How Diverse Publics Understand Climate Change: An Interview with Candis Callison (Part Three)
One of the groups I interviewed were the leaders behind Creation Care, which was a kind of sub-movement at the time of my research in the mid to late 2000s. These were the same people who had worked on What would Jesus drive? a highly successful campaign to turn transportation into a moral issue for Christian communities.
What one of these leaders told me explicitly is that who is speaking matters to a great extent in terms of establishing the credibility of climate change as a concern within jacquard loom evangelical communities. He called it blessing the facts, and told me that the right messengers were required in order for evangelicals to take climate change seriously as an issue of concern that required their involvement and action. Climate change for many evangelicals is caught up in politics, science, and environmentalism, and he argued that such messengers are required in order to steer through all of that and make it about stewardship and part of the moral and spiritual obligation of Christians.
In some cases, this means mobilizing evangelical leaders, but in other cases, it means bringing in scientists who are also Christians. For example, the head of Working Group 1 for the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports is an active and vocal evangelical and a leading scientist. The history of evangelicals with evolution debates and court cases in the U.S. still matter to many, but it isn t a central issue in need of resolving for those working on climate change. Rather, those I spoke with sought to rearticulate concern for the environment from and within Biblical frameworks hence the term, Creation Care as an alternative to environmentalism.
This goes back to the earlier point I raised about vernaculars. Those who bless the facts aren t rubber-stamping the science; it s a much different jacquard loom and more nuanced process based on the moral and ethical contours of climate change. The credibility of messengers, as adjudicators of truth and of what s meaningful within a Christian context, enable them to articulate jacquard loom climate change as a real and science-based issue that needs to be taken seriously because jacquard loom of what the Bible says about taking care of the poor, caring for Creation, etc. So the scientific facts do matter, but they also come with historical and political baggage, and facts by themselves are not an exclusive route to establishing why climate change should be taken seriously.
Many discussions of the climate change debate posit corporate America jacquard loom primarily as villains, who promote skepticism about climate change claims as a means of protecting their own economic interests or defending their current practices. Yet you also point towards jacquard loom a number of corporate efforts to combat climate change. How effective have these efforts been? When and how do they move beyond what some have called greenwashing ? How are they able to reconcile support for environmental reform with the profit motives which drive Wall Street?
In the book, I look closely at the work undertaken by Ceres, a Boston based corporate social responsibility organization. They aren t the only group working on climate change and CSR, but they are one of the leading voices, having focused on this issue since the early 2000s.
This discursive shift from climate change to climate risk has produced a powerful response within financial frameworks. It s not without some critique from those who think Ceres could require more from the range of companies they deal with particularly those whose bottom line is predicated on contributing to carbon emissions. jacquard loom However, mobilizing jacquard loom a business vernacular in order to reframe climate change as a problem that companies must address is an innovative way of moving jacquard loom towards what Ceres hopes will be increasingly progressive corporate action.
There is a tendency to discuss science in terms of rationality and facts, yet throughout your book, you point to the importance of faith, ethics, morality, and other softer human values in shaping how and why people embrace or reject such arguments. How might we develop arguments that better bridge between science and faith, rationality and emotion, pragmatism and morality when thinking about these issues?
In considering climate change as only (or primarily) a science-based or science-laden issue, deeper ethical and moral discussions about our relationships to the natural world and to each other often get lost. This doesn t mean that scientific findings aren t vital to understanding climate change, but rather: for broad and diverse jacquard loom publics to come to care about the issue and care enough to take actions about it, climate change needs to become much more than a scientific jacquard loom concern.
In the book, I refer to this as the persistent “double bind” related jacquard loom to climate change where in order for a rationale to act on the issue to em
One of the groups I interviewed were the leaders behind Creation Care, which was a kind of sub-movement at the time of my research in the mid to late 2000s. These were the same people who had worked on What would Jesus drive? a highly successful campaign to turn transportation into a moral issue for Christian communities.
What one of these leaders told me explicitly is that who is speaking matters to a great extent in terms of establishing the credibility of climate change as a concern within jacquard loom evangelical communities. He called it blessing the facts, and told me that the right messengers were required in order for evangelicals to take climate change seriously as an issue of concern that required their involvement and action. Climate change for many evangelicals is caught up in politics, science, and environmentalism, and he argued that such messengers are required in order to steer through all of that and make it about stewardship and part of the moral and spiritual obligation of Christians.
In some cases, this means mobilizing evangelical leaders, but in other cases, it means bringing in scientists who are also Christians. For example, the head of Working Group 1 for the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports is an active and vocal evangelical and a leading scientist. The history of evangelicals with evolution debates and court cases in the U.S. still matter to many, but it isn t a central issue in need of resolving for those working on climate change. Rather, those I spoke with sought to rearticulate concern for the environment from and within Biblical frameworks hence the term, Creation Care as an alternative to environmentalism.
This goes back to the earlier point I raised about vernaculars. Those who bless the facts aren t rubber-stamping the science; it s a much different jacquard loom and more nuanced process based on the moral and ethical contours of climate change. The credibility of messengers, as adjudicators of truth and of what s meaningful within a Christian context, enable them to articulate jacquard loom climate change as a real and science-based issue that needs to be taken seriously because jacquard loom of what the Bible says about taking care of the poor, caring for Creation, etc. So the scientific facts do matter, but they also come with historical and political baggage, and facts by themselves are not an exclusive route to establishing why climate change should be taken seriously.
Many discussions of the climate change debate posit corporate America jacquard loom primarily as villains, who promote skepticism about climate change claims as a means of protecting their own economic interests or defending their current practices. Yet you also point towards jacquard loom a number of corporate efforts to combat climate change. How effective have these efforts been? When and how do they move beyond what some have called greenwashing ? How are they able to reconcile support for environmental reform with the profit motives which drive Wall Street?
In the book, I look closely at the work undertaken by Ceres, a Boston based corporate social responsibility organization. They aren t the only group working on climate change and CSR, but they are one of the leading voices, having focused on this issue since the early 2000s.
This discursive shift from climate change to climate risk has produced a powerful response within financial frameworks. It s not without some critique from those who think Ceres could require more from the range of companies they deal with particularly those whose bottom line is predicated on contributing to carbon emissions. jacquard loom However, mobilizing jacquard loom a business vernacular in order to reframe climate change as a problem that companies must address is an innovative way of moving jacquard loom towards what Ceres hopes will be increasingly progressive corporate action.
There is a tendency to discuss science in terms of rationality and facts, yet throughout your book, you point to the importance of faith, ethics, morality, and other softer human values in shaping how and why people embrace or reject such arguments. How might we develop arguments that better bridge between science and faith, rationality and emotion, pragmatism and morality when thinking about these issues?
In considering climate change as only (or primarily) a science-based or science-laden issue, deeper ethical and moral discussions about our relationships to the natural world and to each other often get lost. This doesn t mean that scientific findings aren t vital to understanding climate change, but rather: for broad and diverse jacquard loom publics to come to care about the issue and care enough to take actions about it, climate change needs to become much more than a scientific jacquard loom concern.
In the book, I refer to this as the persistent “double bind” related jacquard loom to climate change where in order for a rationale to act on the issue to em
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