coe154_berry.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:23] Hey. Oh, am I saying hello?

Speaker2: [00:00:25] You sure could, if you OK, I will.

Speaker1: [00:00:27] Hi there, cultures of energy, people. Hi. Hello. I met a listener yesterday.

Speaker2: [00:00:32] You did.

Speaker1: [00:00:33] I'm not sure if he's a fan, but he enjoys it.

Speaker3: [00:00:36] Let's shout out. I'm OK.

Speaker1: [00:00:37] Well, I'll just say its first name.

Speaker2: [00:00:39] Ok, we don't want to expose. I mean, I'll say the last name of privacy.

Speaker1: [00:00:44] I don't know. Are there privacy issues? His first name is Sean.

Speaker3: [00:00:47] Do you think it's that debilitating to be a fan of this podcast that people don't want to be publicly?

Speaker2: [00:00:51] I just say I I'm not going to claim

Speaker1: [00:00:53] He's a fan because that was the word he used. He said he's been listening. He enjoys the pod and he also he

Speaker2: [00:01:01] Actually listens to the intros, which is cool. He said that they're his favorite part, this part they were doing right now. Yeah. He said it was the favorite part field.

Speaker3: [00:01:08] We've outed you. Oh, thanks for visiting Tom Sanders.

Speaker2: [00:01:12] Well, yeah. Anyhow, so that was fun. But but I wasn't going to. Well, it's good to shout out to the listeners, maybe even the fans. But mostly I wanted mostly what I was going to say. It was just funny because he came to my office and showed it was in the office, the dog, and he's like, Oh, I said, The dog, you talk about it, the monkey. That's the very one. It's like this little animal has some kind of weird fame.

Speaker3: [00:01:35] So it could be like if we ever do get around to making T-shirts, which should be our one of our like over vacation.

Speaker2: [00:01:40] Oh, vacation, it could have a shadow on it.

Speaker3: [00:01:43] There could be one that just says shadow on it. Yeah, that says Bad Dog, Bad Dog.

Speaker2: [00:01:48] She's very cute cultures of energy. And in this weird, like skinny little black dog, this morning she was totally non barking at anything she could get her hands on. Well, that's because she was because no one was there to tell her not to bark.

Speaker3: [00:02:00] That's right. You know, we got some more dogs on this episode of the podcast.

Speaker2: [00:02:03] Oh my god, yes, we do. Before we get to get ready for the

Speaker3: [00:02:07] Names, but before we get talking about Guy on Ocean, I wanted to say that we had a I hope everyone did have a lovely holiday weekend for those of you who celebrate such things. And I was happy that Nick Estes on his Facebook called it thanks taking which I that was great. Thanks.

Speaker2: [00:02:25] Thanks, taking hashtag. You're welcome or not.

Speaker3: [00:02:29] Not so

Speaker2: [00:02:29] Welcome.

Speaker3: [00:02:31] But on our way

Speaker2: [00:02:31] Back, I called it settler colonial genocide. But I know that that's not so festive.

Speaker3: [00:02:36] Yeah, it's hard to make the hallmark version of that.

Speaker2: [00:02:39] Yeah, right?

Speaker3: [00:02:41] You know, when we were driving back from upstate New York, we're visiting my sisters. We were listening to the Violent Femmes first album, and I was just all the way

Speaker1: [00:02:50] Through that whole album. It's just

Speaker3: [00:02:51] Brilliant. That's it. And that's what I was thinking about today as I was continuing my ongoing recuperation from my broken foot and doing a little running. And I listen to part of that album again, and I realized there should be a Spotify channel just for kind of perfect albums. In other words, and what I would define a perfect album as is an album where every single track is good to great. In other words, you don't want to fast forward over any tracks. There's nothing wrong or really weak in there, but that's somehow all of these tracks add up to more than the sum of their parts. So that kind of experience of listening to the album, yeah, better than just listening to a couple of tracks, right?

Speaker1: [00:03:29] More than the sum of its part.

Speaker2: [00:03:30] It's kind of synthetic. Well, we've had this

Speaker3: [00:03:32] Cut many of those that exist. It's not a it's a pretty finite number of really great albums that are out there.

Speaker1: [00:03:38] I know, well, you didn't just realize this because we've had this conversation a couple of times,

Speaker2: [00:03:43] But not on the podcast, not on the podcast. Well, the couch. We've had this conversation and I recorded. I think we

Speaker1: [00:03:51] Also had some. We came up with a few. Ok, so I suppose you have some in mind. I think we both agree that the Violent Femmes first album, first album, the second album was really weird. That's when they found Jesus, and it got weird

Speaker3: [00:04:05] When I was a alienated punk teenager. I really liked that second album, and in fact, that album, the second album was really

Speaker2: [00:04:13] The love them. Yeah, oh my god, that all the religious one.

Speaker3: [00:04:17] But the non the non-religious religious tracks like Never Tell, like, I just thought it was a brilliant. They were so

Speaker2: [00:04:21] Brilliant. It was pretty

Speaker1: [00:04:22] Brilliant. But it kind of scared me as a as a female person. I like the country song, but it kind of it scared

Speaker2: [00:04:28] Me a bit. Yeah, it's terrifying. And it's very and I

Speaker1: [00:04:31] Think it's pretty misogynist, if I

Speaker3: [00:04:33] Recall. Well, it's not misogynist, that's for sure.

Speaker2: [00:04:37] But that's like a double negative misogynist.

Speaker1: [00:04:40] Ok, but so violent femmes first album. Ok, this is kind of a weird one, and you are not going to agree or disagree because I don't think you know it well enough. If it's the

Speaker3: [00:04:49] Eagles, I disagree.

Speaker2: [00:04:51] I know Blanket disagrees. Hotel California.

Speaker3: [00:04:54] No, not say that word.

Speaker2: [00:04:55] I don't even know

Speaker1: [00:04:56] If there's anything good on that album, except the brilliant

Speaker2: [00:04:58] Song Hotel California. I can't remember what else is on the rest of it. No, that's not what I was going to say to disagree.

Speaker3: [00:05:04] Yes, go ahead.

Speaker1: [00:05:05] Ok. This is a little OK. It's maybe a little non sequitur, but it's a it's called its Echo and the Bunnymen. Ok, Echo and the Bunnymen. And I'm not sure if it's their first album, but it's called Ocean Rain.

Speaker3: [00:05:16] Yeah, yeah, that's that is a strong contender because again. We're being agnostic as to genre like any genre, any type of music could have a great

Speaker2: [00:05:25] Album, but the funny thing is is that

Speaker1: [00:05:28] We're a little limited in scope in some ways because the last time we listened to albums at the very latest was probably the early 90s. No, that's not true. Oh, come on. When was the last time you bought an album and really listened to the whole album over and over again? We just listen to songs now.

Speaker3: [00:05:42] Well, I was going to say part of part of why I think it's important to have this type of a channel would be to

Speaker2: [00:05:48] Bring

Speaker3: [00:05:48] The album album Great Album existed and they still are being made. I think I will give you an example of a recent, more recent album that I think fits this definition, and that's the first Arcade Fire album.

Speaker2: [00:05:59] I know you're going to say that. Yeah, I remember that, right?

Speaker3: [00:06:02] That's that's on my list. That's a pretty perfect album. Ok. And again, you don't have to like it. I mean, of course, I would think you would like it, but it works as a as a piece. It's more than the sum of its parts, and every single track is pretty strong. Yes.

Speaker2: [00:06:15] Another one you've got are you probably have like a queen one or a David Bowie or something up your sleeve, right?

