by exercising near-term sacrificial constraint. Green religious communities, transition towns, and other social activist movements, Northcott insists, are part of a movement of love best fostered by religious communities.

In the second chapter, Bronislaw Szerszynski discusses how he used a series of linked “theory-fictions” to explore possible futures for religion in a new geological epoch, using the notion of a possible “Second Axial Age” based on a radically different metaphysics. Szerszynski argues that any un-derstanding of paths to the Anthropocene has to take account of the emer-gence of Axial cultures, but he cautions that this has to be done with care. On the one hand, Axial cultures seem to have held in check systematic attempts to exploit and transform the Earth because of their belief that the role of this world is largely to symbolize or prepare for the transcendent realm. On the other hand, Axial cultures were particularly suited for imperial expan-sion, promoted the idea that the human being has a privileged status within the cosmos, and could be said to lay the ground for the development of technological thinking. Szerszynski then introduces the concept of theory fictions and summarizes his own use of the genre in three pieces all set in a fictional future spanning a period from the mid-twenty-first to the late-twenty-second century. He then critically explores contemporary claims that a Second Axial Age of global consciousness is emerging in the twenty-first century due to increased dialogue between faiths and cultures. While these are claims of a renewal of First-Axial-Age themes of transcendence and universality, the Second Axial Age described in his own theory-fictions moves in a radically new direction. In his imagined future revolution in hu-man thought, matter is active and self-organizing, difference is an explosive


force within things, time is produced by material processes themselves and is multiple and intertwining, and the ways that worlds organize themselves undergo moments of bifurcation. He concludes with an exploration of what this might entail through a discussion of “sacred work.”

Christopher Baumgartner, in the third chapter on “Transformations of Stewardship in the Anthropocene,” addresses the question of how propo-nents of the notion of the Anthropocene ascribe to humanity the responsi-bility to act as planetary steward. For some authors, stewardship is a decisive characteristic of a new stage of the Anthropocene. His question relates to what precisely it might mean to take responsibility as planetary stewards in the Anthropocene and which specific moral obligations are included in this stewardship. Thus, he offers a philosophical conceptualization and critical analysis of the notion of planetary stewardship in the Anthropocene. On the basis of a comparison with the religious notion of stewardship that is part of Christian traditions, he demonstrates that the concept of steward-ship is profoundly transformed within Anthropocene discourse. He gives particular scrutiny to assumptions about past, present, and future in stew-ardship concepts and how these influence the justification and the scope of our moral obligations in the context of climate change. Such an approach helps to identify, understand, and philosophically reconstruct the transfor-mations of the concept of stewardship in the Anthropocene and critically analyze its strengths and limitations in a planetary context.

The fourth chapter by Sigurd Bergmann deals with eight perceptions of religion in climate change discourse. He argues that our awareness about anthropogenic climatic and environmental change represents one of the core assumptions in Anthropocene discussions. The concept of the An-thropocene was anticipated historically. He begins with a short summary of Alexander von Humboldt’s view of nature as a Naturgemälde (painting of nature). He then explores eight different perceptions of religious belief systems and their significance. Bergmann draws on the work of social sci-entists, including Robin Globus Veldman, to show that religion has a variety of modes: as worldview, source of morality, institution, and skill of con-nectivity. He adds to this perspective the passiological, i.e., the response of religion to suffering and violence, the aesth/ethical, the economic, and the spatial dimensions. Faith communities respond in specific ways to suffer-ing and violence. They express beliefs that are beyond rational and ethical conventions in a diversity of aesthetical ways in ordinary life. Late capital-ist fetishization of money, which, according to Bergmann, is a key driver behind climate change, represents a substantial threat to religious belief. One common earth and one common future is an emerging spatial and temporal consciousness that challenges different religions to revisit their


understanding of life as a gift. Bergmann emphasizes both the multiplicity and ambivalence of religious responses to climatic change as well as the way in which religious traditions are able to make participants feel-at-home and contribute to creative adaptations to acute problems of climate change in the Anthropocene.

The second section deals with historical questions in more recent history and deeper into the evolutionary history of human beings. Franz Mauelshagen’s chapter on the history of ideas related to the Anthropocene goes deeper into historical precedents touched on by Northcott and Berg-mann. Over a long period of modern scientific practice, a “great divide” has opened up between the natural sciences and the humanities/social sciences. Back in the 1950s, C.P. Snow discerned two separate cultures of practice be-tween the sciences and humanities. These “two cultures” are now clashing in the unfolding interdisciplinary debate on the Anthropocene. Among other things, the meaning of the anthropos is highly controversial. The humani-ties struggle with definitions of the human as a biological species that seem to dominate in scientific accounts of the Anthropocene. Though scientific explanations are obviously insufficient to explain the dynamics of anthro-pogenic global change today, it is precisely at this point, in engagement with scientific definitions of the human, where the humanities and social sciences are challenged to question their own tradition of systematically excluding “nature” from their accounts of human affairs. The current “crisis of nature” is also a “crisis of human nature” and its conceptual traditions, predominantly in Western cultures. In his contribution Mauelshagen argues that it is neither sufficient nor convincing to hold on to conventional forms of critique. The social sciences and humanities are invited to enter an open, trans-faculty debate on the Anthropocene that is likely to fundamentally change the disciplinary realm of academia.

