United Methodist and other leaders gathered in front of the White House in Washington D.C. for a prayer vigil in 2014. Together they prayed for a faithful immigration policy and to end deportations. Credit: UMNS photo by Jay Mallin CC BY 2.0.

By Mel Caraway

The climate crisis is very real. Yet as we look at the climate crisis, we unfortunately have a tendency to oversimplify it. We tend to look solely at the scientific aspects of climate and forget about how climate interconnects with so many other aspects of our daily lives. In order for us to achieve a just resolution to the climate crisis, we must look at its relationships to racial justice, economic justice, health care justice, migration justice, age related justice, gender justice, and many other justice related issues. And make no mistake about it, the climate crisis is a justice issue.

Justice is a major focus in our Judeo-Christian tradition. In our discussions of climate and creation care, four major relationships are important for us to understand:

  1. First is the relationship between God and creation. In the first chapter of Genesis, God created the Earth and the plants and the animals and said that they were good.
  2. The second relationship is the one between God and humankind. God gave dominion—not domination but stewardship—to humankind over all that God had created.
  3. In so doing, God established the third relationship between humankind and all that God had created.
  4. The fourth relationship, indeed the one that most people fail to recognize in this creation narrative, is the relationship between ourselves and the rest of humankind. With this relationship, our faith brings us to the understanding of how justice connects all of this together.

Why do we have a climate crisis? Because the average temperature of our planet is increasing far too rapidly, and it has become an unhealthy place to live. Think for a moment—what is your normal body temperature? 98.6 degrees F. If your temperature were to increase by 2 degrees to 100.6 degrees, you would be sick. Well, guess what? The average temperature of our planet has increased by over 2 degrees F. If our bodies did that, we would be taking measures to decrease our temperature to a healthy level. Why are we not taking healthcare measures with our planet to bring its temperature back to a healthy level? To not do so is an injustice to both our planet and its inhabitants.

 So, what is causing this rapid increase in temperatures? Primarily, the use of fossil fuels, which have provided the energy behind transportation, manufacturing plastics, heating and cooling, and many other uses that come from electrification. Burning fossil fuels—coal, oil, and gas—releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas that causes the air inside Earth’s bubble to get warmer. The gas, and therefore the heat, can’t escape. Also, much of our transportation infrastructure—our highways—is built close to poorer, more vulnerable communities of color, especially in our cities where the large amount of concrete also traps heat.

But rising levels of heat are not the only downside of this climate crisis. These increases in temperature are also causing weather patterns to change and become more severe. Heat waves become more intense, cold waves are more brutal, rain and snowfall amounts increase, drought conditions become more severe, and weather becomes more and more unpredictable. We have seen that recently in the devastating wildfires in California.

And just as all these changing weather patterns bring about increasing amounts of damage, other factors come into play that disproportionately impact populations, especially people living in poverty, indigenous peoples, people of color, children, and the elderly. Because temperatures are rising, the ice caps at both the North and South Poles are melting at alarming rates. And with this glacial ice melt comes rising sea levels. Flooding is occurring on inland rivers as well as in coastal regions. Just this year alone, we have seen massive amounts of snowfall that trigger flooding as they melt. We’ve seen increasingly powerful tornadoes wreak total destruction on towns across the country. We’ve seen towns and streets flooded on sunny days due to sea level rise. We’ve seen whole communities forced to relocate as their ancestral homes are flooded.

Naysayers continue to tell us that all these effects are from natural weather patterns. Not so! All of this damage could have been prevented, and more of it will happen unless we make a concerted effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.

So, who suffers as a result of the climate crisis and why are these changing conditions a justice issue?

It is a justice issue because poor and black and brown communities suffer disproportionately. It is a justice issue because it disproportionately impacts the health and wellbeing of children, youth, and older people.

Race and the economy come into play because these communities have historically been segregated in low-lying, easily flooded areas, near industrial plants and refineries, in communities divided by major highways, and the practice of redlining prevented many people from moving to more desirable locations. More often than not …

  • These areas lack basic good health care because their state governments refuse to expand Medicaid health care coverage to those most in need.
  • These areas are in food deserts because corporate grocery chains can make a better profit in affluent suburbs.
  • These areas are often surrounded by industrial plants and refineries that pollute the air and the ground with toxic chemicals that cause increased rates of severe diseases, especially cancers and asthma.
  • These areas are often near landfills that decrease the quality of life with air pollution and depress the possibility of wealth accumulation through rising property values.

Many of these problems could be solved by enforcing stringent regulations, but far too often this does not take place because politicians claim that it would be a job killer. Once again, this is a false narrative. This is a justice issue, because people’s lives and their health are more important than corporate profits. And, besides, if we were to address these causal problems, we could be creating many more new jobs in a newly expanded economy. Mitigation of fossil fuel caused problems would be a job creator as would the expansion of jobs in the renewable energy sector.

So, you can see that there are many intersections between race, the economy, and healthcare with the climate. And all of them revolve less around science and more around justice.

We haven’t even touched on migration yet, even though much of migration is caused by the climate crisis. Drought and increasingly powerful storms are forcing peoples in the developing world from the lands they have historically lived on and made a living from. Much of these changing climate patterns are caused not by the peoples who live in these lands, many of whom are in the Southern Hemisphere and in the Arctic region. Instead, they are caused by increasing use of fossil fuels in the developed world. 

And when their lands become uninhabitable, they seek to migrate to a place where they can provide for their family and live a better life. Unfortunately, neither the United Nations nor the USA have a category for climate migrants who leave their home countries to seek asylum elsewhere. And yet many of them come to our borders because they lost not only their homes, but also their land when it washed down the mountainside in a tropical weather event—a hurricane or cyclone. To not respond to these people in their time of need is an injustice that calls for remediation.

We have all these interconnections between injustice and the climate crisis. Healing the climate in and of itself won’t solve all these injustices, but it would be a first step in bringing justice to all of God’s people.

Mel Caraway, a retired United Methodist pastor, is Caretaker of God’s Creation Coordinator, for the Horizon Texas Conference. He is also a UM EarthKeeper and active in the UM Creation Justice Movement, Texas Impact, Texas Interfaith Power and Light, and Climate Reality.