Speaker3: [00:06:21] Well, David Bowie's interesting case, I think you could make the case that he's had more than one of these, but it would depend a lot on your taste, which one you would pick. I mean, there are some people who might love his Berlin period stuff, because if you're into that, those albums are pretty perfect, right? But I would say probably Ziggy Stardust or Hunky Dory, Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust would be my picks. Maybe man who saved the world.

Speaker2: [00:06:44] But that's the thing. Ziggy Stardust, the one

Speaker1: [00:06:46] With the kind of it's like a painted cover,

Speaker2: [00:06:48] And it's sort of a back alley kind of thing. And there's. Or is it the one where he's got the lightning bolt across his face and try

Speaker3: [00:06:54] To read someone saying,

Speaker2: [00:06:55] Ok, what's the dark one where it's kind of a it's like a reference to some famous sort of late 19th century painter. I think the one with all the dogs Edward Hopper or something. No, it's dark.

Speaker3: [00:07:07] Oh, I think it's Ziggy Stardust, is what you're thinking. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker2: [00:07:10] Yeah, it's like an alley or something. It's like a back a street with a light.

Speaker3: [00:07:14] Or I could happily listen to that whole.

Speaker2: [00:07:15] That's Ziggy Stardust. Yeah, OK. All right. I'm on board with that one.

Speaker1: [00:07:19] I lost that a long time ago. I mean, I lost that in the summer of

Speaker2: [00:07:23] Like 91 or something. Because, you know, what happened to a lot of my albums is that I was living on this in on the second story of this house with two roommates. Yeah, and we had to switch like there were only two bedrooms in the little apartment house thing and there were three of us. And so we had to rotate out and one of us would sleep in the living room like behind this weird curtain. And it was very college. And then so I had all my albums and during the summer was my turn to live in the living room and I was like, OK, I don't care because I'm going to be gone all summer traveling. I think I was in Central America or something, but then I left.

Speaker1: [00:08:01] I had all my albums in there in the Sun, just blasted through there all summer.

Speaker2: [00:08:05] Oh no. And it completely destroyed like warped, you know, even the weak

Speaker3: [00:08:10] Northern California sun did that.

Speaker2: [00:08:12] Yeah. Wow. Well, when it comes to the window all summer, yeah. And I would, I guess there were no curtains or whatever. I forgot to close them. And so I came home and had almost all of them were destroyed, like huge like warps like you couldn't even believe, like mountains. Oh, so sad. So anyway, I lost a lot. I'm sure I gained a lot in spirit that summer, but I lost a lot of vinyl

Speaker3: [00:08:33] In terms of building character

Speaker2: [00:08:35] For your suffering. Yeah. Well, the hilarious thing is that I

Speaker1: [00:08:38] Would try and play those albums.

Speaker2: [00:08:39] I was like, No, I refuse to give them up.

Speaker1: [00:08:42] And I saw I tried all of them. I was like, Maybe the needle can handle it and we'll just play over the war. But it was hilarious. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And then the warps were so bad, most of them were so bad that it threw the needle off.

Speaker3: [00:08:54] Yeah, that's always fun. When you get like throws, get a random mix. It's just like just bouncing all around the place.

Speaker2: [00:09:00] Yeah, that's all right. So what else would you put on your list?

Speaker3: [00:09:02] Ok, I won't go on and on, but a few more that came to mind were Gang of Four's entertainment. I think that's like an essential British punk album. Whatever you want to call it, that album is pretty great punk. I had a little bit of trouble with like, you know, like London, calling is not like that album. If it had just taken the best like half of that album and made it a one LP album rather than a double album, I think it would have been a perfect album, but there's a lot of like kind of not so great tracks on London calling. In my opinion. I think Bad Brains audience, I also probably almost there. I'd have to listen to it again. The second and third Public Enemy albums, I think in rap could maybe qualify. Paul's boutique by the Beastie Boys. Ok, I'm trying to think more. I was trying to think of more rock albums, though, because when I grew up,

Speaker1: [00:09:49] How about that first N.W.A album? So I can't see now I think we're being a little too generous. I think you'd have to go back through and really,

Speaker3: [00:09:57] I don't know. Yeah, well, there's another thing with rap albums of that era as they would have a bunch of tracks, which would just be people kind of goofing off and setting an agenda creating. But the Federal Ministry

Speaker1: [00:10:08] Of First Public Enemy definitely counts.

Speaker3: [00:10:11] The first Public Enemy album is one that a lot of people haven't heard. It's or

Speaker1: [00:10:14] Maybe it's the second

Speaker3: [00:10:15] One. I think it's the second one. The second one was pretty amazing, but so is like a lot of albums in that era. It was a really good era for rap, so, you know, like the first Cypress Hill album

Speaker2: [00:10:24] Is kind of amazing. How about that BDP

Speaker1: [00:10:26] Boogie Down productions, their first album? Does that count?

Speaker3: [00:10:31] I'd have to look at BDP. I'm sure BDP has one. I just don't know if it's the first one or not. Ok? Some some bands take a couple of albums to get get up to their like peak performance, and some some bands like the Violent Femmes basically like could never touch what they did their first album, right? I think there's a lot of great bands that have like basically an album and a half of great material in them, and sometimes it's like one perfect album and then half of it, another album.

Speaker1: [00:10:52] Well, it's sort of like the TV show phenomenon, perhaps that we talked about where it's like someone's developing a TV show and they spend years and years and years developing the plotline and the characters, and they kind of perfected it. And then, lo and behold, it's a big hit, and then they're asked to do a second season.

Speaker3: [00:11:09] This is called the True Detective Theory, right?

Speaker1: [00:11:11] But they don't have quite the time or the energy or the creative inspiration. Maybe it's just time to be able to

Speaker2: [00:11:17] Produce another rutabaga

Speaker3: [00:11:19] Cocaine. They're working

Speaker2: [00:11:19] Their way through this bag

Speaker3: [00:11:20] Away and that they're working well now because they have money and blah blah blah. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:11:25] So now I'm trying to remember the albums that I would listen to over and over and over again. Ok, wait, listen. Talking head. Seventy seven. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Ok, now here's another one, and I can't remember the name of the album, but it might have just been the name of the band. I don't think you were into them. They're called scraping feed us off the wheel.

Speaker3: [00:11:41] It's a great one of the great

Speaker2: [00:11:43] Bands Typekit for a long time. Yeah, that's

Speaker1: [00:11:46] I was really. I was really into that album. Yeah, that's long gone.

Speaker3: [00:11:50] I sort of think if there was a Dead Kennedys album, that would be they. Of all the tracks are great. I'm not sure. I'm not sure they did a kind of perfect album, but it's punk. They shouldn't. They should be like making money.

Speaker1: [00:12:00] They shouldn't write. It's kind of an insult to tell a punk band that they've made a perfect album.

Speaker3: [00:12:04] Exactly. What do you mean? Perfect?

Speaker1: [00:12:06] Like, that's such a bougie thing to say.

Speaker3: [00:12:08] Yeah, right? Well, that's where the thing like the Sex Pistols album, although you know, curated and quaffed in its own way, was pretty perfect. The never wasn't bollocks. Don't you think every

Speaker1: [00:12:18] Record on that? I don't know. I'd have to listen to it again. There are a lot of great songs. Are they all great? That scene? That's that has to be the litmus. That's thing has to be more than two thirds limits to be all. Oh, exactly. And I think a lot of these ones we name, they're like two thirds perfect, but maybe not all the way.

Speaker3: [00:12:33] And here's a good example of like a near miss. Yaz is upstairs at Eric's,

Speaker2: [00:12:38] Which is God. I love that when you've

Speaker3: [00:12:40] Got that stupid telephone, stupid telephone.

