Seeking a Climate Revival

I was asked at a climate conference in Washington, D.C. recently to forgo my digital devices – no laptop, no phone, no watch. Given how bleak things are in this moment, and the fact that I had seen firsthand how frequently governments hack those they deem “dissidents” in the press freedom space – this layer of security was one I very much appreciated, though I suspect it was to prevent unwanted recordings.

That said, it was an incredibly strange feeling to be removed from my disposal the most powerful device ever made in human history for so long a time. I recall a few years ago a Gizmodo article that talked about how our phones were turning us into androids because these “devices” functioned as a bodily extension of our limbs at this point, and if you ever doubt that, go without your phone for a day – not just with it turned off in your pocket but truly no access to any digital device anywhere near you for hours on end.

After the conference, I took to a quiet meal alone processing some of the horrifying things I’d heard, the considerations of world-ending scenarios, and rather than scrolling my phone while I ate, I simply listened. I listened to the sound of my breathing and to the sounds of the kitchen clanking and the workers in the restaurant laughing with each other. I then listened in earnest to an inner voice I had not listened to in a while, and I kept coming back to the same refrain, namely that in this ugly moment in our history as a country and as a species, if we are to survive or move in earnest toward anything resembling justice, we will have to seek a spiritual reawakening.

I’m going to be honest: I cringe a little bit that I’ve even said that. It pulls me back to my Southern roots or to seminary, and it feels a little more, well, ‘evangelical’ than I intend it to sound. I think what I mean is that when the ‘moral arc of the universe’ bends toward justice, it does so because the people bending it are attuned to their truest selves both as individuals and as a community.

To say that we need a spiritual reawakening, then, is not necessarily a statement about religion or belief systems – all of which can have their place and time in our lives. It isn’t asking people to go to church or synagogue or mosque over the weekend. It isn’t a claim that is either theist or atheist or agnostic. What, then, would we possibly be seeking?

I don’t know the answer to this exactly, but my gut says: our ancestors. In particular, by that, I mean our pre-colonial ancestors. And as silly as it may seem to say, “We should pray to our indigenous ancient kin for answers to the problems we’re facing today,” I do think they had access to a kind of knowledge we’ve lost.

They knew what it meant to commune with the Earth, to belong to it and to its preciousness. They understood the fragility of one season to the next – how so much could be taken or so much could be given depending on how the harvest returned that particular year. Their life was an ebb-and-flow, a cycle of dependency with the planet that in our attempt to tame and control, we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we’re beyond all that, having progressed to another new world.

A dear friend once said to me, “We weren’t supposed to all live like kings.” He was talking, of course, about our materialism to some degree and the endlessness of capitalism, its need for never-ending growth. But as we talked about it more, we kept coming back to how crazy it all is, for example, the addition and power the computer and internet has gifted each of us, the mini-serfdoms we all play into inadvertently by merely existing.

I didn’t know at the time of that conversation what I learned recently, namely that for every thousand tons of carbon emissions we spend, a future human dies. Each U.S. citizen spends about 16 tons of carbon a year. I would imagine I’ve been on the higher end of that average in the course of my life and at 41, that puts me at more than two-thirds of the way to a life that’s taken later because of what I took now.

By our shear nature now, we are actively robbing a future human of their life, and we are able to do so completely disconnected from that truth because we are so bombarded by information that in all our faux connections we’ve disconnected ourselves from ourselves. Our greatest lie we’ve ever told one another as a species is a kind of individualistic exceptionalism that guarantees destruction while pretending to guarantee life.

You’ll be online but never connected.
You’ll be consuming but never satisfied.
You’ll be free but never liberated.

What, then, might it mean to reconnect to a world that instead of revolving around you or me, revolved around the “lilies of the field”? What would it mean to reconnect to a time in our past when humans were wondering what kind of better life they might gift their children and grandchildren – and the gift wasn’t land or “stuff” or money – but relationship?

When I say we need a new spiritual awakening, I think that’s what I mean: a call to community, a community with each other but also with both our common ancestors as well as our descendants. It’s only with them in mind that we can learn and live out our truest selves, after all.

I want in earnest a world where a future generation can look back at us with as much awe and gratitude as we owe our pre-colonial kin. But the question of how we find that world – whether because we chose to seek it or because nature itself forced us to – is what is increasingly less clear to me. Suffice to say, in the ugliness of our politics, in the scary moment we find ourselves in, collapse may not be the worst thing we’ve ever faced if that’s what it takes to wake us up and find each other again.