Only by treating “climate change” as a profoundly theological issue can we discover—in part by rediscovering—a better understanding and appreciation of nature and ourselves.
Panic, fear, and loathing concerning atmospheric warming and the “existential” threat alarmists claim it to be have failed so far to encourage a reconsideration of modern man’s relationship with the natural world and the Promethean attitude toward it that has prevailed in Western civilization since the 16th century. The current project to replace fossil fuels with “green” energy signals merely a change of technique in the effort to manage, adapt, control, and repurpose nature to humanity’s material ends, rather than an early attempt at reimagining our relationship with nature and the way in which we think about it.
All that has changed in mainstream thought is a greater attention to how the human race might learn to be less wasteful, destructive, and irresponsible in its exploitation of nature, while maintaining the West’s historically unprecedented levels of production, consumption, comfort, and profit and at the same time “leveling up,” in current British jargon, the non-Western nations by encouraging them to substitute “clean” energy for the dirty kinds.
The green movement—the scientific and governmental parts of it, anyway—is not proposing to replace human arrogance vis-à-vis nature with humility, as environmentalists have been urging for a century or more. Rather, it is raising arrogance to a higher level by assuming that humans are capable of dominating and controlling nature even more completely in the future than they did in the past, repairing the damage already done while simultaneously preventing further harm in future centuries by their quasi-divine powers of imagination, invention, manipulation, and control.
In short, the new project is one of dominating nature by healing it, instead of by continuing to injure it.
But this aim, too, is impossible. Homo sapiens, as the dominant species on earth, cannot survive and flourish according to his nature without affecting, in harmful ways as well as in good ones, the natural environment, the atmosphere included, he shares with all living creatures. This was true many millennia before the advent of the industrial age and fossil fuels, beginning with humanity’s earliest attempts at agriculture and the creation of agricultural societies and continuing through the rise of the great trading and commercial civilizations.
And it will continue to be so after all existing fossil reserves are either exhausted or replaced by other resources, which are certain to discovered—sooner or later and in one respect or another—to be as ”dirty,” or otherwise harmful and unpleasant, as fossil ones. Unsightly wind farms, which do significant damage to the raptor population of the American West while replacing scarce agricultural land with concrete pads, pylons, and access roads, are a case in point.
It is only natural that “climate change” should be perceived as a “crisis,” whether real or imagined, prompting us to reconsider our place in the natural world and our responsibility for it as well as for our own future. But reconsideration needs to go much deeper, and much further beyond, mere scientific, technological, and economic policy. The search for “clean” energy must be accompanied by a philosophical renewal of the kind envisioned by Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences (1948), where he lamented the decline of piety, defined as “a discipline of the will through respect” resting upon a “proper relationship to nature” and a “superior philosophic resignation to the order of things.” The absence of piety, Weaver asserted, is manifested by the prevalence of “pride” and “impatience” in the modern world that leaves man in his metaphysical confusion a “creature who does not fully comprehend his creation.” This spiritual distemper proved, he believed, the indispensability of the “appeal to religion.” Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, poet, novelist, and philosopher, has been arguing much the same thing since the late 1960s.
Such a reformation in public thought and feeling is, for the moment, difficult to imagine. It can cannot be created by educational institutions, much less by government programs; it can occur only as the natural emanation of a growing and generalized consciousness aroused by intelligent and informed public debate and discussion and resulting in an interest and awareness incited by apprehension and even fear. Yet it is hardly more unimaginable than the re-imagination, redesign, and reconstruction—in historical perspective, overnight—of the global economy and the creation of non-pollutive systems of energy production, trade, and consumption.
And all of this dependent upon the necessary replacement of free and individualistic societies by unfree ones consisting of tightly controlled and sternly regimented masses directed by unrepresentative and dictatorial governments of which our present overbearing elites are only the forerunners. As history demonstrates, such engineered societies can never be realized according to the plans of their designers, while attempts to do so have been, without exception, calamitous and inhuman.
Thus any “solution” to the “problem” of atmospheric warming must be a clear, realistic, non-ideological, non-utopian effort. This should resemble as little as possible any sort of crusade such as the “net-zero” movement has become, on the part of cooperating national governments freely elected by free peoples to consider the question of which historical periods have come closest to achieving something like a balance between—on the one hand—civilizational flourishing and human happiness, and—on the other—the health and general wellbeing of the natural ecosystems on which all biological life depends.
Meanwhile, “net-zero” must be recognized as a technical solution to what, in fact, is an existential problem. Not in the sense that it threatens the future of life on earth, but that it is ultimately concerned with modern man’s alienation from nature, from himself, and from the Divine, an alienation due to own metaphysical blindness, unrestrained materialism, Promethean delusions, and reckless folly. Only by treating “climate change” as a profoundly theological issue can we discover—in part by rediscovering—a better understanding and appreciation of nature and ourselves, while strengthening our weakened relationship with the Creator.
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