NEWS: PRESS RELEASE ARCHIVE

Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies Conference on Climate Change
Aspen, Colorado
October 6-8, 2005

By Mitchell Thomashow, Ed.D.
Chair, Environmental Studies Department, Antioch New England Graduate School, Keene, NH
Member, COEJL Board of Trustees

The Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies organized a remarkable conference “Climate Change: From Science to Action” in Aspen, Colorado, October 6-8, 2005.

The purpose of the conference, according to Dean Gus Speth, was “to diagnose the reasons for the gap between climate change science and action, and to formulate an action plan to address this gap.”

To achieve this, Yale invited 120 participants from a range of domains organized into eight working groups: News Media, Science, Religion and Ethics, Politics, Entertainment and Advertising, Education, Business and Finance, Environmentalists and Civil Society. Initially, each working group was expected to develop a series of action steps, to be shared with all conference participants. Those suggestions became the focus of cross-domain working groups who amplified, revised, and elaborated on the initial suggestions. 

Interspersed with these work sessions were a series of plenary speeches and panels, presented by global climate change scientists (e.g., Stephen Schneider, Richard Somerville, Jane Lubchenco), social decision researchers (Baruch Fischhoff, George Lakoff), business leaders (Jim Rogers, CEO of Cinergy), and politicians (Al Gore, John Kerry, Jim Leach), and entertainers (Al Franken), among others.

For a full list of participants, their working groups and biographies, as well as the pre-conference readings, please see the conference web site.

I would like to share my impressions of the conference with you, highlighting what most I found most inspiring and challenging, and then offer a few suggestions for COEJL’s agenda.

As an environmental studies practitioner and academic, and as someone who has written a book on global environmental change (Bringing the Biosphere Home, MIT Press, 2002), I am fully immersed in the educational, spiritual, political, and scientific challenges intrinsic to climate change discussions. Yet, despite how relatively well informed I am, I still have a hard time coming to grips with both the scale and the severity of climate change. It is truly a daunting concept. Even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, or the melting of polar ice caps, or the changing global phenology (yes, spring comes earlier just about everywhere), it is still a reach for me to grapple with the urgency of this issue.

Yet the message of this conference was inescapable. Climate change is the single most pressing challenge that we face. Why? How does this issue compare to questions of global poverty, social injustice, global health, global terrorism, or whatever crisis du jour attracts your attention. What I learned from this conference is that climate change represents an unprecedented experiment with earth’s circulatory system, which is changing oceanic and atmospheric conditions and unleashing a series of unknown patterns and processes that threaten ocean and atmospheric chemistry, global weather patterns, and ecological considerations, including epidemiological threats. Inevitably, these earth system processes will most deeply (although not exclusively) impact the world’s poorest nations, serving to exacerbate all of the issues cited above. Moreover, we are in the earliest stages of this experiment, with ramifications that may be well beyond our very best scenarios. Although global change scientists cannot predict the specifics of how earth system processes will change, there is an unshakeable consensus as to the gravity and inevitability of irreversible climate change.

Hence all of the working groups at the Yale conference had the challenge of developing “action plans” that reflected the urgency of the situation. Whenever urgency is in the picture, we tend to think more in terms of politics, marketing, persuasion, and advocacy, and less in terms of education and spirituality. So the working groups developed a series of options organized across all of the domains that essentially reflected a “let’s get the message out as clearly, effectively, and strategically as possible” mentality. These options reflected the very best political capacity of the conference participants and incorporated the latest social decision making research, the best efforts at understanding “framing” (see George Lakoff’s work), and the extant political realities, including the unprecedented assault on science. All of these suggestions will require financing, mobilization, and coordination. More details on the specifics will become available when the conference proceedings are published.

