(RNS) — The middle of a war that is grabbing the world’s attention may not be the best time to reflect on climate change. But the latest report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that one crisis is not taking a pause while we settle another.
The news from this sixth IPCC assessment, unsurprisingly, is not good.
As The New York Times summarized it, “The dangers of climate change are mounting so rapidly that they could soon overwhelm the ability of both nature and humanity to adapt, creating a harrowing future in which floods, fires and famine displace millions, species disappear and the planet is irreversibly damaged.”
Nowhere does the future appear more harrowing than for the inhabitants of small islands, from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, whom rising seas threaten to literally wipe off the map. But as imminent as the physical danger is, how the inhabitants reckon with what they are facing is often at odds with the scientific understanding.
In a chapter on small islands, the IPCC report to its credit recognizes that “material and non-material symbols that express collective meaning” are “often overlooked in adaptation policies and plans.”
As it happens, many of these communities are composed largely of Bible-believing Christians, and what they believe matters because “(e)xternally-driven adaptation efforts in rural small-island communities that exclude community priorities, ignore or undervalue IKLK (indigenous knowledge and local knowledge), and are based on secular western/global worldviews, are often less successful.”
In other words, it is important to know where the affected communities are coming from — not least, religiously.
Take the outer Fijian island of Ono. When Amanda Bertana, a sociologist at Southern Connecticut State University, went there to study relocation plans, she found a devout Christian population that believes that rising sea levels are the result of God’s disapproval of their immoral behavior and, at the same time, that they won’t be flooded into oblivion.
Why not? Because in the ninth chapter of the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God promises Noah after the waters recede, “Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of the flood.”
For Bertana, this rejection of the secular narrative of coastal degradation is “a form of emotional self-preservation” — one, to be sure, that undermines efforts to get them safely relocated. This comforting promise not to flood the Earth again has been widely embraced among sea-level-threatened islanders.
But University of Oxford geographer Hannah Fair, also working in the South Pacific, has found alternative climate-related interpretations of the Noah story.
Some Fijians see in Noah a model for disaster preparation. Others, in a less orthodox interpretation, regard Noah as a villain who used his wealth for self-protection and those who drowned as victims.
Meanwhile, on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, University of Texas anthropologist Brent Crosson found that the Afro-Christian denomination of Spiritual Baptists has adopted a biblical understanding of environmental destruction based on a (mis-)reading of Psalm 24.
That psalm begins, in the King James Version, “The Earth is the Lord’s.” But since the English creole spoken in Trinidad does not employ the possessive apostrophe-s, the Spiritual Baptists say, “The Earth is the Lord.”
This has led them to see the Earth as God’s body, suffering harm from human activity. That includes the activity of oil companies, which despite providing Trinidad with significant wealth nevertheless are considered vampires consuming the planet’s lifeblood.
Writing in a forthcoming collection of essays, “Climate Politics and the Power of Religion,” Crosson sees in this interpretation of Scripture an “ethics of injury” that “forms the basis not only for empathy but for new legal regimes that, despite many challenges in implementation, define the Earth as a person with rights.”
Those who track religion and climate change tend to divide the world into Pope Francis-type progressives and white evangelical deniers. But there are more environmental theologies in heaven and earth, dear reader, than are dreamt of in their philosophies.
(The views expressed in this opinion piece do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
Hurricane Ida hit the Louisiana coast with 150 mph winds on Aug. 29, 2021, 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans on nearly the same path.
Ida was one of the most intense tropical storms on record in the state. Its storm surge was less than Katrina’s, but it quickly flooded streets and homes outside the levee system where many residents were under mandatory evacuation orders. Most of New Orleans’ rebuilt levees appeared to have held, but the powerful winds tore up roofs, knocked down trees and caused “catastrophic damage” to transmission lines, cutting power across the region.
Four articles from our archives, written by meteorologists and atmospheric scientists, offer some insight into why the New Orleans area is at high risk for intense hurricanes and what climate change has to do with these powerful storms.
1. Some areas are more prone to hurricane damage
New Orleans is among the most at-risk places along the U.S. coast for hurricanes. An analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated the area was likely to see a hurricane within 50 nautical miles about once every seven years and a major hurricane about every 20.
