Cambridge Interfaith Programme Manager Dr Iona Hine interviews Professor Laurie Zoloth about her recent book, Ethics for the Coming Storm. The conversation was recorded via Zoom in June 2024 and is now included as an extension to the Religion and Climate Change miniseries.

About the guest

Laurie Zoloth is Margaret E Burton Professor of Ethics at the University of Chicago and former Dean of Chicago’s Divinity School. She has served as President of the American Academy of Religion, President of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, and Vice President of the Society for Jewish Ethics. Professor Zoloth was also a founding board member for the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the Society for Neuroethics, and the Society for Scriptural Reasoning. She holds a Life Fellowship at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

About the book

Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought (2023) was published by Oxford University Press.

How can we come to understand our existence on this earth, surrounded by air and light and water, while living in a place we deliberately and carelessly abuse, where resources are becoming scarce, and where the well-being and basic health of our neighbors is threatened?

Debates about environmental issues have largely been driven by the language of economics and political power. They have become both deeply divisive and symbolic, turning differing truth claims and moral appeals into signs of identity. This discourse has utterly failed to change the human behavior or political and economic structures necessary to face global warming head on.

In Ethics for the Coming Storm, Zoloth turns to another language, found in the texts and traditions of Jewish thought—the language of Scripture, the Talmud, and philosophy of Judaism—which, she contends, offers a different kind of argument for such a change. The traditions, histories, and texts of Jewish thought, Zoloth claims, address precisely the sort of existential crisis that we now face, and thus deepen and enrich our public discourse about what to do, and who to be.

References

The following is a non-exhaustive list of persons referred to during this episode.

Bill McKibben (1960–)

Author of The End of Nature (1989), the first general audience book about climate change billmckibben.com/bio.html

Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995)

In the opening chapter of Ethics for the Coming Storm, Zoloth summarises Levinas as follows: “The act of ethics, for Levinas, is the moment of recognition of the plight of the Other, and it is the phenomenological event of this recognition that he teaches ... prior to the recognition of the Other, the self is not fully constituted or called into being.” See further: plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/

Fritz Haber (1868–1934)

Winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognising his innovative Haber-Bosch process used to synthesise ammonia for agriculture.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Exiled from Nazi Germany, Arendt became a highly influential political philosopher. After introducing Arendt, Zoloth summarises: “For Arendt, the actions of citizens in public are the actions that define them as individuals with particular, irreplaceable identity, for in the social what matters is not their being, but their social role, and as consumers or producers, they are, like their products, completely replaceable, expendable. Agency in public allows for the defining acts of freedom and equality that are critical to our humanity.” See also plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/index.html.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Perhaps the premiere philosopher of European modernity, Kant’s influence over metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics continues. See plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/.

Jimmy Carter (1924–)

39th President of the USA (1977-1981) and the first to take concrete action about climate change. See: www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/james-carter/

Margarete Susman (1872–1966)

Philosopher, cultural critic, and essayist, Susman was part of the circle around Georg Simmel. See: plato.stanford.edu/entries/susman-margarete/

Naomi Oreskes

Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University. See: histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/naomi-oreskes

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971).

American Reformed theologian and ethicist, known for his political realism. See plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-intl-relations/

Suggested reading

In the discussion about further reading, the following people and works are referred to:

Dale Jamieson (2014) Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle Against Climate Change Failed -- and What It Means for Our Future Get access Arrow

Mark Lynas (2008) Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

Matt Ridley, British journalist--author of several crosscutting books on science and policy www.mattridley.co.uk/biography/

Natan Levy, H. Haleem & D. Shreeve (2013) Sharing Eden: Green Teachings from Jews, Christians and Muslims

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Sarah E. Fredericks (2021) Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses

Yale Forum on Religion & Ecology fore.yale.edu

[Music]

I'm Dr Iona Hine, Programme Manager at the C I P, a research and engagement centre based in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. It was my privilege to speak with today’s guest.

