New Mexico Mercury

“We cannot not hope,” she said.

Something in her gives life to the words and I can’t quite place it. But I want to. So I listen, wondering what she knows, as she plans for the march.  

Joan Brown is the executive director of New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light, the local chapter of a national organization working to raise awareness of climate change and other environmental issues among religious communities.

Joan’s organization, along with many others, is sponsoring marches for climate change awareness in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, to be held Saturday, September 20 (see the links for details). The marchers plan to venture through downtown areas of the two cities, carrying banners and displays, stopping at six points along their routes for brief presentations about the many ways climate change will transform life on this planet in the decades to come.

These local events, along with others across the world, will coincide with the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21. Billed as “the largest climate march in history,” the New York rally aims to assemble a massive crowd filling Manhattan, supported by sympathy demonstrations around the globe. The result, organizers hope, will be to galvanize world leaders meeting in New York City for talks on an international climate treaty. Such an outpouring, the strategy goes, will help create pressure on humanity’s reluctant leaders to act. 

I’m helping a tiny bit with organizing the New Mexico branch of the demonstrations. I am not a neutral observer. Still, I can’t help observing from the outside, too. Trying to understand what these events will mean. A Czech playwright once wrote: we must try harder to understand than to explain.

Imagine it’s 1979, and we see a man standing on a street corner in Prague, Czechoslovakia, a former Communist country that no longer exists. The man holds up a sign that says something like: “Respect Human Rights, End Communism Now.” In all likelihood, he’ll soon live in a gulag.

The passersby ignore him. After all, there is no hope. As Orwell wrote, in 1984: if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face.

Then it’s ten years later. Not Orwell’s future just yet. Hundreds of thousands of people fill the streets of Prague to demand the resignation of the regime, which has tanks and attack helicopters. The demonstrators have candles. The regime surrenders without firing a shot. Vaclav Havel, the playwright who will one day call for understanding it, instead of explaining it, becomes the president of his country.

He knows that it doesn’t always work out so well. Only months earlier, in Beijing, another authoritarian state confronted protesters demanding a new era of democracy. The Chinese army blasted and smashed their bodies to pieces in the streets.

At still other times, protests lead to nothing much happening at all. Demonstrators march, authorities watch, the world seems to go on as it did before. In early 2003, millions of people in scores of cities around the world marched against the impending U.S. war on Iraq. The U.S. government attacked anyway, and conducted its war exactly as if the protests had never happened. Just as Orwell might have expected.

It’s impossible to know what will come of a political demonstration until it happens, and history takes shape.

So why try to make one happen?

I asked this of Joan Brown, one of the leaders behind the New Mexico climate demonstrations scheduled for September 20.

Besides leading New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light, Joan is a sister of the Franciscan order of the Catholic Church. Her words are soft, her manner plain. It’s easy to imagine her teaching in a one-room schoolhouse on a prairie, or a grotto beneath the cottonwood trees. Perhaps some might not easily envision her leading a million people bearing candles into the streets on the night a regime ended and the former things passed away.

But when it comes to climate change, something impels her. Over the course of our conversation, she approaches this something from many angles. She says, in the beginning, “I believe climate change is the greatest ethical and moral challenge of our day.” 

But why?

She refers to a declaration by Pope Francis, who writes that human beings have a sacred duty to protect “other weak and defenseless beings who are frequently at the mercy of economic and indiscriminate exploitation.” We can feel the pain of others as our own, the Pope writes, even when the others are not human. Therefore, human beings must be the stewards of everything that lives, and not merely of ourselves and our own wealth.

But what makes someone accept the existence of this duty, when so many clearly do not?

For Joan, seeing creation in this way is never beyond us. It is, she says, “a part of who we are.” She tells of the Pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. As a young man, seven hundred years ago, the earlier Francis fought on the battlefield, driven to mutilate and slaughter the enemies of his prince in one of Italy’s great wars between the cities. Later, this same Francis taught that all living creatures must live in peace, as brothers and sisters with the sun and the moon.

What makes such a change possible?

It’s in our nature, Joan Brown tells me. No less than brutality, which is part of our nature as well. The story of St. Francis suggests that one side of our soul can prevail over the other. Too often, Joan says, our civilization depicts such conversions as a radical awakening to the depravity of human beings.

