Saving Us

by Katharine Hayhoe

  WHAT I BELIEVE

  What do you believe? I’m a Christian and I believe that if you are someone who takes the Bible seriously, then you already care about climate change.

  I know this might sound surprising. In the U.S., white evangelicals are less worried about climate change than any other group. But even when their objections are cloaked in religious-sounding language, it’s not their theology that drives them. No, it’s the political polarization and tribalism I talked about before. That’s what’s responsible for the partisan frames of many U.S. Christians, and it’s those frames, not the Bible, that cause them to reject what science says about a changing climate.

  Climate change disproportionately affects the poor, the hungry, and the sick, the very ones the Bible instructs us to care for and love. If you belong to any major world religion—or even if you don’t—this probably speaks to you, too. Climate change amplifies hunger and poverty, increasing risks of resource scarcity that can in turn exacerbate political instability and even create or worsen refugee crises. Those most vulnerable to climate change are the same people who already suffer from malnutrition, food shortages, water scarcity, and disease. That’s true here in North America as well as on the other side of the world.

  Then there’s pollution, biodiversity loss, habitat fragmentation, species extinction: climate change makes all those worse, too. Dominion is not the same thing as domination; the very word implies stewardship and sustainability, with more animals on the ark than people, so to speak. In fact, if Christians truly believe we’ve been given responsibility—“dominion”—over every living thing on this planet, as it says at the very beginning of Genesis, then we won’t only objectively care about climate change. We will be at the front of the line demanding action because it’s our God-given responsibility to do so. Failing to care about climate change is a failure to love. What is more Christian than to be good stewards of the planet and love our global neighbor as ourselves?

  BE WHO YOU ARE

  Bombarding people with more data, facts, and science isn’t the key to convincing others of why climate change matters and how important and urgent it is that we fix it. Instead, when we’re talking about contentious, politicized issues, study after study has shown that sharing our personal and lived experiences is far more compelling than reeling off distant facts. Connect who we are to why we care. Bond with someone over a value we already possess and share, one that is already near and dear to our hearts. Tell them why you care about climate change and why others might, too.

  Contemporary theorists like George Marshall explain the power of this approach. Caring about and acting on climate change enables us to be an even more authentic version of who we already are, he says. Being a loving parent, or an avid conservationist, or a savvy businessperson, or a defender of your country, or a devout believer isn’t only consistent with climate action. Such action gives you a new opportunity to better express, through your words and your actions, who and what you care about.

  So now, when I’m not sure how someone will react to a conversation about climate change, I don’t begin with that. Instead, I start by asking them about themselves. I share who I am, placing particular emphasis on those aspects that we have in common. I’m a Canadian; someone who lives in Texas and wants the best for it; someone who loves winter and snow and the outdoors and her child; and someone who’s a Christian who believes that we humans have a God-given responsibility to care for our home, and for our sisters and our brothers and every living thing that shares it with us.

  The World Evangelical Alliance represents 600 million people around the world. Since 2019, I’ve been honored to serve as their climate ambassador. They take climate change so seriously that their former secretary general Bishop Efraim Tendero was an official member of the Philippine delegation to the Paris climate conference in 2015.

  A North American evangelical once asked Bishop Efraim why he cares about climate change, adding accusingly, “Don’t you read the Scriptures?”

  “Yes,” he replied, “I do read the Scriptures. That’s exactly why I care.”

  3 WHO YOU ARE

  “The environment is where we all meet, where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens on what we can become.”

  LADY BIRD JOHNSON

  “How do I talk to my friends about this? They don’t see it like I do.”

  NASA RESEARCHER AT KATHARINE’S TALK

  I never used to talk about why I became a climate scientist. Getting personal about our work is something we scientists are trained not to do. Leaving our deeper motivations at the door of the lab serves us well as we analyze data and draw conclusions. But when it comes to explaining to others—and to ourselves—why it matters, we need more.

  When I was nine years old, my family moved to Cali, Colombia, where my parents spent several years working at a bilingual school and helping out with a local church. We lived in a whitewashed, red-tiled row house in a lower- to middle-class area. We had electricity and running water most days, and we’d fill up the kerosene lamp and the bathtub for when we didn’t. But we often spent the weekends visiting far-flung barrios where houses of mud bricks and tin clung to the side of a mountain, or remote villages that lay several hours up a rutted, puddle-filled dirt road. There, the toilet was simply a wall to stand behind—wearing a skirt made it a lot easier—and lunch consisted of rice, plantains, and the guinea pigs that were slowest to run.

  Our vintage 1969 Ford Bronco would be packed with everyone who needed a ride there or back, plus my dad’s telescope—an avid amateur astronomer, he’d often host impromptu viewings of the moon and Saturn’s rings. If it had been raining, I’d be propped up in the driver’s seat, one toe barely reaching the clutch, to steer while everyone else got out to push the truck through the mud.

