Homo sapiens is faced with a truly wicked problem. To avoid an incalculable catastrophe, within less than two decades we must shift our energy sources from something we burn to something with no gaseous emissions. This is much more difficult than it sounds. We've gotten our energy from burning something for our entire history and have built a complex global economy and culture based on fossil fuels. That economy and culture penetrate to the core of our lives -- our ways of getting food, shelter, and transportation; our work; our values, aspirations, and satisfactions; and all things associated.
We've had "environmental education" for decades, but it largely focused on learning about the natural environment. The natural environment is not the problem. We are the problem. We must understand how we relate to the natural environment and must learn how to live within its natural laws. This is an immense field, including almost all the social and natural sciences, the arts, plus religion and theology.
We cannot go into depth on any of the topics below, but we must not ignore any of them because they are all part of the whole that we live within. Below is a brief overview of a few selected topics.
Because there is not an obvious way to organize these things by topic, we simply present them alphabetically.
Atmosphere
The atmosphere is a mixture of gases (78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide) 7.5 miles thick surrounding Earth. It is an insulator that regulates the sun's heat to provide a liveable habitat for life as we know it. It absorbs evaporated water from oceans and the land and returns that water as rain, snow, and other precipitation that supports life. It is also an immensely powerful engine driven by heat from the sun. It produces tornadoes and hurricanes. Hurricanes are the second most destructive thing on Earth. Human wars are the most destructive.
Culture
Culture is a concept that includes values, religion, rules of behavior, knowledge, language, beliefs, arts, customs, institutions, capabilities, and attitudes of human societies. Culture is generally internalized by members of the society, but there may be substantial variation depending on the tolerance of the culture. Cultures evolve and sometimes change rapidly. However, there may be substantial resistance to change within the society.
Fear
Fear is a natural and necessary emotion that motivates both action and caution. A tiger in the village would motivate us to get our children into the house and stay there until the tiger leaves.
Jesus frequently said "fear not." He probably would not have said that about the tiger, but he would have said not to let fear result in greed, hatred, violence, injustice, repression, and other actions that are destructive when combined with power.
We believe the opposite of fear is applied wisdom, which includes knowledge, awareness, and understanding, plus essential matters of trust, hope, and love/spirit, resulting in wise discernment and resilience.
Flourishing
Harvard University's Human Flourishing Program defines flourishing as "...a state in which all of the aspects of a person's life are good." It considers "...a number of important topics relevant to human flourishing, which may include family, friendship, virtue, community, work, beauty, forgiveness, religion, purpose, and meaning."
While this may sound naive and unreasonably idealistic, it draws on philosophy and religious writing since the Greeks, including Jesus' intent to give life "more abundantly" (John 10:10). It is aspirational, but we believe aspiration is a valid force of human nature. We suggest that you click on the link above and spend time exploring the Harvard program.
Hope
Hope is essential, but can trip us up. To hope for a specific outcome in the future sets us up for having our hopes dashed and becoming hopeless. In Mystical Hope: Trusting in the Mercy of God Cynthia Bourgeault quotes Valentin Tomberg:
Hope is ... a light-force which radiates objectively and which directs creative evolution toward the world’s future. It is the celestial and spiritual counterpart of terrestrial and natural instincts of biological reproduction. . . . In other words, hope is what moves and directs spiritual evolution in the world.
Love (Relational)
Christian scripture maintains that God is love (1 John 4:8 and 4:16) and Jesus said: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40).
But "love" is a much-used word that carries a lot of baggage and misunderstanding. Merriam-Webster online defines love as "strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties. maternal love for a child. (2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers."
Obviously, there must be other meanings for the word "love."
In I Corinthians the Apostle Paul wrote:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres (I Corinthians 13:4-7).
Part of the description above describes love by saying what it is not. This negative way (via negativa) is often used to try to describe the indescribable. However, with apologies to biblical scholars, we changed the negatives to positive attributes so they could become actionable ways to live. Our description of love is: patient, humble, kind, tolerant, accommodating, positive, hopeful, protective, trusting, and resilient.
Both of these descriptions are clear that love as used here is not about emotion, it is about relationships! The importance of this is, given that God is love (I John 4:16), then God is relational love.