The occasion for this interview was provided by her recent book, Ethics for the Coming Storm: Climate Change and Jewish Thought--out now in paperback from Oxford University Press. While recorded as a standalone conversation, and to inform the upcoming Summer School on Religion and Climate Futures, we agreed that there would be value in sharing the discussion more widely--including here on the Religion and Global Challenges podcast, as a continuation of the Religion and Climate Change miniseries.

[Music]

But, Laurie, I've said I'd let you explain who you are and a bit about your background.

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's really a pleasure to to speak with you and to and to speak virtually in Cambridge, one of my favorite places on the planet. So I am a professor at the Divinity School as well, at the University of Chicago, and I'm also a professor there, at the college and at the Medical School.

Crossing boundaries and and thinking about lots of different things, and, in fact, most of what I thought about, for most of my career was bioethics, the academic field of bioethics, and we focused on physician-patient relationships and the individual dynamics, of hospitals and public health centers. And many years ago I did think about the environment. We, I remember, we gathered a group of people from different religious traditions, scholars from different religious traditions, to think about what we talked, what we thought about as ecology, right? And what's striking about that conversation that took place in in the early two thousands is that none of us mentioned global warming.

And it's because no city has been built that's built for this kind of weather. And in fact, it's not just cities, I realized. It's our intellectual structures. It's our religious structures. It's our institutional structures. Very little has been built for a world with a kind of unsustainable climate that we're facing as humanity. So I, because I'm a scholar of religion, and interested in this topic, I thought to myself, “Well, I know there's resources for famine, and I know there's resources for catastrophe in the Jewish tradition.” And I began to explore: In what ways do we have resources in religion to address this kind of global degradation? I found that in many religious traditions not just my own, this apocalyptic vision has been anticipated.

Terrible floods, terrible threatening environments. And, in fact, the fulcrum of Jewish life itself, within the synaptic commandments is this kind of threat: “If you are cruel to your fellow person, to the fellow people you share the planet with, I will make the sky iron.”

So it's that implied threat, that of our conditionality, of our contingency on this planet, our deeply exilic tradition on this planet has been talked about in Judaism, and in Christianity, and in Islam, and in Buddhism and Hinduism there's all this. There's a notion that this earth is not quite belonging to us, something that we've blithely ignored as people who live on the earth.

So this tension between human use, human needs, human health, and the world in which that all takes place has been a longstanding conversation. So I decided I would join it. And that's that led to the book. The Ethics for the Coming Storm.

So there are several things that I'd like to pick up in what you have said. So I'm going to start with the subtitle of your book. So the subtitle of your book is “Climate Change in Jewish Thought”. And for me, approaching the book before I had read any of it. I was really curious about the Jewishness, and then about audiences. So to what extent, taking that particular lens, that of your own belonging provides something for Jewish audiences and provides something for other audiences? So if I could invite you to to reflect on that.

Okay. So the way I ... I have an argument, and I have a method.

So the argument is that good ideas come from different places. This, of course, is a Hannah Arendt idea about plurality, that you see reality through plural lenses, and different locations.

I think that religious traditions, while very particular, and while they are focused on their faith communities actually come up with extraordinary arguments for human behavior, for how you live a moral life. The question of how you live a moral life, and how you, how you raise children to become decent moral human beings, decent moral actors, is done over and over again. If it really is traditions, and there's good arguments, and that we - that the arguments, while religious, have a place in the secular public square. They need to be brought out. They need to be fully developed. You need to think through their implications, but they certainly should be presented and displayed. And largely this is because for Jews or other minority voices in this - in the public square - sometimes arguments of Christianity are more fully developed because many philosophers who think of themselves as secular philosophers, really are representative of their own tradition of Christianity. Logically enough, right? So someone we think of, you know, Immanuel Kant or something, who we think of as a secular philosopher. He was a Christian man who was a monotheist, and who has assumptions and structures around that around that location and around that those assumptions. So my work is in part to clarify arguments from different traditions and then evaluate arguments. And we see this clearly when an argument comes, for instance, from Catholic moral theology, around human dignity. That's most, it's most fully expressed in that tradition, around embryos, around, you know, edges of life, the seamless web of life. That's a really interesting argument. It's not the argument for my tradition. My tradition argues against it in some, in many instances, around reproductive health, for instance. But it's an argument that's worth considering. And we have to take seriously, right? Abolitionist arguments against slavery where that time kind of arguments they came from a deeply religious place into the secular world, political world, and we have to take them seriously. And we did take them seriously, and sometimes they win the day. So that's one aspect of my work.

