FIVE

A WORLD IN EXILE?

Extinction, Migration, and Eschatology

STEFAN SKRIMSHIRE

LOSING HOME

There are few environmental metaphors more compelling and, in conjunction with our current assault on the biosphere, condemning, than that of the Earth as our house, dwelling, or abode. This Earth is, in the words of Pope Francis, “our common home,” and we have “turned [it] into a pile of filth.”¹ “We Are Destroying Our Only Home” was the headline that accompanied several media releases of the United Nation’s 2018 global assessment report on biodiversity.² The statement that “it is time to stand up and save our home” has been a prominent slogan at Extinction Rebellion protests.³ At a profound level, it is also surely more than a metaphor to call Earth our home. Psychoanalyst Shierry Nicholsen says that we initially experience home via our first enclosure, the womb. This then becomes the family, and finally the Earth itself becomes known to us as that which encloses and encompasses and is thus, in a profoundly primordial sense, our home.⁴ If the concept is radically straightforward, it is also conceptually radical. Etymologically, the concept of household is evoked, via their root in the Greek oikos, by the terms ecology and economy, both forms of knowledge about the management of our household. It is, moreover, an association resonant in religious traditions for which creation is narrated as a fitting abode, or home, for the human. The Abrahamic faiths are not unique in this regard, but they are certainly representative. The scriptural expressions of creation as the fitting abode for creaturely existence is a fundamental feature of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian scripture. And the legacy of such thinking to secular environmental narratives is very clear and now calls for reexamination. Christian ecological theology, which will be the predominant focus of my chapter, comes under particular strain and is called to respond to the sense of loss of Earth as home being generated by ecological crisis.

The concern at the heart of this chapter is that the current global extinction crisis troubles this seemingly stable conceptualization of Earth as our home. Anxiety over losing place has been discussed for some time in relation to climate change, of course. A dominant feature of environmental reporting in the last decade has been the shock of extreme weather hitting homes that might have once imagined themselves impenetrable. For instance, wildfires in California and flooding in Miami have made some of the most affluent parts of the world unlivable. Amitav Ghosh noticed how such a concept struggles to register: “For most governments and politicians, as for most of us as individuals, to leave the places that are linked to our memories and attachments, to abandon the homes that have given our lives roots, stability, and meaning, is nothing short of unthinkable.”⁵ It is the sentiment behind some of the starker reporting on climate crisis, such as David Wallace-Well’s The Uninhabitable Earth. Extinction discourses, on the other hand, have been predominantly fixated on the permanent loss of individual species and biodiversity and tend not to be associated with this broader sense of the loss of home and habitat.⁶ As a report on vertebrate extinctions argued, media attention on lost or highly endangered species has come at the cost of the public appreciating the extent of local population extinctions, decreasing geographic ranges for certain species, and the linked destruction of ecosystems and displacement from natural habitats, including the disruption to human dwelling and livelihoods, as a result.⁷ These latter disasters seem less easily identifiable as extinctions. Neverthless, as Willis Jenkins notes in chapter 1, biologists are calling for a shift of emphasis precisely in this direction: from extinction of species to that of “ecological interactions . . . relations and processes,” which generally occurs at higher rates.

The authors of the report just cited are right on scientific grounds to want to widen the public’s perception of an extinction crisis. But a further reason for doing so is to make more explicit the relationship between extinction and another definitive phenomenon of our time, forced migration. There are clear empirical reasons for establishing this relation in our minds. Climate-related migration is increasingly seen as a survival strategy for local populations or species.⁸ Those ill-equipped to increase their range or relocate are most vulnerable to extinction. Conservation strategies to combat species extinction have increasingly turned to the possibility of assisted migration, or relocation (I discuss the example of the proposal to relocate polar bears to the Antarctic later). Alongside such observations, I shall argue that understanding these phenomena together prompts us to revisit environmentalism’s relationship with the concept of Earth as home. Conversely, critically refining what we mean when we talk about Earth as home—with the help of theological distinctions—should aid our understanding and responses to the global extinction crisis.

I acknowledge the fact that the words home and migration can serve radically different purposes in different contexts. Home can indicate a point of common ground with other beings, an interdependence with the natural world. Pope Francis’s use of the metaphor is an appeal to a new sense of openness to the others that share our place in the world. On the other hand, home can in other contexts signify isolation, a position of security, and a fortress to be defended (against others). I wish to critique the tendency for the idea of the fortress to predominate in responses to the global extinction crisis and to find resources by which the understandings of common is stronger. It is this former model that I want to argue is more fit to reflect the conditions of life during this extinction crisis—that is, a notion of home that is in solidarity with those forced to seek refuge, those who become “strangers in a strange land.” Nonetheless, we need to be careful about too quickly appropriating a sense of sojourning as an individual experience of movement and mobility, as this can result in us becoming caught up in privilege and capability. There is an important distinction to make here between the free mobility of privileged “cosmopolitan” humans around the globe and the movement of peoples seeking refuge who are seen by those on the political right as a threat to the security of the globe. It is in the light of the latter phenomenon that I believe religious traditions have a unique potential to inspire ethical responses to the extinction crisis. I will suggest giving prominence to a narrative that is certainly shared by the Abrahamic faiths and has resonance far beyond these—that of being “in exile” or “sojourning” on the Earth. This is a focus that is all but missing from ecotheological discussion, perhaps because of its perceived tension with the dominant narrative of creation as the fitting abode for humanity.

EXTINCTION AND MIGRATION

The relationship between species extinctions and migrations is complex. We might note first that the extinction crisis in its many forms is closely tied to the violent legacies of settler societies and continuing fossil fuel extraction; for example, consider how global warming, habitat destruction, resource extraction, and the killing of Indigenous people affect biodiversity. We might see in this association a very particular valorization of the global mobility of certain humans and an assertion of their right to travel, settle, and pollute at will at the expense of other species. But there is a further, different association. Arguably, we are already witnessing both the forced and unforced movement of peoples from their homelands to avoid extinction. For example, Pacific Islanders in Tuvalu and Kiribati are facing the near-extinction of their state as the low-lying islands on which they live begin to disappear.⁹ Theirs is a very different sense of movement and mobility. The current extinction crisis is also bound up in hostile and defensive attitudes toward the movement of those who are now increasingly referred to as “climate refugees.” Fears about waves of human migrants thus also play on a very specific conceptualization of extinction. Reporting on the impact on human and other-than-human migrants at sites of the US-Mexico border wall, Megan Perret has observed that white anti-immigrant protesters in the United States also invoke a sense of existential threat to their (white) identity.¹⁰

Extinction and migration are also implicitly linked through their respective representation in catastrophic, end-time political imaginaries. The relations here are intriguingly inverse. On the one hand, mass extinction is frequently narrated in terms of what Ursula Heise calls a “declensionist” framework, aesthetically represented through the fear of a great emptying of the planet of life-forms, or what Edward O. Wilson dubs the “Age of Loneliness.”¹¹ The impact of ecological collapse on human migration, on the other hand, is mediated through an opposite end-time aesthetic of swarming (in a very different sense to that explored by Jenkins in this volume) that includes the images and rhetoric of nameless and numberless masses of people and the concept of an overcrowded, shrunken planet.

