Environmentalist: Humans Are ‘Running Genesis in Reverse’

United Methodist Bill McKibben Exhorts Christians to Join Climate Campaign

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Christians must join urgent efforts to reverse deadline climate change, because we’ve failed to follow God’s first commandment to take care for Planet Earth, environmentalist Bill McKibben asserts.

What’s more, time is running out to enact drastic measures to reverse global warming because of the rate at which it’s changing our environment, added the United Methodist layman known worldwide as an author, speaker, and activist.

Mr. McKibben delivered his message, “Running Genesis in Reverse: Moral Witness on a Decreating Planet,” May 18 in an unlikely forum as keynote speaker for the annual Festival of Homiletics. The five-day conference aims to equip, enlighten and inspire Christian preachers to preach the gospel more effectively.

This year’s conference offered a prime example of Mr. McKibben’s topic because it was held online thanks to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.

Pandemic ‘latest sign’

The pandemic itself is merely the latest sign that human activity – specifically burning fossil fuels – is changing “this lovely blue planet” into a wasteland unfit for life, Mr. McKibben said.

Mr. McKibben is considered one of the founders of the contemporary environmental movement, based in part on his seminal 1989 book, “The End of Nature.” Throughout the 1990s and 2000s he has been prominent among American environmentalists pushing for public awareness and action on the worldwide climate crisis. He estimated that he has been arrested “maybe 10 times” while demonstrating for public policies and practices to ensure a sustainable environment.

Now retired from Middlebury College in Vermont, Mr. McKibben devotes himself to climate crisis activism, especially through 350.org, an organization he helped found. Its name refers to the threshold level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – 350 parts per million (ppm) – beyond which climate change could be irreversible.

In his talk, Mr. McKibben noted that Earth’s atmosphere has already passed the 350-ppm mark, currently measured around 415 ppm of carbon dioxide.

The environmentalist’s lecture to preachers and other participants offered a combination of verified science and unswerving faith, starting with his favorite biblical text from the Book of Job.

“God’s discourse on creation in Job is the first great nature discourse in literature,” Mr. McKibben said. “It’s exquisitely beautiful and more than a little sarcastic. … [when God says] ’Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped,’ [Job 38:11 NRSV*).

“The thing is, now we’re telling the waves where to stop with sea level rise.”

Destroyers of the world

Mr. McKibben told nearly 800 participants watching online that God’s challenge was enough for Job to understand that he was a small part of something big.

“That sense of being small changed in the mid-20th century with the explosion of the first atomic bomb, when [scientist J. Robert] Oppenheimer quoted from the [Bhagavad] Gita, ‘Now I am become a destroyer of worlds,” said Mr. McKibben.

Today, burning fossil fuels “in the explosions of a billion pistons” puts into Earth’s atmosphere heat equivalent to a Hiroshima-sized bomb daily, he continued. One degree increase in the Earth’s temperature roughly equals the heat from 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, he explained.

“Sea ice is melting, big storms are more intense, and just months ago we watched the entire continent of Australia burn,” Mr. McKibben recounted. “We are indeed become destroyers of the world.”

The COVD19 epidemic represents “an echo” of what’s to come if drastic measures aren’t taken to stop climate change, Mr. McKibben told his far-flung digital audience. The average global temperature already has risen by one degree Celsius, putting the planet on track to face average temperatures some 3 to 3.5 degrees hotter by the end of the century, he said.

“If we do that, we can’t have civilization as we’ve had it,” Mr. McKibben asserted. “One billion people will be on the move as climate refugees. We will see more racism, xenophobia and political instability. We don’t have to go down that path.”

Climate change’s good news is that “the engineers have done their job,” producing solar batteries and wind turbines that are now “the cheapest sources of power on the planet, he said.

“It’s power from above – from Heaven, not from below the Earth [from mining fossil fuels],” Mr. McKibben said.

“If we got to work now replacing fossil fuels with solar power, we could do it in short order. Scotland uses wind power and now produces twice as much energy as it uses,” he said. “Given that we have a solution, why aren’t we moving heaven and earth to accomplish it?”

Fossil fuel industry blocks efforts

The fossil-fuel industry remains the stumbling block to changing environmental policy and practices, the environmentalist said. He asserted that fossil fuel companies have run a successful campaign of “deceit, denial, and disinformation” against climate change.

“The fossil fuel industry has been willing to lie, possibly the most consequential lie in human history, and we lost 30 years when we could have been stopping climate change,” Mr. McKibben asserted, his normally moderate voice rising to a preacher’s pitch. “Exxon knew back in the eighties about sea level rise, and they just built their ocean rigs higher to account for it. Fossil fuel companies have been willing to break the planet to keep their business model going.”

American Christians should be especially ashamed that President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris climate accords, Mr. McKibben said.

“God instructs us on the very first page of the Bible to be stewards of the earth, to protect it,” he said. “We’re the worst babysitters of all time.”

As he concluded his 40-minute lecture, Mr. McKibben said there is good news about climate change because the ranks of environmentally aware citizens – especially young people like Swedish teen-age activist Greta Thunberg – are growing. Trouble is, climate activism isn’t growing fast enough to keep pace with the rate of climate change, he said.

“There are 10,000 Gretas in the world now, and many of them are indigenous people and religious people,” Mr. McKibben said. “Unfortunately, the movement is weakest in American Protestantism. If you want examples, you can look to the Orthodox, where [Patriarch] Bartholomew has been doing this work for decades, and to the Catholics, with Pope Francis’ amazing encyclical, Laudato Si'. (Editor's note: May 18, 2020 marked the beginning of Catholics' week-long celebration of Laudato Si's fifth anniversary).

“Thank you, Episcopalians and Lutherans and my fellow Methodists who are trying to bring climate to the forefront of churches.”

Mr. McKibben returned to urgency in his final words.

“The one thing we can’t offer is the assurance that we’ll be successful because we have such a small amount of time in which to work,” the environmental leader said.

“The job of our time is to figure out how to make ourselves smaller, to reduce our effect on the planet, so that we don’t spit in God’s face.

“This shouldn’t be impossible for people of faith to understand.”

*New Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, copyright 1996 by the Christian Education Committee of the National Council of Churches USA. Used by permission.

Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011. This article is part of United Methodist Insight's participation with Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.