The other aspect of my work is a method. And it is, of course, heir to a longstanding Jewish tradition of how you study text, which is to look at a problem and then try to imagine what's its precedent. It's a kind of casuistry. Of what? What else? Have we seen this before? How do we know this before? How we... How did we, as Jews look at this sort of problem before? And then go back to texts and say, has anyone thought about a problem like this before? And then we read widely in the Rabbinic corpus, mostly the Talmud. The Talmud Bavli—I use the Babylonian Talmud as a source text, and I'll often just consider: what sorts of problems were the rabbinic authorities thinking about? Is it like the problems that we have? And search among these stories and discussions for relevant passages. And I look, biblically. I look at Hebrew Scripture, and I, and especially I'm interested in places in Hebrew Scripture that have been heavily mined for use in moral theology. And then look again at what the rabbis are saying about these Biblical passages. That might be actually curious, there might be might dissidents. There might be individual voices, minority voices. So playing with the text, text as a source of of delight and inquiry.

And I do that, and then I also draw from postmodern Jewish philosophy.

I'm quite interested in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, for instance. In Hannah Arendt, in a philosopher called Margaret Susman, who is very little known, but was contemporary with Levinas, and with Buber and Arendt in that same menu and who wrote interestingly about the problem of catastrophe. So I use all those people and bring them into a rhetorical room, so to speak, as if we're all sitting at the same table, which is how the Talmud is written. People talk across multiple generations and geographical locations. I try to do the same thing: Come into my room, climate scientists, and come into my room, rabbinic scholars, and come into my room philosophers. And let's have a conversation about this problem. So that's how I build. That's how I build the stories, the narratives that are in the text.

So one of the things that you also have alluded to is that this is a book that has been in the works for some period of time, and for someone who picks up the book to read it that's going to become immediately clear because you find yourself, you know, you had your complete manuscript, and then you were looking back at it at some very particular moments in history. So in the midst of the Covid pandemic, and that's causing some reflection. But yeah, I'm interested in that experience of writing a book over time, and how it developed for you as you were working through the material.

Well, the fascinating part of writing a book, cause it takes a long time to write any book and get it through publication, and convince people to like your work and publish it. Then they have critique, and they go back and forth, and back with, people don't, I don't know how. Sometimes you hear someone who writes a book, and then it's out in the trade in months or something. But for academic books it takes a long time, and I began writing this book in 2014. So this is my earliest thoughts were 2014, when I was first like realizing what we were facing. And you. One of the chapters is drawn from a speech I gave to the American Academy of Religion in 2000.

[Interrupting] Right, because you were, you were president in 2014 in San Diego, and you really gave a challenging speech. I'm so interested to hear about that, and what response you got. So please sorry I interrupted you, but...

Yeah, no, but that's good. Because in about 2012, 2013, when I began to realize the full catastrophe that climate change was, and the enormous ethical problem it was. And then we really didn't have any solutions for it, I decided to choose a theme for the American Academy of Religion Meeting, which is the largest meeting of scholars of religion in the world. It's 10,000 people, all convening at once, burning carbon as we go. And I said, let's all, let's spend a year thinking about climate change, about global warming and climate change and in all the ways you can do it. And I submitted, and and the request for proposals was, let's bring our best capacities and all of our different methods and all of our different disciplines, into one place where we think together about climate change. And people responded, and the whole conference that year was lots and lots of wonderful papers. And we brought scholars from all different places, and invited Jimmy Carter, who is the first American President to put solar panels on the roof of the White House, and the first American President to actually do anything about climate, to notice that there was a problem and begin to set up the structures in American public life for attention to climate change. And we brought people from the UN Commission, who had just won the Nobel Prize, and they came and and spoke about their work. And then we brought Bill McKibben, who gave a speech, and Naomi Oreskes, who gave a speech about climate denial. So it was a wonderful meeting in that way, and I gave a talk as the Presidential address. That's in the book. You could read, a sort of barn-burning Jeremiad, and it was to say, this should be the main thing we think about. We worry about all these other ethical issues. But they're trivial on some level when compared to the fact that the earth may become uninhabitable. It may become uninhabitable. What was it 127 degrees in India the week before we're taping this conversation? That's not sustainable for human life. Just it's not and the moral problem attended to that is that this is because we are participants in the Industrial Revolution. We're heirs to the Industrial Revolution, and we especially in places like the UK, places like Western Europe. Certainly the United States. We are the ones who have been consuming the energy that creates the carbon waste and puts carbon into the atmosphere. We're the extractors. We're the people making the profit. And by we, um I think carefully, and we'll talk, can talk more about this. So let's put a pin on this and go back to this. Who are we? What do I mean? What's our participation? Who are the bad guys?