Even in these inverse terms, the stories of mass extinction and migration both tell us something important about the conceptualization of Earth as home, focusing on the threat to terrestrial security. National Geographic concluded from a survey of four thousand species that “half of all life is on the move” due to climate change and the knock-on effects of species extinctions.¹² This very connection highlights the problematic way in which both extinction and migration are narrated as crises. As is now frequently noted, reporting on “the climate refugee crisis” can reduce complex and multiple social and political drivers of migration—ethnic cleansing, economic and gender inequality, religious and racial prejudice—by referencing a physical, external knock-on effect of climate.¹³ The “refugee crisis” is increasingly referred to as an objectified, threatening force of nature that will quickly accompany the ecological disaster of extinction and biodiversity loss. This passive description is aided by the maritime metaphors of flows, tides, and waves (of migrants) that threaten to engulf neighboring lands. A headline story about a US defense secretary’s warnings in the Guardian serves as a familiar example: “Disaster Alley: Australia Set to Receive New Wave of Climate Refugees.”¹⁴

There are important parallels between this framing of unsanctioned creatures “on the move” in supposedly hazardous ways and the narration of subjects in the “sixth mass extinction crisis” using passive terms. Both evoke the sense of home as fortress—that is, they depict species as in need of saving, enclosing, or relocating. An increasingly prevalent critique of the political discourse of extinction has been that it recommends interventionist forms of biodiversity conservation. These include the placing of endangered animals in captivity, the controversial “half Earth” thesis of Wilson (denying access to certain human populations of half the planet for the sake of the life of the planet), and the forced relocation of certain species to more favorable climates. Julian Reid has criticized the “neoliberal regimes of governance” that underpin such strategies, and they apply to both phenomena.¹⁵ The politics of both migration and conservation are often underpinned by a benevolent fortress logic of intervening in, halting, or enclosing life for the sake of the “survival” of life itself.¹⁶ Both extinction and migration can be conceived as problems of mass movement whose solution must come in the way of managing, redistributing, and repolicing geographical space. Consider as a specific example the proposals to relocate polar bears from the Arctic, where melting sea ice is preventing hunting, to Antarctica.¹⁷ The focus on polar bears is significant, embodying some of the more general contradictions of the mediation of ecological crisis in general.¹⁸ They are the iconic endangered species, the barometer of global warming. Aesthetically compelling photos of bears stranded from land through the breaking up of sea ice epitomizes the link between forced movement and extinction. Less commonly acknowledged, these bears are also part of the livelihood of some human groups (Indigenous communities in Nunavut, for instance), whose physical and cultural existence are also threatened by climate change. Reid suggests that polar bears have come to symbolize the different ways in which life forms can be categorized as vulnerable, resilient, and endangered. Nature documentaries often note how polar bears are especially at risk of extinction due to melting Arctic ice because they are ill-equipped to adapt by migrating to warmer southern climates. They are, in other words, not “resilient” enough. But in fact, other adaptation techniques are being enacted by the bears. In media reports, one senses that such techniques are viewed with dismay in comparison to the “purer” versions of nature conservation and rewilding. There is a palpable aversion to hybridity in reports on, for example, interspecies breeding in the the case of the “grolar” bear (offspring of grizzly and polar bears), which the Guardian noted was the “result of climate change” and was an evolutionary “throwback.”¹⁹

What could be problematic about the attempt to rectify, through forced relocation, a predicament of human making? Managed migration, at least as it is presented here, as a form of social and ecological engineering appears to be attempting to solve two perceived types of problem: hazard and hybridity. The first case involves the hazard of the incursion of foreigners, whether human or other, into the place one is protecting. This sense of a bad and dangerous type of mobility overlaps with anti-immigration rhetoric and the reference to “waves” of refugees set to overrun our societies. In the second sense, the perception of hybridity comes tainted with fears about how unnatural, “monstrous” adaptations of life pose threats to human societies. This fear is confirmed for slightly different reasons in Jeremy H. Kidwell’s chapter in this volume. His treatment of the concept sheds further light on the broader problem of how extinction is narrated as the great emptying of life. Kidwell notes a tension, in the ecological literature, between the practice of restoration ecology and rewilding and the now-frequent discovery of novel ecosystems in the place of wilderness. Questions arise from these discoveries: What ecological base rates, or “normal” states of nature, do efforts at conservation aim to achieve? And what positions of privilege do such evocations of normal and natural betray?

I return to the comparison with migration narratives and note dangerous parallels in an aversion to hazard and hybridity. In both cases, the predominant political response appears to be driven by a highly controlled management of certain life forms—both human and other—and under strict conditions. Reid notes how support for the scheme to facilitate migration, which is assumed to be the only viable solution to guarantee this life-form’s survival, reveals biopolitical assumptions about what counts as life worthy of mobility and reproduction and what does not. A starkly illustrative case in point can be made by comparing the portrayal of the migration of an iconic, mediatized, “in-favor” species (the polar bear) with that of a feared species (developing world humans) perceived as hazardous. In mainstream climate discourse, a polar bear’s inability to adapt is attributed to its “highly specialized” nature as a top predator of a geographically and climatically specific location. By contrast, the forced migration of (typically rural and poor) humans is most often narrated as being the result of their unskilled natures. In both cases, migration is something that must be managed top-down in order to maintain security, but for crucially different reasons. In the case of the polar bear, it is to minimize the risk to human life (polar bears will actively attack humans they come into contact with). In the case of climate refugees, it is to minimize threats—economic, ethnic, religious, physical—to the existence of sovereign nation-states. What such a comparison reveals is that the mobility, hybridity, and flux of species and lifeways are never valorized for their own sake. The relative benefits or value to life will always be conditional on which human lives movement will help and under which conditions such movement can be approved. In the case of the polar bear, even those who advocate for assisted migration appear motivated by a selective desire to preserve an iconic species. Christian theologian Christopher Southgate, arguing on behalf of the assisted migration of polar bears to Antarctica (where sea ice is currently in great supply), defends this highly selective and risky strategy on the grounds of ensuring the survival at all costs of a highly valued, “magnificent, iconic species.”²⁰

To be clear, it is certainly not my intention to dismiss all cases of assisted migration as examples of managerial, biopolitical governance. There might be very good reasons for adopting such schemes. The important question for me is, what sort of reorientation to notions of home, place, and belonging do such actions prompt? Is it a sense of solidarity with those who have become unseated from their habitats? Or is it what I described earlier—a colonialist mentality of home as fortress, solidifying “the human” as head of the household?

One way to encourage a deeper connection with the former perspective—solidarity—might be to think about displacement as an increasingly generalized condition of life. We are used to thinking about migration and displacement through the tragic lens of poor foreign people crowding onto tiny, perilous boats, threatening national border sovereignty, and demanding charitable hospitality. A different perspective is that displacement is now revealed to be not an exception but a more generalized condition of living from which many of us in the affluent Global North have been protected and that ecological and climate crises threaten to unravel this security. Clearly, affluent white communities continue to protect themselves (financially or in terms of mobility) from climate change in ways that poorer communities cannot. Still, this notion of the unraveling of a secure and privileged place was palpable in the apocalyptic framing that accompanied the devastation of Hollywood homes during the 2018 Californian wildfires.

