PREFACE

FOR SOME FIFTY YEARS, SCHOLARS from the humanities and social sciences have sought to better understand the role of religion in ecological issues. Research in this field has tended to cluster around a set of conventions that crystalized early in the formation of the field: debates have tended to focus on whether religion generally or particular religious traditions are good or bad for the environment, and the bulk of published literature has tended to concentrate on North Atlantic societies and especially on the forms of Christianity predominant in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. These foci have remained as constraints on the emerging body of scholarship on religion and climate change.

Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds, along with its companion volume Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (edited by Evan Berry), are outcomes of a research project that aimed at broadening the conversation about religion and climate change by expanding the geographic frame of reference, thinking comparatively, and emphasizing ethnographic scholarship. Funded by the Henry Luce Foundation’s Religion and International Affairs Program and managed by American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS), this project was called Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective. Although they do not appear extensively in the pages that follow, Toby Volkman, Luce Foundation program officer, Eric Hershberg, director of CLALS, and Rob Albro, CLALS research associate professor, played vital roles in shaping the conversations that formed the basis of this book.

Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective began with a focus on three highly visible forms of environmental vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. The project hypothesized that religious communities around the world are confronted by similar environmental pressures and that their adaptive responses might afford comparative insight about the ways religion matters for climate-change issues. Specifically, the project was structured around a series of workshops, each of which foregrounded cases from one frontline impact of climate change. A 2016 workshop at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, India, concentrated on urban water scarcity and the challenges faced by megacities in South Asia and South America as they struggle with issues of supply and sanitation. The second workshop was held at Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya in Lima, Peru, in 2017 and focused on glacial melt and the ecological precarity of high-elevation communities in the Andes and in the Himalayas. The final workshop, convened at the University of the West Indies, in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, in 2017, was dedicated to the special challenges facing small island developing states in the Caribbean basin and in the South Pacific, namely sea-level rise and storm intensification. The workshops provided space for contributors to share, refine, and recalibrate their scholarship in conversation with experts from other disciplinary and regional contexts.

Exchange among project contributors was further facilitated by a provisional framework for the role of religion: conversations were organized into three streams, each representing one important mode of engagement between religion and climate change. In the first, contributors examined the significance of religious actors, including faith-based organizations, religious leaders, and institutionalized systems of religious mobilization. The second explored religious frames of reference, seeking knowledge about the ways religious beliefs, perceptions, and vocabularies shape the way human communities articulate and engage the phenomena invoked within the perhaps too comprehensive term climate change. The final stream imagined the relationship between religion and climate change differently, asking whether, when, and how environmental changes precipitate religious changes.

These are complex questions with no easy answers. The roughly two dozen scholarly essays that emerged from the Religion and Climate Change in Cross-Regional Perspective project suggest some of the many ways intersections between the issues can be seen and understood, hopefully in ways that evoke sympathy and humane policy responses.