But at least the Global North versus the Global South in terms of climate change. It's our, it's our problem that we have caused and that we benefit from. It's the use of the extracted materials. But the people who bear the heaviest weight, the most immediate effects, are people that live at the very margins of our world, who are not, you know who are not causing it— they didn't cause the problem—are most likely to be affected, because they live already on the most, the most degraded and marginalized land, most vulnerable land, and around the equator, where it's gonna be hottest first. So that's, that was what I said in the speech. This is your moral problem. You have to stop your life. And I said, you have to stop what you're doing, whatever you're doing now you have to stop and think about this, and you have to make it a part of how you teach, and how you preach, and how you live your life, and how you structure your ritual activities and your festivities, and all of it has to be a part of it. And I also said, There'll be sacrifice. Sacrifice is central to many religious traditions. Certainly in Judaism, the idea of a sacrifice. We no longer sacrifice animals, but we talk about sacrificing animals, we verbally reenact that sacrifice. We're supposed to tithe. All religions have tithing as a part of their, of almsgiving or tithing as a part of their practice. So you have to sacrifice, and then this will require an enormous sacrifice, so require a diminishment of some of our consumptive practices, and it will require being able just to know evil, to see evil, to discern evil, like the world, has failed to to do in the past. And there I turned to post-Shoah philosophers to make that point. When you see evil you can't just stand by, and you have to name it and and make individuals take responsibility for the acts they do. And then I asked for a final thing, which is, I said, there's a practice of a Sabbatical, a Sabbath year. And many of the injunctions about how to use the earth in the agricultural texts of the Hebrew Scriptures. Many of them are based around the fact that after 6 years of intensive work you let the earth rest.

Just let it rest, and you let the poor take anything they want, and you take down... There's no fences, there's no, there's no distinguishing between what is mine and what is the part that belongs to the poor, and you allow a year in which you just you glean. You take what's on the floor. You take what's on the trees, and you... But you don't farm. You don't work the land.

But you do have a lot of power in some institutions, you know whether it be as tiny as you know your kids soccer team and what you bring for snacks.

All those things, those institutions. There's bottled water or not, whether there's the powerless, but they're really not. And that kind of bottom up change. I hope to inspire about my work, and I hope that remind people that they did, but they have tremendous power to make choices, so that agency needs to take place around this as well. And we've been successful. We don't have smoking. There's no place in - no, you know at the American Academy of Religion there used to be a place where everybody smoked cigarettes, and there was a blue haze everywhere. And we don't do that anymore because we decided (not to).

That's a great example of where change was absolutely possible once people made their minds up. And what you have said will say resonates in terms of conversations we've been having in Cambridge about waking people up to their decision-making power, because it's really easy to sort of feel like you don't have power, but structures are disempowering. And we need to think about actually, we do have power in spaces. And how do we? And to what extent can religion - as something certainly in British society, can be a bit of a taboo thing in the public space - how can we actually, potentially harness that as something that can make the difference to people at waking up to their decision-making power, and thinking about values-led decision making rather than letting the currents of business and big industry, and, etc. be decisive?