In the sixth chapter, anthropologist Agustín Fuentes brings an evolu-tionary anthropological perspective and considers the significance of the Anthropocene through the lens of deep history. If we confine our thinking about the Anthropocene to the Great Acceleration after World War II, or to the changes since the Industrial Revolution, then an opportunity is missed to think about humanity’s past, present, and future trajectory as a species and lineage and how that might inform human endeavors. He insists that we have not arrived at an “end point” in human evolutionary history. Rather, humans were “evolving” in the past and are doing so even now and will con-tinue to do so in the future, which means that humanity is in a constant state of becoming. This is highly relevant when considering the planetary role of humans. He argues that humanity must recognize deeply rooted, ongoing, dynamic, and malleable processes in its midst; by recognizing this, we derive


insight into what we could and should be doing appropriate to humanity’s current place in the world. The insights derived from evolutionary anthro-pology attest that human communities have and continue to “make it” in the world via niche construction, cooperation, collaboration, and creative solutions to current challenges. In the Anthropocene, this awareness has different implications than it did in the earlier eras of the Holocene or the Pleistocene. Over the last twenty to forty centuries, the global rate of human population growth, density, and impact has increased remarkably and in the last few centuries, has become exponential. Fuentes argues on this basis that we may be on the brink of changes that are distinctive and even novel, which may bring potentially catastrophic repercussions for humanity, other species, and the global ecosystem. Human evolution is not, in the manner sometimes interpreted, in a straight line. Human niche construction has broad and deep effects not just on landscapes and environments but also on the myriad of other beings sharing space with us. In the Anthropocene, this extends to the entire planet.

The third section develops philosophical analyses from three very dif-ferent perspectives. Maria Antonaccio’s “De-moralizing and Re-moralizing the Anthropocene,” the seventh chapter, assumes two descriptive features of the Anthropocene noted in other chapters: humanity is now a geological force influencing planetary processes and nature and human society can no longer be seen as belonging to incommensurable domains. Antonaccio con-tends that this description does not inevitably lead to either of the dominant polarized responses: that we should resist the Anthropocene and attempt to regain some measure of nature’s independence from human influence or that we should embrace the Anthropocene and capitulate to the idea of a totally humanized world, a hybridized “socio-nature.” The Anthropocene concept cannot bear the weight of these moralized responses. Her aim is to rescue the Anthropocene from the sometimes overheated rhetoric sur-rounding it by disentangling descriptive from normative claims in the two most prominent narratives (often referred to as the “bad” and “good” An-thropocene) and by exposing to critical scrutiny their underlying premises about humanity and human-Earth relations. By seeking to “de-moralize” the Anthropocene she does not deflate ethical and religious questions. Be-neath the surface of the debate lies a deeper, quasi-theological debate about the sources of the normativity by which humanity orients itself in the world. In particular, the Anthropocene raises the question of whether it is time to give up on the idea of a singular and independent Nature. She argues that the label “quasi-theological” is appropriate because Nature, especially in the American context, has long been understood as a site of otherness that exists beyond human control, desires, and interests. It has been the centerpiece of


a non-anthropocentric value scheme that regards Nature’s intrinsic value as inviolable and worthy of human protection. Insofar as the debate over the meaning of the Anthropocene is about whether we should “give up” on this idea, it is a debate about the potential dangers of relinquishing an opposi-tional force that has served as a restraint to human power.

Stefan Skrimshire, in the eighth chapter entitled “Anthropocene Fe-ver,” asserts that one of the most significant implications of Anthropocene discourse for theology and philosophy is its claim that this epoch of the hu-man will be in some sense legible to a future “reader” of the planet. Whom do we imagine will be this reader: other humans, alien life forms, God? Do we imagine that this data will be the subject of divine judgment? Or will it be a monument to our cosmic legacy? Skrimshire believes that thinking about the Anthropocene as an archive brings a host of problems familiar to scholars of deconstruction, in particular Derrida’s warnings about “archival violence.” Evoking the archive might represent a disavowal of the shocking thought of the unreadable nature of our legacy to the future. Skrimshire explores theological responses to such a fear by illuminating the concept of memory and the archive, in relation to St Augustine’s reflections on the transience of material life via a discussion of memory and forgetting in The Confessions. He contends that a connection can be made between this early debate and a discussion about eschatology, finitude, and extinction in con-temporary eco-theology. The chapter will thus have implications for wider religious, environmental, and political thought in its critique of the current obsession of Anthropocene as a melancholy, readable trace. This, he argues, can be understood as an ideological form of distraction from the ethical and political task of mourning or lament, as understood in theological tradi-tions, for the irreversible losses of present ecological life.