As an educator, and as a person who writes about the ecological and existential challenges of perceiving environmental change, I am fully aware that a deep understanding, commitment, and cognition of climate change takes time. However, I'm not sure it's something you convey through a political message or a marketing campaign, or through social persuasion techniques. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to do so, and I yield to those fine and experienced minds who have the capacity to work accordingly. This is a real dilemma. I sat on both the education and religion panels, and I found that most of the discussions were centered around the advocacy orientation. Yet in both educational and spiritual settings, people look for something more long term, the capacity for deep understanding, dealing with questions of purpose and meaning, issues of ethics and faith. These qualities of attention are less about advocacy and more pertinent to deliberation.

How then should COEJL respond? Given COEJL’s activities in Washington, its recent Rabbinic Letter (Wonder and Restraint: A Rabbinic Call to Environmental Action), its efforts to protect the Endangered Species Act, and its interests in greening synagogues, it is already exerting as much influence as it can using its advocacy channels. Of course, the scale of these efforts can be ramped up, depending on resources and staff, and more strategic attention can be placed on the best way to spread the message. These efforts are crucial and they are very much in keeping with the spirit of the Yale conference.

However, there is another, perhaps equally important challenge for COEJL, and that is in the spiritual domain. How can climate change become the subject of our best ethical and moral thinking? And how might that be done within the context of everyday prayer, ritual and worship?

I’d like to share a more personal narrative about climate change and use my story as a means to make a few suggestions. Like many weather aficionados, I’m compelled to watch the Weather Channel during extraordinary weather events. While watching the origins, development, and emergence of hurricane Katrina, like many viewers, I was astounded at the sheer size of the storm. Indeed, the spectacular satellite imagery (dressed up in the best color imagery denoting pressure and precipitation
intensities) made the storm appear, at least to me, as if it were a sentient being. This “golem” appearing out of the tempestuous oceans, its origins in the deep Atlantic, picking up strength over the Caribbean, like a monstrous, furious wrath, was traveling straight towards “civilized” New Orleans as if it was doing so with full intent, punishing the very precariousness of a misplaced city. Finally, this incomprehensible power unleashed its fury and humanity was left to pick up the pieces.

If you will bear with my imagination, and consider the almost biblical ramifications of this catastrophe, you can ponder the extent to which this storm raised levels of fear and anxiety that require nothing less than the deepest spiritual attention. Of course, I am aware of the scientific explanation of how the hurricane emerged, why it picked up strength, how the unprecedented temperature of the Gulf of Mexico fueled its strength and why New Orleans was an environmental disaster waiting to happen. I am aware enough of the science to conjure such a cause and effect dynamic. But on a deeper, visceral level, the storm was downright terrifying.

Surely the prospect of further disasters, or other unprecedented climatic events, must on some level, however conscious, fuel a need for both spiritual and scientific discussion. Perhaps this is exactly where COEJL can play an extraordinary leadership role. Yes, we can alert our membership to the broader political urgency of climate change. And we can do our best to explain the scientific issues. Our unique opportunity is to combine such awareness with a discussion about the meaning and purpose of human action. Judaism, with its emphasis on how people live in time, in history, can lend such depth to the contemplation of climate change as a spiritual call to responsiveness.

Might a COEJL conference place its entire emphasis on the ethical and spiritual dimensions of climate change, with workshops and presentations on how the issue can be made intrinsic to Jewish practice? Might the COEJL newsletter have an article each issue by a different rabbi which can become the basis for a series of lectures, presentations and discussions? Can COEJL use climate change as a means to deepen an appreciation of ecological and evolutionary creation, as a way to simultaneously celebrate the miracle of the Earth’s biogeochemistry, and its phenomenal oceanic/atmospheric/ continental matrix? Might we establish a consortium of Jewish climate change scientists and Jewish theologians who can provide leadership and guidance?

I hope these questions will spawn dozens of interesting, innovative, and vital ideas that will reach the heart, mind, and soul of Jewish thinking, and propel COEJL’s leadership on this issue.

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I wish to thank the Mark and Sharon Bloome Fund for providing me with a generous grant to attend this remarkably stimulating conference.