The numbers shown here reflect how often a hurricane would be expected within 50 nautical miles. The red dots suggest a hurricane every five to seven years.NOAA
One factor is timing, she wrote. Storms tend to hit Texas and the Atlantic Coast earlier in the season, while the northern Gulf Coast is at higher risk from late August into October. Trade winds tend to push storms away from the western Gulf later in the fall.
The busiest areas during each month of hurricane season.NOAA
Another is the shape of the sea floor. A shallow continental shelf like Louisiana’s can generate a powerful storm surge. Parts of the coast were inundated with more than 9 feet of water as Ida arrived.
Conditions along the storm’s path, particularly the water temperature, largely determine whether a tropical storm becomes a dangerous hurricane, Masson said.
“Three key ingredients are needed for a hurricane to form: warm sea surface water that’s at least about 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26.5 C), a thick layer of moisture extending from the sea surface to roughly 20,000 feet, and minimal vertical wind shear so the thunderstorm can grow vertically without interruption,” Masson wrote.
Hurricane Ida had all three. The Gulf of Mexico’s surface was exceptionally warm as Ida moved through, with temperatures around 85 to 90 F (29.4 to 32.2 C). The storm also had plenty of moisture and very little wind shear to stop it.
2. What does climate change have to do with hurricanes?
The 2020 hurricane season broke records with 30 named storms, seven major hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher, and 10 storms that underwent rapid intensification like Ida did before making landfall.
Hurricane Ida just before landfall on the Louisiana coast on Aug. 29, 2021.NOAA
On the question of whether climate change affects the number of hurricanes, there is no detectable global trend in hurricane frequency, and studies using computer models have had conflicting results, Ruppert and Wing wrote. But, they said, there is a trend toward more intense storms – those that are Category 3 and higher, like Hurricane Ida.
Climate change also affects the level of hurricane damage in another way: It gradually increases the risk from storm surge.
Storm surge – the huge volume of water that the hurricane pushes on shore – is one of the greatest threats to life and property from any hurricane. The height and extent of the storm surge depend on the strength and size of the hurricane, but sea level rise is raising the baseline height of the ocean, Penn State meteorologist Anthony Didlake Jr. explained.
“As water warms, it expands, and that has slowly raised sea level over the past century as global temperatures have risen. Freshwater from melting of ice sheets and glaciers also adds to sea level rise. Together, they elevate the background ocean height,” Didlake wrote. “When a hurricane arrives, the higher ocean means storm surge can bring water further inland, to a more dangerous and widespread effect.”
The latest global climate analysis from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change offered similar conclusions.
It discussed evidence that hurricanes are now more intense than they were 40 years ago, are intensifying more rapidly and are slowing in their forward movement, leading to more rainfall. The influence of greenhouse gas emissions in these changes is still being determined; reductions in particulate pollution have also had important effects, said Robert Kopp, an author of the report’s chapter on oceans and sea level rise.
“The clearest effect of global warming is that a warmer atmosphere holds more water, leading to more extreme rainfall, like that seen during Hurricane Harvey in 2017,” Kopp explained. “Looking forward, we expect to see hurricane winds and hurricane rains continue to increase.”
In June 2017 — in response to the planetary climate crisis — Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist religious leaders joined hands with indigenous peoples from five tropical countries to form the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) — devoted to protecting the world’s last great rainforests.
Since then, IRI has worked to engage congregations of all faiths around the globe in an effort to, through political pressure, protect the rainforests of Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Colombia and Peru — accounting for 70 percent of the world’s tropical forests.
During Climate Week at the United Nations in New York City starting September 22, IRI will unveil its Faiths for Forests Declaration and action agenda, jumpstarting its global campaign to harness faith-based leadership and the faithful in recognizing tropical forests as “sacred” and humanity’s obligation to provide stewardship to these great bastions of biodiversity.
IRI recognizes the staggering scope of the challenges that lay ahead — to create and energize a worldwide interfaith movement that will successfully pressure national governments to act on climate — national governments that have long backed industrial agribusiness, mining and timber extraction within the world’s last great rainforests.