Right, and I think in some sense it's the last source. So I just, I make this point in the book. I say, there used to be lots of theories of justice. There used to be robust theories of justice. When I was, when I I was born into a world in which, in which you know, a fifth of humanity lived in China, and people lived in Sweden, and people lived in China, and people lived in Cuba, and people lived all over the world, and they were Communists. And it was, their societies were working. You know that it was [inaudible], but it turns out, it was, you know, it was not working very well there, but it was the system of justice. It was an argument right? It was. So Marxism had, was a robust argument. That's... And now we, you know, it's hard to turn to that now, because of the ways that it that it fell off into fascist manifestation, Stalinism, and other fascist manifestations. So that's our, we don't have that argument really, that we can make it in the public square very, very logically, or very often. We used to have the argument of noblesse oblige, you know Downton Abbey, which Americans, of course, love right? Oddly. Oddly enough. This no, this argument that the rich have this noblesse oblige towards the poor, and many of our public institutions, public hospitals were done using that as the theory of justice. I have much, and have an obligation to you to give it to you. But people, clearly, people in power and position and authority feel that much less. Much less, there is, much less charitable giving. There's no, there's not not a sense that I live here, and I'm responsible for the village. So I have to take care of it. But Carnegie, who became incredibly wealthy, and then went off to study in Edinburgh, after making a dubious fortune in the United States. Came back from that, his experience of studying the great texts of the Scottish Enlightenment, and set up libraries all over the United States. So in every little tiny, dusty community in the Midwest or the West you'll see a Carnegie library. He did put his name on it, but there's libraries. There were libraries everywhere, and that was his money and his gift, so that so... But noblesse oblige is not a system. So we had these other systems that seemed to work. And now the argument for why you have to take care of the poor. Why, that's why the man on the street in the rags is a human being, and it's important to you. That's only, the only place that's left is in religious traditions. There's no other coherent reason. It makes no sense under capitalism. And because it makes no sense, you know, American cities have vast encampments of people without homes and without kin, living on the street. And you know people flooding up from from affect badly affected areas in Guatemala and Venezuela because of climate change, and because of chaos pouring into the United States desperate at the border and there's no argument for having them come and stay with us as human as fellow human beings who have dignity and for whom we have to share the world. The only argument for that is within religious traditions, because, as you see, in capitalism and our current government system, our fractious American democracy, there's not an argument for them, because it's it's expensive, and you'd have to sacrifice, and people could take your job, and all of the reasons against welcoming the poor and welcoming the immigrant are very robust in secular societies whose goal it is to maximize profit. It's not - which isn't a terrible goal. It's just a goal that doesn't take into consideration anything about the poor or really anything about the planet. So the places to find those arguments are in, is in religious texts and they're there very clearly making the last stand.

So a while back you put a kind of pin in the question of who "We" are, and I know you've kind of begun to touch on it again there. And actually, when I was preparing to talk to you, I was reflecting on the fact that one of the audiences we're aware of to listen to this conversation are the various people who will be coming to to Cambridge in less than a month's time now, coming to take part in our summer school, which is looking at religion and climate futures. It's something we're working on, together with researchers from the London School of Economics, who have been running a programme for the past 3 years or so around sort of global society, plurality, etc. They have done some work I know, in Egypt and Indonesia, in some other kinds of context. And so some of the people who are coming to participate will be coming from those contexts which I think we could place as part of the Global South as you have referred to, and on the real sort of brunt of some of the effects, impacts of climate change. So I'm wondering that sort of - sorry this has become a bit of a big question, or at least a rambling question - But where the "we", "us", etc., sits when bringing your work and your conversation to that kind of wider and mixed audience. And also, you know, it's a cruel question to an author. But I was wondering what would be the chapter that you might recommend if you were kind of inviting someone from the Global South into this conversation? Because I was aware of the kind of the American rootedness of some of the examples. So yeah, I just wonder if I can invite some inflection on that?

