MORALITY AND RELIGION IN THE CLIMATE CRISIS.

AuthorHendershot, Susan

Journal of International Affairs (JIA): You are the president of Interfaith Power & Light. Can you describe for our readers what that organization does and why the work is important?

Susan Hendershot (SH): The mission of Interfaith Power & Light is to inspire and mobilize people of faith and conscience to take bold and just action on climate change. Our whole mission is focused on mobilizing people of faith from around the country to work for climate solutions. We are based in Oakland, California, and we have 40 state affiliates around the country, so we are able to work at the local, state, and national levels on our issue, which is pretty unique for a faith organization. It allows us to be fully focused on the issue of climate change and to have that grassroots infrastructure we need.

We bring people in the door to the issue through our programs. For example, we have a program called Cool Congregations. It is actually our longest running program and it teaches congregations how to measure and reduce their energy use. Programs like that bring people in the door. It educates them on the issue of climate change and shows them how to respond in a practical way. But we never want to leave them there; what we really want to do is to bring them into the advocacy side of things. We know that what we really need to do is get the right policies in place to address this emergency, and bringing people into advocacy is a major part of the solution. What we need to do is cultivate advocates who can speak up to their policy-makers and urge them to enact the right policies and block the bad policies. We look at it as a "both/and" issue: we want people to take personal, practical action, and we want them to be policy advocates.

J1A: A lot of people are probably used to seeing religion and climate change in separate baskets. How do you see the concept of climate change fitting in to the biblical narrative?

SH: While religion can play a very positive role in calling attention to this as a moral issue (which I believe it is), in some ways it has also played a negative role. Consider the broader creation narrative; although there are two creation narratives in Genesis, we've translated one word of it as "dominion," which, many people have decided, means that humans control the earth, that it was given it to us, and that we can do what we want with it. The problem with that narrative is that it obscures the narrative of stewardship and caretaking. The idea that humans were put into the Garden of Eden to tend and to keep it is a much different way of thinking about it than giving "dominion" over it.

At the same time, when I read scripture, I find many examples of this compelling narrative around how we should be taking care of both the earth and one another. The truth is that we are all bound together. We cannot separate out what happens to the earth, what happens to the water, what happens to the air we breathe, what happens to us, or the creatures, or the plants, and so on.

In the Hebrew scriptures, when the people of Israel were in right relationship with God, they were fulfilling the Covenant and the land was flourishing. The opposite was also true; when they fell out of that relationship, when they...

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