Overview

How does our faith affect how we think about and respond to climate change? Climate Politics and the Power of Religion is an edited collection that explores the diverse ways that religion shapes climate politics at the local, national, and international levels. Drawing on case studies from across the globe, it stands at the intersection of religious studies, environment policy, and global politics. From small island nations confronting sea-level rise and intensifying tropical storms to high-elevation communities in the Andes and Himalayas wrestling with accelerating glacial melt, there is tremendous variation in the ways that societies draw on religion to understand and contend with climate change. Climate Politics and the Power of Religion offers 10 timely case studies that demonstrate how different communities render climate change within their own moral vocabularies and how such moral claims find purchase in activism and public debates about climate policy. Whether it be Hindutva policymakers in India, curanderos in Peru, or working-class people's concerns about the transgressions of petroleum extraction in Trinidad-religion affects how they all are making sense of and responding to this escalating global catastrophe.

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9780253059055

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Reviews

At most times and in most places, human cultures have interpreted changes in their climates through religious eyes. Berry's welcome collection of grounded essays, drawn from India to Peru, from Trinidad to the Philippines, shows that the twenty-first century is no different. The cases Berry foregrounds in Climate Politics and the Power of Religion drive home that it is not only 'the science' that politicians need to listen to. They also need to listen to the religious narratives, movements and demands that make climate change a meaningful phenomenon for billions of people in today's world.--Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge Climate Politics and the Power of Religion explores a range of fascinating, new approaches to the study of religion and climate change in the Anthropocene. The authors attend less to doctrine than to the adaptive cosmovisions and practices through which religious actors respond locally, and often innovatively, to planetary challenges and seek to converge or bridge them with secular, global responses.--Prasenjit Duara, Author of The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future

Author Information

Evan Berry is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is author of Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism.

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