Against Lockdowns for the Climate and for a Theology of a Living Earth

Abstract

There is an eerie convergence in academic and media commentary between ‘public health’ policies in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic and policies to address climate change. Bruno Latour argues that unprecedented state control and surveillance of citizens in their homes, meetings and movements, are needed to address climate change. This claim rests on two assumptions. The first is that reducing carbon emissions is the way to address the modest increase in global temperatures since 1850 despite the failure of this approach to impact either atmospheric carbon or global warming. The second is that forcibly destroying the creative agencies of billions of people is good for human health and good for the health of the planet. Against the suppression of the agency of ordinary people in Covid-19 as a ‘solution’ to climate change I argue that ecological and climate crises can only be turned around when people, and other creaturely beings, recover their agency as co-creators and co-curators of their habitats and the cultural and material resources they need for human flourishing. Evidence from many domains indicates that it is the loss of such agency by ordinary people, and by other creatures, which is the key driver of ecosystem destruction. Its recovery involves restraining the industrial agencies which continue to wreck Gaia.