Claire Colebrook takes this reasoning a step further and suggests that underpinning the narrative of the Holocene period of climate stability has been a myth of the permanence of place and sanctuary.²¹ The Holocene was the age in which certain species, and certain peoples within those species, bestowed upon themselves the right to inhabit and conquer certain lands. Thus, Colebrook argues, we ought not characterize the figure of the climate refugee as the tragic loser in the harsh new reality of climate breakdown. Rather, the figure of the migrant reveals something of an original condition of life that might only have been previously understood by thinking within the context of deep time but has been thrust to the fore in an age of extinctions. Even though the “sixth extinction” is a story of “unnatural history” (to cite Elizabeth Kolbert’s well-known work), Colebrook thinks that what these forced extinctions reveal is a condition of life as maintained through continual flux, displacement, and movement. Essentially, life is made and remade through the successive finding and losing of refuge. Only as a result of the violent colonization of habitable space by an elite race did the myth of stable, habitable space become the norm: “Rather than see nations as blessed spaces that accept refugees, one should see the nation as the outcome of a violent expulsion of the migratory movements that are its original and ongoing condition. The condition of life is migration and refuge, the searching out of hospitable conditions after metabolic processes exhaust or transform milieus.”²² I find Colebrook’s thesis highly problematic for a number of reasons. In particular, one might draw the conclusion that taking a deep time perspective—considering the human over stretches of geological timescales—ought to inure us against the narrow-minded concerns of Holocene existence. She seems to advocate for an abstracted God’s-eye view, taking in the deep time “bigger picture” precisely at a time when arguably we need the opposite—to focus attention on our present fragile and creaturely existence. And since the Anthropocene, which derailed that period of geological stability, was a creation of certain humans at the expense of others, why not fight for its return in our attempts to secure a more stable and livable planet? Nevertheless, there is a valuable point of critique that we might want to retain here: simply put, affluent societies are being forced to acknowledge that their sense of place as guaranteed, privileged, exclusive, and permanent is being radically pulled from under their feet. Bruno Latour’s parallel observations can be of some help here. Latour argues that contemporary migrations, though the continuation of old problems (e.g., colonialism, neoliberal capitalism), finally signify that the world cannot be inhabited in the unequally distributed, bordered, and policed ways that it currently is. The Earth is already radically uninhabitable in that sense of inhabiting privileged space. Hence, we are today witnessing a change in the nature of what it means to be at home: “The soil of globalization’s dreams is beginning to slip away. This is the truly new aspect of what is discreetly called the ‘migratory crisis.’ If the anguish runs so deep, it is because each of us is beginning to feel the ground slip away beneath our feet. We are discovering, more or less obscurely, that we are all in migration toward territories yet to be rediscovered and reoccupied.”²³ Far from portraying the subjects of extinction and migration as tragic victims of an external force of nature (Gaia taking her revenge) we can understand both as crises in the sense that they reveal “our” current ways of living as unsustainable and incompatible with the material limits of one Earth—or at least my way of living. The material conditions of an affluent white male are still bound up with the identity of being globally mobile and able to travel, work, live, and relocate with relative ease. It is in this sense that there is no longer a guaranteed homeland: “It is a question of attachment, of lifestyle, that’s being pulled out from under us, a question of land, of property giving way beneath us, and this uneasiness gnaws at everyone equally.”²⁴

We might suspect Colebrook and Latour are playing fast and loose with temporalities here. Of course, much can be said about the preeminence of migration and flux in the life of every living system, when viewed at a certain scale. Even mountains are constantly on the move.²⁵ But what does this have to do with the threat of extinction for those in flood- and drought-stricken parts of the world? One ought to be wary, too, of adding unreflectively to the commentary (often made, in my opinion, for a kind of shock value) that in a world of extinctions and ecological breakdown, we are increasingly becoming a world of refugees. One should exercise extreme caution in adopting such a view to avoid generalizing a condition that is still experienced in highly specific political, ethnic, and geographical contexts. Also to be resisted is the equally romanticized image of a globe that is suddenly in motion. We need to acknowledge the paradox, as Anna Rowlands attests from her work with destitute asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, that the condition of immobility through detention is one of the hallmarks of being a migrant in the twenty-first century.

On a further critical note, we should say that Latour’s slippage into universals is also careless. It cannot be correct that a sense of loss of lifestyle “gnaws at everyone equally.” A sense of entitlement is not equally distributed, just as the ability to leave home and take refuge is not. Nevertheless, I do think that a case can be made that in the context of our global extinction crisis, while the physical inability to take refuge is not an experience universally shared, localized examples are a reflection on the health of the whole. Donna Haraway, citing Anna Tsing, says that this generalized condition is perhaps definitive of an age of extinctions. The epoch that we are in is marked by the planetary loss of “most of the refugia from which diverse species assemblages (with or without people) can be reconstituted after major events (like desertification, or clear cutting, or, or . . .).”²⁶ The fear this loss conveys is not only about the literal ecosystem and habitat destruction. It is also about the possibility of recovery, the conceivability of future sanctuary and resilience in a self-replenishing Earth. Though the revelation of an end of nature is shocking, so too is the awareness that many human societies that weren’t previously are now experiencing the end of refuge such as we have known it. But our response, says Haraway, should be to rethink the idea of refuge as the transcending of boundaries of kinship and living alongside (different species). Talk of a world “full of refugees” is, for her, part of a manifesto for radical multi- and interspecies coexistence, not a leveling out of the very unequal experience of displacement. Neither ought this prognosis encourage an abandonment of the idea of emplacement, or a sense of belonging to place. On the contrary, for Latour, it entails rethinking the relationship between politics and territory that avoids all the pitfalls that one might expect in such a relationship. We can conceive of our sense of political identity as the search for somewhere to land—reattaching oneself to “national” place but without the traditional associations of sovereign borders, blood, and soil. The challenge of thinking about homeland in the context of extinction echoes the political critique of tying sovereign rights to place of birth, or, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, tying natio to nativity.²⁷ It is precisely the concept of being in exodus or refuge that should be the principle that binds each member of the community rather than being its principle of exception: “The guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual.”²⁸

What the arguments offered thus far suggest is that the way in which an age of extinctions and migrations has been portrayed in terms of an impending end, or collapse, of habitable space can be contested. The figures of extinction (emptying of life) and migration (surplus of life) have been imagined as opposite figures of a secular eschatological narrative. They are portrayed as the absolute or ultimate—the limit of our mode of existence and perhaps their telos or destination, if they are narrated as tragic inevitabilities to the current crisis. I would also like to note that both extinction and migration are narrated in apocalyptic terms—that is, they reveal something of the ultimate end of human life. The framing of migration and extinction in this way exposes something that I believe to be an unacknowledged aspect of extinction studies in general: what we often take to be thoroughly secular discourses, derived as they are from scientific categories of species, climate, and so on, are on closer inspection closely bound up in “theological imaginaries.” This can be in the form of the prefiguration of apocalypse, as we have seen. But it can also produce alternative conceptions of life and human existence and remind us of our dispossessed, stateless, and nomadic humanity.²⁹ It is to such imaginaries that I turn next.

