For a while now, scientists have been warning us of Global Warming. Collectively, we haven't been able to adjust. Each warning is more dire than the last. Since 2007, the IPCC has told us it's too late to fix it.
Not cheer, but thoughts on the flip.
I'm not going to organize this. Accepting disintegration is part of the task.
Exhibit 1.
A woman stands up in my Quaker meeting and recounts a dream, or perhaps vision is better, that followed on a moment when she had a deep, not surface, realization that humanity's not going to make it. In the dream, the world was on fire, and she went down into the earth, where she encountered a fish. The fish had the message, "the earth will survive." Perhaps simple and obvious enough - it got along for billions of years without us, will continue to do so.
Exhibit 2.
Suzanne Vega captures the value of coming to know things as both objects and knowledge passes back into night
Exhibit 3.
I pitched a class to a seminary on "Liberal Eschatology: Social Justice and Human Exinction." The question is, if theology has let go of an ultimate justice in heaven in favor of ongoing efforts to establish justice on earth, what does the prospect of human extinction mean? It didn't get picked up. I might get to teach the class some day. I might not. It represents the hope of putting the pieces together, at least for the moment. If not, the pieces are there, just not together.
This is what I would have assigned:
Walter Rauschenbusch – A Theology for the Social Gospel
Reinhold Niebuhr – Moral Man and Immoral Society
James Cone – A Black Theology of Liberation
Spike Lee - When the Levees Broke
Jared Diamond – Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail
Alan Weisman – The World Without Us
James Gustafson – Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective
Christopher Southgate – The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil
Lee Edelman – No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Mary Daly – Quintessence … Realizing the Archaic Future
Catherine Keller – Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World
Rosemary Radford Ruether – Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing
Sallie McFague – The Body of God: An Ecological Theology
Anne Primavesi – Gaia and Climate Change
Exhibit 2, revisited.
Exhibit 4.
We need scientific solutions to get us out of this mess. We also need to be honest with our narratives and realize that technological-scientific ideologies and practices got us into this mess.
Exhibit 5.
As I sort through a sense of hopelessness about the future, I keep coming back to the ideas, dense and vivid, of Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, in which she offers a metaphysics of becoming as alternative to the stasis of being and the despair of nothing. It's a tour de force, tackling centuries of misreadings of Genesis, and throwing the reader into a deeper appreciation of the unfolding world that blossoms and decays, but will always have been, once it is no more.
Exhibit 5a.
She talks about fractals a lot, too.
Exhibit 6.
Part of the reason I went and got a Ph.D. is that I wanted to be part of the chain of transmitting the knowledge from the past down generations into the future. Shit.
Exhibit 2, again.