Solving the problem of climate change requires more than the development of technology, it needs the ancient wisdom of paying attention, argues ecological theologian Dr Deborah Guess.*
You may have heard the phrase ‘wicked problem’. What people mean by ‘wicked’ in this sense is a problem that is so large, complex and interconnected that it is especially difficult to tackle. The ecological crisis—climate change, but also things like deforestation, overfishing etc.—is sometimes described as a ‘wicked’ problem.
The wicked problem of climate change is so very wide-ranging that it’s hard to see any area of life that it doesn’t impact or implicate in some way. It’s also unprecedented— in human history we’ve never had to tackle a problem like it. In the last few decades there have been many instances of individuals and communities taking positive steps to address environmental problems, for example lobbying policy-makers to stop coal mining or set carbon emission reduction targets, and at a more local level developing local supplies of energy and food. Yet despite these important projects, overall carbon emissions and other forms of environmental decay have only increased.
Why haven’t we solved the ‘wicked problem’?
Why do people say they care about the environment while at the same time carbon emissions are rising? Here are just some of the various possibilities, and they may each be partly right:
One is that change only ever happens slowly, that people need a lot of time to get used to something new. If that’s the reason, it’s unfortunate to say the least because climate scientists are suggesting that time is one thing we don’t have. Also, the idea that we are incapable of quick change is not an entirely convincing argument because we know that people can adapt quickly, to buying a new digital device when it comes out for example, or wearing a mask, or getting a vaccination in a pandemic.
Or, could the reason we are not doing anything effective about climate change be that human beings are fundamentally selfish, too much motivated by self-interest, so that giving up comfort and privilege is just too difficult? Well, history shows many instances of people making sacrifices, small and large, for other people or for the greater good. So, as environmental commentator Naomi Klein observes, perhaps the reason we do not act in an ecologically helpful way is not because of human nature. She says: ‘We weren’t born having to shop this much, and we have, in our recent past, been just as happy (in many cases, happier) consuming significantly less.’
Some people might say it’s too late to do anything anyway. Jem Bendell, strategist and educator on social and organisational change, believes that current environmental data indicate a future of ‘inevitable collapse, probable catastrophe and possible extinction.’ Unfortunately, he may well be right, but at the same time, the future can never be entirely predicted, and even in the very worst situation the best or only thing people can do is to behave with integrity, rather than just giving up.
Another reason that perhaps is not raised often enough is the ‘dinosaur factor’: that it’s always hard for society to let go of the ideas and values that worked well in the past to get that society to a certain point but that may now be harmful. Could our dinosaur factor be commitment to things like economic growth, wealth creation, infinite progress, individualism and so on, things which trump the wellbeing of others, or of future generations. In the last few decades in particular economic growth and consumerism have come to play an increasing role. Naomi Klein speaks of ‘our climate change mismatch’ by which ‘… just when we needed to consume less, consumerism took over virtually every aspect of our lives; just when we needed to slow down and notice, we sped up’.
Small, or large change?
For many, it seems inevitable that in order to reduce carbon emissions, stop overfishing, and so on, some change needs to be made to how people live on this earth. But if we can all pretty much agree that change is needed, there’s no agreement on whether the change needs to be small or big.
At one end are the climate deniers or minimisers who think we don’t need to do anything much. The size of that group is shrinking as time goes on, but they still exist and they continue to either deny or minimise how serious climate change is.
Quite a lot of people think there is a significant problem and that the main way to do something about it is through technology – especially renewable energy – but that our fundamental economic system and way of living doesn’t need to change very much if at all.
It’s undeniable that moving to renewable energy sources – solar, wind, tidal power – is central. But some other people think that even though technology is important we mustn’t put all our trust in it, and that a business-as-usual, consumerist way of living will always lead to environmental problems.
That view comes from environmental thinkers who recognise planetary boundaries, that the earth and its resources are finite, that its ability to absorb carbon emissions and other forms of pollution is finite, that it cannot indefinitely support a large human population and high standard of living.
Naomi Klein notes that climate change is ‘a symptom of a much larger crisis, one born of the central fiction on which our economic model is based: that nature is limitless, that we will always be able to find more of what we need, and that if something runs out, it can be seamlessly replaced by another resource that we can endlessly extract.’
Even some economists agree, and this is also my own view. This view advocates fundamental change in how societies and individuals operate, replacing consumerism (producing and buying too much, possessing things we don’t need) with a more ecological ethos and ethic in which some forms of behaviour, such as extracting and burning coal and oil, are stopped.