THEOLOGIES OF HOME/LESSNESS

To repeat the claim I began with, the belief in Earth as our home is theologically central to many religious traditions, including the three Abrahamic faiths. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures describe creation as a fitting abode for humans and other creatures to dwell in.³⁰ But it is this same scriptural focus that has historically been a primary target in the environmental critique of religion. Critiques of the negative impact of (mainly monotheistic) religion on ecological awareness—one thinks of the legacy of Lynn White Jr.’s thesis most obviously here³¹—have focused on those faiths’ interpretations of creation as a temporary backdrop to the human’s true eschatological destiny. The notion of the believer as a pilgrim on the Earth is present in numerous cultural legacies of religious narratives. A familiar phrase found in Christian hymns and spirituals is This world is not my home; I’m just passing through. The sentiment is found in many parts of scripture; in the Hebrew Bible, for instance, it says, “We are guests before you, as were all our ancestors, our days on earth as fleeting as a shadow” (1 Chron. 29:15, NRSV). In the New Testament, this eschatological sentiment takes on explicitly political language. The apostle Paul reminds his followers that “we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14, NRSV), and the apostle Peter suggests that they are “sojourners and exiles” (1 Pet. 2:11, NRSV). There are parallels to be found in the Koran, in which the responsibility of humans, as khalifa or vice regents who serve as protectors of creation, is mitigated by the reminder of the transience of this world: “And the life of this world is nothing but play and amusement. But far better is the house in the hereafter for those who are Al-Muttaqun (the pious). Will you not then understand?” (Qur’an 6:32).

Placed in the historical context of a profound suspicion toward the legacy of religious traditions for the value of nonhuman life, these are highly partial interpretations of scripture. And contesting the focus on pilgrimage and sojourning has been one of the major contributions of ecotheological and feminist critiques of those narratives. As Grace Jantzen pointed out, eschatological narratives flourished in the context of a Western philosophical tradition for which all that is impermanent and subject to decay (which conceptually ties Earth to women) is less perfect than that which is disembodied, otherworldly, and eternal—the world to come. We recognize also the ideological context in which sojourner narratives have flourished. In the words of Brazilian liberation theologian Ivone Gebara, the dominant story of eschatological salvation has been one that, in denying people a true home in the “arms of the earth,” acts instead to dominate and alienate human existence, leading to “human damnation in concrete history” for the world’s poor in particular.³²

It is not hard to see how this line of critique might continue to inform a theology fit to respond to ecological crisis—and mass extinction specifically—as the loss of home. Ecotheologians have hitherto sought religious foundations for ethical imperatives to conserve species based on the special type of harm of extinction—a harm based on the eternal, irrecoverable loss from the world of a particular type of living thing.³³ The duty of the religious ethicist in response to this situation is ongoing, never complete. And advocates of ecotheology will want to insist that the urgency of this task is not hindered by eschatological faith. On the contrary, a Christian might argue that a vision of the beatific end point of Christian faith ought to spur the believer to greater acts of mercy in the present. Nevertheless, the context of a mass extinction crisis places the long-term viability of Earth as a fitting dwelling place into question. Thus, it is easier to see how the narrative of sojourner existence might be viewed as a temptation toward apocalyptic fatalism.

The critique of sojourner theology is very much relevant for our times. It finds powerful targets in both religious and secular responses to global extinctions. For instance, we might consider the secularization of eschatological hopes through the promise of technological salvation as an appeal to a literal sense of leaving the Earth as home. The colonization of Mars is a fantasy not only explored in science-fictional thought experiments. It is now a heavily funded field of research by the likes of Elon Musk’s SpaceX (“It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past”³⁴) and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origins (“Building a road to space so our children can rebuild the future”³⁵). Such ventures are increasingly presented as a response to the planetary emergency. Sarah McFarland-Taylor has identified a thinly veiled secularized salvation narrative operative for both venture capitalists, for whom the possibility of addressing the extinction crisis has now disappeared.³⁶ To these figures we should also add the target of Lisa H. Sideris’s critique in this book—advocates of genetic de-extinction technology who similarly evoke a secularized salvation narrative as justification for their work. But specifically in relation to planet colonization, such fantasies manifest very clearly the sojourning desire—those who can afford it will effectively become exiles—in terms of literal escape and have nothing to do with the message of political liberation or hope for return with which much exilic political theology is concerned (I return to this later). Here, salvation is conceived as an escape from the possibility of human extinction. Planet colonization represents the desire for a literal exodus from Earth in order to save the species.

More generally, we should be wary of those traditions for which crises such as mass extinction represent further evidence of the hastening conclusion of the world’s history. One still encounters forms of millennialist eschatology for which the longed-for destination is framed in terms of absolute rupture from the historical and ecological order rather than the fulfillment or redemption of the current one. In Christian history, such a position is represented by forms of premillennialist apocalypticism that are most prevalent in the United States. To those embracing such beliefs, ecological catastrophes (including extinctions) may represent the nearness of the second coming of Christ and the beginning of the millennium. It is important to note the environmental and social context of nineteenth-century America in which premillennialism first flourished. As Michael Northcott describes, premillennial preachers in puritan settler America capitalized on the experience of the Civil War, the Great Depression, and a series of cataclysms that included “agricultural catastrophes” and “increasing immigration” as the backdrop of a general mood of apocalyptic catastrophism.³⁷ If such a theology can be characterized as exilic, then it is with a view to “return” that has nothing to do with this world. An escapist eschatology hopes for a return to an Eden that is not the world renewed but is on the contrary a more literal understanding of a “new heaven and a new earth.” (Revelation 21:1) The following words of nineteenth-century dispensationalist preacher Dwight L. Moody are interesting to read alongside consideration of contemporary ecological end-time rhetoric, including the secular prognoses of Elon Musk on the extinction crisis considered earlier: “I looked on this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a life-boat, and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can . . . the world is getting darker and darker; its ruin is coming nearer and nearer. If you have any friends on this wreck unsaved, you had better lose no time in getting them off.’”³⁸ Neither are contemporary versions of this sentiment hard to locate. Though they are not universally anti-ecological, there are still prominent dispensationalist Christian organizations (e.g., RaptureReady.com) that are increasingly looking to signs of mass extinction as the fulfillment of end-time prophecy and the nearness of the rapture for believers.

