by Lauren Groff
(This story first appeared on the Greenpeace.org website as part of its Climate Visionaries series and is being reprinted with permission from Lauren Groff.)
The church of my youth was antique and stern, shot through with light from the great stained-glass windows, its long plaster columns splitting when it reached the vast ceiling into arched ribs. Sundays were days when you awoke underwater into slowness and grayness; sitting through service in this ribbed white church was being swallowed by a translucent albino whale. It was there that I ignored the men who preached on the pulpit and instead read the King James Bible, where I felt its music seep into my bones.
I have been haunted in my life by so much of that strange book, the Bible: the wives made into pillars of salt, the seraphim, the begetting and the begotten. I am haunted now by Genesis, the moment when God, having made the stuff of this planet — the firmament, the waters, the lights, the animals — breathes into his new creation, we poor humans molded of clay, and says:
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
I am haunted by this passage; this passage has long been haunting our planet. Our disintegrating climate, our rising seas choked with plastic, our dying trees, our extinct animals, can all be directly traced to a profound and devastating misreading of it.
For dominion, men these past few thousand years have not read good custodianship, caregiving, a maternal nursing of the gifts we have been given: they have read domination. The whelp of domination is that nasty biting creature, supremacy. Where supremacy exists, there is always suppression. Where suppression exists, there is destruction.
We are here at the apex of the result of all of this tragic and intentional misreading of Genesis: Every day, the news brings to us ever grimmer statistics. Any rational person would be running around screaming with their heads on fire about what we are doing to this gorgeous planet that has given us life; that, in killing, will kill us, also.
But we look at our neighbors, our friends, even our buddies who are scientists, and they all are living their lives in relative calm. They do their laundry, they walk their dogs, they go to the movies; some even read books. And because they are not panicking, we do not panic.
It is so painful to think about the wide-scale and intensifying destruction of our planet, that, like so many Bartlebys, we prefer not to. It is easier to turn our eyes away. Despair fills our limbs with lethargy. Instead of acting, we sing ourselves to sleep with screens.
Mea culpa; there are times I have also been part of this. To imagine the world my own children will inherit is so painful that if I don’t ignore it, I walk through the world as though flayed, nerves exposed, leaving footprints in blood.
Yet, at the same time, I have long been frustrated — I have found myself, frankly, furious — that even artists in our society have been complicit in this vast effort of averting our eyes, of pretending that nothing is happening.
Even now, it is rare to find a book or a song or a film or a statue deeply engaged with the work of describing, tracing the evil taproots of, thinking about the most urgent catastrophe in human history, the thing that will affect every other urgency, from pandemics to starvation to tribalism to air and water rights. Instead, we are getting art that would have seemed essential thirty years ago.
Artists are the blazing moral voices of a society. If our artists are focused mainly on the urgencies of thirty years ago, they are abdicating their moral responsibilities. We have been abdicating our moral responsibilities.
We can no longer look away. Today is the first day of 2020, and this is the year that we must focus on climate change with steady hearts and calm understanding and enough courage to make real and lasting change.
We need to act. All of us collectively need to act; all of us individually need to act.
Yes, it is sometimes hard to know where to start. We say: To make art, to write an essay, to draw, to take a photograph, to engage in a real and thoughtful way with climate change is one way we can all move forward.
We have asked some of the brilliant writers, artists, and thinkers we know to engage with climate change in whatever way that they could manage to do so: We are so thrilled to show you what they have come up with. For the next few days, we will have posts from them [on the Greenpeace website]. Please share the ones you love and respond to. Please make your own art, write your own essays, and share what you’ve created with us.
It’s a start. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s get going.
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About this story: All month long, Greenpeace is giving space on its channels to authors and artists working within the climate crisis. Acclaimed author Lauren Groff is spearheading the effort, prompting artists and thinkers to write exclusive essays and create art about climate change, each addressing, in some form, what it means to create in the midst of this crisis. For more powerful work by creative visionaries, visit Greenpeace’s Climate Visionaries Artists’ Project.
