Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles

289 Pages·2011·2.191 MB·English

by  Dieter Gerten & Sigurd Bergmann

Religion in Environmental and
Climate Change
Also available from Continuum
Climate Change and Philosophy , Ruth Irwin
Ecological Imaginations in the World Religions , Tony Watling
Ethics of Climate Change , James Garvey
Religion in Environmental
and Climate Change
Suffering, Values, Lifestyles
Edited by
Dieter Gerten and
Sigurd Bergmann
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Dieter Gerten, Sigurd Bergmann and Contributors 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN: 978-1 -4 411-6 628-9
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Religion in environmental and climate change : suffering, values, lifestyles / edited by
Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann.
p. cm.
Proceedings of a symposium held Jan. 11- 13, 2010 at the Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research.
978-1 -4 411-6 929- 7 (hardback)
1. Ecology – Religious aspects – C ongresses. 2. Global warming – Religious aspects –
Congresses. I. Gerten, Dieter. II. Bergmann, Sigurd, 1956– III. Title.
BL65.E36R45 2011
201’.77–dc23
2011017982
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Part 1: Setting the Stage
Chapter 1: F acing the Human Faces of Climate Change 3
Dieter Gerten and Sigurd Bergmann
Chapter 2: Global Change and the Need for New Cosmologies 1 6
Wolfgang Lucht
Chapter 3: Religion in the Public Sphere: The Social Function
of Religion in the Context of Climate and
Development Policy 3 2
Michael Reder
Chapter 4: C ontemplating Climategate: Religion and
the Future of Climate Research 4 6
Timothy Leduc
Part 2: S ketching Sustainable Futures: Recent Dynamics
in World Religions
Chapter 5: C limate Justice from a Christian Point of View:
Challenges for a new Defi nition of Wealth 6 9
Markus Vogt
Chapter 6: C limate Justice and the Intrinsic Value of Creation:
The Christian Understanding of Creation and
its Holistic Implications 8 5
Friedrich Lohmann
Chapter 7: Evangelicals and Climate Change 107
Michael Roberts
vi Contents
Chapter 8: Religious Climate Activism in the United States 132
Laurel Kearns
Chapter 9: The Future of Faith: Climate Change and
the Fate of Religions 1 52
Martin Schönfeld
Part 3: Regional and Indigenous Belief Systems in
Climate and Environmental Change: Case Studies
Chapter 10: Climate and Cosmology: Exploring Sakha Belief
and the Local Effects of Unprecedented Change in
North-E astern Siberia, Russia 1 75
Susan Crate
Chapter 11: Religious Perspectives on Climate Change Among
Indigenous Communities: Questions and
Challenges for Ethnological Research 2 00
Lioba Rossbach de Olmos
Chapter 12: Vulnerable Coastal Regions: Indigenous People
under Climate Change in Indonesia 2 15
Urte Undine Frömming and Christian Reichel
Chapter 13: Jaichylyk: H armonizing the Will of Nature and
Human Needs 236
Gulnara Aitpaev
Chapter 14: E nvironment, Climate and Religion in Ancient
European History 261
Holger Sonnabend
Index 267
Acknowledgements
The contributions to this book originate in a symposium that was held in
January 2010 in Potsdam, Germany. The editors would like to thank the
Volkswagen Foundation ( www.volkswagenstiftung.de/ ) for funding this
event and Gabriele Götz for her organizational help in conducting it. They
are grateful to Nancy Bazilchuk and Andreas Diesel for editorial help, the
Norges Teknisk- Naturvitenskapelige Universitet (NTNU) for its gener-
ous publication subsidy, and Udo Simonis and the Society of Friends and
Promoters of the Potsdam Institute for supporting the research agenda
‘religion in climate change’. Thanks also to Konrad Ott, and to Sarah
Campbell, Tom Crick, Kirsty Schaper and their colleagues at Continuum
who were involved in this project, for their support.
Notes on Contributors
Gulnara A itpaeva holds a candidate degree in literature from Moscow State
University and a doctoral degree in folklore and literature from Kyrgyz
State University. In 1999, she created the Kyrgyz Ethnology Department at
American University in Kyrgyzstan, then took the initiative of transform-
ing this into the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology with the
mission of developing a social anthropology and facilitating connections