Feminist theologians have long been critical of the patriarchal and ecologically destructive implications of sojourner language for precisely these reasons. Sallie McFague’s Body of God is a classic example of a Christian theology of being “at home on the Earth.” She insists that “space is the central category, for if justice is to be done to the many different kinds of bodies that comprise the planet, they must each have the space, the habitat they need.”³⁹ This prioritizing of spatiality over temporality is an attempt to counteract the eschatological connotations discussed earlier.⁴⁰ Sojourner narratives have, she argues, been at the expense of realizing that the earth is our home and that we belong here: “Christians have often not been allowed to feel at home on the earth, convinced after centuries of emphasis on otherworldliness that they belong somewhere else—in heaven or in another world.”⁴¹ Sin, within this re-embodied theology, is to be understood as a refusal of our place within the web of life. Turning away from sin would mean recognizing our codependence with humans and nonhuman others. Philosopher Mary Midgley is invoked by McFague precisely in these terms; she speaks of the fittingness of the ecosphere for human flourishing: “We are not tourists here. . . . We are at home in this world because we were made for it. We have developed here, on this planet, and we are adapted to life here. . . . We are not fit to live anywhere else.”⁴² We should also note that religious traditions have contributed profoundly to broader cultural associations of particular places, landscapes, and even ecosystems with a belief in the “dwelling place” of divinity or a sense of “the sacred.”⁴³ The strength of this line of argument, it would seem, is that in a time of ecological crisis, we need to deepen, not problematize, religious modes of identifying with the suffering of the Earth and resist the causes of that suffering.

EXILIC RELIGION

These theological arguments are much needed against the macho cultures of salvation from the world that we have mentioned. Even so, how equipped are they to acknowledge the shifting sense of home that I have claimed lies at the heart of our extinction crisis? And which theological emphases do they sideline that might be better equipped to meet that crisis? Some ecotheologians insist that redefining the notions of sojourn and exile can and ought to be undertaken for an ecological age. Indeed, as I shall explain in more detail, the spirit of sojourning is not always cast in a negative light. American nature writer Annie Dillard, in her short essay “Sojourner,” uses the biological phenomenon of mangroves, the migrant of the plant world, as a metaphor for a more generalized human condition. She follows this up with a theological reflection on the meaning of exile: “I alternate between thinking of the planet as home—dear and familiar stone hearth and garden—and a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word ‘sojourner’ occurs often in the English Old Testament. It invokes a nomadic people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: ‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.’ We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here.”⁴⁴ In a similar way and going against the grain of the focus on a theology of “enworlding” by McFague and others, some Christian thinkers question the implications of a theology of being at home on the Earth. Ernst Conradie, for example, argues that a theological overemphasis on being earthbound discourages resistance to the suffering and injustice that marks our material condition. Distinguishing home from household, Conradie believes it is possible to retain the sense of longing for a redeemed creation that is not yet enacted without succumbing to an escapist eschatology: “It is only through the Christian longing for the new earth that we can discover our belonging, in body and soul, to this earth. The earth may therefore be our one and only house, but it is not our home yet.”⁴⁵

What might be made of this subtle theological shift in emphasis from home to house? And if this is something that resonates with religious believers, what new approaches to extinction might it open up? The focus on being pilgrims is, of course, deeply associated with that element of Christian eschatological belief in a world to come that has been the target of suspicion by environmentalists since White Jr. To see oneself as on the way to another world is surely to leave behind the concerns of the present crisis. Two points can be raised by way of response to this suspicion. First, there is nothing exclusively or quintessentially Christian about the idea that human existence is caught between the desire for belonging and a restless longing for that which transcends the world altogether.⁴⁶ Geographer Yi Fu Tuan asserts that a core thread of all major religions (of the Axial age, we might say) that broke away from the local specificity of place to the universal is the sense that for them, “humans are most deluded when they believe that they can feel, even in the best of times, at ease and at home on Earth.”⁴⁷ There is nothing obviously eschatological in an escapist sense, or exclusively Judaeo-Christian, about such a sentiment.

Second, the theological concept of exile invokes a tradition in political theology that is grounded in the social and political experiences of the Abrahamic faiths. Explicit to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are two core features in their founding narratives: stories of fleeing persecution, displacement, and wilderness; and the ethical imperative to welcome and make a home for the stranger. For instance, the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from enslavement in Egypt is a central founding narrative of Judaism. The forced exile following the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians is what produces the distinctive literature and religious worldview of the exilic prophets.⁴⁸ Their quintessential condition is one of being cut off from their homeland and receiving the mercy of welcome and repatriation from foreign strangers. The founding texts of Islam also place the experience of exile and the mercy of strangers at its heart. This can be seen in the Hadith story of Hagar and Ishmael being abandoned at God’s command by Abraham at the Ka’ba; the action of Hagar running between the Marwa Mountains and Safa to seek refuge and water for her son is still reenacted by Muslims performing the hajj. Another example is the account of the migration (hijra) of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Abyssinia (to seek refuge with a Christian king). Christianity also begins its story with a forced migration (to Bethlehem) and the experience of (Jesus’s) self-isolation in the wilderness. Some telling moments in Christian scripture affirm this tradition of seeing the status of prophets as essentially one of migration and dispossession. In Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, “Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob . . . were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). The exilic traditions criticize the idea of a stable home based on fixed imperial conceptions of place. Biblical scholar Casey Strine argues that even St. Paul’s strongly eschatological reference to our homeless condition—we are strangers because “we seek a home (commonwealth/citizenship—πολίτευμα [politeuma]⁴⁹) that is not here” (Hebrews 13:14)—can be read in its emphatically political, historical context. To Paul’s audience, the new sense of universal citizenship is a counterpoint to the exclusivity of Roman citizenship. To oppose an imperial logic of identity and difference, one must adopt a radical cosmopolitanism.

There are interesting connections between exile and exodus as twin biblical motifs that essentially express anti-imperial theologies; they call for reliance upon Yahweh alone in foreign environments rather than capitulating or recreating their own narrative of national sovereignty.⁵⁰

How might these foundational religious narratives help us engage ethically with the global extinction crisis? I have been arguing that the threat of an extinction crisis brings into sharp focus the fragility of our sense of place as we become aware of the constant relocation forced on humans and other species. We also fear the knock-on effects the extinction crisis will have on “our” patch of earth. Religious narratives of migration have the potential to help here, imaginatively and performatively. They help by redescribing this fragile condition of being forced into the path of strangers as a place of encounter with the other and with the divine. The scriptural stories I have briefly mentioned are well known, of course. But I am suggesting they need to take a more central place in ecotheological thought than they have done. What might this renewed focus look like? Peter Scott’s commentary on the “Earth as home” debate comes close to the re-emphasis I am seeking here. The problem with a traditional theological defense of Earth as home, argues Scott, is their equation of salvation with a recovered “totality” in creation that has become deficient and must be restored. Scott calls this the “Eden-Exile-Return” model; it is the view that the destiny of human beings is to be “at home everywhere” and that what is sought is “the expansion of home and the overcoming of the loss of access to home.”⁵¹

The “return” element of this account of home raises suspicions about what we take humanity’s role (and capacity) in restoring that totality to be—totality here signifying a total occupation of all places. The extinction crisis describes an assault on the planetary commons by specific human groups that no efforts at rewilding or conservation will be able to fully restore.⁵² If one is to avoid the concept of totality, especially in the context of extinctions in which relations between humanity and other creatures seem irreparably broken, then a faithful conception of exile would be one that affirmed the tragic element of the human’s relation to the rest of creation rather than a promise of its mastery. Scott affirms precisely this, suggesting that the human may be homeless in the sense that it comes up against its other in nature just as much as it desires to be united with it. Resisting the temptation either to master nature or to escape it, we could say that the human is in the business of rehoming rather than being at home. This replaces the temptation to totalize with that of a circumscribed rehoming—precisely the sense of fortress I have been critiquing throughout. The theological notion of salvation, far from signifiying a removal from this world and securing of one’s place in the next, might be understood through the experience of making one’s home with others and being at home somewhere (i.e., in certain places). Especially in the context of climate change, such a sentiment of rehoming implies a certain solidarity with and deep acknowledgment of the primacy of displacement in the fate of human existence. And it retains a critical element of feminist and liberation contributions to eschatology by implying its spatial—rather than purely temporal—dimension. Salvation is not only “elsewhere” in time; it is where encounter is opened up in space, where boundaries have been traversed.⁵³