Francis Van den Noortgaete’s chapter explores the philosophy of Wil-liam Desmond. Drawing on Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and resonating with Northcott’s arguments, he begins with the idea that the Anthropocene is in continuity with, is a culmination of, and is made possible by modernity. Thus, reflecting on ethics in the Anthropocene always in some manner will imply a commentary on modernity. Van den Noortgaete recovers Des-mond’s metaxological philosophy and his critique of modernity as a way of informing environmental ethics in the Anthropocene. The dualism of being and the good in modernity is at the root of Desmond’s critique. The devalu-ation of being in a world that seems to have become a matrix of resources renders the ethos we live in seemingly worth-less apart from its instrumen-tal value. An “incognito of the good” pervades and shapes our late modern condition. Desmond, however, also emphasizes a pre-reflective, experiential intuition of the goodness of being. He thereby appeals to a lived, immediate


ontological intimacy with being as good, prior to any conceptualization or subject/object dichotomizing. He discerns possibilities for a renewed aston-ishment towards the givenness and origin of being. The main justification of such originary questions lies precisely in this intuitive experience of the goodness of being, for it allows for the generosity of its non-determinate origin. Desmond’s philosophy uncovers being in the Anthropocene as con-tinuously, and more acutely than ever before, at a bifurcation: either remain-ing in the (late) modern decoupling of being and the good that leads to an erosion of the worth of being, including human being, or—experientially—calling its counter-intuitive presumptions into question and then drawing on a pre-conceptual astonishment about the goodness of being. The latter, for Desmond, opens up the possibility to begin again in an ethics of grati-tude and hermeneutical generosity, after having nearly “come to nothing” at the inception of the Anthropocene.

The fourth section on theological trajectories more explicitly explores aspects of religious and theological literature while still taking account of philosophical concerns. In chapter 10, Celia Deane-Drummond picks up some of the issues raised in Fuentes’s chapter and contrasts the differences between deep history, which deals with the evolutionary anthropology of early human origins, and big history, which charts global scale cosmic changes. She considers some of the reasons why ecotheologians have con-centrated on big history and not deep history. In the first section, she criti-cally examines Bruno Latour’s anthropology of the moderns in the context of the Anthropocene, arguing that he has forgotten deep history. The second section engages closely the philosophical analysis of the Anthropocene and its ethical implications in the work of philosopher Joanna Zylinksa as a way of opening up an alternative theological reading. Using the idea of theologi-cal markers, Deane-Drummond suggests that semiotic markers inspired by ancient theological wisdom, such as that of divine image bearing, provide openings for new interpretations in dialogue with evolutionary anthropol-ogy’s account of deep history through the category of performance. Her po-sition contrasts with a more recent theological turn among ecotheologians away from using the language of image bearing at all, on the basis that it merely reinforces problematic portrayals of human beings as separate from the rest of the natural world. Like Antonaccio, Deane-Drummond is alert to the quasi-theological dimensions of this discussion, though her analy-sis concentrates on the potential theological import of the Anthropocene concept, rather than, in Antonaccio’s case, its capacity to undermine ideal-ized concepts of Nature that are serving in a quasi-religious mode. Given the potential of the Anthropocene to become a universalizing and perhaps even totalizing narrative that has quasi-theological overtones in a manner


that goes beyond the accusation of Christian rhetoric on image bearing, she argues that it is important to engage in ethical critiques of the underlying rhetoric.

Like Deane-Drummond, Petra Steinmair-Pösel, in chapter 11, “Cooled Down Love and an Overheated Atmosphere,” also engages with anthropol-ogy but focuses particularly on the work of cultural anthropologist René Girard. In Battling to the End, Girard characterizes our present world as an apocalyptic era when both the threatening and saving potentials of human-ity are growing. Though his main focus is not the destruction of human habitats through anthropogenic global warming but rather violence esca-lating to the extremes, his prophetic voice can nevertheless contribute to understanding the ambivalent role of religions—especially the Judeo-Chris-tian tradition—in the Anthropocene. Steinmair-Pösel argues that Girard’s mimetic theory sheds light on the more fundamental dynamics underlying our ecological crisis, which lead to a never diminishing sense of scarcity, ever-expanding needs, and reluctance to downsize or renounce demands. This applies even if from an epistemic perspective there is acceptance that the Western ecological footprint exceeds Earth’s capacities. Girard’s chal-lenging conclusion is this: while Christian revelation stands at the begin-ning of the unleashing of human desires, it also indicates the only way out of the crisis. However, this way out is connected to a genuine conversion. Steinmair-Pösel discusses the significance of Girard’s approach in the light of her earlier work tracing a profound connection between Christian social ethics and spirituality.

