Don't Even Think About It (33 page)

We cannot stand to think of the death of our own children, but we accept that they will die after we ourselves have died. Similarly, we can avoid the fear of climate change by placing its impacts beyond our own life span. In focus groups, people often do this quite openly, justifying their indifference with the observation that it is all in the future, when they will be long since dead and gone.

However, there is another, subtler aspect to Becker’s terror management theory. When the reminder of mortality is subtle or so subliminal that people do not even notice it, they display a greatly enhanced sense of the superiority of their own social group, and that can lead them to give increased attention to status, money, and improved self-image. Becker believed that our innate way of coping with our death is to invest our energy in our social group and its achievement—what he called our “immortality project.”

Dickinson suggests that it is the subconscious associations of climate change with death that are having the greatest effect, fueling the extreme polarization of deniers and believers, and driving the wider population toward status-driven high-carbon lifestyles.

She cites the strong evidence that people interpret images of environmental destruction in terms of their own death. As Becker’s theory predicts, exposure to images of death increases environmental concern among those who already have those values, and reduces it among those who do not.

Throughout this book, I have avoided arguments that are not supported by strong evidence, but in this case some conjecture is justified, not least because so many thoughtful people (Bill McKibben, Bob Inglis, Daniel Kahneman, and Joe Romm, among them) have spontaneously suggested in my interviews that climate change might be a proxy for death.

The environmental author Carolyn Baker finds it impossible to avoid this connection: “Collapse forces us to march in a funeral procession toward the end of life as we have known it—and the end of ourselves as we have known them. And who, I ask, would willingly sign up for this?”

Many people who work on climate change deal with a deep sense of grief. Journalist Ross Gelbspan wonders why he has such problems crying when he feels such a terrible sadness to see the loss of the future for young people who look forward to fulfilling their lives. “Instead of just running away from it, I try to take a deep breath and close my eyes and let it in.”

The campaigner Bill McKibben agrees that climate change does feels uncannily like our own death. When I invite him to explore the theme, he adds an important caveat: This is, he tells me, quite unlike a natural death. “We are grieving for what we are doing and our own inability to deal with it. We all know we are going to die, and we used to be able to cope with the thought that our life was contributing to something larger that would survive us. Now even that has been taken away from us.” So even the “immortality project” that compensates for our own deaths has been taken away from us.

Increasingly we are told that whatever we do, we are
committed
to some uncertain future catastrophe that threatens to render the past meaningless. All we can do is wait for it to come. It feels both real and unreal, something we are told will happen, that we might rationalize but we can’t quite believe.

This
strange sense of impermanence was the central theme in McKibben’s seminal book on climate change,
The End of Nature
:
“Our comforting sense of the permanence of our natural world, our confidence that it will change gradually and imperceptibly if at all, is, then, the result of a subtly warped perspective . . . We are at the end of nature.”

Maybe it is appropriate to leave the last word to the founder of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, whose work so often revolved around the centrality of death in our psyche. In his short essay “On Transience,” Freud explores the way that our anticipation of future death diminishes our view of the present. In 1915 Freud was walking with a friend in the summer woods, a few months after one hundred thousand men had been massacred in the Battle of Ypres:

The poet admired the beauty of the nature around us, but it did not delight him. He was disturbed by the idea that all this beauty was bound to fade, that it would vanish through the winter, like all human beauty and everything beautiful and noble. All the things he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be devalued by the fate of transience for which they were destined.

39

From the Head to the Heart

The Phony Division Between Science and Religion

Tim Nicholson’s modest and soft-spoken
style provides a disconcerting cover for an altogether more flamboyant and risk-taking personality. In 1995 Nicholson and ex-army wife Major Jo became local celebrities after they drove from their hometown of Oxford, UK, to Oxford, New Zealand, in a 1954 Morris Oxford—a bulbous British car that looks like a boiled sweet and is about as powerful as a lawnmower.

In 2009, Nicholson was in the news again—this time around the world—when he sued his former employer, a large housing organization, on the grounds that it had fired him from his position because of his deeply held conviction in climate change. Nicholson built his court case on European legislation that protected workers against discrimination on the grounds of “any religious or philosophical belief.” He had, quite deliberately, begun another dangerous journey: this time right through the minefield that lies between those who regard anthropogenic climate change as an irrefutable scientific fact and those who see it as an ideologically driven belief.

Skeptics saw the case as confirmation of their long-held argument that climate change was a new and false religion. Environmental campaigners applauded his bravery, and one newspaper, unhelpfully reinforcing the religious theme, declared him to be a green martyr.

Scientists were a lot less convinced. Science writer Wendy Grossman said he should be “appalled” by the case he had brought. She wrote, “Science is not a belief system but the best process we have for establishing the truth. If the issue of climate change is one of competing religious beliefs, then those claiming impending doom can be safely ignored.”

Nicholson would never argue that climate change itself was similar to a religious belief. What he was arguing, and what ultimately won him the case, was that this scientific evidence could become the basis of a life-changing moral philosophy and that this was
similar
to many religions—based on principles of caring for others, responsibility, and thoughtfulness. As Nicholson told me, “In the end, climate change is not some facts and figures; it comes down to what’s in your head. And that’s a belief.”