This attempt to paint an exilic condition in a more positive religious light seems a far departure from the critiques of sojourner theology I have summarized. Consider, by contrast, the use of the word exile by renowned eco- and liberation theologian Leonardo Boff in a first draft of the plenary speech he gave to the Earth Charter Continental Meeting in 1998: “We, human beings, men and women, have exiled ourselves from the homeland we shared in common, the Earth. . . . We must come back from exile to take care of the home we all share, which is the Earth, so that all humans and other beings, our brothers and sisters in this great terrestrial adventure, can all live happily in this home. . . . Never more shall we exile ourselves from the Earth again but we shall share life with her, in synergy and in solidarity.”⁵⁴

Though Boff’s return from exile develops a slightly different emphasis than Scott’s rehoming, the two positions do not seem to me to be incompatible. Indeed, Boff’s perspective provides a crucial reminder to any such formulation of an exilic theology. With regard to the extinction crisis, humans do not simply find themselves in a position of exile from their homeland. We exile ourselves insofar as our actions collude in the poisoning of land, destruction of habitats, or violence against other living beings. In Boff’s native Brazil, as I write this, an act of wholescale sabotage is taking place through the burning of the Amazon rainforest. Such an act surely represents the destruction of home in the two senses we have been considering—first, the literal home and ancestral place of its Indigenous humans and other creatures, and second, the habitability of planet Earth itself, which depends on that ecosystem for its storage of carbon, production of oxygen, and maintenance of biodiversity and climate stability. It is not, then, any passive or universal sense of exile that we are considering; it is certain humans in their pursuit of short-term gain who are exiling others, and eventually themselves, from their own home. And in response to such an assault on the commons, the appropriate response might well be mourning and seeking reparations. To the extent that mass extinction is an irreversible process (despite what the advocates of de-extinction discussed by Sideris might think), then exile here evokes a real sense of being estranged from the good home of God’s creation.

We might well consider, at this stage, whether any of this discussion of interdepence, refuge, and exile is a uniquely religious concern. Its ethical significance can surely be expressed quite easily in secular terms. There are clear parallels—for instance, with the expression adopted by scientists in relation to the extinction crisis: “Humanity’s ongoing annihilation of wildlife is cutting down the tree of life, including the branch we are sitting on.”⁵⁵ Nevertheless, I do want to claim that religious perspectives are capable of lending a very particular kind of urgency insofar as anthropogenic extinction must be seen as an act of exiling human existence from the gift of its integral home. It is essential to consider, as Noah Theriault et al. do in the context of writing about Indigenous perspectives on extinction, that extinction represents not only loss of home in this passive sense but also a form of “world breaking”—that is, as a willful neglect of the relationships and protocols between living beings upon which meaningful and flourishing existence depends.⁵⁶ Insofar as religions profess citizenship that is truly without borders, truly otherworldly, thus might they resource responses to the extinction crisis as the permanent seeking and embodying of refuge. An ethics of world remaking seems akin to the expressly religious belief that humans are called to be, through their actions, the presence of the divine on the Earth. In the Christian traditions of liberation and ecotheology, this means that making home is not simply a form of settling; it is a form of world-building in the sense of creating hospitable climates even where refuge is provisional and fragile. Making home is thus inseparable from acts of love and justice toward fellow creatures.⁵⁷

Giving due attention to the figure of exile in religious narratives might also temper some of the more troubling aspects of a theology of stewardship. While the idea of a steward has been the favored mode by which ecotheologians interpret the command given to Adam by God to claim (as some translations of Genesis have it) dominion over the whole Earth, stewardship has also brought its own problems to recent ecological contexts. Reflection on the extinction crisis is one such context. Consider the case of the assisted migration of species that I mentioned earlier. Southgate’s theological and ethical defense of such a scheme references the extinction crisis as living in the “new days of Noah” and requiring “large scale stewardship.”⁵⁸ There are enormous hazards involved in such schemes (introducing bears to Antarctica might threaten the existence of penguins, who are unprepared for a new top predator). Nevertheless, humans, in Southgate’s argument, are called to intervene in creation’s suffering and contribute to the good of the whole community—in this case, the biotic community and not just the human community.

What some will find questionable about this use of theology, as well as its secular parallel in strong, interventionist forms of conservation practice, is its presumption of the human as the guarantor of a primal, Edenic harmony. Stewardship models will always enact, as Scott says, “the modern tendency that affirms the ascent to mastery of the human. . . . The relations between human creatures and nonhuman creatures are [in such theologies] one of hierarchy and management.”⁵⁹ Such a danger is inherent and exemplified in the approaches to extinction I considered in the previous section. Moreover, the danger is amplified in considering them alongside similar approaches to forced migration. By shifting their theological focus from narratives of stewardship and management to those of solidarity through exile, religious traditions can better inspire an ethic of radical hospitality for an age of extinctions. By thinking of human existence as sharing a space of fragility and impermance with other life-forms, rather being their managers, religious traditions can inspire a different sense of home and dwelling as a mode of “living in turmoil.”⁶⁰

An exilic ecotheology might still be considered eschatologically oriented toward some end. In Jewish and Christian scriptures, the hope of the prophets is not for a romanticized, indefinite exilic existence. The prophet in exile is a mouthpiece for the people who hope for future deliverance from that homeless existence and the promise of their own land. Considered in this way, the scriptural narratives of exile I have mentioned straightforwardly oppose the destruction of habitats. By prophetically pointing toward their deliverance, eschatologies can inspire action to halt such practices in the present. But the main contribution of my chapter has been to suggest that this message of hope and deliverance isn’t the only one that religious traditions can offer us in such times. They can also provide a form of alternative imagination by which to inhabit an age of extinctions.

My suggestion has been that religious traditions can help us to understand being at home on the Earth not as permanent, imperial, or sovereign masters but as impermanent, sojourning, and displaced citizens. I am not advocating a theology of fleeing—an eschatology that is really escapology—from the conditions of the Earth and its crises. I am looking instead to those religious narratives that express the human condition as in some sense un-Earthed, forced into the paths of strangers and called to solidarity with others who are also displaced. Both Jewish and Muslim (and to a different extent, Christian) histories have been profoundly shaped by the political experience of forced displacement and migration over centuries. In their religious privileging of the experience of homelessness, an active memory of life that is on the move suggests a theological reading of the condition of “unworlding” I have been developing. And such a religious perspective also lends an important nuance to our understanding of the threat of extinctions; it situates the decimation of species within a more generalized condition of threats to home and the ability to dwell.