Chapter 12, by Matthew Eaton, works more explicitly in the domain of systematic theology and offers an internal critique of traditional Chris-tology in the Anthropocene. While the role religion plays in conceptually undergirding the Anthropocene is beyond simplistic genealogical analysis, Eaton identifies the logic of the Christian doctrine of Incarnation as con-tributing to the possibility of such a geological epoch. He is highly critical of the benefits of traditional incarnational theologies; argues that insofar as such theologies restrict the revelation and manifestation of divinity on Earth to a single human, or even to humanity in general, they betray an implicit idolatry of the human form and consequently divinize humanity and establish value hierarchies in support of human domination of Earth. For Eaton, it is necessary to re-imagine Christianity’s central doctrine apart from any inherent metaphysical anthropocentrism. He is inspired by the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, especially his wartime essay, “La Vie Cosmique.” For Eaton, Christologies of deep incarnation, including those of contemporary theologian Niels Henrik Gregersen, do not go far enough to ameliorate anthropocentrism. He believes that they continue to harbor


traces of a metaphysical anthropocentrism that normalizes the human that makes anthropogenic planetary destabilization possible. Therefore, he radically re-imagines Christology apart from metaphysical anthropo-centrism by reconfiguring a theological understanding of divine/material entanglement. He draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and philosophy of subjectivity. Following Merleau-Ponty, as well as developments in modern physics that understand existence as a shared mixture of matter, energy, and information, he argues that the human form is not unique in incarnating divinity. Such a theology insists that subjects do not exist within the confines of simple, embodied boundaries but instead penetrate one another in a chimerical world. Eaton argues that this theol-ogy provides a spiritual optics better equipped than classical Christology to combat the anthropogenic destruction inherent in the Anthropocene.

Marisa Ronan’s chapter 13 deals with some of the dangers associated particularly with the eschatological perspectives of branches of American Evangelicalism. She explores why, after almost a decade since the Evangelical Climate Initiative’s (ECI) call to action, so little progress has been made in recognizing human-induced climate change as a serious issue for evangeli-cal Christians. Through an exploration of Tim LaHaye’s and Craig Parshall’s Christian fiction collection, The End Series, Ronan analyzes the wider politi-cal implications of the belief that the Anthropocene is a biblically ordained apocalypse that is God-made, not human-made. The End Series challenges the notion of human caused climate change within a narrative of the apoca-lypse. It charts the President of the European Union’s creation of a Religious Global Treaty on Climate Change. The writers interpret this as evidence of a biblically prophesied, One World Order that will lead to the End of Days. The series admits an increase in global temperatures but asserts that this is attributed to a short-lived trend, resulting from global volcanic events. This push against the belief in anthropogenic climate change is reflected in real-world political affairs. In his discussion of natural disasters and weather patterns, Senator James Inhofe, Chair of the Senate’s Environment and Pub-lic Works Committee, publically stated that he thought climate change was a hoax. Senator Inhofe is not alone in this view: the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2014 findings in their Religion, Value and Climate Change Survey showed that white evangelical Protestants are more likely than any other religious group to engage in climate change skepticism. Ronan argues that while there was a short-lived call to action through the ECI, this has now dissipated. In its place is a rising distrust of the very notion of the Anthropo-cene, coupled with a codification of climate change within apocalyptic nar-ratives that reassert biblical inerrancy. For American Evangelicalism, then,


the Anthropocene represents not a human-made problem but a welcome, God-made, and biblically prophesied conclusion.

The fifth section of this book more explicitly deals with ethical aspects of living in the Anthropocene. Markus Vogt, in chapter 14, explores human ecology as it has been interpreted in Catholic Social Teaching. The term human ecology, or “the ecology of humankind,” has a special meaning in the Catholic church and arguably is the leading concept of environmental ethics in Catholic social teaching since 1991. It was originally the subtitle for the first draft of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si´. Human ecology means recognizing that all human understanding of self and world depends on specific ecological and social contexts. Vogt insists that environmental ethics in the Anthropocene must understand these dynamics, rather than simply formulating conservation rules to protect specific natural entities like animals, plants, or landscapes. Human ecology is a research approach between the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and ecology as a scientific discipline on the other. It is also at the boundary of an indi-vidual, personal approach and a more systemic approach. Human ecology, incorporating humanities, social sciences, and science, is therefore pivotal for addressing the insecurities regarding today’s notion of science and the contemporary self-conception of humanity. Consequently, human ecology plays a special role in the search for new models of science and ethics in the Anthropocene. It brings the perspectives on human being from the per-spective of society, understood as a “geographic factor” in Earth System re-search, together with the cultural constructive approach of the humanities. Vogt develops a trans-disciplinary sustainability and a contextually-driven, spatially-informed ethics. He argues that the spatial-ethical approach to human ecology might help dissolve the current dichotomy between bio-ecological and socio-ecological approaches and be an important facet of a new theory of environmental ethics in the Anthropocene. Taking account of specific contexts can enable ethics and theology to understand the differ-ence between cultures better and build bridges between them in a pluralistic world. Based on this perspective, human-ecological ethics as a spatial-contextual and intercultural approach combines the analytical perspective of the “spatial turn” with the normative perspective of “spatial justice,” a central dimension that is also explored in Bergmann’s chapter.