This way of seeing such experiences, in Joan’s view, does not lead us to truth. She sees the transcendent power beneath the awakening of St. Francis as coming from something other than begging forgiveness for his blood stained youth. Transcendence came when something moving in him like a ghost revealed that all blood, and all flesh, and all life, are part of the same whole. And so all of them should be loved. From this revelation came a mission to make gentle the life of this world.

Joan did not use those words, when I spoke with her about the power behind the awakening of St. Francis. But it’s the vision that came to me when she spoke of that power. 

She called it love.

She meant, I think, the way you feel someone else to be a part of you, when you love them. The pain of that person crying or broken or bleeding becomes yours. You don’t want them to be hurt. Ever. And so you may come to find that you will do anything for them.

Anything.

St. Francis wasn’t the only one to feel this. Almost everyone does, at least sometimes, for someone. For human beings other than ourselves. 

So why not for Being itself? This is the soul of the philosophy of St. Francis and, it seems to me, of Joan. Why should we not feel for all the living things in Creation, feel all of them as sacred, if all of them, and all of their pain, are inseparable from ourselves?  

Joan sees history flowing in that direction, like oceanic currents toward a distant shore. Beginning about 2,500 years ago, Joan relates, many human cultures of the eastern hemisphere were swept up in the revelations of charismatic religious leaders, like the Buddha and Christ and Mohammed.

In their day, far ranging caravans and trading fleets fed the unprecedented growth of cities, making the scale of human communities ever more vast than anything humanity had yet known. Amidst the impersonal sprawl ruled by distant emperors, grinding poverty, and endless waves of plague, the new religions offered personal salvation, in obedience to the law of powers beyond this world.

We live, Joan suggests, in the culmination of that age and the beginning of something new. Human life now unfolds on a scale that emperors in the days of the old prophets could never imagine. Our cities and infrastructure have begun to engulf the planet. So have the consequences of this expansion. The Earth is being stripped of minerals and life, the resulting waste products devouring the water, land, and air. Human burning of carbon is heating the skies and turning the oceans to acid. Nothing on this scale has ever happened since human beings in their modern form first appeared, about 200,000 years ago.

Joan speculates that such monumental change might, like the change that fueled the first wave of salvation religions two millennia ago, trigger equally vast transformation in the life of the human spirit. Today’s concern for one’s own salvation, and the human beings we love, might become a longing for something much more. St. Francis might be the harbinger.

We can see signs of this already, Joan believes, in the spreading awareness among religious communities of climate change and ecological crisis. Leaders of many of the world’s religions will, for example, be in New York City for climate demonstrations on September 21 and after.

The details of this transition to ecological spirituality will vary, Joan believes, depending on culture and other vagaries of circumstance. But the gist of the change, in her view, will be a growing awareness that nature, spirit, and humanity are inseparable. It sounds simple enough, but the ramifications are profound. Since the industrial age began about 200 years ago, the dogma of human economics has held that the wilds of nature exist entirely apart from the machinery of civilization. We now know this dogma to be false. The collapse of ecosystems and natural cycles damages human beings, not only in the loss of beauty but in the loss of organisms and energy flows essential for all life.

Joan illustrates the point by reference to a theological concept that is becoming prominent in ecologically conscious Christian communities. The concept is named oikos, after the ancient Greek word meaning “home” or “house.” The philosophy of oikos treats the relationship among Earth, spirit, and human economies like the relationships within the economy of a household. In a literal household, no aspect of our lives is separate from any other. The psychological and physical well-being of the people in the home (health) is linked directly to balancing the checkbook (home economics), to maintaining healthy interpersonal relations (family), to preserving the physical integrity of the building in which the people live (home maintenance), to getting along with other households (community), and to searching for a meaning of life in this world (spirituality).

In our homes, we don’t treat any of these things as unrelated, so why should we treat our planetary home any differently? If our home economy depended on cannibalizing the roof of the house, or burning toxic fuel that fouled the interior air, every aspect of our life would suffer – and we would see this in short order, with no room for debate as the roof caved in or the fumes burned our lungs.  

This is what we are doing to our planetary home, in Joan’s philosophy of oikos. “This is why oikos matters,” she says.