Looking toward heaven in the Indonesian rainforest. The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) is an alliance of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist religious leaders, their congregations and indigenous peoples working to save the world’s last great rainforests. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
An ambitious global interfaith partnership, targeting five rainforest countries in Asia, Africa and South America, is emerging to harness interdenominational congregations worldwide in demanding aggressive climate action from national leaders.
The Interfaith Rainforest Initiative (IRI) is an international alliance bringing the leverage of faith-based leadership and moral urgency to a global effort to slow and reverse tropical deforestation by shifting the priorities and policies of world leaders.
Scientists say that meeting the forest conservation goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement is vital to preventing catastrophic global warming of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. But reducing deforestation as a means of slowing the pace of global warming is seen as increasingly difficult — with the objective hampered by the rapid expansion of industrial agribusiness, mining, and timber extraction, all heavily supported by corporate and financial interests and national governments.
IRI was formed at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, in June 2017 as Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist religious leaders joined forces with indigenous peoples from the five tropical countries. Promoting the rights of indigenous peoples — whom environmentalist call the true “guardians of the forests” — is viewed as essential to the cause.
The countries on which IRI is focused contain 70 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests, and include Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Colombia and Peru — nations which are daily seeing their capacity to regulate the earth’s climate diminished by rampant deforestation due to wildfires, mining, timbering, agriculture, roads, dams and other infrastructure construction.
“This isn’t about churches planting trees,” said Joe Corcoran, IRI program manager with UNEP, the United Nations Environment Programme. “We want to say clearly and definitively to world leaders: religious leaders take this issue of forests and climate very seriously, and they are going to be holding public officials accountable to make sure these issues are addressed.”
During Climate Week at the United Nations in New York City starting September 22, IRI will unveil its Faiths for Forests Declaration and action agenda. Its website will promote the next phase of organizational capacity building, or the congregational “entry point,” as Corcoran called it. Religious leaders and places of worship will be asked to endorse the IRI declaration, access educational materials and learn how to participate in political activism.
Also during Climate Week, millions of young people, led by Swedish teen Greta Thunberg, are expected to participate in global strikes aimed at pressuring policymakers into action.
Corcoran says that IRI’s “movement building” initiative comes at a critical moment, as wildfires rage in Amazonia and the Congo, and as the world turns its attention to New York. There, on September 23, UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres will make a single demand on the world’s nations: stop delaying and commit to aggressively cutting your carbon emissions, and dramatically increase the aggressiveness of your climate action plans now.
Young Munduruku warriors in the Brazilian Amazon. IRI has joined with indigenous groups in five tropical countries to apply political pressure and help preserve indigenous claims to ancestral lands and forests. Image by Mauricio Torres / Mongabay.
Irreplaceable rainforests
“Twenty years ago there wasn’t even a thought connecting religion and ecology,” recalls Mary Evelyn Tucker, an environmental scholar at Yale University with appointments in its schools of forestry, religious studies and divinity.
And it’s likely that this moment in history marks the first time the interfaith community is stepping prominently into the political arena to help significantly reduce rainforest deforestation. The IRI declaration is seen as a rallying point for faith leaders and their followers. It decisively states: “Tropical deforestation is a crisis of existential proportions. We either deal with it now, or leave future generations a planet in ecological collapse.”
But for IRI to be successful, Tucker explained, faith leaders must preach and promote a “change of heart and conscience” that values tropical forests not only for the ecosystem services they deliver to humanity — such as carbon sequestration and climate stabilization — but also for the sake of conserving God’s creation. With more than half of the Earth’s plant, animal and bird species living in the world’s rainforests, s it is vital people of faith understand and value the irreplaceable creatures that keep tropical forests thriving.
“Religious leaders can come onboard for practical reasons,” Tucker noted. “But they can also come onboard because the goals are sacred. That’s why their voices are essential.”
This was the central message offered up by Pope Francis in June 2015 in his unprecedented Catholic teaching document, Laudato Si, On Care for Our Common Home. Concerned by the extinction rate driven by human activity, Francis wrote: “Because of us, thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence, nor convey their message to us. We have no such right.”
In an early September 2019 swing through southern Africa, the pope denounced the exploitation of natural resources for the economic gain of a few, and decried rampant deforestation in Madagascar: “The last forests are menaced by forest fires, poaching, the unrestricted cutting down of valuable woodlands.”