Anders Melin in chapter 15 examines the place of non-human beings in the Anthropocene and asks how much room we should leave for other life forms. One of the major consequences of current anthropogenic im-pacts on the environment is the reduction of biodiversity. Most scientists agree that the current rate of species extinction is much higher than pre-industrialization levels. According to a recent estimate, the current rate of


extinction is 1,000 times higher than natural background rates of extinction and future rates may be 10,000 times higher. Melin argues that in order to act responsibly, humanity needs to make conscious decisions about how much room on Earth, both literally and metaphorically, we should leave for other life forms. He discusses from a theological perspective the following two questions: 1) What reasons should be given to protect threatened spe-cies? and 2) To what extent should humanity protect threatened species? As for the first question, Melin rejects the traditional belief that other life forms exist only for the sake of humanity, and that we ought to protect only those species that have a material and immaterial value for humans. Instead, he states that we should regard other species as having an independent rela-tionship with God and that we have reason for protecting species even if they have no instrumental value. Regarding the second question, he claims that we should maintain the level of species diversity. He is skeptical of the view that humans ought to act as “co-redeemers” of evolution and that we ought to eliminate all anthropogenic extinction.

The sixth and final section of this book on sociopolitical transforma-tions treats two vital topics: one that contests the good life of technological modernity by Ian Barns and the other that deals with the future of diplo-macy by David Wellman. Barns’s chapter 16 considers the socio-political consequences of the extraordinary expansion of global, technological modernity over the past two centuries, especially over the past fifty years. He argues that learning to live within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries is and will continue to be a central challenge. His primary aim is to explore the distinctive contribution that Christian believers can make to this daunting collective task. He suggests that a transition to an ecologically sustainable world will involve shifts at three inter-connected levels: first, in relation to the practical challenge of adapting the complex socio-technical systems that provide the infrastructure of modern life; second, in relation to the adaptation of the global political economy needed to bring about unprecedented levels of cooperation between the present global patchwork of nation-states and the reform or replacement of the presently dominant order of neoliberal capitalism; and third, in relation to re-narrating the story of technological modernity as one of learning to live within ecological limits rather than attaining human mastery over nature. He focuses on Christian engagement in this fundamental task of imaginative re-narration. A domi-nant secularist narration of modernity, shared by “light green” supporters and “dark green” opponents alike, inhibits significant Christian theologi-cal contributions in public debates. To contest this, he draws on Charles Taylor’s and Bronislaw Szerszynski’s revisionist post-secularist accounts of modernity and technology. Both authors argue that modernity has involved


an ongoing dialectic between the processes of secularization and reforma-tions of the sacred. Dealing with the post-Christian return of the sacred becomes central to the task of coming to terms with planetary limits, and Barns considers various ways that Christians can foster this alternative. He believes, like Northcott, that a pre-condition of this is a Eucharistic political economy of Christian community, a form of Christian communal praxis that can creatively contest the dominance of consumerist forms of life.

It is fitting that this volume concludes with a chapter addressing the crisis in international relations occasioned by living in the Anthropocene. Wellman believes that, while normative discourses exploring the ecologi-cal dimension of international relations often view nation-states through a classical realpolitik lens, a new discourse is emerging which focuses on the opportunities for transnational peace-building presented by the deepening of the global ecological crisis. His chapter explores some of the predominant opportunities and challenges presented to traditional and non-traditional practitioners of diplomacy in the age of the Anthropocene. This new dis-course is emerging through the work of individuals and communities who have dedicated themselves to building bridges across transnational bound-aries distinguished by religious and political difference with the goal of realizing concrete ecological transformation. While the historic language of diplomacy was French, many today who are most dynamically promot-ing the work of conflict resolution and peace-building are drawing on the common vocabulary of our shared ecosphere that describes “potable water,” “arable land,” and “breathable air.” These common realities call attention to what a secular worldview might call a “language of the ecosphere” and, for the more theologically inclined, a “language of Creation,” both of which describe the ontological connectedness of all members of the ecosphere. Wellman argues that as the language of ecosphere/Creation becomes clearer in the Anthropocene via the multiple unfolding ecological crises that mark this era, a powerful corrective to the dominance of the language of commerce, finance, and human-assigned value is emerging. This alterna-tive worldview holds the potential to open the door to new approaches in sub-state diplomacy and transnational bioregional relations. In this light, nation-states have the potential to diminish the importance of the national borders that separate them. On a broader scale, the Anthropocene presents regional groupings of nation-states, such as the European Union, with new opportunities to go beyond the limitations of relying so heavily on the eco-nomic dimension of international relations and recognize the bioregional dimension as a more powerful source of common identity and basis for cooperation.


