In climate extremes, opportunities for deeper reflection

Amid heat waves and floods, more people see resilience as built on compassion and other high qualities of thought.

The Monitor's View

With greater weather disruptions this year, scientists are ever more eager to understand what drives people to keep warming the atmosphere. A study published today by World Weather Attribution group, for example, found a link between human activity and the floods, wildfires, and the record-breaking heat waves now affecting people from Phoenix to Beijing. That link clearly turns the global discussion on climate change toward a deeper dimension. A growing number of experts are asking whether people might be changing their core beliefs.

“The solution to climate change ... [doesn’t] seem to lie in technological innovation or climate modeling (not to negate their importance), but rather, in something within humanity itself,” Jessica Eise, a professor of social and environmental challenges at the University of Texas at San Antonio, wrote in the journal Sierra last month. “Hope? A sense of connection? Of being loved, and loving in return? Could spirituality save us?”

The questions Dr. Eise poses arise from her research into the shifting attitudes among Americans who regard themselves as deeply spiritual despite rejecting organized religion. While only 38% of her subjects think “people are stewards of nature,” 59% think that “people are a part of/one with nature.”  She argues for a rethinking of science on the basis that Earth and all life are united and cared for.

That view coincides with what the Graduate Theological Union, a partner institute with the University of California, Berkeley, calls “green spirituality” – “ways of knowing that are embedded in religion, philosophy, spiritual ethics, moral traditions, and a culture that values the community and the commons.”

In some of the world’s cities most vulnerable to extreme heat, those values are already reshaping responses to climate change. An expanding network of “chief heat officers” is sharing and implementing new urban designs rooted in compassion for those most vulnerable to weather disruptions – children, women, and those without homes. “Social resilience is important for any kind of difficult scenarios that we’re gonna face in the future,” Eleni Myrivili, global chief heat officer to U.N.-Habitat, told NPR last week.

In the aftermath of torrential rains that flooded parts of Vermont this month, environmental writer Bill McKibben wrote a passage in The New Yorker that shows how humanity may be working out this problem by degrees. The incredible warming of these current weeks, he wrote, should “remind us how valuable a breeze is, how remarkable a deep-blue winter day, or how precious the cool that comes when night falls. ... This planet remains stirringly beautiful, and that beauty must be one of the things that moves us to act. And so must the beauty that people can produce” – such as panels that safely harness the power of the sun.

For decades, the fear of climate change led to inaction and blame. A new era may be emerging, one that rests on seeing Earth and all life connected and cared for by the highest quality of thought.