For this group, deep and far-reaching changes are called for. I like to adopt the precautionary principle that it is worth being cautious in advance, that delaying action until there is overwhelming evidence that the economic system is unworkable would be too late and too dangerous. And in any case there are considerable non-environmental benefits to checking consumerist behaviour, as will be discussed later in this article.
Collective or individual action?
The ecological crisis urgently requires political or policy changes at the level of government and business. Ecological questions like climate change are collective problems which need a collective response. Therefore the first and most urgent need is a structural, legal and policy(that is to say political) response.
Large-scale infrastructure changes are essential, such as more available and affordable public transport, energy-efficient and affordable housing, and renewable energy grids. This collective and communal type of response is effected by advocacy (writing to the papers, lobbying politicians, protesting, and the ballot box) to influence policy making at all levels.
There are many organisations that can be joined: the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), for example. In comparison, individual or household action can seem paltry and ineffective.
Klein says the hard truth is that there is nothing an individual can do to stop climate change. While that is strictly true it doesn’t mean we can only act at the larger scale. Smaller communal, household or individual changes in habit can also matter. They help to develop an ethos, a habit, which prepares people to be more resilient if/when a future of far more restricted choice and wealth comes about; They help a person or household to feel empowered, to feel that they are doing something; they can influence other individuals/households and even policy makers; and individual actions, when multiplied in sufficiently large numbers, can contribute to lowering a society’s ecological footprint. For example, an individual choice to cease or radically limit airline travel could have a real effect when multiplied over hundreds, thousands or millions of individuals.
Religious calls for ecological change
In our own times many religious and spiritual thinkers, in light of the ecological crisis, have called for a radical change in the way people live and think. Islamic philosopher Seyyed Nasr argues that the magnitude of re-thinking that is required of people today is so great that it amounts to ‘a death and rebirth of the modern person and their worldview.’
Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ drew connections between the ecological and social crises and argued for a deep change in the minds and hearts of human beings: ‘Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change … A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.’
Author and academic David Tacey says, ‘… we cannot have a moral revolution without also having a spiritual revolution.’ And a similar point is made by many others.
Religious traditions and ascetic practice
‘Ascetic’ originally meant exercises or training. It’s a word that has taken perhaps a negative connotation, which itself tells us something about our present culture and its valuing of comfort and prosperity. A recognition of the need for some kind of limit is deeply rooted in many religious traditions which advocate ascetic practices: observing dietary laws, living frugally, prayer/meditation and acts of forbearance during sacred times and seasons.
Practices like these that involve a degree of voluntary restraint, voluntary poverty, self-control or sacrifice are counter-cultural to consumerism. As one eco-theological writer notes: ‘The notion of holding back and limiting consumption in the interests of the physical environment, the poorer parts of the world, the good of the community or one’s own moral and spiritual well-being is anathema and heresy.’
Yet the COVID-19 pandemic showed that a changed way of living is possible, that the consumerist pattern of living may not be the only one, that a turn away from economic growth and towards communal wellbeing, even if temporary and not endorsed by all of society, is possible.
Attention and the John Main tradition
In light of that, many possible topics could be explored. In this article I discuss just one. The daily meditation practice of the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM)is simple, and at its centre is the practice of paying attention.
John Main, the English Benedictine monk whose life and teaching inspired the establishment of the WCCM, connects the origin of the WCCM’s meditation practice with the gospel instruction to pray without ceasing and to the Desert tradition, in particular John Cassian’s Tenth Conference.
In this tradition the meditator pays attention by repeating a single prayer-word or phrase which Laurence Freeman, Benedictine monk and Director of the WCCM, says ‘Leads beyond words, images and thoughts into the faith-filled and presence-filled emptiness we call the silence of God’.
To pay attention in this way is extremely simple – not easy necessarily but always simple.It is also gentle. It’s not about vigorous attempts to marshal will-power or concentration but gentle calls for detachment, suspension from thought, and perseverance.
French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil describes attention as suspending thought and leaving it detached, waiting, not seeking anything, in order that it may be penetrated by God.
John Main distinguishes between tension and attention: ‘Prayer is a-ttention, a state of non-tension’ and suggests that perseverance is the ‘only effort’ required in meditation’.
Attention concentrates us in the present moment
Paying attention has always concentrated people in the present moment. Philosopher and historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot quotes Marcus Aurelius saying that attention is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude and that it develops an attitude of ‘concentration on the present moment’.
Constant and renewed attention to the present moment ‘is, in a sense, the key to spiritual exercises’ because ‘the passions’ are ‘always caused by the past or the future – two areas which do not depend on us’ and attention to the present frees us from that.
