A leap of Green faith: the religious discourse of Socio-Ecological Care as an Earth system governmentality

ABSTRACT

The Anthropocene is fundamentally altering concepts of human agency and responsibility in the governance of the Earth system. These concepts are paramount in discussions about governing deliberate interventions into the global climate – often referred to as ‘climate engineering’. Reflections on what it might mean for humanity to ‘play God’ by controlling the climate have brought religious knowledge to bear in these discussions. Using climate engineering as a paradigmatic example of human interventions which may come to define the Anthropocene, this paper presents a sociology-of-knowledge discourse analysis of interviews with environmentally active multi-faith leaders and scholars. Showing how green religious discourse provides a blueprint for a governmentality of Socio-Ecological Care (SEC), the paper argues that religious knowledge has a role to play alongside other global systems of knowledge in reconceptualising the who, what, why and how of responsible and sustainable Earth system governance in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS:

• Global environmental governance
• Earth system governance
• governmentality
• discourse analysis
• religion
• sociology of knowledge

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Cynthia Scharf, Forrest Clingerman and Fletcher Harper for facilitating contact with interviewees for this project. Thanks to Dominic Lenzi and Sean Low for invaluable feedback during the drafting of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics declaration

The authors declare that the research meets ethical guidelines and adheres to the legal requirements of the study country.

Informed consent declaration

The authors declare that all interviewees provided written informed consent.

Notes

1 The initial interviewees were sourced through the GeenFaith network, and were asked to suggest further interviewees. Given that the topic of CE is only beginning to be discussed within religious communities, the number of interview partners available was limited. While the group of interviewees is not taken to be necessarily representative of their respective religious communities, nor of all world religions writ large, it does constitute a representative cross-cut of the religions which have so far engaged publically with the topic of CE.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Miranda Boettcher

Miranda Boettcher has a background in Global Environmental Politics and Linguistics. Her research examines how discursive communities and practices shape the emergence of technology governance, with a current focus on climate-relevant-technologies such as solar climate engineering and negative emissions technologies. Miranda is a Research Associate at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany and an affiliated member of the Environmental Governance Section of the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She has been an Earth System Governance Project Research Fellow since 2021, was an Oxford Martin Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society in 2018, and a Visiting Researcher at the Australian-German Climate and Energy College at the University of Melbourne in 2019.