Speaker2: [00:12:42] Yeah. So, oh

Speaker1: [00:12:44] God, I hated that song so much that it was so irritating that it was right in the middle of like was on a or B. I can't remember what side it was on, but it's right in the middle. Yeah. And I was like, listen to the first three songs. And then when that song came on, I would run over to the record player, lift up the needle and move it past that song so I didn't have to listen to. Yeah, exactly. That's how bad that song was, exactly. And as total ruination for the album,

Speaker3: [00:13:07] And isn't there also a song in there that's just like, got this really piercing noise on it, too? That's really irritating. Is that what that album, anyway? So that is like a near-miss, like a really beautiful album that's marred by just like one or two sucky songs?

Speaker1: [00:13:19] Now what about the Eurythmics again? I think their first album was all white, and it had her on the cover. I remember listening to that pretty obsessively like flipping it over and listening to it over and over again. That's how I'm trying to remember. Like, what a perfect album might be is.

Speaker3: [00:13:33] Yeah, well, that's right. Like, what did you listen to, where you ever listened the full album over and over again without lifting the needle?

Speaker1: [00:13:39] Yeah, that's an flip and flip it over. Not just one side.

Speaker3: [00:13:43] If you had a tape, same thing. Yeah, you wouldn't. Fast forward that tape.

Speaker2: [00:13:47] Get all jammed up, it feels like. Think about the tape, like

Speaker1: [00:13:50] The tape that you that you played so many times that it wore out and broke. Yeah, like, that's the tape.

Speaker3: [00:13:56] That's the tape.

Speaker1: [00:13:57] I had that happen to one tape and I shoot. I can't remember which one it was.

Speaker3: [00:14:01] For me, it was like a Beastie Boys tape, but I've been there. I can't

Speaker2: [00:14:04] Remember. Yeah, or like other violent films, they

Speaker3: [00:14:07] Work it out, actually, because I listen to most of my stuff on record, not tape, to be honest.

Speaker1: [00:14:11] So you know what? Listening to them. Listening to the Violent Femmes in the car the other day. Hilarious and recognizing or recalling that I actually remember every single word which is hilarious. Yeah. You know, if only I could do that with like Deleuze or something

Speaker2: [00:14:28] That remember every fucking word of the Violent

Speaker1: [00:14:30] Femmes. And then, you

Speaker3: [00:14:32] Know, singing to lose would be pretty. Maybe that's their next. Their next comeback

Speaker1: [00:14:36] Album. So but it also reminded me of this trip that I took with my friend, who was my best friend at the time, Molly. He is actually two friends. My mom took me and two friends down to visit the grandparents down in Southern California,

Speaker2: [00:14:50] And we drove down in her

Speaker1: [00:14:51] Honda, her red Honda Prelude and had a tape player and we switched off listening to songs. Everyone got a turn at the song that's like me and Molly, and I forget who must have been Lisa Morris.

Speaker2: [00:15:05] We were so into violent fans that we just we listen to the whole album all the way down, and we had three quarters of the votes. So we basically like every time it was our turn, we'd put on the Violent Femmes really, really loud. Can you imagine being in the car with three teenagers with that? Cranked up if you were like a parent.

Speaker3: [00:15:22] So which is your mom's favorite Violent Femmes album?

Speaker2: [00:15:24] She hated it so much because there's, you know, because it's pretty edgy, like anyone wants to go out there and listen or listen again. It's pretty screechy and like, the singing is really easily and kind of horrible, and the music is kind of harsh.

Speaker3: [00:15:42] It can be harsh. It can be quite beautiful in places. That's what's so great about the album as it moves over. It's like like Velvet Underground, you sometimes. And it's a really punky and thrashy and bizarre and chaotic.

Speaker2: [00:15:52] And oh, what about

Speaker1: [00:15:52] That Velvet Underground with the banana that peeled

Speaker2: [00:15:55] Off? Did you ever see that Nico?

Speaker1: [00:15:58] So my friend actually had one of the originals where the banana actually peeled. Did you have ever seen that?

Speaker3: [00:16:04] I've heard of it. I may have seen it back in the day. I never

Speaker2: [00:16:08] Feel OK.

Speaker1: [00:16:09] So you peel it down and it's a pink banana inside.

Speaker2: [00:16:12] Yes. And of course, you know

Speaker1: [00:16:13] The angle of

Speaker2: [00:16:14] The banana. Like, it's clearly a big day.

Speaker3: [00:16:16] Are you saying more misogyny?

Speaker1: [00:16:17] I'm I'm just saying, fellas, it wasn't misogyny. It wasn't misogynistic.

Speaker3: [00:16:21] I'm going to. I'm going to make a I'm going to make a controversial statement that I think Loaded was the best view album. But I'm also not sure that they produced like a perfect album. I don't remember that. I don't know that one. I'm looking at the time, and I think we should move right on to talking about our guest today. Evan Berry from American University is with us and his two dogs, Guy and Ocean, who apparently were set up to do some barking in the background occasionally. Anyway, there are some dogs and

Speaker1: [00:16:47] There have been very polite, some perfect albums.

Speaker3: [00:16:49] I bet Evan will write in any tweet at us with some albums. In fact, anyone listening who has a perfect album they want to recommend, please recommend it. I would love to discover some new ones. If you got them, let us know. The book we're talking about is devoted to nature of the religious roots of American environmentalism, among other things. Evans, doing a really cool work on the intersection of religion and environmentalists thought and more recently on religion responses to climate change. And I think it's really cool. He's very thoughtful and has a lot of really brilliant insights to share about thinking both about how a lot of modern American environmentalists thought was influenced by Christian theology. But also, you know, now that we're living in an era in which climate change is becoming ever more present in our lives, how religion offers certain resources to understand our conditions, including as we point, we discuss the conditions of believing in things that are not always immediately visible to us.

Speaker1: [00:17:45] I was just thinking about theology and theocracy, and then I was thinking about the name Theo. Yeah, if your name is Theo, does a does that have a religious connotation? I guess it might, right?

Speaker3: [00:17:55] If it audio for sure, like I should be, you should probably have to wear some kind of a priestly garment if you're

Speaker1: [00:18:02] Atheist, like a like some like some pope slippers. Yeah. So the fancy pope slippers? Yeah, OK. Well, good. We have a wonderful conversation with Evan, who's very smart and knows a lot, and we had such a good time chatting with him and we had a fun time meeting him. Where did we meet him? Well, I had already met him back in DC, but

Speaker3: [00:18:22] Glasgow,

Speaker1: [00:18:23] Glasgow? Yeah, I was talking about the Glasgow effect yesterday. Go look that up, people. That's that's a weird thing. You got it. Ok. Anyhow, at this point in time, we're going to say, Go Evan, you haven't.

Speaker3: [00:18:53] Welcome back, everybody, to the Cultures of Energy podcast we're thrilled to have on the line with us, which we assume is from D.C., but maybe I shouldn't make the assumption, but it is Evan Berry from American University.

Speaker4: [00:19:04] Hi, Evan. Hi there. Glad to be with you guys today.

Speaker1: [00:19:07] Yeah, we're glad you're here. All right. So I was saying just a second ago before we started recording that, I want to ask you a kind of big and open ended question. But I think it's a fun one, and I bet it's something that you've thought and thought about quite a bit and written about as well. And that is what's up with this pope and the environment pope. Plus climate change equals what? Evan Berry?