In August, Laura Vargas, the coordinator of IRI Peru, convened meetings and workshops with three dozen national interfaith and indigenous community leaders in Madre de Dios — a biodiverse hotspot deep in the Peruvian Amazon, now being rapidly deforested by illegal gold mining.
Vargas, along with Bishop David Martinez in Puerto Maldonado, the capital of Madre de Dios state, have joined with NGOs and other environmental activists to lobby the historically environmentally-lax Peruvian government to act decisively to protect the already badly ravaged Madre de Dios region from the miners.
“This is a very important moment and we have to act,” Vargas said from Lima. “This is as important as the Mass or religious activity. Caring for the forests is essential to our faith.”
A Coquerel’s Sifaka lemur (Propithecus coquereli) in Madagascar. The interfaith gorup is trying to curb climate change and preserve sacred rainforest biodiversity. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
Untested political capital
IRI received a boost in August when its Faith for Forests declaration was endorsed at the Religions for World Peace assembly held in Bavaria, Germany, an interfaith organization that represents more than 900 million people in 125 countries.
“We were floored by the reception we received — the commitment across faiths and the recognition of indigenous rights in fighting deforestation,” said Corcoran of the event.
Today, partners to the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative include Religions for Peace, GreenFaith, the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the World Council of Churches, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative, Rainforest Foundation Norway and the UN Environment Programme.
But IRI and its goals aren’t finding easy acceptance everywhere. Efforts to organize in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have been slowed thus far by political leaders who are actively promoting deforestation as part of their pro-business policies. However, Corcoran reported that small lobbying successes are emerging in Colombia and Peru.
“IRI Colombia held a briefing with 11 members of Congress in July,” he said, and negotiated an outcome document “where government representatives in attendance agreed to include wording around a commitment to ending deforestation in the forthcoming National Development Plan for Colombia.”
The Rev. Fletcher Harper, an Episcopal priest and the executive director of GreenFaith, a U.S.-based interfaith environmental coalition, is cautious; he has seen religious interest in the environment wax and wane over the years. For all its ambition, IRI has its challenges, he said.
“There are places on the planet, Brazil being one of them, where religious groups are part of the problem, as well as the solution,” Harper noted. “You have some conservative Christians working in support of deforestation efforts.”
The administration of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, is moving quickly to “develop the unproductive Amazon,” and is also heavily backed by Evangelical Christians.
Harper said that in places like Brazil and Indonesia, IRI would do well to “lift up the voices of religious moderates and conservatives” who represent a more politically potent segment of those countries’ religious populations. In Indonesia, he added, “there are moderate and conservative Islamic leaders who want to be involved in this [conservation] effort.”
One challenge to truly building momentum, Harper said, will be in getting religious leaders of all sects to use their political capital in a way that most haven’t yet tried.
“Does this effort stand a chance?” he asked. “I think it does. But around the world, that question is still up in the air. Religious groups have more potential for political influence than they have yet deployed. But it’s going to take a level of education, resolve and scale of action that is altogether larger and different than we’ve seen so far.”
Justin Catanoso, a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, is a regular contributor to Mongabay. Follow him on Twitter @jcatanoso
Indigenous Ticana children in Colombia. Their future depends on people working together around the globe to conserve rainforests. Image by Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay.
Two of the top donors who made constructing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture possible were black. AP Photo/Susan Walsh
When African American businessman Robert F. Smith declared during a Morehouse College commencement speech that he would pay off the student loan debt of the entire 2019 graduating class of about 400 young men from the historically black school, he provoked a frenzy. Footage of the jubilant graduates immediately went viral, with an outpouring of hot takes on what the news meant.
On top of paying tribute to his ancestors, I see this generous act as an extension of the underappreciated heritage of African American philanthropy that began soon after the first enslaved Africans disembarked in Virginia in 1619.
Robert F. Smith told the Morehouse College class of 2019 to applaud their own families and communities for helping them succeed.
Strong tradition
The West African people put into slavery brought cultures of giving and sharing with them across the Atlantic. In 1847, for example, enslaved Africans in Richmond, Virginia, donated money through their church to Ireland’s potato famine relief efforts. I believe that their ways of looking after others and pooling resources to survive forms the basis of giving by African Americans today.