and collaborations among social scientists of Central Asia. Since spring
2004, she has been leading the Aigine Cultural Research Center with the
mission of expanding research into lesser- known aspects of the cultural
and natural heritage of Kyrgyzstan, integrating vernacular, esoteric and
scholarly epistemologies. Since 2006, she has been editing a series of books
(four volumes to date) on sacred sites pilgrimage and related traditional
knowledge and practices in Kyrgyzstan. She is a professor of the National
State University and teaches courses on history and theory of epics and
comparative literature.
Sigurd Bergmann holds a doctorate in systematic theology from Lund
University and works as professor in religious studies at the Department of
Archaeology and Religious Studies at the Norwegian University of Science
and Technology, Trondheim. His previous studies have investigated the
relationship between the image of God and the view of nature in late antiq-
uity, the methodology of contextual theology, visual arts in the indigenous
Arctic and Australia, as well as visual arts, architecture and religion. He is
chair of the European Forum on the Study of Religion and Environment,
and in ongoing projects he investigates the relation between space/place
and religion, and religion in dangerous environmental/climatic change.
His main publications are Geist, der Natur befreit (Mainz 1995; Russian ed.
Arkhangelsk 1999; rev. ed. C reation Set Free , Grand Rapids 2005); G eist, der
lebendig macht (Frankfurt 1997); God in Context (Aldershot 2003); A rchitecture,
Aesth/Ethics and Religion (ed.) (Frankfurt, London 2005); Theology in Built
Notes on Contributors ix
Environments (ed.) (New Brunswick, London 2009); I n the Beginning is the
Icon (London 2009); Så främmande det lika (‘So Strange, so Similar’, on Sámi
visual arts, globalization and religion, Trondheim 2009) and Raum und
Geist: Zur Erdung und Beheimatung der Religion (Göttingen 2010). Bergmann
was co-p roject leader of the interdisciplinary programme ‘Technical
Spaces of Mobility’ (2003–2007) and recently co- edited T he Ethics of
Mobilities (Aldershot 2008); S paces of Mobility (London 2008); N ature, Space
& the Sacred (Farnham 2009); Religion, Ecology & Gender (Berlin 2009);
Religion and Dangerous Environmental Change (Münster 2010); Religion som
rörelse (‘Religion as Movement’, Trondheim 2010) and E cological Awareness
(Berlin 2011).
Susan Crate is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in environmental
and cognitive anthropology. She has worked with indigenous communi-
ties in Siberia since 1988 and specifi cally with Viliui Sakha since 1991.
Her current research focuses on understanding local perceptions, adap-
tations and resilience of Viliui Sakha communities in the face of unprec-
edented climate change. Crate is the author of numerous peer- reviewed
articles and one monograph, C ows, Kin and Globalization: An Ethnography of
Sustainability (Alta Mira Press, 2006). She was senior editor of the 2009 vol-
ume, A nthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions (Left Coast
Press). She is an associate professor of anthropology in the Department of
Environmental Science & Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax,
Virginia.
Urte U ndine Frömming is a junior professor at the Institute of Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin and head of the envi-
ronmental anthropology research area. She has undertaken ethnographic
fi eldwork in Indonesia, Tanzania and Iceland. Besides her interest in envi-
ronmental anthropology, she specializes in hazards and disasters research.
She has published several peer- reviewed articles and a monograph,
Naturkatastrophen. Kulturelle Deutung und Verarbeitung (Natural Disasters.
Cultural Interpretation and Coping), published in 2006 by Campus,
Frankfurt am Main. She is one of the principle investigators of the joint
research project ‘Alpine Naturgefahren im Klimawandel’ (Alpine Risks in
Times of Climate Change. Pattern of Impacts and Coping Strategies from
18th to 21st Century) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education
and Research (2011–2014). She is chairperson of KatNet (Network of
Disaster research) and member of the European Forum for the Study of
Religion and the Environment.