Speaker4: [00:19:33] Yeah, that's a great question. A fun place to start. I think there's maybe a cynical way to think about it and an optimistic way to think about it. The cynical way to think about it is that religious actors have been relatively slow to get on board with a serious, like, morally robust climate message, even though previous popes have spoken out on the issue, even though there are other big religious figures who have talked about climate change in the past. This is sort of the first pull out all the stops ever to do international religious engagement on climate change, and I think part of that is of, if not a face saving exercise, certainly an attempt to to have the Vatican weigh in on a contemporary issue where it feels like it has a unique contribution in a world where it feels like it's maybe losing its overall political salience, it's not the powerful thing that it was an evil ages. So that's maybe the cynical take. The less cynical take is that the Pope's Encyclical 2.0 C is actually addressed to all men and women of goodwill. It's not exactly a Catholic document. It's a it's a universal document, and it makes some really interesting gestures towards what an ethic that is not narrowly theological in its attempt to think about ecology and the collective good would look like, and it actually invites sort of a conversation. So when I teach that my students are often most excited, the students of mine who are most excited about it are often the ones that are the least religious. They find it a very welcoming and engaging document, and sometimes the Catholic students are the ones that are sort of nonplussed.

Speaker1: [00:21:19] That's really interesting because I guess I didn't realize that it was addressed to all women and men. What did you say of goodwill? That's right. Right. And so it's not directed just to the faithful that the Catholic faithful. And I think this is also what you mentioned, previous, that there might be a kind of instrumental reason for bringing climate change and bringing questions of environment into the encyclical and to create, I guess, a kind of political leverage or a political tool that can can make the church more relevant. And or it can increase its relevance, shall we say, than it might be seen in some places around the world.

Speaker2: [00:22:01] So, yeah,

Speaker4: [00:22:02] That place for it still has

Speaker2: [00:22:03] Some traction.

Speaker1: [00:22:04] Yeah, for sure. Ok, interesting. All right now, now it's Dominic

Speaker3: [00:22:08] As we happen to have the pleasure to read your terrific book devoted to nature. The religious roots of American environmentalism, which came out with the University of California Press,

Speaker1: [00:22:18] Which is also a great title. I like to recognize great titles.

Speaker3: [00:22:21] Yeah, good title writing is a is an art unto itself, I think. Yes, and it is a very, very interesting book. A good read. It covers a lot of ground, but very efficiently and insightfully. Evans So first of all, congratulations on a terrific work. Thank you. I wanted to kind of get right to, you know, where you where you start the book this idea that you know this possibility that somehow environmentalism is somehow resembling a religious belief system, which can be both, you know, sort of put in the positive and the negative, as you point out. But you do say that, you know, we should be attentive to the fact that there are real affinities between modern, seemingly secular environmental thinking and a Christian theological tradition. Do you want to tell us a little bit about how you got to that, that argument?

Speaker4: [00:23:12] Sure. So I think scholars, mostly in religious studies, but in anthropology and other other places in the environmental humanities have been thinking and writing on the relationship between religion and the environment for almost a half century now, with more developed conversations since the mid-1990s. And those conversations have tended to gravitate around to bases. On the one hand, there are folks who are most interested in theological ethics as a resource for grappling with contemporary environmental issues, thinking about the ecological dimensions of different religious traditions. And on the other hand, you have a group of folks who've been most interested in the religious characteristics of secular environmental movements. So not just radical environmentalism, but just the rhetoric around save the planet and save the whales and what that all means in terms of practice and daily life and the reorganization of morality in a late capitalist frame. And I find myself wanting to do both and not really seeing either of those things as mutually exclusive. So this book for me was a way to think through and and work through the connection between those two schools of thought. How is it, on the one hand that secular environmental movements are informed by and related or related to religious traditions of thought? And on the other hand, how is it that theological resources are kind of a partial and incomplete way of engaging contemporary environmental issues?

Speaker3: [00:24:48] So, you know, just to just to kind of speak to the framing of the argument a little bit, you do both at the beginning and the end of the book. Remind us of Lyn White's 1967 piece, where he argued that Christianity had a kind of intrinsic tendency to devalue nature. And you know, much of the book obviously shows that this is not quite so easily stated right that there's a more complex situation than that. But you also say that in a sense, I think you say he's half wrong, but I guess that, you know, means he's also half right. What do you think White got right about the relationship between Christianity and maybe our societal tendencies?

Speaker4: [00:25:25] Yeah. The thing I like the most about White's article and the piece that stays with me, I think really in all of my work is his working premise that religions inform the way that cultural systems take shape and that we can trace from theology into more diffuse patterns of social organization ideas about nature and the environment and the place of human beings in in the in the in the biological order, right? And so that more axiomatic claim that religion is informative for, but not absolutely in control of what what comes to take shape in human human ecology, I think is something he got, something he got right. I just think the issue which he actually addresses, right, he doesn't say this is the only possibility within Christianity. He very clearly says that anthropocentric frame is one that became dominant and doesn't in that article, explore why. But elsewhere in his work talks about why the Dominion theology became the dominant force in medieval Christian thought and what he then he identifies alternatives and people like St. Francis and elsewhere.

Speaker3: [00:26:44] Sounds like you got a dog who would beg to differ there?

Speaker4: [00:26:48] Apparently, I do. I wonder if I need to restate my claims online.

Speaker3: [00:26:53] He says, You're overreaching of and you're overreaching.

Speaker2: [00:26:55] It's not. No, I'm just joking. You're not

Speaker1: [00:26:57] Human companion. As defending old white

Speaker3: [00:26:59] Assumes it's OK. We have we have frequent appearances often, you know, kind of uninvited drop in guests, guest star dogs. Yeah.

Speaker4: [00:27:07] So we were on the topic of human ecology, right? So I definitely do not live in a world of humans only.

Speaker3: [00:27:15] Yes, I think it was the moment you said Anthropocene centrism that got him or

Speaker2: [00:27:19] Her or her. That's right.

Speaker3: [00:27:21] Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:27:22] So I don't know if you're able to finish your thought there.

Speaker4: [00:27:26] Yeah, I think I'm good unless you'd like me to try to take another crack at it.

Speaker2: [00:27:28] Yeah, no, that's great.

Speaker1: [00:27:29] So I wanted to get some more of the framing of the book in here, too, and just be really explicit about the argument that you lay out in it and you say that American environmentalism is related to religion, not out of some serendipitous resemblance. That is not because environmental activists or actors or lovers of the environment are holy and religious in their effective state or disposition. But in fact, you say, but by way of historically demonstrable genealogical affinity with Christian theological tradition. And so this is kind of the big takeaway of the book, and I think I think one of the other important things that you do for us in the beginning. So you frame it up in such a way that we can see this historical distinction where, you know, in the first instance, there is a kind of 19th century romantic tradition, the transcendentalist movements and trend transcendentalist thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and like John Muir, who you take as a kind of paradigmatic case of someone whose personal religious affiliation is often taken as the root of why of how these Christian values came to be a part of environmental thinking and environmental kind of theological orientation. But in fact, you say with John Muir, it was it was already in the water. It was what he was breathing beyond his own, you know, personal inclinations towards religious values or not. And then in the second instance, you bring us to this post World War Two moment where we meet people like Rachel Carson, famously where where environmentalism becomes an object not of transcendental romantic religious interest, but becomes instead a site of scientific and policy interest. And so you see this as a really pivotal move that many people have called a kind of secularization. But you argue that that's not exactly what happens here. So could you can you kind of fill us out a bit here in terms of how how that pivot happens and how you were able to trace this movement from the kind of transcendental ethos to a more cientifico political orientation in American environmentalism and how they're both connected to it sets of Christian theological norms?