Okay, so I don't. I think it's a little reductionist. We do it all the time. I do it too, to talk about the Global North, the Global South, because some of the worst offenders are the megabillionaires in India and China and Kuwait and Qatar, and that are making in Africa. There's people who are making enormous I mean, enormous profits, who are Africans and Indians, and Indonesians, and doing it to their own people as well as the rest of the world. So it yeah, there's a lot of sinners to go around. So one thing I would I did want to mention was you did say, "what's it like to start a book in 2014 and publish a book 10 years later? And part of the thing that's odd is while book production is slow, climate change is actually faster now. So as I was writing the book at every stage things were getting worse. And you can see me saying during and look well, now we have to deal with the pandemic. And now we have to do... And now this summer, and this, and every summer, when I would work on the book every summer, it'd be worse and worse. In 2019 I was in Britain, and I was in Cambridge actually, and I just saw every lawn turn brown. The beautiful rolling lawns of England like suddenly gone, and it was ridiculously hot. And you know people in Cambridge were not used to that. People walked around with these looks of horror and betrayal on their faces like us, even us, even here, are with our moody, misty climate, even we right? And yes, indeed, it's because it's everywhere. And so, and then, as the book was going into production, there kept being catastrophes. And, I have add, like, should I add this, should I add this into a certain point? It we realize the pace of climate change. The pace of warming is so fast that we're beginning. Everyone's now seen the effects. You can see the effects all around you, and that wasn't the case when I first started. It's, it was very theoretical. It was very. It was, you know, it was like "in the coming days", and now "the coming days" are here, and now people are saying we have 10 years. And then, when we won't be able to turn things back. So that's one thing I wanted to highlight is the rapidity of change and the closing of that of that window, which means everything has to happen, both personal and also political changes. And that gets to your question. So much of the early focus on climate change and much of the how to books certainly in the early years were about personal products. Personal things like you buy this kind of recycling bag, and you do recycling, and you personally cut back on on your use. And I became a vegetarian out of that impulse because I did that, and I cut back on um traveling by air, because that, you know, I have tried to use public transportation, it's just always a challenge in the United States. And tried to tried to bike everywhere. Got a hybrid car, I mean, I did all those personal things that one is urged to do, and in every way I'm - my home is full of, you know, a thousand blameless decisions and virtue, signaling decisions because of that. And that's a good thing to do. We should do that. We should do that because of the, because you want to feel like you're participating as a moral actor. And you're, it's part of your moral formation. And if everybody does it, surely it's better because it just signals. I am on the side of trying to deal with this and not on the side of, you know. BP Oil or Shell Oil trying to make money off of this. I'm not donating to their cause. I'm donating to our side. So everything you can do as an individual person allows you to participate in the people who are trying to deal with climate change. So that's a good thing. But it's clearly not the only thing. Because the only thing that's really going to change stuff is substantial political action, the only thing you have there is the vote in democracies and the reality, the tough reality is that is sort of like Reinhold Niebuhr brought us to understand, there's real sin. And sin has, sin is not absent to the Jewish tradition, but it's seen more as error, you know, like oh, you can err. But in the Christian tradition there's a robust analysis of sin, especially the Christian realism. And I think about that argument a lot. And in the Talmud there's a moment in which they say, you know, we no longer know who the bad guys are, who are particular bad guys. So it's hard for us to enact justice. But I know who the bad guys are. And these are the oil companies that made billions and billions and billions even during the pandemic years, when people reduced their use of carbon dramatically. And you saw the earth immediately begin to heal, and birds sing and fish reenter the canals of of Venice. Right? You saw our capacity to turn things around. and then you saw that collapse again. And carbon is still going up, and billions and billions of dollars are being made which alerts us to the fact that these companies are extraction companies. It's a business for them. It's just all a business, and they're making. It's a way to make money. It's not about providing energy. It's just here's a way to make a ton of money. And let's just make it. Let's just make as much money as we possibly can. And they could stop extracting oil now today and two things would be true. One is, we would still have in storage an enormous amount, probably enough resources to to allow us to not drill anymore, and yet make the transition to cleaner energy. We have that much stored. And we'd also no matter if we stop now and stop everything right now, we can't stop the rate of warming because it's like a train that takes miles to stop. You know our, the big American Amtrak train I ride takes about 3 miles to stop. And so this will take decades to stop. So the world we have already made, which is actually the world of our grandparents that we're living in now. But the world that we're making right now. That's those effects are there, and without some remarkable new technology getting... Taking carbon out of the atmosphere is exquisitely difficult and not impossible, but exquisitely difficult. So we do have to name names. We do have to say this particular corporation, this man at the head of this company is making these choices, and they are sinful choices. And again, here again, only someone who's thinking about religious categories can say that. Because otherwise you just ,you're making, what kind of a complaint is that? Right? The only complaint against that, the only category, the only discussion in which sin has a place is a religious conversation. So that's why I think that it's a cross-cultural discourse, not just an American one.

