Don't Even Think About It (35 page)

This independence has led to some predictable fire from the Florida far right for his open partnership with Muslim preachers. But that is nothing compared with the attacks he receives for his belief in climate change. The hate mail has now calmed down, but while he is rarely accused of being a “tool of the devil” anymore, people still take him aside to say, “I think you are good man, and you mean well, but
they’ve got you
.”

Hunter was introduced to the subject by his fellow evangelist Richard Cizik—“my friends are always getting me into trouble,” he says—who had attended the 2002 conference organized by Sir John Houghton in Oxford. Cizik describes his experience in Oxford as a conversion experience: “I had, as John Wesley would say, a warming of my heart, a change that only God could do, like Paul’s conversion in which he fell off a donkey on the road to Damascus.”

Hunter also describes his belief in climate change as a religious conversion. He quotes from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says, “You must be born again. The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.” You are being called to live your life by a different standard.

Always on the lookout for new narratives, I invite Hunter to explore the ways that his church identifies and nurtures belief in Christ and whether these might help us build wider acceptance of climate change. Three key concepts emerge that are directly relevant to climate change.

First, that belief is held socially and is shared through testimony and witnessing with your peers and community. Hunter describes this as “the huge one”: “You have the fellowship of fellow believers. That is the encouragement that we need, to be around people who have the same interests, the same goals, the same values as ourselves.”

The church then becomes a safe place to admit to personal problems and struggles with belief and doubt. “We have to make an environment—excuse the pun—where we fully acknowledge that everybody is going to have doubts and struggles, and everybody is going to need encouragement. We see if we can help with that and we walk through that together.”

Second, that people can be brought to a commitment at a moment of choice. In the Bible, people are offered choices: As God says to the people of Israel, “I have set before you life and prosperity, death and destruction, blessings and curses . . . Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” Evangelism seeks to generate a moment when people actively choose to commit themselves to their faith in a public context that sets a social norm for others. The outreach crusades of the great evangelist Billy Graham would culminate in an altar call in which new people were invited to step forward to receive a special blessing. It’s a simple but very effective device to break the bystander effect. As Hunter says, “Even if you are a little tentative, you see all these people going forward and you think, ‘I have nothing to fear. I will be with them. I’m not left to my own devices. I want to join the movement.’”

And, Hunter need not add, the altar call is also a point at which the church can identify potential new members and then welcome and support them. Evangelical outreach, such as the hugely successful “I Found It” advertising campaign in the 1970s, always directs people to make personal contact through their local church. Environmental outreach around climate change, on the other hand, invariably directs people to websites and places where they can find more information.

Third, Hunter argues that belief in climate change can be understood as a personal revelation. Moments of personal revelation are a universal human experience reported by around three-quarters of people, regardless of their culture or religion. In 1969, more than seven thousand people replied to a small advertisement placed in British newspapers inviting them to share their “experience of a presence or power which is different from your everyday self.” They described their experience as joyous, sometime frightening, and always “ineffable” and “unknowable.” Although these are often called religious experiences, only a quarter of the respondents use the word
God
.

Professor Brian Hoskins, the director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change in London, is unusual in his recognition that scientific information requires this transformative moment. “Often what we do is provide the landscape in which Saint Paul can have his moment. I don’t believe these come from nowhere; they come from all the information around and then it clicks for someone. We [as scientists] are creating the ether in which people can have that illumination.”

Lynda Gratton, a chair of the World Economic Forum, reports that the most ambitious sustainability programs in the business world invariably stem from the transformative inner experience of a single influential individual. Jochen Zeitz, the former chairman of Puma, says that his stay in a Benedictine monastery inspired him to develop a valuation of environmental impact in his bookkeeping. H. Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart, reportedly had a climate change “epiphany” on a field trip in New Hampshire to learn about the impacts of global warming on maple trees.

Eamon Ryan, the former environment minister in the Irish government, told me of how an ecology course at his Jesuit school, which started as “a chance to lark about and smoke behind trees,” became his personal “epiphany on the interconnectedness of us and nature.” His language is itself a reflection of the teaching of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit movement, who had found his own calling sitting by a river.

Bob Inglis, former Republican representative for South Carolina, asks how we can enable this kind of life-changing conversion. Drawing on the church experience, he formulates it this way to me: “You go to them with a credible messenger and you affirm their truth. And you help them to see that this fits within their story and you honor them by being there with them. Then you can get conversions.”

Conversions? Affirm? Witness? Epiphany? These words never appear in the discussions of how we mobilize action on climate change. Acceptance of climate change is assumed to be transferred, as though through osmosis, by reading a book or watching a documentary. When it is acquired, it is assumed, like the data that it is based on, to be solid and unshakeable. Because there is no recognition of climate change conviction, there is no language of climate change doubt, no one is offering to give us encouragement or to help us to “walk though that together.” There is no defense against backsliding and denial, and there is no mechanism for coping with grief.

And so, outside the circles of dedicated environmental activists, there is no community of belief. There is no social mechanism for sharing it, least of all witnessing it. People deal with their hopes and fears in isolation, constrained by the socially policed silence and given no encouragement other than a few energy-saving consumer choices. If Christianity were promoted like climate change, it would amount to no more than reading a Gideon’s Bible in a motel chalet and trying to be nice to people. The critics are right in this regard—if climate change really were a religion, it would be a wretched one, offering guilt and blame and fear but with no recourse to salvation or forgiveness.