Speaker4: [00:29:49] Sure. I think I'm actually making two moves when I try to build that case, and the one move is around the problem with so-called great man approaches to history. But we have this. We have a genealogy of American environmental thought that I think is pretty commonly. It appears pretty frequently in literatures about the history of American environmentalism, and it runs something like Emerson Thoreau, Muir, maybe Leopold and then definitely Rachel Carson and very commoner and the folks in the nineteen sixties. And there's a huge gap there. So the one move is maybe those what do we what do we take away if we think about those people, not as the the individuals putting a stamp on their historical moment, but as people who were reflective of broader currents of tradition? So flipping the script to think more about social histories than about personal biographies, I think really changes the way we locate that intellectual genealogy. And I also think that the way that that story often runs is that it clusters Leopold and Carson and commoner and others in a post World War Two moment where policy concerns and industrialization and the beginnings of the environmental movement with a capital E. right around issues of public health and not in my backyard and vestiges of what later became the nuclear energy movement that we think of that as one cluster. And then we think about figures like Thoreau and Emerson and Muir as another sort of proto type for later environmentalism. We don't have a good story about how those are connected. So one of the major impetus is for the book is to try to tell a more linear genealogy that that thinks about the relationships between those earlier romantic turns and the leader more secular ones.

Speaker4: [00:31:48] And I think in large part that that we actually can give a pretty good account of why the specifically theological content of environmental discourse gets screened out. And it's precisely because of the work that people were trying to do in the name of protecting and conserving the environment. So in the nineteen in the 19th century, a lot of that work is around raising public consciousness about the importance of preserved spaces and using the language of recreation and the enjoyment of nature and the need to preserve the grandeur of God's creation as a sort of overarching way to talk about land use in the American West. And so this is the language you get and people like John Muir. And really, the idea is that if we have these places, we can visit them and we can benefit spiritually from our encounters with wild nature. That idea that we get very directly from Thoreau folks later on. And I take Leopold to be very much in this vein because they're trying to speak to different audiences because they're trying to enter testimony into congressional records because they're trying to get five to one to three tax status for organizations to do to to lobby for policies because they're trying to build broad constituencies across state lines. Stop using the manifestly religious language that was everywhere in the Sierra Club bulletin and the Appalachian Trail club, literatures from before World War Two just disappears as a new kind of political organization. Activity takes shape after the war. And it's

Speaker1: [00:33:30] Really fascinating. It really is. I mean, just looking at this history and kind of getting into the fine grained elements of it in the book is it's it's really quite enlightening. I wanted to also think through a little bit. One of the threads that you found in these historical junctures and in the genealogy here, and that is that part of this environmental inheritance that you write about. One of the key elements within it, you write, is the notion that nature is morally salient as an object of value, intrinsic value and as a means of advancing human moral goods. And I would love for you to take us on a tour of how nature is morally salient, what what you mean by that or what these thinkers and advocates and others meant by the the moral nature of nature.

Speaker4: [00:34:29] Yeah. This is sort of an oft made claim, but there's this great Raymond Williams essay in his critical terms on about nature of being the most difficult to define word in the English language, which is kind of true, right? Yes, it has so many vacancies, but at its heart is this idea that it is something given. And in that sense, it's over against the human in a really fundamental way. So there's already this theological quality to the way we think and talk about nature as something that is in dialectic relationship to human being and that our self-knowledge gets played out in terms of our relationship to it. So this takes a particular shape in the 19th century discourse around natural history and natural science, especially in the era before Darwin. So here, natural science serves as a tool for knowing about the story of creation and understanding the grandeur of mountains and geologic history and the ocean, and reading through those teleological story of progress, right? So to understand the unfolding of the universe is something that then can be known, and that information is taken as as part of a broader process of human moral education and achievement of wisdom. And I think that then also gets recapitulated at the smaller scale right, that individuals, by encountering nature, are transformed by it and that that transformation does important work and the language.

Speaker4: [00:36:11] This is actually one of the people who is really into this particular kind of language is Olmstead, the the architect of Central Park and so many other American parks who wrote a lot about the moral salubrious ness of nature. Their people were very concerned in the late 19th century as cities become more and more industrialized. This is somehow corrupting and making the the working classes sick and alienated from their agricultural roots, because this is still a very rapid transit transformation from the early 19th century to the late 19th century as people move out of farming and into manufacturing jobs. People are worried about that, and so parks get built as a way of cleansing the masses. Which, to me, is both fascinating and a little creepy that that's how Central Park is there to get the immigrants clean. And so this idea that nature somehow provides that moral work for free, it's almost like the same way we talk about environmental services right to monetize them. It does this work. All we need to do is protect places, and those places will allow us to go and renew ourselves against our own self. Devastating industrialization.

Speaker1: [00:37:30] Mm hmm. Right. Just to to breathe the fresh air and to sit on the grass is to purify oneself in this in this moral object called nature. And yet at the same time, there is a discourse about nature as completely

Speaker2: [00:37:45] Amoral, right or immoral.

Speaker1: [00:37:47] Perhaps because we have the evolutionary theories of Darwin, where natural processes are based on survival in the basic sense. And there's no morality to the, you know, the hunting of prey by by larger animals. We have the same construction of a morality or immorality is a part of. The system called Nature at the same time, right, it's kind of without human, it's without that human inflection, but it is ruthless, right? Nature is also ruthless as much as it is moral.

Speaker4: [00:38:24] Yeah, part of me and here I'm being a little conjectural, thinks this is why we have an interruption in our standard history of American environmental thought sort of ends with Thoreau and then begins again after World War Two. But there's some broader process of resolving this tension between nature as beneficent and God given and nature as empty and amoral, and that those those strains of thinking about the environment. I mean, we don't use the language of nature in the environmental discourse in the second half of the 20th century, the same way we did in the first. And that that gets sorted out so that many of our older ideas about nature have been reimagined, either in terms of wilderness or the environment. And so the the tension there actually gets played out in the way we talk about nature of being an autonomous system of predation and and change. The fact that it's that it's existence, apart from reasoned human order is exactly part of why we need it to teach us particular things about the limits of our own being.

Speaker2: [00:39:41] Mm hmm.

Speaker1: [00:39:42] Yeah, that really nicely put.

Speaker3: [00:39:43] So, Evan, I found the many of the chapters fascinating, and one of the things that really drew my attention was your discussion of nominal ism. And, you know, Christian, or maybe more specifically, Protestant nominal ism and its influence upon environmental thinking. Two questions, I guess you point on the one hand to a shift in Christian thought. For the first fifteen hundred years or so, there was a kind of conceptualization of nature as being profane. And then seemingly and I suppose this happens, you know, more or less coterminous with the development of science or the Renaissance. Perhaps we begin to find imaginations of nature that appreciate the intelligence and design and beauty and architecture of the divine will or divine thinking in the making of the world. And the first part of the question, and this is probably the one that's very speculative. It's you know, to what extent this this nominal list impulse to say, Well, we can't know God's will or we can't understand, you know, in the Calvinist way we can't understand what God has in store for us. He is a kind of uber intellectual force that are puny human minds aren't really capable of of being able to access, you know, how much of that redefinition was, in some ways, a response to the advances in scientific imagination and human scientific imagination. Engineering this idea of trying to create God as a still more powerful intellectual force, even as you know, some humans were becoming very able to to do things that previously, you know, would not have been thought capable of being done by humans. And the second part is is just whether you think this anomalous impulse actually carries over into contemporary American climate denialism, whether you know, part of it is this idea. Well, we are, you know, kidding ourselves. If we think climate science can get a purchase on what God's plan is for the weather and for the seasons and floods and drought and so forth.

