From Religious Cosmology to Environmental Praxis

Abstract

Discourse about climate change has the potential to empower moral agency toward sustainable praxis or arrest action by furthering moral oblivion. This dissertation analyzes sources for moral narratives about climate change—in theology and ethics, in public discourse and the news media, and in social movements—to determine their relative influence on agency. Because climate change and environmental degradation are wicked problems, there are always multiple ways to understand the problems and propose solutions that influence agential action. This dissertation promotes a pragmatic approach to environmental ethics, which analyzes the particularities of each problem to mediate the interconnected impact of historic injustice, social sin, and lived experiences of harm. Social movements provide new moral visions for enacting social change opposing structural injustice. The environmental justice movement, generated from experiences of environmental racism in the disposal of toxic waste, provides both a corrective moral vision and normative metrics by which sustainable action can be measured: recognition, participation, and distributive justice. Application of these normative principles makes it possible to analyze the extent to which environmental action pursues redress for structural injustice or continues to perpetuate social and environmental harm. Rooted in a social praxis of Christian hope, environmental ethics ought to stimulate the moral imagination to sustain action pursuant to tangible and lasting social change.