I don’t understand why so many leaders of our religious institutions haven’t zeroed in on the climate crisis as the major moral issue of our time. We are already watching the murder and mayhem it is producing from California to Europe and climate refugees in Africa and Latin America.
Global warming brought devastating floods to the Eastern seaboard, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the Gulf Coast as well as a large part of Asia.
Global warming changed the climate over the Pacific, bringing drought and huge fires to the west coast. Oregon towns of Detroit, Blue River, Vida, Phoenix, and Talent are substantially destroyed. Ironically, the town called Paradise was largely destroyed in California. Fire took Malden in Washington and hundreds of thousands of acres.
Droughts, fires and floods, kill, devastate and drive people from their homes, towns, regions and countries. These are tragedies of biblical proportions. And they create huge flows of refugees – “climate refugees,” because they’re fleeing places where the natural environment has become unlivable.
If humans can do something to stop or reduce it, dealing with dehydration, starvation, death and displacement of millions of people annually, is a moral crisis. All our religious traditions make us responsible to prevent tragedies if we can. Scientists by the legions across the globe and at all levels, in all relevant fields, are telling us we can stop climate change. That being the case, it is a violation of the word of God, a sin in any language, to turn our backs on the growing problem, to keep silent, and elect leaders who won’t deal with the climate crisis.
The clergy can be a force for change. They played a key role in turning white Americans against slavery and for civil rights. I suspect the reticence of too many clerics in dealing with the number one moral crisis of our time has been emptying the houses of worship for decades as people see religion as less and less relevant.
Religious leaders stood with Martin Luther King. Where do religious leaders stand on the climate crisis? Where are they on fossil fuels that heat up the climate and contribute to forest fires? Where are they on the human origins of climate change that lead to drought in some areas, increase flooding and seawater rise in others, and push us to the edge of tipping points that will put the climate on a glide path to hell and our own extinction? Our kids come home from school and tell us to turn off the lights to save power. Where are the clergy?
Some clerics are too fixated on individual behavior to see our contribution to community, corporate and national behavior? A cleric on a panel with me told us that we have no business making corporations behave because we are the enemy in our individual, private actions. He refused to see the systemic problem, the ways that only organized behavior can solve large social problems, the ways that only popular movement to force our legislators to deal with the climate crisis will make a difference.
It would make a big different if clerics would start using their voices and moral authority to spread the movement to deal with the climate before it is too late to save anyone – ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, and each other’s. Clerics have responsibilities too. And please tell me the exceptions.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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