Speaker4: [00:41:38] Yeah, those are both great questions. So the the first one, first I would say that the moment of scholastic ism and and nominal ism are they precede the emergence of anything like what we would call modern science. These are late, medieval or even renaissance developments that have largely to do with the reintroduction of Aristotelian thought into Christian theology. So these have to do with Tom ism and its and its rejoinders. I think they actually end up paving the way for science in many ways in that the limits to our innate reason are part of the driving motivations for the scientific method and the need to recognize the limits of our understanding by having a reliable method for knowing that which is beyond our inborn comprehension, which is sort of the platonic model for scientific reasoning that had been dominant in the earlier Middle Ages. Your second question is really fascinating. I hadn't I hadn't thought about that, and to be perfectly honest, that that makes great sense. There is an impulse and this is so the nominal lists are the the advance guard of the Protestant Reformation. They're the ones that tell the the Thomas and the scholastics that they're sophists, that a more radical. Commitment to God's absolute omnipotence, even over our formal categories of language and naming things is absolute. And so that they're the ones that refuse our ability to to know and name nature. And I think that that's that's a nice way to think about an underlying impulse that remains alive in certain forms of contemporary Christianity that for whatever kinds of claims the scientists may make, their validity exists on a pretty superficial ontological level and that what's really true is something beyond that.

Speaker3: [00:43:55] Yeah, I mean, I have the sense that, you know, we've been doing I've been doing these interviews with with.

Speaker4: [00:44:01] So to be perfectly honest, the ecosystem, I think, also has to do with my son punking me. I think I think he knows I'm in the basement on a phone call that he finds it hilarious to make the dogs pop. That's OK. These are always human animal interactions. That's right.

Speaker2: [00:44:18] Yes.

Speaker1: [00:44:19] Props to him.

Speaker3: [00:44:20] No. I was just going to say that, you know, I've had this chance to talk to a lot of folks who were Hurricane Harvey victims. Their homes were flooded and a good number of them are quite Christian and quite Republican. And their political leanings was just talking with somebody yesterday and reading your book at the same time, something clicked. I felt like the way he was describing his inability to comprehend. I mean, he knows that it's raining more. But yet what the implications of that and what the what it then prompts in terms of human actions are not obvious, right? There's a sense that we have to have faith rather than necessarily embark on any specific program of decarbonisation. So it's an interesting, interesting little loop there.

Speaker4: [00:45:02] Yeah. So a lot of the work that I've been doing since finishing this manuscript has been aimed at a similar question to the one you're framing, which is about the relationship between religious belief and people's thinking and actions around climate change in particular, but just environmental issues more generally. And in the book, I don't argue that religious ideas neatly predict what shape environmental engagement will take, but they describe a range of possibilities that can be realized in public discourse. Both the, as you put it, the nominal list repudiation of climate science and the value of wilderness are both ideas that emerge out of Christian theology and get taken up into environmental debates in ways that weren't originally designed to do. But they serve those functions in our modern, discursive formations.

Speaker3: [00:46:07] On the topic of wilderness, I mean, really fascinating chapter in the book as well. I love this discussion of walking as the original form of recreational salvation. I wanted to invite you to talk a little bit about that. And then, of course, the idea that the best place to walk, I suppose, is the wilderness.

Speaker4: [00:46:25] Yeah. So I tell a story in that chapter about a longer tradition of peripatetic philosophy in which the movement of the body is essential to get the thoughts and and the soul and the flesh all working together. It's a meditative exercise, and increasingly walks in cities are become more and more limited as Europe industrialize. And so you have people like Rousseau writing about in his reveries about how important taking really long walks in the woods is for his own philosophical work. And those kinds of practices become really important for people like Emerson and Thoreau and for the British romantics, and that practice of reflecting on the scenery and on landscape as a way to look inwards. Have this particularly Christian romantic tradition, but then take a whole new form in the United States when we start building parks that are specifically designed to let people do that kind of work. So it's not just that we have those practices and those longer traditions, it's that we then start building infrastructure around them. And I say this as a person who grew up backpacking and who loves to do this practice. But clearly, the whole infrastructure around the national parks and ride gear and the way we do that has a deeper root than simply a good way to spend the weekend right? It's supposed to do a certain kind of transformative work for us.

Speaker1: [00:48:11] Yeah, right, right. Maybe this is by way of Segway and a little bit more into your more recent work too, but I did want to bring in something where you begin to talk about climate change in the book itself, and you make the important point that in some ways, this is not new because we can look back to at least a century of worries that preceded climate change. As an explicit object where those who have cared to look have been concerned about resource depletion and about erosion, and about the extinction of different creatures and water pollution and toxic waste and in fact, environmentally vulnerable communities. So this is not new. But you do say that when we turn to climate change because of its global economic and temporal complexities, which is important, this, you say, has really pushed our environmental imagination to its very limits. And then you ask the question, how can we respond meaningfully to a crisis that has no singular technical or political solution? And I went out to that. Nor does it have a temporal location that we can precisely locate either in the past or in the future. But I wanted to ask you as a this is really interesting to me, pushing our environmental imagination to its very limits. Let me pose this question to you. Isn't the notion of God or gods an exercise in pushing one's imagination to the limits?

Speaker2: [00:49:43] Sure. Good answer.

Speaker4: [00:49:48] You're right. I think what I'm trying to say there is less about our imagination of what the environment is and more about our impoverished notion of what the possibilities for human relation to the environment are. There is the piece that I'm trying to pick up in the sections that you're you're referring to here is around the limits to nature discourse to talk about nature as being worth preserving because of its status as created or because of the kind of service that it can do for us in healing our sick souls has real limits for thinking about climate change, but that was an appropriate, if perhaps settler colonial way of grappling with nature and through the American project. But climate change, as much as it is sort of an unfolding of the American project, is much more than just that. And I think we need more robust, more or less provincial, less religiously provincial way of thinking and talking about our environmental imaginations.

Speaker1: [00:51:06] I mean, it's just it struck me in a kind of profound, almost philosophical sense that it's true that climate change and the solutions, if you will, to it, demand so much of the imagination. It feels almost like an impossible task. And yet, as speaking as a secular person who has never been a person of faith nor a true believer, I I now wonder if we could look to people of faith who who are believers who have the strong sense of faith, who have been able to objectify in some sense, the unimaginable and the unseeable that is part of climate change. But that is really fundamental to especially, I guess, Christian notions of of God, right? That there's you have to have faith

Speaker2: [00:51:55] In something that you can't touch that that can't be

Speaker1: [00:51:59] Rendered explicit through science or evidence, right? And with climate change, there's an element of needing to be able to grapple with the impossible. And I think and some of the same ways that it must be for people of faith as they're maybe even as they're challenged about their beliefs.

Speaker4: [00:52:20] Yeah. I mean, I take one of my main arguments to be that those of us who would call ourselves secular are kind of covering our own tracks that the positions we take when we say that themselves are partly derived from religious currents and that maybe in thinking about that more honestly, we recover something about what we mean when we say that we're secular. I actually think what I'm talking about the impoverished quality of our environmental imagination. I'm trying to say that there are certain things we take for granted about nature with a capital n that are counterproductive for the climate crisis, that those were useful in conserving land and that now. In a world where we have a much more nuanced appreciation, not just of ecosystems, but about the whole planet as an interconnected system of materials and life and creatures and places and plants that that broader system maybe matters in different ways than we imagined it did when we were just talking about individual souls living in particular places. I think I don't think I'm particularly concerned about individuals. I think that that's I think that's a problematic language for us to talk about climate change through and you actually hear it a lot. Right. So one of my axes to grind as it were, is with people who tell unnecessarily utopian stories or unnecessarily apocalyptic stories about the coming climate future that they both serve the purpose of imagining the narrator of those stories in some future world as an individual and either extrapolating out that human nature figures it out and that we triumph technologically over our own crisis, or that humanity falls apart. Yet somehow we can still see that future and that that's to be lamented. I think that there's something about collective destiny that we're missing in either of those either of those renderings.