From the bits of the book that I've read so far. It seems really the Amtrak train is doing a marvelous amount of conceptual work. I see you. It's like you were the many rabbis, and, like, you know, looking at different perspectives on the train. I don't think we have time to to go into the depths of that. But I do really admire your capacity for these sort of stories. And you know that journey that you go on in the penultimate chapter. The strangers on the train, arriving at the conclusion that actually at the very least, we have to get off the train and engage with the people who are suffering and, you know, it more immediately impacts. And that's, that is a kind of a point in the book. I think you are coming at it from sort of the Western comfort of being on the train.

Right.

So I wondered. There's a point where you kind of acknowledge other voices. And how, when people were reading your book and responding to it for you. While you were kind of getting it ready, they would say, Oh, have you read this? Have you read that? And I just wondered like, what else would you suggest that people should be reading? Who else is doing... has a really interesting religious voice on this? What would you suggest?

Oh, there's so many people, and there's, and I hesitate to name them because I don't leave out somebody, but like people say in their Academy Award accepted speech. If I don't want to leave anyone out right, there's and they're marvelous, and they're coming out all the time. I would urge people. If people who within faith communities, who care about that, those arguments to really look at, look sincerely at, the people who are writing from those, their own communities. Because there's this, I'm sure there's people that I don't know and don't recognize. There's a lot of work in feminist theology on this topic. There's the colleagues at Yale. The group at Yale, who's been working on climate change and ecology for three decades have produced extraordinarily good, extraordinarily good series, good works to take, to turn to. There are interesting works from native populations, scholars who look at the native populations, and they're not my traditions, but they are for people who, weaving Sweet Grass, of course, is one of the classics of of that genre, who do some very good work around that. And I am interested in the source text things I can plug in - for my son's book, Rabbi Natan Levy's book, of course, which I think is a marvelous book, and talks about that. How the structures of the, of the early chapters of Genesis structure us for a certain kind of positionality relative to the environment. So that's someone that I've learned from a great deal. I do think that Matt Ridley's book was the one - that was the first one that I read, Six Degrees was a book that is very old now and horrifyingly enough, everything that he said was gonna happen has happened, right on time. and so I think that's it for me. That was very. That was a very important book. Because it had a lot of data, and it was early, and it was. It was objective, and it was prophetic, tragically. This book, so many of the books have a bookshop, book after book on climate. And I think it's really good. I always do. And you know. A shout out to my colleagues at the University of Chicago who are doing this work as well. So Sarah Frederick's book on Guilt and climate change is one that I've learned a great deal from, from my colleagues. So these are. These are all places you can turn. There's so many now that you can, you can look to that really give a sense ... Dale Jamieson, who's written on philosophy and climate change is also really marvellous book. And now, of course, I'm leaving people out so, but...

That's always a risk, and I set up the trap

That's it

So if you fell into it, that's my fault.

