A review of A Liberation for the Earth: climate, race and Cross by A.M. Ranawana. SCM Press (Norwich 2022) 256 pages. £25.
Anupama Ranawana is a Catholic theologian. Climate Change is the great issue facing humankind. My background is Christianity, so I hoped we might be in some sympathy. She begins: ‘Taking a trip in a small boat in Negombo, Sri Lanka,…to see the mangroves….I drew back a little in shock. Covering the base of them was a brightly coloured skirt of plastic.’ She provides further arresting examples of environmental devastation. Much later she stares over the beautiful but overburdened ocean and in ‘an experience of grace’ understands the need to care for Creation. ‘All is fallen so the work towards justice and liberation must occur in complex ways.’ She develops her argument over four short sections – sans notes, the book is barely 100 pages long. An ecological conversion, a ‘personal conversion to the struggle for institutional change’, must occur before we can see meaningful change, a radical break required, ‘beyond the idea of sustainable development, suggesting a shift from the purely anthropocentric to the understanding of “multiple and interlocking networks of relationships”. Nature is not merely a “utility for humankind”.’
The Pope’s 2015 encyclical letter Laudato Si’ moved her, but it’s ‘an incomplete document’ in its insistence on the centrality of the family, patriarchal bias and ‘failure to think beyond the binary of two genders’. She monitored its reception; righteous anger was a common reaction. She was convinced of ‘the need to further conversations on the topic of ecological sin and the importance of spiritual awakening that would add to the ongoing activities that focus on effective transformative social justice.’ And she was speaking from ‘theologies of the ground’ as she developed a political theology of rage, citing examples of righteous anger from Moses to Jesus to Francis of Assisi – and many more.
Liberation theology is ‘the through-argument’ of the book, its mantra: ‘Earth is the new poor.’ Her absorbing chapter on liberation theologies necessarily scuttles through the territory and it’s hard to condense, but I want to mention James Cone, Leonardo Boff and Ivone Gebara, a Catholic theologian who ‘focused on deconstructing knowledge using a liberationist perspective’ and was referred by the Vatican for re-education. Ranawana touches on: Buddhists challenging consumerism, the Fire Sermon as their guide; the Muslim concept of stewardship; a 2015 Rabbinic Letter demonstrating the dire effect of ‘the worsening concentrations of wealth’; ‘Indigenous communities that live within a spiritualist setting’; the (drowning) Pacific Island cultures. Ranawana condemns neo-liberal economics, consumerism, throw-away mindsets, extreme technological fixes, land appropriation, chemical pollution, loss of biodiversity, vast strip mines – common ground. ‘I feel angry every time I am asked what needs to be done or asked how we can gather to lament together and lately my response has been… to remember that for so very many there is no choice to lament.’ (Rather than lamenting, I contemplated practical measures.) Before justice can be attained, Ranawana says, we must ‘take on a process of unsettling’. She takes issue with ‘apocalyptic narratives’, problematic because they expect climate catastrophe to trigger largescale immigration. XR she attacks for its ‘whiteness’, neglecting history by not fore-fronting blame. Meanwhile, the extreme right appropriates the story (Le Pen says certain ethnic groups should ‘remain distinct and restricted to their “native lands”‘.) And, even if you ignore denialism, there are Christian groups that envisage an Apocalypse offering ‘selective salvation’. Remedies long practised by ancient ‘worldhoods’ in the Global South are ignored while the West arrogantly assumes leadership, focussing on technologies, setting long timescales for reform, ignoring reparations.
We could all add egregious examples of abuses from across the world and through history and I’ve wondered if ‘rage’, the twin of hopelessness, could be harnessed to dispel our national complacency, generate pragmatic action. But Ranawana eschews the middle ground. She believes with Sarah Jaquette Ray that ‘there is an inherent whiteness to climate anxiety’, mere fear of losing privilege, while early environmentalists were linked to eugenicists. She cautions the reader not to think of anger in a secularised manner but to equate it with the thunderings of Jesus. ‘We need more theological work… [and] scholarship requires us to make epistemological breaks’. She calls for a rainbow coalition of the dispossessed. But must we wait while she rallies her troops and wins the argument before we can cooperate?
Digby Hartridge is a SOF member living in Bristol.