The belief in the significance of humanity and its capacity to under-stand itself and, in fact, also to act as a sovereign ruler over all in the world could, in the age of the Industrial Revolution, be proven true by empiri-cal science. Nevertheless, the suggestion of geologists and geoengineers to name this situation as the Age of Humans—the Anthropocene—remains provocative, as all the chapters of this volume show. Especially the norma-tive implications of distinct Anthropocene narratives remain in our eyes ambivalent: they can either lead to new humility towards both human and other life forms and an adequate new agenda of research questions or to a new triumphalist self-understanding of humankind and a utilitarian agenda with human techno-economic management of non-human (and also other human) life forms solely for the sake of humanity’s own interests. Even if the introduction of the term and its historical predecessors, fortunately, has tended to follow a humbler approach, one can also trace a certain degree of a self-aggrandizing and socio-engineering attitude to the human/cultural/social/spiritual spheres of life. For the environmental humanities in gen-eral and scholars of religion and theology, this ambiguity is painful. Even if the transdisciplinary potential of Anthropocene discourses are without a doubt present and might encourage deeper cooperation of the humanities and sciences on questions of “the anthropogenic,” the term also might serve as a catalyst for hyper-anthropocentric self-understandings in science and technology, such that it could become even more difficult to focus on the deep dependence of humanity on nature. Will the dominant Anthropocene narratives, then, hinder or enhance reflection on nature’s complex gifts of life to the human, what religions compress into the language of “respect for,” “wisdom about,” and “compassion and wonder within” nature?

There are no easy answers here and this book does not attempt to shirk such dilemmas. Not all the religious studies scholars and theologians con-tributing to this volume agree on how far and to what extent traditional Christian teachings need to undergo revision and change in order to re-spond adequately to such challenges. For some, a retrieval of elements from traditional, ancient, or modern resources or practices is enough. For oth-ers, a moderate re-interpretation is needed. Still others press for a radical re-reading of theology. The ambiguities present within religious discourse become most obvious when considering millennial Evangelical interpreta-tions of the Anthropocene as that initiated by divine agency. Either way, the significance of religious traditions to this discussion cannot be dismissed. Even secular discourses around the Anthropocene bear quasi-religious elements that deserve careful philosophical and theological analysis. With humble expectations and hopes of continuing to deepen these challenging


questions, from which the easy way out definitively should not be sought, we hand over this book to the committed reader.

PA rT 1

Setting the Stage

19

1

on going gently into the Anthropocene

Michael Northcott

The term “Anthropocene” for a successor geological epoch to the Holocene was coined by Russian scientists in the 1960s and first

popularized by Paul Crutzen at a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) near Mexico City in 2000. In a plenary dis-cussion Crutzen said: “Whenever you go somewhere in the world and make measurements, you cannot avoid having to deal with humankind,” and this is what is meant by the Anthropocene.1 Crutzen, with Eugene Stoermer, wrote up the idea in the newsletter of the IGBP and the term rapidly snowballed from there, initially in the natural sciences and subsequently in the social sciences and humanities.2 To date over 1100 scholarly articles, fifty books, and numerous media reports have been written on the Anthropocene and the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences is considering the case for recommending that ge-ologists formally recognize the Anthropocene as the successor era to the Holocene.

1. Voosen, “Geologists.”2. Crutzen and Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene.’”

Pa r t 1 : S e t t i n g t h e S ta g e20

Crutzen initially identified the commencement of the Anthropocene epoch with growing atmospheric emissions from coal burning triggered by James Watt’s invention of the condensing steam engine, the emissions of which are discernible in raised levels of carbon in air bubbles trapped in the polar ice pack generated from the eighteenth century.3 Watt’s engine was so efficient compared to its predecessor that it enabled the large-scale extraction of coal, whose burning in sky-darkening quantities sparked the Industrial Revolution, and anthropogenic climate change. The consequent temperature rises mean that humanity will remain “a major environmental force for many millennia.”4 In a subsequent paper Crutzen and Will Stef-fen argue that the Anthropocene commenced with a period of intensified human domination of the Earth System after 1950.5 From 1950 a range of indices of human influence on the planet show exponential increases, in-cluding: nuclear isotopes in air, soil, and water from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons; atmospheric carbon and methane from fossil fuel extrac-tion and burning; boreal and tropical deforestation; industrial ocean fish-ing; nitrogen fixing in agriculture; intensive animal husbandry; production of concrete, steel, copper, and aluminum. The “period of the Anthropocene since 1950 stands out as the one in which human activities rapidly changed from merely influencing the global environment in some ways to dominating it in many ways.”6