Most climate scientists hate to talk about
belief
,
which they regard as diametrically opposed to reality-based facts. Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, says, “I always feel a bit weird when someone asks me if I ‘believe’ in climate change, as if it’s the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus.” Australia’s chief scientist Ian Chubb complains, “I am asked every day ‘do you believe?’ and every now and then I make a mistake and say yes or no. But it’s
not
a belief. It’s an understanding and interpretation of the evidence.”

As with so many of the arguments that surround climate change, this is not really about the word
belief
, but about the religious frames that it triggers and the false polarity it suggests between the rational brain and the emotional brain. In the struggles with deniers, the word
belief
has become poisoned, and many scientists see it as the antithesis of peer-reviewed science. This is why I prefer to use the word
conviction
—to indicate a condition of strongly held opinion, reached through a personal evaluation of the evidence.

Many deniers harbor a deep hatred for all religion, seeking to smear climate change by association. To one business columnist, climate advocates are like “crazed American televangelists who predict that the Antichrist will come next Tuesday or that God will purge the land of homosexuals.”

The metaphor is especially strong in Australia. Ian Plimer, a retired petroleum geologist who has built a lucrative new career as a leading Australian denier, based an entire book,
Heaven and Earth
, around this theme, arguing that climate change “creates a fear of damnation, demands appeasement by selling indulgences to the faithful and demonizes dissenters.” Even Cardinal Pell, Australia’s most senior Catholic, describes emissions reductions as “religious sacrifices” and compares the sale of carbon credits with “the pre-Reformation practice of selling indulgences.”

However, climate skepticism is, in a manner of speaking, a broad church, and it also includes those, especially among the American Christian right, who see climate change as a heresy that “speaks to the inherent spiritual yearnings of human souls and seduces children in our classrooms through spiritual deception.” These are the words of Calvin Beisner, the founder of the Cornwall Alliance, which markets a set of twelve DVDs that will “provide the armor” to rise up and slay environmentalism, or as he calls it, the Green Dragon.

In 2006 Beisner and twenty-two evangelical leaders launched “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” arguing that it is a natural cycle. One of the most active promoters of the declaration, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, argues that we have a God-given right, indeed requirement, to burn fossil fuels because “the parable of the talents tells us that the wicked and lazy steward was the one who buried his talent in the ground and did not do anything to multiply it.”

However, conservative evangelicals, like the political right as a whole, are split between those who think that climate change (if happening at all) is due to natural cycles and those who accept that it is due to human behavior and that taking action to prevent it is the moral equivalent to protecting unborn life and preserving the family. So says the Evangelical Environmental Network in its rival manifesto, “Climate Change: An Evangelical Call for Action.” The Network achieved widespread attention for an inspired television commercial about the environmental impacts of car travel that ends with the question “What would Jesus drive?” There are now similar initiatives among Jews, Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists, and Hindus that weave climate change into their own narratives and traditions.

In spite of this, what has been remarkable is how
little
involvement religions have had in the climate change issue. Previous social justice movements, from the anti-slavery campaigns through civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti-debt, and anti-poverty campaigns, arose through church networks.

People of faith have found it hard to incorporate this new issue into their existing worldview. Climate change is seen as an environmental issue that is poorly defined and contested in their theology. For conservative Christians, it is tainted by its association with the liberal environmental movement and has become bundled among the checklist of issues that define their group loyalty.

Environmentalists are equally wary of religion and seem to form strategic alliances with just about anyone before they talk to religious groups. This is a major tactical error. All of the world’s major religions are growing, Christianity and Islam fastest of all, and much of that growth is from the more fundamental strains of their faiths. Within the United States, only 5 percent of people are members of environmental organizations, but more than 70 percent of Americans still identify with a religious faith, and more than a quarter of Americans consider themselves to be born-again or evangelical Christians.

Even Christians who do care tend to keep their faith and climate change “in two separate boxes,” says Erin Lothes Biviano, a professor of theology at the College of Saint Elizabeth in New Jersey who spent a year interviewing climate change campaigners in the faith communities. She tells me that they rejected the comparison between climate change and religion because “they have an experiential relationship with their faith that is special, and they would not say that climate change has that same personal luminous quality.”

So, what association between religion and climate change
is
appropriate? In one sense, they are clearly incompatible. Religions are based in ancient texts and revealed knowledge. Climate change is grounded in constantly changing and carefully evaluated scientific data. Religions relate to the otherworldly, the spiritual, and the afterlife. Climate change is utterly worldly in its causes and solutions and offers nothing spiritual.

However, climate scientists with strong religious faith argue that this has always been a false divide. Katharine Hayhoe is the director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University and is also an evangelical Christian who is married to a pastor—an unusual combination that has led
Time
magazine to list her as one of the World’s 100 most influential people. Hayhoe says, “The facts are not enough. When we look at the planet, when we look at creation, whatever it’s telling us is an expression of what God has defined it to be. So instead of studying science, I feel like I’m studying what God was thinking when he set up our planet.”

Sir John Houghton, who founded and then chaired the Inter­­governmental Panel on Climate Change for fourteen years, is also a preacher in the Methodist Church. In 2002 Houghton hosted a conference between scientists and U.S. evangelical leaders at Oxford University (because he was told that “Americans love coming to Oxford”), which was the first attempt for a conservative audience to talk with one another about climate change using the language of faith. The conference was a resounding success and initiated a change of heart in participants that many later described as a conversion. The initiative provides further strong evidence that even the most unconvinced people can be persuaded by trusted peers who understand their values and can use their common language.