For a future worth living, we need one fundamental shift

By Tom Krattenmaker
OnlySky, October 7, 2024

Have you heard the two major candidates for president say much about the urgent need to face the climate crisis? I haven’t either.

Have you seen any polls indicating that the voting public ranks climate high on their list of priorities heading into the election? Nor have I.

Not to play at false equivalencies. When it comes to climate (and so much else), Kamala Harris is superior to her opponent. The administration of which she’s part has done more for a low-carbon energy shift than any other. In her convention speech she declared that people have a right to “live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.”

Trump? Windmills cause cancer. “Drill, baby, drill.”

Not only would we fail to move forward in preserving the Earth’s habitability in a second Trump presidency. We would move backwards.

Because Trump must be defeated, I am giving Harris the benefit of the doubt and harboring something between hope and trust that she will give climate the urgent attention it deserves if she becomes president. Those of a like mind realize that her climate reticence probably owes to her doing what she must do to win. We realize that the public, on aggregate, cares more about the economy, crime, and immigration than about climate.

The dynamic reveals a frustrating lay of the land. As the world burns and drowns, it’s mostly business as usual for the majority of Americans and the politicians seeking their favor. Until there’s a new paradigm, there’s only so much a realistic political “leader” can do to enact the laws and policies commensurate with the enormity of the crisis.

We need a change in the zeitgeist—a change in the “givens” and parameters and underlying social conditions—if the necessary actions are to become feasible on a large scale and at the requisite speed. If humanity is going to have a future worth living, there needs be a fundamental shift in the way Americans—all people—perceive humans’ relationship with the planet and the lifeforms with which we share it.

‘Communion of subjects’

It’s not a mystery what that new paradigm will have to look like. Pioneering thinkers like Thomas BerryBrian SwimmeMary Evelyn TuckerJohn Grim, and others, have been laying the philosophical, ethical, and spiritual groundwork for decades. It comes down to how humans view the universe and natural world and our place in them.

Humanity must come to accept that the universe is not a cold, indifferent mechanical system but a mysterious gift replete with an impressive capacity for self-direction and awe-evoking creativity and complexity. Not just objects for the taking and exploiting, the Earth and its other-than-human lifeforms must come to be seen as alive, precious, worthy of rights and respect.  

“The universe,” Berry wrote, “is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. The devastation of the planet can be seen as a direct consequence of the loss of (the) capacity for human presence to and reciprocity with the nonhuman world.”

The animals and plants that people disregard as dumb or inert, as merely responding to the stimuli and forces around them, are more like us than people generally acknowledge. Nonhuman lifeforms are up to something. They strategize and act to provide for themselves and their offspring and to perpetuate their species, often in cooperation with other species. They possess purpose and agency and, with those, the capacity for suffering.

They are co-habitants and co-travelers with us in a biosphere that has its own penchant for creativity and complexity. “The human,” Tucker writes in a volume of essays on Berry’s work, “needs to recover a sense of being part of not apart from the Earth community.” 

The Earth community of which she speaks—it is wonderfully resilient but can be pushed only so far before it breaks down, with chaotic and destructive results.

All this is worth accepting and acting on because it’s true and right. But more, it creates the exact context that is needed if humanity is going to find the commitment and wherewithal to take action to head off large-scale catastrophe and create a flourishing future.

As I have discussed elsewhere, the absorption of this different understanding would catalyze profound changes in the way our species does education, religion, spirituality, business, economics, law, and, yes, politics. These systems are, to a large degree, premised on outdated understandings of peoples’ place in the world and are unsustainable if humans are to find a healthy way forward. The transformations would be premised on the glad acceptance of humanity’s more humble and reciprocal way of living on this planet, mindful of its limits and the need to care for it.

Now? I recently went through the galling but revealing experience of having Facebook reject a sponsored post I submitted that contained the words “climate change.” If that’s a violation of Meta’s community standards, something is alarmingly wrong with the community or the company’s understanding of it. 

Widen the parameters

The great task is to align human life with the life of the planet and its wildly diverse inhabitants. “Humans (living) out of alignment with the Earth community is causing problems not only for humans but also for the rest of life on Earth,” says Sam Mickey, an educator and author who studies ethical and existential perspectives on environmental issues. “That alignment is crucial for the survival of humankind and for the survival of all the species and ecosystems we inhabit the planet with.”

As for the current paradigm—one in which the climate threat and ecological crisis are largely ignored by the candidates for the highest office in the land, one in which hurricanes and fires wreak ever more devastation but are sloughed off as bad luck or natural fluctuations in the weather—its days are numbered. It is coming to an end whether by our own choosing and acting or by the playing-out of larger geological forces. Given the massive destruction and death sure to be wrought by the latter, the former is preferable, to put it lightly.

As important as they are, politicians and elections are woefully unequal to the task when it comes to the transformations the twenty-first century is demanding. They operate inside a narrow band of the possible. We must dramatically widen the parameters—a task only achievable through large-scale social movements and paradigm shifts.

I long for the day when presidential candidates don’t ignore the climate crisis but climb over one another to show an Earth-loving public that they’re the one who will do right by the planet. Sadly, that will remain a dream until there’s a climate change of the good kind—a shift in the political climate.

People will lead. Politics will follow.