Despite the toll that four centuries of slavery and discrimination have taken on black earnings, African Americans regardless of their economic status have long given generously of their money and time.
Black women
I have written extensively about the historical roles of black women as the creators, innovators and purveyors of African American philanthropy. In my forthcoming book about Madam C.J. Walker, the early 20th-century black entrepreneur philanthropist commonly known as the first American self-made female millionaire, I’ve documented this history through her gifts and those made by her peers – other black businesswomen and leaders of clubs.
Countless other black women, from all walks of life, give of their time, talent and money generously through their churches, clubs, sororities and giving circles – groups of people who pool charitable money for nonprofits they collectively choose to support. Black women also made August Black Philanthropy Month, an international celebration of giving by people descended from Africa.
Smith has said his mother, Sylvia Myrna Smith, set him on a path of generosity. A high school principal, she instilled in him the habit of giving through her annual ritual of donating to the United Negro College Fund to help young people of color gain access to higher education.
A place in history
Smith earned his wealth through technology and finance, and has his own foundation. He has signed the Giving Pledge, through which dozens of the world’s richest people have promised to donate most of their wealth to causes they believe in. But in my view, it would be a mistake to look to the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the billionaires who created the Giving Pledge in 2010, to understand Robert F. Smith’s philanthropy.
That’s because of the challenges Smith made to the Morehouse graduates benefiting from his gift and his peers as well.
“The liberation of communities we come from depends upon the grit and the determination and the greatness inside of you, using your skills and your knowledge and your instincts to serve to change the world in only the way that you can,” Smith said.
This idea of a responsibility to liberate one’s community links Smith and today’s black donors with those of the past.
Forten and LaFon
One of the black philanthropists in colonial times was James Forten, who was born in 1766 into a free black family in Philadelphia. Introduced to sail-making by his father, Forten apprenticed in the trade after serving on a ship near the end of the Revolutionary War. He became wealthy and a leader in the movement to end slavery.
Thomy LaFon, another early black giver, was born into a free family in 1810 in New Orleans. He grew up in poverty but was a natural entrepreneur who sold food, ran a store, brokered loans and eventually invested in real estate.
LaFon leveraged his clout to advocate for racial equality. He funded a black newspaper and the arts. He financed the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Underground Railroad. LaFon bought property for orphanages and following his death his estate financed two hospitals, a nursing home that still exists, the New Orleans college that became Dillard University and a black order of nuns called Sisters of the Holy Family.
McKee and Gaston
Colonel John McKee was born into freedom in Alexandria, Virginia, around 1819 but became indentured at a young age.
Col. John McKee’s legacy of helping young men without fathers attend college continues, more than a century after his death. McKee Scholarship
McKee ran a Philadelphia restaurant in his twenties. Over time, he acquired a significant amount of property. He provided housing for the black migrants who traveled north to Philadelphia after emancipation.
When he died in 1902, McKee left most of his reported $2 million fortune to the Catholic Church and a school to educate black and white orphaned boys. After decades of disputes, the McKee Scholarship emerged in the 1950s. It continues to help cover higher education costs for many young fatherless men in the Philadelphia region today.
A.G. Gaston was born in 1892 in Demopolis, Alabama, to parents who had been enslaved. He began building businesses in Birmingham in the 1920s. He ultimately owned an insurance company, a funeral home and cemetery, a business college, motel, bank, radio stations and a construction company.
Gaston worked behind the scenes of the civil rights movement to maintain relations with whites while maintaining a reputation as having a non-confrontational approach to ending segregation. In the 1950s, the entrepreneur helped pay the legal bills tied to a court case seeking the admission of African Americans to the all-white University of Alabama.
He regularly donated or discounted the use of his facilities to house civil rights activists and host meetings. When the police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, jailed Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy for protesting in Birmingham in 1963, Gaston bailed them out, along with hundreds more protesters.
When the Alabaman, who was reportedly worth $130 million, died in 1996 he left several provisions in his estate for charity. Birmingham’s A.G. Gaston Boys and Girls Club is still operating.
With this gift and the rest of his big donations, Robert F. Smith has assumed his place in this philanthropic history, and encouraged other African Americans to do the same.
