climate scholarship

Sigurd Bergmann (Trondheim) and Dieter Gerten (PIK Potsdam) came out with a helpful scholarly anthology on climate, Religion in Environmental and Climate Change (London: Continuum, 2012).  The subtitle is Suffering, Values, Lifestyles.  This anthology is a proceedings; its chapters originate in a symposium held January 2010 at the PIK (Potsdam Institut fuer Klimafolgenforschung / Institute for Climate Impact Research) in Germany near Berlin.  This 2010 conference had been superb: it was interdisciplinary and focused, scholarly and cutting edge, rigorous and creative.  It gathered theologians, anthropologists, ecologists, sociologists, historians, and environmental policy analysts.  The point was to share perspectives from the humanities on the emerging reality of climate change, a reality that challenges human beliefs to the core, and this includes religious creeds.  The subtext of the conference, at least to this here participant, was to do the scholarly groundwork for reinventing western culture. 

When I organized the 2006 climate philosophy conference in Tampa, various American theologians contacted me, wishing to participate, but their submitted proposals were denialist without exception.  I rejected them all, but was regretful that the monotheistic faithful in America are part of the problem.  I would have welcomed theological-philosophical synergies in Tampa, but ultimately had to wait four years before I could enjoy such a heuristic convergence in Berlin.  In Europe, Christians are part of the solution.  How deeply divided the American religious culture is can be seen in the chapters by Laurel Kearns (Drew) and Michael Roberts (unaffiliated; vicar in Lancaster, UK).  Of the other presenters I listened to and chapters I read (an incomplete list), I was most impressed with the papers by Markus Vogt (LMU Munich), Timothy Leduc (York), Susan Crate (George Mason), Froemmig/Reichel (Free University Berlin), and Gulnara Aipaev (National State University Kyrgyzstan).  Here is the list of contributions:

facing the human faces of climate change
Dieter Gerten & Sigurd Bergmann
3-15

global change and the need for new cosmologies
Wolfgang Lucht
16-31

religion in the public sphere: the social function of religion in the context of climate and development policy
Michael Reder
32-45

contemplating climategate: religion and the future of climate research
Timothy Leduc
46-65

climate justice from a Christian point of view: challenges for a new definition of wealth
Markus Vogt
69-84

climate justice and the intrinsic value of Creation: the Christian understanding of Creation and its holistic implications
Friedrich Lohmann
85-106

evangelicals and climate change
Michael Roberts
107-131

religious climate activism in the United States
Laurel Kearns
132-151

the future of faith: climate change and the fate of religion
Martin Schonfeld
152-172

climate and cosmology: exploring Sakha belief and the local effects of unprecedented change in north-eastern Siberia, Russia
Susan Crate
175-199

religious perspectives on climate change among indigenous communities: questions and challenges for ethnological research
Lioba Rossbach de Olmos
200-214

vulnerable coastal regions: indigenous people under climate change in Indonesia
Urte Undine Froemmnig & Christian Reichel
215-235

jaichylyk: harmonizing the will of nature and human needs
Gulnara Aitpaev
236-260

environment, climate and religion in ancient European history
Holger Sonnabend
261-266

As an aside, and for the sake of topical organization, it should be noted that my "the future of faith" is not really scholarship.  Due to its futuristic-speculative subject-matter, it is devoid of empirical contents.  Everything in there is purely conceptual and creatively made up, so it should rather be filed under "climate philosophy".