Speaker1: [00:54:39] Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like Chakraborty's argument in his four thesis about. Yeah. I mean, so fundamental. And you know, I think there really is a question whether we can imagine ourselves as a species right, as a collective entity called human and whether that that kind of species thinking that he calls for is possible because the collective is very important to get away from this individualization, as you've been talking about. And yet can we imagine ourselves that big and that diffuse is a is a big question for all of us

Speaker4: [00:55:16] And one that is, I think, limited in some specific ways by the role of Christian theology in shaping our moral vocabulary around the environment.

Speaker3: [00:55:27] I wanted to ask you about the, in some ways, the difference between maybe American Christianity or which I know is already hopelessly diverse. It's a multitude of different sects and ideologies, but there is perhaps a common root and branch system there and the kinds of Christianity we might see in Europe. Because I think in Europe, generally speaking, one of the things that's been nice is that you find the Christian socialist parties or because they're truly conservative in in this Latin sense of concevoir, they actually want to preserve something. And they they typically are are much more on board with the idea that some kind of concerted social action needs to take place to preserve nature and the United States. I think it's much more of a mixed bag. And I'm curious just to hear your thoughts about that, about American exceptionalism in terms of Christianity.

Speaker4: [00:56:17] Yeah. So maybe this can start to bring us full circle a little bit. I think my main question that's that's guiding the work I've been doing in the last couple of years is about the tension between, on the one hand, voices from within Christianity, mostly in the European sphere that are pretty progressive on climate policies and the issue of white evangelical climate denial in American Christianity. And that that distinction, I think we often imagine that the different positions religious folks take on environmental issues flow naturally from their theological commitments. So earlier you were speaking about some conversations you've had around Houston in the aftermath of Harvey and listening to your your confidants tell you about how they navigate those challenges vis a vis their faith. I think that's maybe a better way to talk about it. That faith is a set of tools for reflecting on things in the world as opposed to a coherent source of ideologies. Right. So conservative Christians in the United States didn't have a strong tendency to deny that climate change is caused by humans. Twenty five years ago, we either didn't know about it or didn't care about it, and it has increasingly entered their vocabulary as a project of the secular left in scientific indoctrination. And the problem with liberalism, right? So those objections have as much to do with American political tribalism as they do with theology of any kind. Good point. When you when you really sit down and talk about theology, you can you can usually find places where even the most. Should conservatives want to preserve, say, childhood health by protecting air quality so you can talk about carbon particulate and so on? So there's always ways where the theology and the and the environmental issues match up. I think the problem is that American political culture has become a really nefarious incubator for religious radicalism.

Speaker1: [00:58:38] Yeah. One of the points that you make at the end of the book, even in the conclusion and I think this could bring us into, I'd like to talk a little bit about this annual review article that you published recently. And and that is is that it's you mentioned here in the conclusion that it's important to remember that there's these religious roots to our contemporary environmental imagination and that this also helps us to focus that on the fact that our relationship with the natural world is fundamentally a cultural condition. And sitting here with two anthropologists, you will get no argument about that fact. It is in fact a cultural condition. And and this is one of the points that you make with your co-authors in the review article. Is that the argument that you can't really understand the cultural dimensions of climate change without also understanding religion? And so this is kind of a looping it back into the questions again. But one of the other points that you make in the article is that religion becomes this unstable category when we're looking at the scholarship and the thinking around the relationship between religion and climate change. And I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about that instability, how you came to see that or what that looks like. Religion is destabilized in these conversations.

Speaker4: [01:00:01] Sure. So the the way I sort of have this tripartite, it's nice. I swear to God this isn't crypto Christianity, but I have a tripartite way for for thinking about this issue. And it emerged through a research project that I've been doing with my colleagues at American University's Center for Latin American Latino Studies for the last couple of years. We proposed a grant project with the Henry Luce Foundation to think about these questions on an international comparative basis and to think about the different ways that religion and climate change are connected across different cultural context as we think about cultural comparison as the underlying piece there. And as we started to put that project together, we quickly realized that the the sort of the methodology that I had developed in my monograph wasn't going to be sufficient, right? Of course, it's true that religious sentiments and perspectives inform the way that human communities think about and talk about nature and the environment and sort of narrate what's happening and imagine responses. But that that's only sort of one part of the conversation around religion and climate change. So it's a really interesting place, and we advance a lot of really interesting case based research on that. But another place just kind of more formally different is around the activities of religious actors, right? Like when we think about the political responses to climate change, we imagine that the pope has some seat at the table.

Speaker4: [01:01:36] And so how is that? Where is that? Why is that? But then we also started to find in our initial research that in fact, it wasn't simply that people imagine climate change through their religious life worlds, but in fact, climate change has already advanced to such a degree that it's reshaping those worlds themselves. My colleague David Haberman at Indiana University is working on a case from. He works on pilgrimage practices in North India, and over the last five to 10 years, there have been a number of really dramatic flood and disaster events in that region, which are quickly changing the narrative about what river gods the Ganga in particular are like from one of beneficence to one of anger. So he's trying to tell this story about why supercharged atmospheric systems are not just perceived through the language of religion. They actually change the content of that religion. So again, the destabilisation. Climate change is a form of cultural change. It's not merely something we see through our different cultural lenses, but it's something that is now changing those lenses themselves.

Speaker1: [01:02:57] That's a great example.

Speaker3: [01:02:59] I know this is a different article, but you've also been doing some thinking about climate ethics and some of the scalar issues involved with that. And you talk a bit about this idea of the. Temporal tragedy of the Commons in which, you know, we have a tendency each generation kind of one wants to live as well as it can and to push problems down the road, which is very much our current situation, it seems. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit about your take on the kind of questions of intergenerational ethics today and whether alongside scale you think that temporality is something that we should be paying more attention to also.

Speaker4: [01:03:36] Yeah, I think this is connected to some of our earlier conversations about the individual and nature as these distinct categories for for moral analysis. If we're approaching climate change as a problem where we each individually are somehow responsible and are trying to secure better futures for ourselves, we are likely to fail to come up with any kind of serious response. We should all recycle and we should all fly less and we should all drive or not drive at all more fuel efficient cars. But those piecemeal attempts are rooted in an ethic that's really focused on discrete individuals. That's not really the kind of entity that's causing climate change. We're causing climate change collectively, and we're also causing climate change at the level of societies, even maybe more so than nations. And so in the article, I take you to be pointing to a draw on a bunch of great work that's been done around the failure of democracies to grapple with climate change because they basically work on four year lifespans. We have an administration in power that was brought to power, in part because it would advance the interests of fossil fuel corporations in the short term. And maybe the next American administration will have a very different idea about how to respond to climate change. And then maybe the next one after that will be different. And we don't have built into our political institutions ways to think out in 50 or 100 year blocks. We don't really have those ways at the level of the individual to. So I think if we're talking about where in in our social existence that kind of time span thinking happens, it's in institutions that are bigger than persons and smaller than states. Those are universities and churches and civil society organizations and and organizations that are community groups, neighborhoods, cities.

Speaker1: [01:05:37] You just gave me a very dismal thought here of and I'm sure you didn't intend it. But all of a sudden I'm thinking the answer to climate change is in Kim Jong UN. I mean, is that is that is it the authoritarian state that we require because democracies are not capable of like these rotational political systems that we see all over the world may be truly incapable of making the dramatic policy changes. Maybe we need a world dictator? I don't know. We could all.

