This panel offers insights into human’s violent/non-violent role as members and stewards of the Earth community. We begin our panel by considering the slow violence committed against our Earth. This panel continues by highlighting radical environmental activist movements including Earth First!, Extinction Rebellion, and Just Stop Oil, which tow the line between violence and nonviolent resistance. While organizations can justify their radical environmentalism through adherence to nature spiritualities, some outsiders consider their behavior to be terrorism. Nuances in the violent/non-violent discourse of religion and ecology and Dark Green Religion will be explored, considering questions like: When does violence become a tool for non-violence, and what kinds of strategic violence are necessary to honor the sacredness of Earth? When can peacemaking and constructing cultural imaginaries further climate justice? What can we learn from fundamentalism and Cold War ecotheology as conflicts continue as a result of climate change?
Although peacemaking has concentrated on resolving armed conflict, it can further climate justice when appropriately amended. For example, Glen Stassen’s religious version of just peacemaking prioritizes efforts to realign economic incentives—now climate justice’s foremost obstacle—by reforming regulatory regimes. Such reform is crucial to redressing climate change because the slow violence of this change can only be remedied through long-term coordination. Nevertheless, Stassen’s reliance on mutual self-interest and economic interdependence for such regulatory reform leads him to emphasize prudence. This emphasis compromises his peacemaking’s ability to mitigate climate change, since as conventionally understood prudence intensifies the intergenerational conflicts of interest that accelerate such change. However, religious traditions have resources to broaden conventional understandings of prudence and render interests unrelated to one’s own worthy of consideration. Religious peacemaking that harnesses these resources may thereby moderate the slow violence of these intergenerational conflicts and so advance climate justice.
Drawing on over three decades of in-depth ethnographic and archival research, in this presentation I will review the main watersheds in the history of radical environmentalism, focusing especially on Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front, but also illuminating continuities between these radical environmental forms (including their nature spiritualities and apocalyptic expectations) and the more recent emergence of Extinction Rebellion. I will analyze the factors that precipitated the eruption and implosion of Earth First! and the ELF, including the critically important role of the 'dark green' nature spiritualities that animate most of its activists, consider the movement’s current forms and future prospects, and whether Extinction Rebellion represents a new, and possibly more effective chapter, in the history of radical environmentalism.
Recent high-profile activism, especially by the group Just Stop Oil, has increased attention to radical environmental groups. Responses have typically ranged from derision to anger, with some calling for the group to be considered a terrorist organization. In this paper, I apply William Stringfellow’s theology of the powers and principalities as a useful heuristic for interpreting radical environmental activism, to demonstrate that such activism is an example of truthful action in the face of systems of deception and death. I turn to Stringfellow because of the explanatory force of his treatment of the powers and principalities. In ways that track closely the tactics of the fossil fuel political economy, this New Testament imaginary reveals the essential connection between systems devoted to death and the deceptive and dehumanizing tools that perpetuate those systems, and it shows the feebleness of activist efforts that fail to recognize the systems for what they are.
The apocalyptic future of the climate crisis looms large in the cultural imagination: news reports, opinion pieces, dystopian fictions - all project to a not-too-distant future where human civilisation collapses, or the world-as-we-know-it ends. Yet there is another concept, also drawn from the study of religion, relevant to the climate crisis: one that points us not towards the future - but rather the past. This paper will explore the utility of the concept ‘fundamentalism’ in understanding the social effects of climate change. Whilst acknowledging its limitations as a descriptive category, scholarship on ‘fundamentalism’ nonetheless identified a key fault line in 20th century society - reaction against the destabilising trends of modernity. In the 21st century, climate change is fast displacing modernity as the destabilising force. This paper considers what we can learn from fundamentalism about identifying emerging social fault lines and conflicts in the era of climate change.
This paper offers a brief intellectual history of a Cold War era classic of ecotheology: Sallie McFague’s 1987 Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. I argue that it provides an imaginative portal to a moment of recent history that may have some lessons for us, as we live differently into similar forms of possible danger: world obliterating violence, and environmental crisis. I focus on McFague’s suggestion that these dangers threaten to end the idea of the future, and her argument that theology is a form of fiction that creates imaginative pictures. Cold War era ecotheology can be read as a form of speculative fiction offering speculative visions of a thriving future earth life. One lesson scholars of religion and ecology might learn from this Cold War era ecotheology is the importance of imagining (and re-imagining) our relationship to power, and to the future (which does not yet exist but can be imagined).