The advantage of drawing on the religious traditions that I have engaged here—principally Christianity, but hopefully there have been enough references to Judaism and Islam to show how the theological moves being made are not the monopoly of this tradition—is that they are particularly suited to navigating the morally difficult tension between romanticizing exile and migration and portraying them as a sign of evil. In discussing the links between responding to biodiversity loss and responding to increased forced human migration, Rowlands, responding to Southgate’s argument for assisted migration has pointed out that arguments for or against assisted migration tend to polarize the meaning of migration itself as either “unalloyed good or a pathological evil.”⁶¹ It can be good because migration can be understood as the expression of self-determination and resilience. It can be evil because it can equally be narrated as the destabilization of life—a strategy of last resort to preserve life—and a threat to place-based sovereignty. It is in religious traditions that one finds an account of human, earthly existence that encompasses both senses. Exile is both a blessed condition into which humanity is called, revealing God’s purpose, and a tragedy or curse, the sign of fallen humanity.⁶²

Though we should be careful not to romanticize it, we can see exile as revealing a crucial perspective of counterhegemonic existence. This perspective is affirmed by two of the most preeminent postcolonial thinkers on exile, Edward Said and Homi Bhaba. The former in particular wrote of the need to think about exile and return in literal terms (the urgency of struggling for the return of Palestinians to their homeland, for instance) but also about metaphorical exile, whose moral example will always be narrated and is thus a permanent resource. This essentially means that in a world in which injustice rules, one can never be at home.

One can see the fruits of navigating this tension in the experience of those who live at the intersection of political, ecological, and religious conflict. A distinctive faith-based practice and identity can draw on the experience of being strangers in a strange land as the basis for hospitality. Faith-based organizations responding directly to the increasing number of forced migrations across the world (but mostly in Islamic countries) draw increasingly in their literature on religious ethics of hospitality and duty toward the stranger. As David Hollenbach explains, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and also (though less explicitly) Hinduism and Buddhism all contain sources from tradition and in some cases scripture that speak directly to the experience of forced migration/displacement and hospitality to the stranger. On a practical level, then, religious communities need to hold to account their national governments’ records of the treatment of aliens and the effects of border policies, particularly in light of the pressures on movement caused by climate change and the extinction crisis. Indeed, as we have seen, the efforts of refugee support might in many cases be viewed as a response to the real threat of extinction to particular peoples as well as a response to the broader crisis of climate change in which extinctions occur. The politics of nationalism affects religious communities in every part of the world and is increasingly linked to the environmental pressures that lie at the root of displacement. The moral directives that are discernible from these traditions have been applied to the needs of nonhuman “strangers.” For example, punitive border policing and technologies, and ecological destruction caused by border walls, produce injustices to both migrating humans and nonhumans alike.

CONCLUSION

The extinction crisis strikes at the heart of the concept that is most dear to many of us—the notion of Earth as our only home. We should not relinquish that notion. But we need a supplementary narrative that does justice to “the experience of being ‘unworlded’ by environmental change,”⁶³ that resists a securitized, biopolitical defense of homeland and a theology that underwrites the human as sovereign guarantor of that homeland. There are, I have argued, at least two ways that theology and religious studies ought to contribute to such resistance. The first is to critique the way eschatological imagination—imagination that is derived from belief in the end, or end-times—is in the service of a secular imagination or extinction-oriented catastrophe. A religiously inspired catastrophic imaginary is one that is routinely used to justify increased border security and the protection of certain (white) human populations from extinction and from the mythical incoming “swarm” of migrants. Second, religious traditions may play a role in resourcing the imaginations of their faithful, as well as of those who find themselves outside of religious tradition altogether but who look to them for moral inspiration. This very different form of eschatology could emphasize a narrative of being “human alongside,” on the move, “in between worlds,”⁶⁴ in constant hope of a dwelling that cannot be guaranteed but whose very search produces ethical life in the form of new ways of welcoming the other.

All of this means overcoming the dominant security paradigm that is the main framework for thinking about both extinction and migration today. To live an exilic existence is today more than a reflection of hyperglobalization; it is also a necessary reflection on the shifting relationship between place and home in one’s environment. We need to reevaluate the meaning of home to mean not fortress or settlement but “restless journey.”⁶⁵ We need to describe a radical openness to encounters with loss and an inhabiting of the spaces of death and rebirth (through new life forms). Such a realization removes the temptations that have plagued climate migration discourses of describing “resilient” identities in simplistic terms as the stoic acceptance of whatever fate comes our way. The latter approach tends to favor those creatures who are either adaptive enough to weather the coming storms or iconic enough to merit human assistance in doing so. On the contrary, a migrant, exilic eschatology would be more sensitive than ever before to the vulnerability and fragility of all life and the need to bear that vulnerability within its ways of being a community.

In an age of extinctions, these crossing points of encounter are, very sadly, often sites of mourning as much as they are sites of encounter with other forms of life. As the opening of Kidwell’s chapter powerfully attests, the absences of extinction are increasingly present in our worldly encounters with mountains as much as with fellow creatures. The task for which I have here sought the potential of religious belief and practice is to seek new modes of encounter in such contexts of loss and change. In the light of extinctions, let us do more to create refuge.

STEFAN SKRIMSHIRE is Associate Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. He researches the intersection of religious and political responses to the ecological and climate emergency. He is author of Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope and editor of Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. He lives in LILAC, the United Kingdom’s first affordable, ecological cohousing community, in Leeds.

NOTES

1. Francis I, Laudato Si’ (Vatican City: Vatican Publications, 2015), para 61.

2. Sandra Díaz et al., “Summary for Policymakers of the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,” Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (2019), accessed September 17, 2019, https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment.

3. Jamie Bullen, “Extinction Rebellion: Shell HQ Windows Smashed as Climate Protest Blocks London Roads,” The Telegraph, April 16, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/15/extinction-rebellion-activists-threaten-bring-london-standstill/.

4. Shelley Nicholsen, Love of Nature and the End of the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 37.

5. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017), 54.

6. Audra Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction,” Theory, Culture & Society 33, no. 5 (September 2016): 23–42.

7. Gerardo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich, and Rodolfo Dirzo, “Biological Annihilation via the Ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction Signaled by Vertebrate Population Losses and Declines,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 30 (July 10, 2017): E6089–E6096.

8. Martina Grecequet, Jack DeWaard, Jessica J. Hellmann, and Guy J. Abel, “Climate Vulnerability and Human Migration in Global Perspective,” Sustainability 9, no. 5 (2017): 720.

9. James Ker-Lindsay, “Climate Change and State Death,” Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 58, no. 4 (2016).

10. Perret, Megan, “Extinction in Public,” presentation at online symposium hosted by Univeresity of Leeds, July 2020.

11. Edward O. Wilson, “Beware the Age of Loneliness,” The Economist, November 18, 2013.

12. Craig Welch, “Half of All Species Is on the Move,” National Geographic, April 27, 2017, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-change-species-migration-disease.

13. Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini (eds), Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 3–5.

14. Ben Doherty, “‘Disaster Alley’: Australia Could Be Set to Receive New Wave of Climate Refugees,” Guardian, April 4, 2017.