I’ve thought about Joan’s words for a long time, after talking with her. She isn’t just tossing out a metaphor or a sterile intellectual construct to be used for academic discussion. So it seems to me. When she speaks of our home and what we’re doing to it, she sees our own well-being woven into the vaults of forest and sky and the billion-year river ocean deep of life in which the human world exists.

Today, most humans don’t see the world in this way. But Joan believes they can. The separation humans perceive between themselves and nature is not inevitable. The revelation that can break it lies in the power of love, which alone of all things human can make all things one.

Our lives and the destiny of our world may lie in great cycles of nature and history, but our life as an individual human always comes down to choices about how we will spend our day. For Joan, the connection between the two scales of existence, greater and smaller, lies in finding a spiritual path.

This means self-conscious reflection on what we are doing and why, and what it means. There are no final answers, only awareness. No formulas to deliver certainty. Only more than we understood before. “We must,” the Czech playwright wrote after the old order of the gulags was swept away, “try to harder to understand than to explain.”

All of this might sound like a pitch for the latest trendy self-help book on the morning talk shows. But it’s the heart of the matter, really.

A spiritual path, according to Joan, is a matter of finding, at some point in the day, a time to reflect. “We need quiet moments of discernment, of contemplation,” she says. Those moments are not easy to create, given the intensity and complexity of the life our species has constructed for itself over the millennia. The knowledge of climate change and the coming storm can make the chores of daily life even harder. Hard times are coming. “People can seem overwhelmed by it all,” Joan says, “and rightfully so.”

But the moments for quiet contemplation, she says, are the times when we open ourselves to insight. When connections and realizations come unbidden. As if from someplace beyond. Out of those nameless well springs new possibilities can emerge. Things we never thought to do can become doable. Simple things, Joan says, like, “Maybe I could plant a garden.”

Other things, too. Joan had a moment like that years ago, working in a soup kitchen in Colorado Springs in the 1980s. Working there among the poor, she first began to conclude that poverty is a form of violence and nonviolence a wellspring of liberation. In her soup kitchen, and later in wasteland neighborhoods along the U.S.-Mexico border, Joan saw the violence done to bodies and minds by toxic air and rat hole housing and beatings or guns in the night.

This violence can be ended. After that, bodies and minds made whole, and safe, and loved can realize the potential locked in every soul at birth to create beauty and to comfort others.

Again, these are not always the words that Joan uses, as she speaks with me, but it’s a vision that comes to me as I listen. A baby born healthy and protected and raised in safety and shelter instead of gunshots and filth is the seed for future acts of kindness and creation by the man or woman the baby will become. This is the power of nonviolence. It’s more than just protesting without the use of force. It’s a way of making a world that would not otherwise have been.

It’s not a utopian fantasy. It’s about making a choice about how you will spend your day. Right now, in this very moment. Utopia lives in the acts of kindness of one person for another, right now. The science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson wrote, in a tale of a future America free of poverty but not human failings: take the first step and you’re there. Whatever the failings of a person, there is always a choice about what to do next. Helping a sick neighbor take care of the kids. Seeing a stranger with a stricken look wandering in tears down the sidewalk and asking if she’s okay. Seeing the homeless man lying on the ground unmoving and checking to see if he needs help.

But it’s about more than individual acts of kindness, Joan points out. These alone aren’t enough. We live in communities. Societies. Governed by vast, powerful institutions. In a high technology urban civilization that spans the planet, it can’t be otherwise. Our hunter-gatherer life is gone. We can’t live without the infrastructure and rules and structures of authority that bind our cultures together across continents and oceans.

And so it matters very much what those structures do. Joan learned this lesson working to improve housing conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border. Nothing good would happen without changes in housing codes and the terms of federal loans and regulations applicable to housing. Changing these meant dealing with elected officials and career bureaucrats. And the decision to visit a city councilperson’s office or write a letter to the editor is another choice about how to spend time each day.

The problem is that we can’t have certainty that the time spent will lead to any particular result. But that’s true of any action we take in any aspect of our lives. We make a choice and do our best. The rest is up to powers beyond ourselves. The choice is still ours.

Joan made hers a long time ago. “I choose,” she says, “to live a life grounded in holiness and love.”

Joan would be the first to acknowledge that everyone experiences holiness and love in a unique way, on a unique path.