  Disasters hit us hard here in North America, but our recovery is cushioned by private and public services, from home insurance to disaster relief. In Colombia in the 1980s, life was challenging at the best of times: poverty, inequality, lack of clean water and health care; corruption and danger from the mafia, the guerrillas, the paramilitaries; reverberations from the atrocities of “La Violencia” in the 1950s still echoing through many rural areas. When disaster struck, it could be devastating. When rains came, entire neighborhoods were swept away. When drought hit, people starved.

  Inspired by my dad’s love of the night sky, I decided to study astrophysics when I returned home to attend university in Canada. But a course I serendipitously took on climate science yanked my focus from the stars to the Earth. I learned how climate change is making many of the risks faced by people in low income countries worse; that is why the U.S. military calls it a threat multiplier. Climate change affects our food, our water, even the air we breathe. It accelerates the destructive impacts of human expansion on natural ecosystems and it impacts our own health, our welfare, even our pocketbooks. And it exacerbates humanitarian crises: poverty, hunger, diseases, even political instability and the plight of refugees.

  I learned how the vulnerabilities I saw in Colombia are reflected around the world and are being amplified by climate change. Just like the coronavirus pandemic, it’s deepening the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, pushing many more into poverty. Whoever we are, wherever we live, disasters take whatever challenges we are already facing and make them worse.

  As a Christian, I believe we’re called to love others as we’ve been loved by God, and that means caring for those who are suffering—their physical needs and their well-being—which today are being exacerbated by climate impacts. How could I not want to do something about that?

  That’s why I became a climate scientist.

  BEGIN WITH WHO YOU ARE

  The first time I was invited to speak at a local church here in Texas, I decided the time had come to share more of my personal motivation, as uncomfortable as it might feel. After all, the reason I’m a climate scientist is
because I’m a Christian. Maybe, I thought, just maybe a few of the people there might realize they cared about climate change for the same reasons I did.

  It was a Wednesday night. The meeting was in one of the adult Bible study rooms, down a long hall with tan carpet. A group of about fifty interested people had gathered. I showed them the data revealing that yes, the planet is warming, and yes, humans are responsible. As I expanded on the impacts we were already experiencing in Texas, people listened and nodded along; they felt validated by what I had to say and it matched what they’d witnessed themselves. But then I took a deep breath, gathered up my courage, and for the first time ever, nervously launched into why I cared: the biblical mandate for stewardship and care for creation, the connection between climate change and poverty, and the Bible verses that directed my concern.

  I was half expecting people to laugh; but instead, they seemed surprised. They recognized those Bible verses I was quoting and they lived by the same principles. And the questions I got afterward shifted: they were deeper, far more personal than I’d heard before. This audience cared. Why? Because we had connected over something fundamental and undeniable that we shared.

  BRING FAITH INTO THE CONVERSATION

  Tim Fullman is an ecologist who studies caribou in Alaska. He grew up in a conservative evangelical church in Southern California. Although he was encouraged in his love of science, certain topics—creationism and evolution—were only considered from one viewpoint. For a long time, his perspective on climate change could best be summarized as “I don’t really know either way, but I’ve at least got some skeptical questions,” but he hadn’t really taken the time to look into the issue.

  It was only later, when he was in grad school at the University of Florida studying geography, that he started to question why climate change was a “Christian issue.” “This led me to ask a Christian mentor the same question,” he says, “and his response surprised me. ‘It’s because this is the kind of thing that will lead to big sweeping regulations and a one-world government, as you read about in the Book of Revelation. It could be a sign of the end times.’ ”

  As a Christian, Tim could understand why there was debate over evolution, but his mentor’s reply left him with more questions than answers. This prompted him to look deeper. “I couldn’t find anything that clearly contradicted climate change from reading the Bible,” he says, “so I felt like I should take a more open look at the scientific evidence.” When he did, it was enough to convince him. “I saw the potential alternative drivers of climate change—volcanoes, the Sun, the Earth’s orbit—failing to fit the historic data,” he says, “and human-produced greenhouse gases fitting it nicely.”

  One of the most frequent “Christian” arguments I hear is that God is in control, so humans can’t affect something as big as the Earth. But this completely overlooks the role of human agency, the fact that the Bible explicitly states that God gave humans responsibility over the Earth. And Tim agrees. “Even though my ultimate hope and security is in heaven,” he says, “I think we are called to stewardship and what we do here on the Earth really matters.”

  Tim now makes it a priority to communicate about climate change with others, especially with friends and family in the conservative sphere. Five years ago he would not have brought this topic up, but now he values helping other Christians see that this doesn’t conflict with their faith. “Actually, caring about the climate and the environment is how we ‘love the least of these,’ and help other people,” he reflects. His values didn’t change; if anything, he developed a deeper understanding of them, one he can now communicate to those who share them.

  If you’re not a Rotarian or a person of faith, don’t be discouraged. These are only two of many ways we can connect with others. Another effective point of connection is through a shared passion or interest.

  START WITH WHAT YOU LIKE TO DO

  Renée is a ski racer from Quebec. Like many of her high school classmates, she cared about climate change but was starting to despair of being able to alter anything. “I felt overwhelmed,” she says. “The problem was so big, and a lot of people knew that climate change was an issue, but nobody was doing anything about it.”

