Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds

Description

Read chapter 6 online for free here.

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change?

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld, edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges.

People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change.

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

Preface
Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World
Recombinant Responses
1. Climate Change Never Travels Alone
2. Climate Change, Moral Meteorology and Local Measures at Quyllurit'i, a High Andean Shrine
3. Religious Explanations for Coastal Erosion in Narikoso, Fiji
Local Knowledge
4. "Nature Can Heal Itself"
5. Maya Cosmology and Contesting Climate Change in Mesoamerica
6. Anthropogenic Climate Change, Anxiety, and the Sacred
Loss, Anxiety, and Doubt
7. The Vanishing of Father White Glacier
8. Loss and Recovery in the Himalayas
Religious Transformations
9. Angry Gods and Raging Rivers
10. Recasting the Sacred
Conclusion: Religion and Climate Change
List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Calentamiento global
• Global warming
• Ethics in religion
• Climate change
• Ethics
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 04 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253056016
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 8 Mo

Extrait

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First printing 2021
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-05605-4 (cl)
ISBN 978-0-253-05604-7 (pb)
ISBN 978-0-253-05603-0 (web PDF)
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World / David L. Haberman
PART I . Recombinant Responses
1. Climate Change Never Travels Alone: Oceanian Stories / Cecilie Rubow
2. Climate Change, Moral Meteorology, and Local Measures at Quyllurit i, a High Andean Shrine / Guillermo Salas Carre o
3. Religious Explanations for Coastal Erosion in Narikoso, Fiji / Amanda Bertana
PART II . Local Knowledge
4. Nature Can Heal Itself : Divine Encounter, Lived Experience, and Individual Interpretations of Climatic Change / Georgina Drew
5. Maya Cosmology and Contesting Climate Change in Mesoamerica / C. Mathews (Matt) Samson
6. Anthropogenic Climate Change, Anxiety, and the Sacred: The Role of Ecological Calendars in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia / Karim-Aly S. Kassam
PART III . Loss, Anxiety, and Doubt
7. The Vanishing of Father White Glacier: Ritual Revival and Temporalities of Climate Change in the Himalayas / Karine Gagn
8. Loss and Recovery in the Himalayas: Climate-Change Anxieties and the Case of Large Cardamom in North Sikkim / Mabel Denzin Gergan
PART IV . Religious Transformations
9. Angry Gods and Raging Rivers: The Changing Climate of the Central Himalaya / David L. Haberman
10. Recasting the Sacred: Offering Ceremonies, Glacier Melt, and Climate Change in the Peruvian Andes / Karsten Paerregaard
Conclusion: Religion and Climate Change: An Emerging Research Agenda / Willis Jenkins
Index
PREFACE
FOR SOME FIFTY YEARS, SCHOLARS from the humanities and social sciences have sought to better understand the role of religion in ecological issues. Research in this field has tended to cluster around a set of conventions that crystalized early in the formation of the field: debates have tended to focus on whether religion generally or particular religious traditions are good or bad for the environment, and the bulk of published literature has tended to concentrate on North Atlantic societies and especially on the forms of Christianity predominant in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. These foci have remained as constraints on the emerging body of scholarship on religion and climate change.
Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds , along with its companion volume Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (edited by Evan Berry), are outcomes of a research project that aimed at broadening the conversation about religion and climate change by expanding the geographic frame of reference, thinking comparatively, and emphasizing ethnographic scholarship. Funded by the Henry Luce Foundation s Religion and International Affairs Program and managed by American University s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), this project was called Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective. Although they do not appear extensively in the pages that follow, Toby Volkman, Luce Foundation program officer, Eric Hershberg, director of CLALS, and Rob Albro, CLALS research associate professor, played vital roles in shaping the conversations that formed the basis of this book.
Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective began with a focus on three highly visible forms of environmental vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The project hypothesized that religious communities around the world are confronted by similar environmental pressures and that their adaptive responses might afford comparative insight about the ways religion matters for climate-change issues. Specifically, the project was structured around a series of workshops, each of which foregrounded cases from one frontline impact of climate change. A 2016 workshop at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, India, concentrated on urban water scarcity and the challenges faced by megacities in South Asia and South America as they struggle with issues of supply and sanitation. The second workshop was held at Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in Lima, Peru, in 2017 and focused on glacial melt and the ecological precarity of high-elevation communities in the Andes and in the Himalayas. The final workshop, convened at the University of the West Indies, in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, in 2017, was dedicated to the special challenges facing small island developing states in the Caribbean basin and in the South Pacific, namely sea-level rise and storm intensification. The workshops provided space for contributors to share, refine, and recalibrate their scholarship in conversation with experts from other disciplinary and regional contexts.
Exchange among project contributors was further facilitated by a provisional framework for the role of religion: conversations were organized into three streams, each representing one important mode of engagement between religion and climate change. In the first, contributors examined the significance of religious actors, including faith-based organizations, religious leaders, and institutionalized systems of religious mobilization. The second explored religious frames of reference, seeking knowledge about the ways religious beliefs, perceptions, and vocabularies shape the way human communities articulate and engage the phenomena invoked within the perhaps too comprehensive term climate change . The final stream imagined the relationship between religion and climate change differently, asking whether, when, and how environmental changes precipitate religious changes.
These are complex questions with no easy answers. The roughly two dozen scholarly essays that emerged from the Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective project suggest some of the many ways intersections between the issues can be seen and understood, hopefully in ways that evoke sympathy and humane policy responses.

INTRODUCTION
Multiple Perspectives on an Increasingly Uncertain World
DAVID L. HABERMAN, INDIANA UNIVERSITY
I FIND IT DIFFICULT TO get a bead on climate change as it appears in the comparative perspective of global occurrences and diverse cultural experiences. Moreover, thinking about climate change provokes an unsettling anxiety-at least for me. I recently finished a book on interaction with a sacred mountain and its stones in northern India (Haberman 2020). Although understood in radically different ways within human cultures, stones are solid-it s easier to get a grip on them. But climate change is a different matter altogether. A classic distinction between fear and anxiety is that fear has a clear object or understandable threat, whereas anxiety does not. Climate change certainly does not present itself as an obvious object or easily comprehendible threat, nor is it localized like a particular sacred mountain. It appears to be everywhere, yet nowhere. Sometimes it s an idea; at other times it s a phenomenon. Climate change poses a problem so all-encompassing that it seems to absorb all other environmental challenges and becomes a category of its own. It s vast and vague, present here and now, yet threatening in ways that stretch far into an uncertain future. Furthermore, as the essays in this volume make evident, there is a diversity of perspectives on what climate change even is about and what causal forces are involved with it. A multiplicity of climate changes emerge in this collection of studies of the manner in which so-called climate change is interpreted and experienced as well as in the range of responses that various communities around the world call for.
There appears to be no one-size-fits-all perspective or solution. In addition to addressing climate change as a global phenomenon, greater attention needs to be given to local cultural explanations of it, which are often articulated in terms of the mythic, ritual, and theological traditions of a particular place. This is one of the chief aims of Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds . It seeks to deepen our understanding of the relationship between religion and climate change across multiple regions of the world, for a deeper understanding of climate change requires comprehending the ways in which religion is involved in human experiences and reactions. Also featured here are the complex nature of religion in the context of climate change and some transformations it is undergoing in face of climate-related challenges. In many ways, the field of religion and climate change is a new and emerging field; this volume is intended as an introductory contribution to this emergence.
RELIGION AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The subfield of religious studies known as religion and ecology, which appeared in the latter decades of the twentieth century, involves the examination of religious worldviews for how they shape human attitudes and behavior toward nonhuman entities and the environment as a whole.