But the path is always open.

The connection between political action and the individual spiritual path is what strikes me when I listen to Joan Brown contemplating the upcoming climate marches in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

The choice to attend or help organize an event like this is a choice about what is worth doing on a particular day. And with whom, and for what. Similar events, flowing from similar choices, will occur next weekend around the United States and the planet. There is no guarantee that these events will change history, although the organizers hope that they will.

Without such a change, under whatever circumstances, human history is headed for the fall of night. This impending future history is set down in numbers. Our planetary civilization can emit a certain finite amount of additional gigatons of carbon before a global temperature rise of more than two degrees Celsius (the arguably least dangerous maximum, according to many assessments) is impossible to prevent. At our present rate of emissions, we will burn through this remaining two-degree carbon allowance within about twenty years.  

Even if we hold the increase to two degrees, the warmer world that results will be harsher than the one we know. Already, even with current warming, we see the gathering impacts of climate change: increasing droughts, heat waves, sea level rise, extreme storms, new disease vectors, the loss of forests and farmland and coral reefs. Two degrees will make all of this worse. But it is conceivable that we can adapt to the changes and set our societies on a long term course to heal as much of the damage as possible by eliminating carbon emissions, letting the excess carbon in the atmosphere eventually fall out by natural processes to pre-industrial levels.

If, on the other hand, our remaining carbon budget is blown, a future beyond two degrees will make the Earth an alien planet before this century is done. At three or four degrees Celsius by 2100, according to models, oceans inundate every coastal city in the world, deserts become the norm on the Earth’s surface, global weather patterns gyrate into wild paroxysms, and agriculture collapses across much of the planet, which becomes incapable of supporting the current human population. At five or six degrees Celsius and beyond, the physical destruction of ecosystems and human economies approaches that of an asteroid strike or nuclear war, and the planet becomes ever more indistinguishable from Hell.

Our current emissions path will take us to four degrees Celsius or more.

To prevent this future, we must begin reducing global carbon emissions immediately, to stay under the gigatonnage that will hold the coming temperature increase to two degrees. Only drastic, immediate cuts in emissions will push back the date on which the global economy will blow past the two degree carbon budget. Those cuts will have to continue, year in and year out, until they end with the absolute elimination of all carbon emissions forever. That means a world without gasoline-powered cars, without power plants belching fumes from coal or natural gas, and without any aircraft powered – as almost all of them now are – by any petroleum fuel.

It is nearly impossible to imagine such a world. Nearly, but not entirely. Humans have built a modest foundation for it already, believe it or not. According to the International Energy Agency, the human species last year generated 22 percent of its electricity from non-carbon, renewable energy sources. We’re within striking distance of producing one quarter of our electricity from renewables. Meanwhile, some of the world’s ground transportation fleet has been converted from liquid petroleum derivatives to electricity. It’s a start. Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined even that much.

Right now, it’s hard to imagine more. Harder still to foresee that marching in the autumn sun in Albuquerque or Santa Fe can help make a carbon free future come about. We do not easily connect such a small act to altering the course of history.

Robert Kennedy once saw the connection anyway, speaking in South Africa to the multitudes living under apartheid, more than two decades before apartheid fell. History, he said, is made of numberless small acts.

We don’t know what will come of them. For Joan Brown, as she prepares for a climate march in New Mexico in the autumn of 2014, the uncertainty is not a cause for despair. “There are so many variables we don’t know about,” she notes. But from this observation she concludes: “Things can shift in an instant.”

As they have, many times before. Hopeless defiance by one person on a sidewalk in Prague might be the harbinger of a million people in an unforeseen future marching with candles in the streets. Whole populations in the streets can change history.

Maybe it will be so with climate change. Joan believes it can be. “We can’t not hope,” she says. Too much is at stake. Possible futures await in which the people of the world awaken in time to what needs to be done. We can’t guarantee that future, or summon it at will. We can only choose what we will do with our day. And then hope.

To Joan, this hope isn’t born of naïve optimism or blind faith. It reflects the natural human capacity to act on what we can feel and love and imagine, trying to make it real, even though the future in our dreams remains beyond our literal sight. This capacity to act on what may or may not come to exist is what makes us human. It is, Joan says, “a hope in that which is not seen.”