Yeah, right. But if you, if I can tell you that there's wonderful, wonderful bookstores in Cambridge if you're here for summer school, and they both have - both the Cambridge bookstore for Cambridge Press books, and the, you know the other book stores in Cambridge have just wonderful sections on climate change with a very rich array, and I did much of my work in Cambridge, and spent a lot of time buying books for those bookstores as well. So it's it's really interesting, because some of the early work, Bill McKibben's work, for instance, said that by 2020 things would be a lot worse than they are, and I think to some extent because I'm not - you know, because many people have heeded these those calls - there are things that are better. So I want to say there's some hopeful things, too, all over the world. Many, many, many scientists are working on technical fixes. And I love technology just as much as the next person here. Here we are in Zoom on my iPad, right? So and I do think that many times technology has saved us. It just has. That's why we can't do reductionist and say Industrial Revolution, what a horror! I love the Enlightenment, and I love the Industrial Revolution. It was a good thing. Both things were good things for feminists and good things for Jews because they were liberatory. Like all liberatory acts, they have an edge of danger. So now we're living on the edge, the danger thing. But I still, yeah, we want big, intensive care units for newborn babies where - cause I used to work in one. And I understand how important they are. You know we, we're upset about microplastics, but the invention of plastic as a replacement for some things has been important. IV lines, for instance, made blood transfusion possible. So thank you, plastics. So the capacity of technology to maybe do something about carbon extraction, from the atmosphere or transformation is possible, and will it have bad effects down the line? Yes, probably. And the example that I think is interesting is the example of Haber, the Haber-Bosch process. So the world was about to have a catastrophe, because we were running out of naturally occurring nitrogen in the 1800s. And the British Royal Society put forward a call and said, We're running out of nitrogen. It's a climate... It's a crisis. We won't be able to grow any food. It's the first environmental crisis of, in the 19th century and they put out a call - and clever scientists, clever, I must say a Jewish scientist, in Germany, Fritz Haber came up with a way to extract nitrogen from the air by binding it with with oxygen, and put making artificial nitrogen by using a chemical process, synthetic chemistry to make that process. Now, of course, we have nitrogen blooms, and there's.... But in fact, nitrogen fertilizer created the capacity for enormous, the end of enormous human suffering and end of starvation in many areas of the world because it created crop yields that were extraordinary. So, and that was a complete technical fix for a problem, a natural, a naturally occurring problem. So it is possible. And I am optimistic. And I keep reading of small little projects. You know, sea urchins or something. And then I think, okay, maybe this would maybe this could work? And maybe one of them will. But I do think, even if we figure out a way technologically fix away out of this terrible, terrible situation, the ethical issue will still be true. How much do you consume? How much of the world can I need to consume and take and own? And that's again a problem of faith, a problem of religion. it's idolatry in the worst sense, because it's not only mistaking who God is. It's just saying who you are right, and thinking you actually own the world, the world, and it is yours to own and to have, and that's one of those classic errors that one is warned against in in Hebrew Scripture and in the New Testament. Don't think it's yours! It's not yours! If this is God's. This is God's world. So it's ... and it's not Eden. It's a place for thorns. It's gonna be hard to live in. It's gonna be agonal. You and life will be agonal. But it's not, it's not about possession. So... I do think there's extraordinary and deep wisdom in our texts. And it's there. We have to look for it, but it's there so - a long answer to your question.

Thank you so much. It's been really fascinating talking to you, and I have that sense that we could go on for another two hours very easily.

We could!

But I will encourage people to engage with your book. I think that we have only touched in the lightest of ways on the kind of, on the topic and the depth you bring to it, with your kind of various Jewish interlocutors through the ages, and indeed also some interreligious interlocutors especially. I know that you have a chapter where you get into the sort of Scriptural Reasoning and looking...

Yes, I do.

at other religious texts, too.

Yes, of course I could not. I. Of course I would do a Scriptural Reasoning chapter on the issue of the well and water. So it's that's - that the issue on women and water is a really for me, one of the my favorite chapters in the book. And it is, of course, based on Scriptural Reasoning and the work we've done in CIP. So.

Well, thank you so much, Laurie. It has been wonderful speaking with you today. And I hope that those who listen into this conversation get as much from it as I have. And especially such a rich potential reading list. So that's been fantastic.

And thank you to CIP that for decades and decades has supported our inquiries and in our work, our deeply, deeply important work. It's transformed my work entirely. Allowed this kind of conversation to continue across religious traditions, allowed me to more deeply understand my own tradition and to participate as friend and neighbor in the traditions of others. And it's invaluable work. And I, you know I look forward to many, many more years of successful working with CIP. So thank you.