We can think of love as the spirit of positive constructive synergistic relationships. This opens an important connection between our understanding of God and science. Most of science is about trying to understand relationships, from the smallest subatomic particles to the cosmos, especially including everything about our life support systems. The attributes of love are good operating principles for our cultural systems and possibly even operate naturally in non-cultural systems.
Power
In her book On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process, the process theologian Catherine Keller called power the ability to influence. This implies that power is neutral. In itself it is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for both. Power is a relative differential -- one side has more of something than the other. This might be physical or military strength, wealth, possessions, charisma, beauty, social position, or moral authority.
Power has a power of its own, in that it attracts more power, rather than willingly distributing power. For example, money makes more money and concentrates, leading to inequalities that can ultimately be disruptive to the system and even eventually destroy it. Thus, a system must regulate power. It does so via negative feedbacks, such as the checks-and-balances system built into the U.S. Constitution. Laws and ethics are other negative feedbacks within cultures.
Process
In systems thinking a process is defined as "...a natural phenomenon marked by gradual changes that lead toward a particular result; a continuing natural or biological activity or function; a series of actions or operations conducing to an end." (source)
Process theology adds depth to the meaning. In On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity In Process, Catherine Keller wrote:
"Process in this book means becoming: it signifies the intuition that the universe itself is not most fundamentally a static being or the product of a static Being—but an immeasurable becoming."
Process from both perspectives implies continual change, evolution, encouraging us that to quest for the wisdom in and around us is valid.
Spirit
The Spirit ... can represent the Holy Spirit of Christians, the Great Spirit of traditional Native American wisdom, or the Buddha-nature in all living beings. For some, the Spirit may signify the underlying force that binds all life together, like the Tao. It can be understood as God or Allah by Jews and Muslims. It can embody Brahman for Hindus. It can be the collective human spirit for humanists. Bishop Steven Charleston, Ladder to the Light.
Systems Thinking
The video below was produced by the Donella Meadows Project. Donella Meadows was an early and very influential thinker in developing systems theory. Click on the image to learn more about systems thinking.
Trust
Trust is the active form of faith. We have faith and live trust as relationship. Living trust as relationship means it is reciprocal -- it goes both ways. We trust and we must be trustworthy.
Fear displaces trust. In our current fearful state of being we are not very trustful.
A 2024 Gallup poll describes our lack of trust:
Americans’ ratings of nearly all 23 professions measured in Gallup’s 2023 Honesty and Ethics poll are lower than they have been in recent years. Only one profession -- labor union leaders -- has not declined since 2019, yet a relatively low 25% rate their honesty and ethics as “very high” or “high.”
Nurses remain the most trusted profession, with 78% of U.S. adults currently believing nurses have high honesty and ethical standards. However, that is down seven percentage points from 2019 and 11 points from its peak in 2020.
At the other end of the spectrum, members of Congress, senators, car salespeople and advertising practitioners are viewed as the least ethical, with ratings in the single digits that have worsened or remained flat.
Thus, faith/trust is a wicked problem in our society.
Values
Our core values are our major sources of meaning and purpose for our lives.
A simple definition of values is that they are our concepts of how we think things ought to be. This means that when a choice arises we decide in favor of our idea of how we think it ought to be, if at all possible. In this way we shape our own future and the future of our community and society.
Meg Selig in "6 Ways to Discover and Choose Your Core Values" in Psychology Today wrote Values“are the principles that give our lives meaning and allow us to persevere through adversity,” according to psychologist Barb Markway and Celia Ampel in The Self-Confidence Workbook. I love both parts of this definition—that values stand for our most meaningful ideals and also that they inspire us to keep going when the going gets tough.
As you will see later, values are the basis of our discernment ability, which is the heart of resilience.
It is often difficult to identify our values because they are so intertwined with the larger cultural values, which we also must understand. It is useful to work through the six steps in the article and perhaps some of the other suggested resources. However we identify and/or develop our values, it is essential to understand them, particularly to work out conflicts between values, because they are the drivers of our individual and social decisions and actions.
See Brené Brown list of values and North American Cultural Values from Boston University.