Guilt
is a word that appears all the time around climate change. “Is it just me, or does everyone else feel guilty for being alive too?” wrote Jeremy Burgess in an opinion piece in
New Scientist
. What is missing, Burgess noted, is forgiveness, and failing this, “we can only look forward to punishment.”

Sally Weintrobe, a psychotherapist, agrees. Without forgiveness, she writes, our feelings about climate change will “become stuck in a climate of hatred, bitter recrimination and relentlessness, easily feeling harshly judged and not moving towards accepting the reality of the loss.”

Mechanisms for personal forgiveness are a critical component of the Abrahamic religions. In the Christian faith it is the power of God to forgive that leaves the door open for personal change. In Judaism the ritual of Al Chet, held on the eve of the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, enables the recital of sins against oneself, others, and God. Most relevant to climate change, the ritual explicitly regards inaction and silence as the moral equivalents of active sin.

The climate change narrative contains no language of forgiveness. It requires people to accept their entire guilt and responsibility with no option for a new beginning. Not surprisingly, what happens is that people either reject the entire moralistic package or generate their own self-forgiveness through ingenious moral licensing.

Fred Luskin, the director of the Stanford University Forgiveness Projects, is at the center of the booming area of forgiveness research. He tells me that the number of published studies has quadrupled in just ten years, though not one of them has been concerned with forgiveness and climate change. He agrees that this is a major weakness, especially, he suggests, as climate impacts increase and “there will be a frantic rush to punish, to assign blame, to limit freedoms, and to set up good guys versus bad guys.”

This is already happening in international negotiations, where the unresolved responsibility for past emissions continues to prevent agreement on a shared approach to future action. According to Luskin, forgiveness is not about pardoning, or excusing; it is “a process of transforming the continuing and destructive feelings of guilt, blame, and anger into positive emotions such as empathy and reconstruction.” The absence of a narrative of forgiveness cuts off many of the options for a constructive resolution.

I found talking with Hunter and other evangelicals invigorating. Putting aside the immediate context of evangelical Christianity—and here I will openly admit that I respect but do not share their religious faith—they outline a vocabulary and methodology for overcoming our cognitive obstacles that is absent from discussions around climate change.

In this book I have shown that scientific data, although undoubtedly vital for alerting our rational brain to the existence of a threat, does not galvanize our emotional brain into action. Indeed, I have suggested, climate change contains enough inherent uncertainty and distance that we can quite deliberately keep what we know contained and detached from what we believe and what we do.

Learning from religions, I suggest that we could find a different approach to climate change that recognizes the importance of
conviction
: the point at which the rational crosses into the emotional, the head into the heart, and we can say, “I’ve heard enough, I’ve seen enough—now I am convinced.”

Applied to climate change we could accept that this is a process of steadily growing awareness, though it may also progress through personal revelation or moments of informed choice and public commitment. Conviction need not remove questioning and doubt—and it is essential that climate science is never above challenge—and these uncertainties, anxieties, and fears need to be openly recognized within a supportive community of shared conviction.

Finally we could learn to find ways to address the feelings of blame and guilt that lead people to ignore or deny the issue, by enabling people to admit to their failings, to be forgiven, and to aim higher. By concentrating on universal and non-negotiable “sacred values,” we could sidestep the arid cost-benefit calculations which encourage us to pass the costs onto future generations.

These ideas are not unique to religions, and can be found in every successful social and political movement in history. We already know how to overcome the cognitive challenges that make it possible for us to ignore climate change. The lessons are all there, if we choose to heed them.

41

Why We Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change . . . And Why We Are Wired to Take Action

Through our long evolution, we
have inherited fundamental and universal cognitive wiring that shapes the way that we see the world and interpret threats and that motivates us to act on them. Without doubt, climate change has qualities that play poorly to these innate tendencies. It is complex, unfamiliar, slow moving, invisible, and intergenerational. Of all the possible combinations of loss and gain, climate change contains the most challenging: requiring certain short-term loss in order to mitigate against an uncertain longer-term loss.

Climate change also challenges and reverses some deeply held assumptions. We are told that the way of life that we associate with our comfort and the protection of our families is now a menace; that gases we have believed to be benign are now poisonous; that our familiar environment is becoming dangerous and uncertain.

Our social intelligence is well attuned to keeping track of debts and favors, and ensuring equitable distribution of gains and losses. Climate change poses a major challenge here too, with all solutions requiring that rival social groups agree on a distribution of losses and thereafter the allocation of a greatly diminished shared atmospheric commons.

We are best prepared to anticipate threats from other humans. We are inordinately skilled at identifying social allies and enemies, identifying the social cues that define loyalty to our group and that identify the members of rival out-groups. Climate change is immensely challenging in terms of these categorizations. It is not caused by an external enemy with obvious intention to cause harm. It therefore tends to be fitted around existing enemies and their perceived intentions: a rival superpower, big government, intellectual elites, liberal environmentalists, fossil fuel corporations, lobbyists, right-wing think tanks, or social failings such as overconsumption, overpopulation, or selfishness.