15. See Audra Mitchell, “Beyond Biodiversity and Species: Problematizing Extinction,” Theory, Culture and Society 33, no. 5 (September 2016): 23–42; Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life (London: Polity, 2014); Jamie Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

16. For a critique of the logic of survival in state responses to extinction threats at the level of international politics, see Mitchell, “Is IR Going Extinct?,” European Journal of International Relations 23, no. 1 (2017): 3–25.

17. Emma Marris, “Moving On Assisted Migration,” Nature Climate Change 1 (2008): 112–113.

18. See Katherine Yusoff, “Biopolitical Economies and the Political Aesthetics of Climate Change,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 2–3 (2010): 73–99; Reid, “Climate, Migration, and Sex: The Biopolitics of Climate-Induced Migration,” Critical Studies on Security 2, no. 2 (2004): 196–209.

19. Oliver Milman, “Pizzly or Grolar Bear: Grizzly-Polar Hybrid Is a New Result of Climate Change,” The Guardian, May 18, 2016.

20. Christopher Southgate, Cheryl Hunt, and David Horrell, “Ascesis and Assisted Migration: Responses to the Effects of Climate Change on Animal Species,” European Journal of Science and Theology 4 (2008): 99–111.

21. Claire Colebrook, “Transcendental Migration: Taking Refuge from Climate Change,” in Life Adrift: Climate Change, Migration, Critique, ed. Andrew Baldwin and Giovanni Bettini (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 115–130.

22. Colebrook, “Transcendental Migration,” 119.

23. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 4–5.

24. Latour, Down to Earth, 8.

25. I owe this insight to Richard Irvine, who provided it during the symposium on which this volume is based.

26. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthuluene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 100.

27. Georgio Agamben, “We Refugees,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 49, no. 2 (1995): 114–119.

28. Agamben, “We Refugees,” 118.

29. Andrew Baldwin, “The Political Theologies of Climate Change-Induced Migration,” Critical Studies on Security 2, no. 2 (2014): 210–222.

30. The reader should take note that while I refer to key parallels drawn from Islamic traditions with regard to the broad narrative of home and exile, I am not attempting to construct a comparative account of Abrahamic faiths here, and the theology from which I draw is predominantly Christian theology.

31. See Todd LeVasseur and Anna Pearson, eds., Religion and Ecological Crisis: The “Lynn White Thesis” at 50 (London: Routledge, 2016).

32. Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, trans. Ann Patrick Ware (Mineapolis: Fortress, 2002).

33. See, for instance, Southgate, “The New Days of Noah?,” Creaturely Theology: On Gods, Humans, and Other Animals, ed. Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough (London: SCM, 2009).

34. “Mars & Beyond,” SpaceX.com, accessed January 10, 2019, https://www.spacex.com/mars.

35. Hanna Miao and Michael Sheetz, “Jeff Bezos Says First Spaceflight Was “Tiny Little Step” in Blue Origin’s Plan to Build a Road to Space,” CNBC, July 20, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/20/jeff-bezos-says-this-is-a-tiny-little-step-toward-blue-origins-plan-to-build-a-road-to-space.html.

36. Sarah McFarland-Taylor, “No Planet B v. Disposable Planet: Self-Fulfilling Technocratic Apocalyptic Prophecies in the Marketing of Mars Colonization,” International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture conference, Cork, Ireland, June 2019.

37. Michael Northcott, An Angel Directs the Storm (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 59.

38. Quoted in Northcott, An Angel.

39. Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (London: SCM Press, 1993), 102.

40. For two further explorations of spatial eschatology, see Vitor Westhelle, Eschatology and Space (London: Palgrave, 2016); and Kathryn Tanner, “Eschatology and Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics, ed. G. Meilaender and W. Werpehowski, 41−56 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

41. McFague, The Body of God, 102.

42. McFague, The Body of God, 111.

43. See Northcott, Place, Ecology and the Sacred (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Sigurd Bergmann et al., eds., Nature, Space and the Sacred: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).

44. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 148–149.

45. Ernst Conradie, An Ecological Christian Apology (London: Routledge, 2016).

46. This is what Bergmann, drawing on the German romanticist concept of heimat, calls the movement of Beheimatung—making oneself at home through movement and by embracing “turmoil.” See Bergmann, Religion, Space, and the Environment (London: Routledge, 2017).

47. Quoted in Bergmann, Religion, Space, and the Environment, 45.

48. Peter Scott, “The Re-homing of the Human? A Theological Enquiry into whether Human Beings Are at Home on Earth,” in Christian Faith and the Earth: Current Paths and Emerging Horizons in Ecotheology, ed. Ernst M. Conradie (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 124.

49. For a discussion of the significance of this translation, see Bergmann, “Places of Encounter with the Eschata: Accelerating the Spatial Turn in Eschatology,” in Embracing the Ivory Tower and Stained Glass Windows, ed. Jennifer Baldwin (New York: Springer, 2016).

50. Alain Epp Weaver, “On Exile: Yoder, Said, and a Theology of Land and Return,” Cross Currents 52, no. 4 (2003): 3.

51. Peter Scott, “The Re-homing of the Human?,” 124.

52. Ashley Dawson, Extinction: A Radical History (New York: OR Books, 2016).

53. For a radical account of this view, see Westhelle, Eschatology and Space.

54. Leonardo Boff, “Alternate Earth Charter,” Petropolis, November 13, 1998, https://cartadelatierra.org/wp-content/assets/virtual-library2/images/uploads/Alternate%20Earth%20Charter%20Proposal.pdf.

55. Damian Carrington, “Humanity Is ‘Cutting Down the Tree of Life,’ Warn Scientists,” The Guardian, October 15, 2018.

56. Noah Theriault, Timothy Leduc, Audra Mitchell, June Mary Rubis, and Norma Jacobs Gaehowako, “Living Protocols: Remaking Worlds in the Face of Extinction,” Social and Cultural Geography 21, no. 7 (2020): 893–908.

57. Bergmann, Religion, Space, and the Environment, 42.

58. Southgate acknowledged that the practical and moral complexities of such a project would be significant. Nevertheless, Southgate suggests the thought experiment might be of value as a rhetorical device. In other words, it highlights the great effort and expense that would be required to reverse the threat of extinction and hopefully deter such an eventuality.

59. Scott, “The Re-homing.”

60. Bergmann, Religion, Space, and the Environment.

61. Anna Rowlands, respondent, “The Suffering of Creation: Human and Nonhuman Migration,” panel at Radical Ecological Conversion after Laudato Si’: Discovering the Intrinsic Value of All Creatures conference, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, March 8, 2018.

62. Rowlands, “The Suffering.”

63. Nigel Clark, “Strangers on a Strange Planet: On Hospitality and Holocene Climate Change,” in Life Adrift, ed. Baldwin and Bettini, 134 .

64. Cueto, quoted in Peter C. Phan, “Embracing, Protecting, and Loving the Stranger: A Roman Catholic Theology of Migration,” in Theology of Migration in the Abrahamic Religions, ed. Elaine Padilla and Peter C. Phan, 77–110. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

65. Scott, “The Re-homing,” 117.