Identification of the date of the event(s) thought to have set the An-thropocene in motion depends upon the choice of “facts” that may be said to characterize the emergence of this new epoch. Some confine the human marker of the Anthropocene to biogeochemistry and hence to Earth System effects, in particular the Atmosphere.7 The term “Earth System” was invent-ed by James Hutton; its effects are events such as the rapid melting of the cryospheres—the permanent ice regions of the Poles and the Himalayas—caused in the present by raised atmospheric carbon from fossil fuel burning and deforestation. Cryosphere melting impacts thermohaline circulation in the oceans, raised air temperatures are causing more condensation from the oceans and hence increased and stronger precipitation events, and raised land temperatures are causing the spreading of deserts. Others use the term Anthropocene to speak about measurable global human impacts not only on the atmosphere, climate, and cryospheres but also on minerals, nitrogen,

3. Crutzen, “Geology,” 23.4. Ibid.5. Crutzen and Steffen, “How Long?”6. Ibid., 253.7. Hamilton, “Getting the Anthropocene.”

O n Going Gent ly in to the Anthropocene 21

oceans, rocks, rivers, soils, and species. The spread of plastic and black soot are examples of such global anthropogenic phenomena. In this broader definition, the human behaviors that generate the Anthropocene include not only such practices as fossil fuel burning and deforestation, which have rapidly accelerated since 1950, but also agricultural and horticultural plant selection, sewing and tilling, hunting, mining, damming rivers, deep sea fishing, and the movement of species to non-native regions.8

Adopting a broad definitional approach to the Anthropocene, William Ruddiman and others argue that elevated methane levels from early agricul-ture are discernible in sedimentary layers from 5,020 Before Present.9 This would take the dating of the Anthropocene closer to biblical chronology. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin prefer the date of 1610, in recognition of the significance of the European “Age of Discovery,” the disappearance of tens of millions of American cultivators and hunters in the sixteenth century from introduced diseases, and the mixing of species between the Americas, Europe, and Asia this produced.10 The principal stratigraphic evidence of this dating is the mixing of Old and New World plants, pollens, and spe-cies from the 1500s. This dating also fits well with the historiography of Fernand Braudel for whom 1492 was the origin of a new era of globality in human history, in which human cultures, minerals, pollens, and species were gradually mixed up between and across continents.11

The range of possible starting points for the Anthropocene indicates that the dating of this new epoch depends as much upon values as facts. For those who use it to highlight the dangers to human- and other-kind from anthropogenic influence on the climate, Crutzen’s emphasis on atmospheric carbon and fossil fuel burning as the definitive historical marker is correct. But for those who believe that industrial humanity’s influence on the climate is not so cataclysmic, then the role of preindustrial agrarians in increasing atmospheric methane, or of early modern colonials in the movement of spe-cies, is more appropriate. The dating of the Anthropocene, like many other scientific judgments, is in reality an interdisciplinary hybrid that crosses the nature-culture divide. This is because it depends upon judgments about the historical significance of events associated with discernible human influ-ences on atmospheres, forests, ice cores, oceans, rocks, species, and soils.12

8. Pálsson et al., “Reconceptualizing.”9. Ruddiman et al., “The Anthropocene.”10. Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene.”11. Braudel, Structures.12. On hybrids and the nature-culture divide, see Latour, We Have Never Been

Modern.


The identification of the definitive historic events that mark humanity’s rise as the dominant terrestrial influence on the Earth System, including the evolution of soils and species, is a quest for a pre-Heisenberg “factish” which exposes the attempts of moderns since Hume, Kant, Hutton, and Darwin to separate nature from culture, and natural history from human history.13 From the distant future, whether the Anthropocene began in 1750 or 1945 will not be discernible to geologists in sedimentary rocks. In any case since Heisenberg, natural scientists know, at least in theory, that it is not pos-sible to investigate subatomic particles, genes, rocks, or species without the mechanics and subjectivity of the act and tools of interrogation exercising a degree of influence over the observed phenomenon. Particle physics, just as much as Earth System science or ecology, now reveals that humans are entangled in the levels of being they seek to observe, control, reproduce, manipulate, and re-engineer.14

The claim that humans are living in an anthropic epoch, the Anthro-pocene, is not only a matter of historical and scientific judgment. It also involves a departure from nineteenth-century ecological science and the related rise of environmentalism. In essence it is the realization that nature and culture are irrevocably mixed up, and that what for a century humans have called the “environment” is human as well as “natural.” But the an-nouncement of the Anthropocene shares a dominant feature of environ-mental discourse—its apocalyptic character. The earliest apocalyptic text of modern environmentalism in the English language was John Ruskin’s Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. In this lecture Ruskin described his observations over fifty years, as recorded in his journals, of new weather conditions—including a persistent “tremulous” “plague-wind,” a “lurid” “smoke-cloud,” and changes in the color and quality of sunsets—in the skies around his house above Coniston Water in the Lake District, which he blamed on the industrial pollution of “Manchester devil’s darkness” and its “manufacturing mist.”15 Ruskin argued that the smoke besmirched the British Empire; instead of being an Empire in which the sun never set, it was becoming one in which the sun never rose. He called for smoke con-trols on industrial chimneys, and for citizens to be housed in smoke-free zones or greenbelts away from the harmful effects of industrial pollution.