  That all changed when she heard the words of young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who inspired her to go to the big climate strike in downtown Ottawa in September 2019. “That sense of community made me think, ‘I’m really not in this alone. A bunch of other people are fighting for the same goals,’ ” she said.

  With her friend and fellow skier Julia, she joined Protect Our Winters (POW), an organization started by Jeremy Jones. He’s an American snowboarder worried about the effects that climate change is having on the sport. Now she recruits other skiers to spread the message. To help, she’s going to make helmet stickers, with the Protect Our Winters logo, out of recycled materials. “There’s no waste coming from the stickers,” she says, “and they can start a good conversation and get more people involved.”

  Renée has given presentations in class about Protect Our Winters and described ways her classmates can all minimize their impact on the environment. For Earth Day, she helped organize an assembly at her high school with a speaker from POW’s Hot Planet/Cool Athletes outreach program. She’s realized that although hardly anyone ever changes their mind in the span of a conversation, helping people connect who they are to why they care makes a big difference, long-term. Now in university, she’s decided to major in environmental studies.

  TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU LOVE

  Who else’s interests are directly impacted by climate change? Well, birders, for one. The Audubon Society has put together over 140 million observations by birders and scientists to create a compelling series of maps showing where hundreds of bird species live today and how their ranges will shift due to climate change. They estimate that two-thirds of the birds in North America are at risk of climate-related extinction, and iconic species may lose the meaning of their names—the Baltimore oriole, for example, may no longer be native to Baltimore. The Audubon’s conclusion is crystal-clear: “Birds will be forced to relocate to find favorable homes. And they may not survive.” So if you’re a birder, you have every reason to care about climate change.

  If you enjoy fly fishing, you need to know that climate change is increasing the water temperature in streams, making fish such as salmon and trout more susceptible to disease and parasites. Many streams are snow-fed: warmer winters mean less snow, more rain, and earlier snowmelt. This affects the timing of fish migration and lowers summer flow. In Oregon and Idaho, it’s estimated that up to 40 percent of salmon habitat could be lost before the end of the century due to warmer temperatures alone.

  Then there are hunters. Ducks Unlimited says that conservation has made great strides in restoring bird populations—but climate change could undo all its gains. “Climate change poses a significant threat to North America’s waterfowl,” they warn, “that could undermine achievements gained through more than 70 years of conservation work.”

  Snowmobilers might not seem like the most obvious group to be concerned about climate change, yet a study I led for the U.S. Northeast found that the snowmobile season in many states is already shrinking. Across much of eastern North America, recreational snowmobilers are essential to the wintertime economy of many small towns. Motels, restaurants, shops, and gas stations depend on their traffic. As climate continues to change, only the most northern locations will still have enough snow on the ground on a regular basis to sustain the industry.

  Warmer temperatures and heavier rain events are affecting the viability of many other outdoor sports, from golf to soccer. Record summer heat waves since their last stadium opened in 1994 have already prompted the Texas Rangers baseball team to build a whole new stadium. They put a roof on it and air-condition it to keep the fans and players cool. Pond hockey and outdoor ice rinks, a staple in many northern backyards and neighborhood parks, are getting less and less viable as winters warm.

 
; Cities hosting the Winter Olympics have to worry about whether there will be snow on their mountains; Summer Olympic hosts like Tokyo are concerned about extreme heat. Biometeorologists like my friend Jenni Vanos from Arizona State University are being asked to map out marathon routes that keep athletes cool. Outdoor tennis competitions are taking longer breaks to minimize athletes’ risk of heat exhaustion.

  Even those of us who aren’t into sports often look forward to a beach vacation. However, many beaches are already being eroded and submerged by rising seas. Half the world’s sandy beaches could be gone by end-of-century, with many beachside economies—in Australia, Brazil, and the U.S. Gulf Coast region—along with them.

  It’s hard to think of any outdoor activity that isn’t being affected by climate change.

  BRING UP WHAT YOU GROW AND EAT

  Gardeners are seeing plant hardiness zones shifting. Across much of the U.S., they’ve moved a whole zone in just twenty-five years. Plants are flowering and blooming earlier in the year, and invasive species are migrating into many regions. It’s estimated invasive species have cost the global economy over a trillion dollars since 1970.

  I’m part of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC). We work with landowners, farmers, and ecologists worried about species like fire ants and bindweed spreading across our region as it warms. In the Northeast CASC, scientist Bethany Bradley decided to be more proactive about it. She and her colleagues created brochures and a website to teach Northeastern gardeners which non-native plants to avoid: burning bush, Japanese honeysuckle, and, most of all, kudzu. During the 1930s, farmers in the Southeast were encouraged to plant kudzu to feed to their livestock. Lacking any natural predator, this woody plant soon became known as the “vine that ate the south.” Thanks to warmer winters, over the last few decades kudzu has been spreading northward. It’s even reached southern Ontario.