{"id":3781,"date":"2021-07-28T14:15:28","date_gmt":"2021-07-28T14:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=3781"},"modified":"2021-07-29T15:15:55","modified_gmt":"2021-07-29T15:15:55","slug":"words-for-a-dying-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2021\/07\/28\/words-for-a-dying-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Words for a Dying World"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Thinking Little About Climate Grief<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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A new anthology on climate grief avoids many of the pitfalls frequently found in the environmental movement.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Matt Miller
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I recently had the chance to drive the Flint Hills, the most significant remaining stand of tallgrass prairie in the world. The region, making up much of western Kansas and a portion of northern Oklahoma, was preserved from the encroachments of the plow by a rocky terrain and sparse population. Today, when 96 percent of the tallgrass region has been plowed or developed, the Flint Hills compose much of the remainder. Passing down Kansas 177 from Council Grove to Matfield Green, I was stunned by the beauty of the place: the low blue hills in the distance, the tossing early-spring grasses, the wildflowers: compass plant, milkweed, coneflower, poppy mallow. And yet I could never escape a consciousness of all that had been lost. I saw no bison; driving on a modern highway, I was never in true solitude. All in all, the drive was an experience of profound ambiguity: joy and loss, gratitude and frustration. I felt a desire to be involved in conserving this precious landscape mixed with guilt at my complicity in its destruction.<\/p>

Anyone who learns a bit about the history of the land begins to be haunted by such visions: the vanishing prairie, the felled old-growth forests, the extinct species. A new collection edited by Hannah Malcolm, Words for a Dying World: Stories of Grief and Courage from the Global Church<\/em>, considers these visions and the emotions attendant upon them. Words for a Dying World<\/em> is an eclectic volume, encompassing personal essays, poetry, and academic prose. Contributors write from a variety of professional backgrounds (professors, clergy, activists, scientists, artists) and geographic contexts (the UK, India, New Zealand, Canada, Ecuador, Namibia, the US, Finland). Theological perspectives are varied as well, although most cohere in the range of what we would term the \u201cmainline\u201d here in the US, with a decided emphasis on Malcolm\u2019s own tradition in the Anglican Communion.<\/p>

As with any edited collection, not every piece in this volume impressed me equally. However, there are in Words for a Dying World<\/em> many valuable explorations of concerns that anyone who feels a sense of ecological responsibility will feel. Kyle B. T. Lambelet\u2019s essay \u201cMy Grandmother\u2019s Oil Well\u201d helpfully explores complicity and how to negotiate a sense that one is profiting from the destruction of the earth (such as by owning part of an Oklahoma oil well); Christopher Douglas-Huriwai\u2019s \u201cKo Au te Whenua, Ko te Whenua Ko Au: I am the Land and the Land is Me\u201d articulates a compelling theology of the land drawing on traditional Maori thought; Caleb Gordon, in \u201cThe Edge of the World,\u201d describes the sometimes inconsistent ways in which we set boundaries on the damage we do to the land.<\/p>

Malcolm\u2019s chosen term for the emotions I have been describing is \u201cclimate grief.\u201d I should confess that I\u2019m wary of the term. Much as Wendell Berry has criticized amorphous concern with \u201cthe environment\u201d as insufficiently tethered to concern for real places, I\u2019m disinclined to focus my advocacy on something as large as the climate when there are so many particular places (the tallgrass prairie) to protect. As Berry argues in \u201cThink Little<\/a>,\u201d if the environmental movement deals only in big, sweeping ideas about global change, it will be too easily subsumed under the heading of a fad. In contrast, the person who is willing to \u201cthink little\u201d and thus to involve herself personally with the issue\u2014by even an act as small as planting a garden\u2014will have a personal, private involvement with the land that will better sustain a lifetime of advocacy. As Berry argues, \u201cthe environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives.\u201d This is not an argument for quietism or mere personal responsibility, as if we can each individually save the world in our own backyards. It is simply an appeal for advocates to have some skin in the game, to attend to their subject with care and precision and fidelity to the particular.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Thinking big about the environmental crisis too often produces messages that enact a bleak histrionics about impending doom.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Fortunately, Malcolm ably counters my concerns about thinking big and little in her introduction, which lays out an understanding of climate grief that is less about a vague sense of impending doom and more about a constructive dialectic of lament and hope, played out in our particular places. She insists that climate grief \u201cis not about death in abstraction. We grieve the death of particular things, whether creatures or places, and, until we understand this, our relationship between others and ourselves, we will continue to flounder in slogans and simplifications.\u201d An expression of climate grief \u201ctakes on the shape of the places and creatures to whom we intimately belong.\u201d Accordingly, Words for a Dying World<\/em> centers around personal works written from particular places\u2014Centralia, Oklahoma; New South Wales, Australia; Manchester, England; West Timor, Indonesia. As such, the thinking in this collection tends toward the little, toward personal accountability and involvement.<\/p>

Thinking big about the environmental crisis too often produces messages that enact a bleak histrionics about impending doom\u2014by obsessing over problems on a scale that we cannot meaningfully affect, we can too readily tend towards helplessness and rage. I gravitate toward more constructive forms of advocacy, whether that\u2019s the culture-building, back-to-the-land work of Berry and the institutions he has fostered, or the technological solutions (carbon capture, clean energy) advocated by thinkers like Matt Frost. In contrast to these active approaches\u2014which think little by getting practically involved in local action\u2014a stress on climate grief could be seen as driving one towards a form of advocacy centered on performance of emotion, with ultimately counterproductive results.<\/p>

Here too, Malcolm heads off the least productive possibilities for climate grief. Her introduction marks ways in which advocacy can go wrong if we \u201cromanticize the non-human (\u2018we need to learn from Mother Nature\u2019), flatten the obvious differences between humans and other creatures in order to emphasize similarities (\u2018we are nature defending itself\u2019), or demonize all human activity (\u2018humans are the virus\u2019).\u201d She notes, perceptively, the ways that even expressions of grief can be misused, if they are merely \u201cwielded as power.\u201d And, most importantly, she turns in her conclusion toward resurrection hope: \u201cSurvival, compassion, honesty. These are all good reasons to grieve. But the conviction that Christ\u2019s resurrection marked the death of death also contains the hope that our works of love in the present are not consigned to destruction.\u201d Exploring our grief at the destruction of place and ecology thus becomes a foundation for that love which never ends.<\/p>

As such, the experience of climate grief is a participation \u201cin God\u2019s orientation towards the earth\u2014the One who takes on flesh to dwell among flesh, in time and space, and tastes death.\u201d Malcolm here articulates a response to ecological devastation that is far from the abstract pursuit of big ideas; it is rather a kind of thinking little with the One who, in his self-emptying incarnation, in his taking on of our grief, thought littler than we can conceive.<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Matt Miller<\/strong> writes from Reeds Spring, Missouri. He writes about gardening, place, and faith at A Habitation<\/a>, and can also be found at <\/em>matt-miller.org<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>

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Words for a Dying World: Stories of Grief and Courage from the Global Church <\/strong>was published by SCM Press on December 7, 2020. <\/em>Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a copy for our reviewer. You can purchase a copy on their website here<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new anthology on climate grief avoids many of the pitfalls frequently found in the environmental movement. 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