“Energizing Human Development”: Humanity, Divinity, and the Climate Crisis

During the summer of 2020, the Wendland-Cook program hosted a series of webinars under the theme: Liberating People and the Planet: Christian Responses at the Intersection of Economics, Ecology, and Religion. Originally planned as an in-person conference, these webinars featured insights from theologians and scholars of religion reflecting on our climate and economic crisis. The original papers are being prepared for a book to be released in 2021.

In preparation of the book release and to contextualize the webinars, we featured brief overviews of each of the chapters in an Interventions forum. To see the entire forum, click here. This is Terra Schwerin Rowe’s contribution to the forum.

“ENERGIZING HUMAN DEVELOPMENT”: HUMANITY, DIVINITY, AND THE CLIMATE CRISIS

TERRA SCHWERIN ROWE

September 10, 2020

In a 2016 Report to the United Nations Development Programme, ecological economist Julia K Steinberger emphasizes that most research and policy decisions aimed to mitigate climate change have focused on the concern that human well-being is tied to economic growth, which, in turn, is tied to high energy consumption. She argues that rather than focusing on the problem of economic growth, energy and its role in societal development and human well-being should be a primary focus of research and policy decisions. While Steinberger’s argument emphasizes the aim of human well-being, given her climate and sustainability concerns, it is evident that for her human well-being and ecological flourishing are intertwined.

As Steinberger’s work demonstrates, given the urgency of climate change, energy production and consumption emerges as an urgent focus for ecological economics. The same could be said for the study of religion. In her 2019 book, The Birth of Energy, political ecologist Cara New Daggett highlights the way Scottish Calvinism informed the 19th century emergence of the modern science of thermodynamics. She argues that the Protestant work ethic infused the modern redefinition of energy as an ability to do work. Consequently, Daggett suggests, in order to adequately address the current energy induced climate crisis, we need to decouple the concept of energy from its associations with work.

I agree with much of Daggett’s analysis of problematic theological influences on the way energy has been conceptualized in the West. However, I will argue that the problem is much more ancient than the Protestant work ethic. In the West, from Aristotle to the 19th century “discovery” of oil in America, theologians and philosophers have consistently aligned high heat/energy production and consumption with divinity, the full development of humanity in the form of a rational male, and the height and aims of civilization. Consequently, the more deeply rooted and pressing problem today is the decoupling of high energy from divinity and the highest values and aims of human fulfillment/development.

In her work, Steinberger challenges this consistent Western logic that high energy production and consumption invariably leads to high human development. Steinberger also identifies places in the world where low or moderate energy consumption habits are also high markers for human development and well-being. Given these findings, I argue that an unexplored, but urgent area of constructive theological exploration is in drawing on the rich religious resources of ritual, contemplation, certain modes of asceticism, and communal organizing that can foster the kinds of shifts in human values, aims, and habits that might decouple high energy civilization from human flourishing.

Terra Schwerin Rowe is Assistant Professor in the University of North Texas Philosophy and Religion Department. Her work focuses on critical and constructive engagements with Western religious traditions from the perspective of environmental and feminist concerns. Her first book, Toward a Better Worldliness: Economy, Ecology and the Protestant Tradition (2017) analyzes the Protestant ecological and economic implications of the Protestant articulation of grace as “free gift.” A current project, Of Modern Extraction: Gender, Religion, and Energy (forthcoming, 2022) focuses on the imbrication of gender and energy constructs (including oil narratives) in predominant Western religious and philosophical traditions.