Joel Pett, a once obscure cartoonist for USA Today, became famous after one particular cartoon of his became a sensation. It was published right before the 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen and it shows a presentation taking place at the conference. The guy on stage is showing a PowerPoint slide with the list of benefits of fighting climate change: “energy independence, preserve rainforests, sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewables, clean water and air, healthy children, etc.” – all bullet-pointed on the screen. And then there’s a guy in the audience, standing and asking a question: “What if it’s a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”
This cartoon spread like wildfire. The cartoonist had this to say about it: “I’ve had requests from all corners of the globe for signed copies, permission to reprint it in publications, post it on blogs, even blow it up onto protest signs. …Not a week has gone by … that I haven’t had a request for some kind of re-use. Recently I heard from a Canadian blogger who …remarked that someone in his town had a replica, get this, painted on their garage. … Somehow it seems like the highest compliment I’ve ever received.”
Humor with staying power like this is humor that speaks to a deep truth that we all recognize. In this case, it’s the truth that the things we would need to do to stop global warming are also the very things that would transform our world into the world we yearn for in so many ways. By its very nature, climate change is not something that can be siloed or surgically separated from everything else. What causes global warming is not just one policy or practice that needs a tweak, but a spiritual sickness that pervades every aspect of our life together. And by the same token, to heal our earth would require a healing so deep and so wide it would touch each and every one of us.
For decades if not centuries our movements – progressive and religious movements – have been working toward a world where we care for one another – where everyone has enough to eat, where everyone gets the health care that they need, where everyone has a safe place to call home; where the air and water are clean and the soil is free of toxins; where everyone is paid a living wage; where people are no longer ranked based on their gender, race, class, or sexual orientation; where cruelty to humans and other animals becomes an artifact of the past; where violence and war are washed from the face of the earth.
For the most part, these struggles have been understood as “issues,” that, while interconnected, were separate battles. These battles are still ongoing, still have to happen and still have to succeed. Climate change doesn’t diminish the necessity for us to do any of this work. But today we also need to think bigger. We have to change our culture at its root. We have to create a world where we no longer see other humans or the earth as “resources” for our use and disposal, but as irreducible miracles. We were always going to have to make this fundamental change eventually but, in the words of author and activist Naomi Klein, climate change “puts us on a deadline.” As Elly described so frighteningly in her homily, time is running out for us to send a message of love to the future.
We’re going to have to change everything. We’re going to have to change, not just our property laws, but the things that we value – and by things, I mean things. We’re going to have to start valuing people and time over things and money. We’re going to have to change, not just our environmental regulations, but our very relationship to the earth from one of domination and extraction to one of awe and stewardship. We’re going to have to change, not just our economic policies, but our entire economy such that corporations are accountable to everyone impacted by their business – to their employees, to their customers, to the people who live where they extract their natural materials and dispose of their waste.
We are going to have to get, not just campaign finance reform, but once and for all, money out of politics. The same ethic that allows corporate oil and gas executives to fill the halls of the EPA allows the NRA to buy politicians and prevent any real action on gun control. And so we have poor black and brown kids choking from air pollution, oil drilling on indigenous lands, and schools becoming sites of bloodshed and terror. It’s all the same root. A calculation has been made that certain people’s lives with certain colored skin in certain places in certain kinds of countries are just not worth much compared to corporate profits. We’re going to have to change that calculation.
We’re going to have to buy, not just different, “greener” stuff, but a lot less stuff. Every single thing that we buy, every bit of energy we use was at some point taken from the land, air, or oceans. The earth can’t regenerate anywhere near as fast as we’re taking from her. We’re going to have to shift our work into the caring professions – teaching, social work, service of all kinds, academics, and the arts.
We’re going to have to imagine outlandish possibilities: Maybe the most faithful thing we could do with this piece of land we’re sitting on right now would be to disassemble this building and turn it into a community garden to feed the hungry in Brooklyn, or a tiny patch of woods with carbon capturing trees and a rest stop for migrating birds and butterflies. I don’t say this to give anyone a heart attack – there are no imminent plans to do this as far as I know – but just to make the point that we’re going to need to really think out of the box and be prepared to make radical change in ways that we would think would be unthinkable.
The idea of this kind of profound, heart-level, values-focused transformation is terrifying to those in political and economic power right now. They do everything possible to stamp it out, to label it as naïve utopianism, impossible, unrealistic, and disastrous. The NY Times columnist Bret Stephens complains that it’s “quasi-religious,” as if that’s a bad thing. It’s not because people like him actually fear that if it happened, this scaling down to a simpler life would make us all miserable; it’s because they fear we might like it.
We might like it a lot. This transformation is more than quasi-religious; it’s absolutely religious and entirely spiritual. It’s about re-sacralizing our relationships. It’s about de-commodifying the other. It’s about reclaiming humility and admitting our utter dependence on our mother, the earth. Given a chance, we just might like this. We might find that we like unplugging from our screens and rediscovering our live friends, children, parents, and strangers on the subway. We might like getting dirt under our nails, growing food and sharing food. We might actually like giving up some creature comforts and conveniences when we find that when we’re not outsourcing our lives through screens and machines, we’re actually living them.
We will definitely like having clean air and water. We will like knowing that our lifestyles no longer come at the expense of the lives of poor people around the world. We will like knowing that we are protecting wild animals in all their diverse magnificence. We will like living in a country where racism and sexual violence aren’t killing our children, while our leaders stand by and do nothing. We will like reorienting around time with our families and building strong communities. We will like feeling healthier and stronger with our delectable plant-based diets. We will like our carbon-neutral play – walking, talking, running, reading, playing music, making art, and making love. We may even like having less stuff, when having less means having more of what matters.
And if it turns out long in the future that the climate change deniers were right, that all along climate change was a big hoax perpetuated by China or just another stunt of the liberal fake news media and the polar ice caps are perfectly fine, then, oh well. We built a better world for nothing.