13. In coining the word “factish,” Latour suggests that there is a modern fetishistic attachment to scientific “facts” that are said to be independent of human culture, and in particular scientific discourse and data gathering practices, and in this way, as with fetishistic idols, moderns forget that they invent the idols to which they attribute tran-scendent authority. Latour, Modern Cult.

14. Simmons, “Theology.”15. Ruskin, Storm Cloud, 21, 24, 26–27.

O n Going Gent ly in to the Anthropocene 23

And he was equally concerned at the aesthetic change that industrial pol-lution was bringing about, for it was endangering the whole tradition of landscape, cloud, sky, and weather painting that J. W. Turner, Constable, and other nineteenth-century artists had developed to such a fine art. For Ruskin, an anthropic sunset or atmosphere was not merely a new “fact” to be accepted but a reality that was to be resisted and that indicated a moral and spiritual, as well as a scientific and technical, pathology. Hence Ruskin linked the apocalyptic portent of humanly induced weather changes with a call to moral and spiritual renewal, drawing on the words of Christ when he stilled the storm on the Sea of Galilee, and on the words of the late Hebrew prophet Malachi:

Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you can see the signs of the times. Whether you can bring the sun back or not, you can assuredly bring back your own cheerfulness, and your own honesty. You may not be able to say to the winds, “Peace; be still,” but you can cease from the insolence of your own lips, and the troubling of your own passions. And all that it would be extremely well to do, even though the day were com-ing when the sun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood. But, the paths of rectitude and piety once regained, who shall say that the promise of old time would not be found to hold for us also?—“Bring ye all the tithes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord God, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”16

Ruskin here treated the changes in the weather as a kairos event in which humanity was called to moral, spiritual, and social renewal and not only to make technical changes in its positioning of housing or emissions controls on chimneys.17 Instead of the latter, Ruskin called the industrialists and wealth accumulators who were driving the injustice and pollution of the factory filled cities to recover the old paths of justice and piety, to God, to the land, and to its inhabitants. It was in moral and spiritual renewal that Ruskin envisaged that humanity, and more especially the English, would find it in their power to restrain the civilizational rush towards a coal-fu-elled industrial economy which, though it profited the wealthy few, brought ill health and misery to millions, while besmirching the beauty of the earth and skies for future generations of artists and nature lovers.

16. Ibid., 30.17. Day, “Moral Intuition.”


Crutzen’s announcement of the Anthropocene, including as it did a reference to the Manhattan project and the discernible aftermath of atmospheric nuclear testing in raised atomic isotopes spread across soils and oceans, involves a mode of apocalyptic discourse that is analogous to Ruskin’s description of the “storm-cloud.” To underline the analogy Crutzen was one of the first scientists to model the atmospheric effects of a thermo-nuclear exchange and the possibility of “nuclear winter.”18 As with Ruskin’s storm-cloud, Crutzen’s announcement of the Anthropocene is intended to generate a kairos moment out of scientific observations and predictions of changes in the atmosphere, oceans, plants, and soils. The Anthropocene presents a new and portentous horizon of risk, this time not merely to the appearance of the skies and to the health of city dwellers, but to the whole Earth System. It threatens not just aesthetic losses and localized ill health but the ability of the earth to support the numbers of humans that are and will be born in the future. But unlike Ruskin, Crutzen does not call for moral and spiritual renewal to reduce humanity’s impacts and tread more gently on the earth. Instead, his is a call for a new intentionality in the hu-man management of the Earth System, and for a significant ramping up of research and development by scientists and technologists of the technical means for intentional interventions in the Earth System, including active geoengineering of the atmosphere to reduce solar radiation.19 On this ac-count, the term “Anthropocene” indicates not only that the stable Holocene climate era is ending but also that humanity has a new power over, and collective responsibility for, the state of the earth and her future. Hence for climate scientist H. J. Schellnhuber, the dawn of the Anthropocene repre-sents a second Copernican Revolution.20 The first revolution revealed that the earth, and hence humans, were not at the center of the universe but instead that the earth revolved around the sun. But if the Copernican turn decentered humanity from the cosmos, and reduced the perception of hu-man influence over the earth and the skies, the Anthropocene is a second Copernican turn because it puts humanity back into planetary history as its most influential shaper.

When the philosopher Hans Jonas earlier highlighted this increased sense of human agency over the biosphere, he intended to promote a new moral sensitivity for humanity’s relationship with life on earth and the conditions for its persistence.21 However, when Schellnhuber explains this

18. Crutzen and Birks, “The Atmosphere.”19. Crutzen, “Albedo.”20. Schellnhuber, “‘Earth System’ Analysis.”21. Jonas, Imperative.

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