Both the past and the future are illusory. They are outside of present reality, beyond our control, and can each invoke a range of negative emotional states. As Zen Buddhist Thich Naht Hanh says: ‘The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments’.
Attention relates to a holistic way of living
Paying attention helps us to live holistically, through the entirety of who we are. A holistic way of living brings personal satisfaction. Again, that’s not a new idea. The ancient schools of philosophy (Platonist, Stoic, Epicurean, etc.) practised spiritual exercises which included the discipline of attending and developing self-mastery and sought to live a full and meaningful life, advocating virtue, contemplation, a simple life-style and the happiness of existence. The ancient spiritual exercises ‘were exercises because they were practical, required effort and training, and were lived; they were spiritual because they involved the entire spirit, one’s whole way of being’.
Ancient practices were intended to transform all aspects of the disciple including ‘intellect, imagination, sensibility and will’ developing an ‘art of living’ shown in all aspects of one’s life.
Like the ancient philosophical schools, Christianity is anchored in an all-encompassing way of living. John Main describes the aim of meditation as ‘the realisation of our whole being’, and as finding ‘the ground of our being wherein our essential unity, the essence of our personhood, consists’. A whole of life approach is a corrective to the modern tendency to compartmentalise and specialise, which has destroyed our sense of personhood.
Attention helps to access our deep mind
The practice of paying attention by detaching thought while meditating does not mean at all that we undervalue the human mind. Although the meditator lays thoughts to one side while meditating, he or she accesses ‘deep mind’, a ‘vast, spacious, generous, silent, thinking mind that seems to have knowledge we have never self-consciously learned; that makes unexpected connections; that has its own ethics; and that not only gives us insights but can tell us when an insight is correct’.
Anglican hermit and theologian Maggie Ross says that paying attention allows us to engage deep silence, deep mind, direct perception: it is a kind of self-forgetfulness that leads away from narcissism.
She speaks about us having two kinds of mind: our ‘deep mind’ and what she calls the self-conscious mind, our daily mind, what Laurence Freeman calls our ego self.
There’s nothing wrong with the self-conscious mind or the ego-self, it is a natural part of who we are and is essential for daily survival in the world. But on its own the self-conscious mind ‘deludes itself that it is in touch with reality. In fact, everything it experiences is distorted, and what it takes for direct perception is interpretation at several removes’ – it is ‘unreal and vacuous’.
But the self-conscious mind is also essential for engaging with the deep mind because the self-conscious mind uses linear reason to sort and classify the perceptions of deep mind. It is important that the deep mind, whose cultivation Ross encourages, is a thinking mind and that the perseverance involved in paying attention enables us to inhabit deep silence, ‘to observe one’s own mind at work …’
Attention can lead to a transformed consciousness
The daily habit of paying attention in regular contemplative practice can lead to a deep transformation of the whole of our life, to changed understanding, outlook, convictions and behaviour.
Hadot notes that although a transformation of vision is not easy, little by little spiritual exercises ‘make possible the indispensable metamorphoses of our inner self.’
Laurence Freeman notes that the transformation brought about by spiritual practices can lead to ‘a heightened sense of responsibility’ as we turn away from our ego-self, false-self or self-conscious mind and become attuned to our true nature and our union with Christ so that we become fully ourselves.
The notion of leaving self behind, or self-renunciation, is the basis of the Christian faith, but it is not to be confused with self-rejection. John Main says that self-renunciation is: ‘a discipline which helps us to transcend all the limitations of our narrow and isolated self-obsession. … And as Hadot says: ‘The “self” liberated in spiritual exercises is no longer merely our egoistic, passionate individuality: it is our moral person, open to universality and objectivity, and participating in universal nature or thought.’
And philosophical theologian and Christian meditator Sarah Bachelard says transformation occurs in ‘the progressive surrender of our falsifying habits of thought and feeling, and the distorted perspectives and reactions that flow from them’.
Part II of this article will appear on ‘Living Water’ on 28 May 2021. Both Parts 1 and 11 are based on talks given on 15 May at a Meditatio event organised by WCCM-Australia. See https://wccmaustralia.org.au/
*Dr Deborah Guess is a long-time meditator and member of the World Community for Christian Meditation. She is also an Honorary Research Associate and Adjunct Teacher at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. Her main research and teaching area is ecological theology. Deborah also practises permaculture and sustainable living at her home in the Yarra Ranges to the east of Melbourne. Among current projects, Deborah is writing a book about the ecological theology of place.