Speaker3: [01:06:12] Why isn't the dog barking at us?

Speaker2: [01:06:14] Yeah. Why is it your

Speaker3: [01:06:16] Dog barking at that?

Speaker1: [01:06:17] Because the dog the dog has its ears are pricked up, and it's so fascinated with that possibility.

Speaker2: [01:06:23] And don't it? We could

Speaker1: [01:06:25] All be wearing little worker suits, and

Speaker4: [01:06:29] I don't think I want to venture an explanation about why that would be a bad idea. But I do have a parallel worry, which is that the thing that democracies are good at doing is responding to the immediate dimensions of crises and not to the future ones. So I see not in the dynamic, but I mean, Kim Jong UN is one of the only dynastic autocracies in the whole world most and maybe the Assad regime in Syria, too. Most of the populist, xenophobic nationalist governments we see popping up around the world are democratically elected. And many of them are elected around a cadre of concerns that are climate related. Immigration, public health, law and order. Securing important domestic industries from globalization right to those kinds of. You can imagine a not so unrealistic climate dystopia in which we need to make sure we produce our own steel and our own fossil fuels, and that we have so-called strong borders to protect ourselves from the chicken gunilla hordes to the south, right? That that kind of rhetoric is something that democracies do. And so I worry that there is not that autocracy is the answer, but that authoritarian is going to be increasingly appealing inside democracies as the climate change crisis gets worse.

Speaker3: [01:08:02] Yeah, I think that that is going to be a real concern,

Speaker1: [01:08:05] Instrumentalized and localized kinds of ways.

Speaker2: [01:08:08] Well, speaking

Speaker1: [01:08:10] Of the South, do you want to tell us a bit about the book that came out recently that you and Robert Albrecht edited together on Latin American responses to environment, climate change, spirituality, religion, etc.? Tell us the the story of that framing and how you came to that. That was another loose project. I believe,

Speaker4: [01:08:32] Yes, in which you also have one of the. I'll just jump.

Speaker2: [01:08:36] Oh, yeah. Flattery will get you everywhere of it.

Speaker4: [01:08:39] Thank you very much. So this this is an edited volume that came out of the previous loose project that Rob and I were involved with at the Center for Latin American Latino Studies. And the idea there was to follow up on work they had already been doing around authoritarianism and religion and violence in Latin America during the seventies and eighties in the heyday of dictatorships in the region. Religious actors had a strong record of being advocates for human rights and were in solidarity with a variety of other stakeholders on the political left. And as those dictatorships have fallen, the relationship between the Catholic Church, other religious actors, the political left and human rights discourse has become much more mixed. And so our research was about well in emerging issues in Latin America, especially around gender, sexuality, on the one hand and on environmental contestation on the other. Are these alliances still holding? And if so, how and why? And what we basically found is that they're not holding in areas related to gender and sexuality, but they are in interesting ways in environmental issues where the language of rights and justice remain really strong political tools for advancing the claims of the environmental marginalized throughout Latin America, and that those are tools that are not just used by powerful religious elites like those in the Catholic Church or evangelical missionaries who connect North America and South America. But those claims are also salient for a number of indigenous peoples movements in South America. And so the way the book is organized is sort of one set of cases that focus on Christian groups and one set of chapters that that focus on indigenous peoples movements and those two sets of chapters are in conversation in interesting ways where you see Christian groups trying to both support and work in solidarity with indigenous groups, even if sometimes I'm tripping over themselves. So this sort of interplay between the three dominant forces in the region Catholicism, evangelical Christianity and indigenous cosmic visions are in delicate relationships around environmental protection in different, in different ways, in different parts of the region.

Speaker2: [01:11:10] Yeah. And I think one of the other

Speaker1: [01:11:12] Important elements, at least as I read through this and we got, I think you have good in us and then you get a chapter from him as

Speaker4: [01:11:19] Well. Yeah, he wrote the epilogue.

Speaker1: [01:11:21] Yeah, the epilogue. So that was amazing. And you know, speaking of him and his work, this experience with extreme activism, I think, is really critical. And it has been so important for framing Latin American responses to environmental precarity as well as you just pointed out, indigenous traditions and the strength of those traditions in some places and lack of strength and some others, of course. But these two things coming together, I think, is really critical in terms of thinking about global environmental futures and what Latin American can teach us about those potential futures.

Speaker4: [01:11:54] Yeah, this question of extractive ism, especially around hydrocarbon resources, is increasingly on my mind, in large part because of our collective work on that earlier project. But also, just as you said, hydrocarbon production is no longer limited to very particular parts of the world. It's it's now something that happens sort of everywhere at the local scale, right? Fracking is a Maryland thing and a Pennsylvania thing and an Ecuador thing and a Kazakhstan thing. And I think you're right that Latin America has stories to tell and lessons to teach on that front.

Speaker3: [01:12:29] Yeah. So, Evan, we've come up on the hour and I know it's a busy day. Let me just maybe close out with a question that'll be on the on the hopeful, optimistic front. We're looking across the religious landscape of the United States today and you need an, you know, limit yourself to Christian groups. Where are you seeing religious organizations or work going on that you feel is is the kind of work with climate or on climate that that really encourages you, that we might see new ways in which spirituality is is coming to augment the kind of techno political discussions of environment.

Speaker1: [01:13:07] Where are the good guys who are the good God?

Speaker3: [01:13:08] Just check out, shout out some good folks for us.

Speaker4: [01:13:11] Yeah, I'd be happy to. I don't normally do optimistic, but I give it a shot. So I think there's some great work being done right now in interfaith circles. Strangely enough, I actually spent a little bit of time working in the policy world a couple of years ago, helping connect some of the religious organizations here in Washington, DC who were concerned about climate change. The policy conversations that are that are unfolding, especially around climate finance, and there are all sorts of ways in which there are certain leaders in the United States who will hear a message differently if they hear it from religious leadership. If a group of people representing a church group or a synagogue come in to their office on Capitol Hill, they will take that meeting and they will not take that meeting if it's a bunch of left wing environmentalists. And so getting the message out there, not just about climate change being real, but about knowing what some of the first line of defense tools are around financing adaptation efforts and around engaging more robustly in climate diplomacy efforts. Those are conversations that there are people on the center right who are willing to listen to those, but they're going to listen to them when those concerns are brought to them by folks they perceive as being friendly. And that work is being done and carried forward even in this really tricky time that we call our own.

Speaker1: [01:14:42] Well, that's really good. That's positive. It's good to

Speaker3: [01:14:45] Hear. It's good to know. Well, Evan, thank you so much for taking the time to the hours flown by. Fascinating conversation.

Speaker1: [01:14:51] Great book and yes, wonderful book. Really, really beautifully done. And so and so informative. So what is your Barker's name? We have to do a shout out to your Barker. Or maybe it's plural barkers.

Speaker4: [01:15:02] It's plural, because it's Dahlia and O'Shane.

Speaker2: [01:15:04] Oh, nice. All right.

Speaker3: [01:15:07] Ok, talent for naming their

Speaker2: [01:15:08] Mr. to recognize

Speaker1: [01:15:10] Our non-human participants on the Pod two.

Speaker4: [01:15:13] Thanks for the thanks for the shout out. I'll be sure to pass it along.

Speaker2: [01:15:16] Their voices will be preserved for posterity. I think it's called a bark out of frankly bark out. Yeah. There you go.

Speaker3: [01:15:24] Well, Evan, until next time. Hoping to hoping will connect again on the energy, environmental humanities circuit again soon.

Speaker4: [01:15:31] I hope so. Thanks again.