Exploring Environmental Ethics & Uncertainty – Interview with Whitney Bauman & Kevin O’Brien

We are excited to share this interview with ISSRNC scholars Whitney Bauman and Kevin O’Brien, co-authors of the book Environmental Ethics and Uncertainty: Wrestling with Wicked Problems (Routledge, 2019). Interview by ISSRNC’s chris crews.

I caught up recently with Professor Bauman and Professor O’Brien to talk about their work on environmental ethics and wicked problems and I’m excited to share the following edited interview based on that discussion.

Stay tuned for more feature interviews with ISSRNC scholars in the future.

Exploring Environmental Ethics & Uncertainty

ISSRNC: I want to start out with a little background for our readers. We hear the phrase “wicked problems” thrown around a lot in relation to climate change, but also other issues. Can you start by telling us what you have in mind when you use that phrase?

Kevin O’Brien (KO): In his book Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells writes about the “climate kaleidoscope” to note that our culture has a whole bunch of distinct but overlapping ways of talking about and understanding the issue. The “wicked problem” language is trying to make a similar point, but to emphasize that this is inherent in the nature of the issue. There is no one way of understand climate change; the problem is bigger than any way we have to talk about it.

Climate change is our key example, but I’d also put problems like structural racism and poverty and patriarchy into the same category. Whatever we do, these are still going to be problems for generations to come, but we still have a responsibility to work on them, to try to be less complicit in them and to make the world a little less sexist, classist, racist, and degraded.

Whitney Bauman (WB): Yes, and in addition to what Kevin has already said, this is a term that is used by Horst Rittel and Melvin Weber in 1973 in terms of policy and planning. So, there is both a conceptual component to the term, as Kevin has clearly articulated, and an ethical/solutions-based component to the term. For me one of the most important things about this term is that it pays deep attention to the way that creative ideas (solutions) materialize in the world and affect different bodies (human and non) differently, depending upon race, class, sex, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc.

The term is a caution to those who understand solutions as singular, for all, and final. Instead, the term highlights that any solution will present its own problems because we live in an evolving and pluralistic planetary community. We can’t just apply managerial solutions to problems in the future as we have done in the past as this will re-create the same problems. Finally, I think it calls on us to take an experimental approach in addressing things such as climate change: make changes (theoretical, ethical, policy, political, etc.) and then see how these changes affect different bodies in different ways (both good and bad), and then revise according to those bodies that are most negatively affected by said changes.

KO: A friend of mine from Massachusetts said, after reading the book, that she liked the idea of climate change as a “wicked” problem because of the double meaning that comes when you say the word with a Boston accent, and she has hope that characterizing it as a wicked problem also has the potential to make it more interesting. I hadn’t thought of this, but I’m intrigued, and I do think that when we think climate change has a solution, we tend to appeal to experts —scientists, engineers, politicians, etc.— to solve it. On the other hand, if it’s a “wicked hard” problem, we all need to muck in.

ISSRNC: You open the book with a vignette about the Laudato Si encyclical from Pope Francis and criticism of the text by evangelical pundit Calvin Beisner, going on to note that: “this book is about what Beisner and progressive environmentalists too often have in common: a desire to find a single, overarching narrative with which to answer all environmental questions. Opposing such certainty is the point of this book, a point inspired in part by Pope Francis’s encyclical.” What is it about this desire for a master frame that worries you, and how does this urge bring together progressive environmentalists on one hand, and reactionary critics like Beisner on the other?

Professor Whitney Bauman

WB: I am inspired by a phrase Catherine Keller uses in her book, God and Power (Fortress 2005), which states something to the effect that certainty has caused more violence than uncertainty ever has. To be sure, there are times when we have to take a stand and draw a line in the sand, but the general idea that certainty is the end of knowledge production is problematic. From this perspective, if we want to follow post-colonial, decolonial, and other critical theorists, the only option when encountering different or multiple perspectives is to arrange them in accordance with one’s certain knowledge. This could be done hierarchically (which is colonial and leads to all sorts of problematic “isms”) or it could be even more violent in that all others must be assimilated or annihilated into the certain truth (which is the case with slavery and colonization).

Religious traditions are full of warnings against idolatry, apophatic and negative practices that prevent us from confusing our understanding of the world with the way the world is in metaphysical reality, and with practices that help us to take on the perspectives of others (both humans and non). As Walter Mignolo points out in the Darker Side of Modernity (and in conversation with the Zapatista movement), rather than living in one, common world, what we need to think of is how to create worlds among worlds (no center, but with definite points of connections). Grand narratives tend to want to wrap an ultimate layer around this multiple worlding process, and I think uncertainty helps us to keep a vital, agnostic openness that allows for new, unimagined possibilities to emerge.

KO: For me, this book crystalized in a conversation that Whitney and I had with Rick Bohannon, who is co-author on two chapters. The three of us were talking about environmental politics and one of us said, “Whoever thinks they have the answer is the problem.” I’m not sure who said that—in a really good conversation, who knows?— but it became the central point we wanted to make. The world is complicated, and terrible violence is done by people who want to disguise that, even for the very best of intentions.

In The Princess Bride, the Dread Pirate Roberts says at one point, “Life is pain. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” That’s a bit dark for me, but I might adapt it to “Life is complex. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” Our book is trying to help readers resist such sales. And it seems to be working because we haven’t sold too many copies…

ISSRNC: Your book is described as offering a multidisciplinary environmental approach to ethics, with a very broad audience in mind: everyone from environmental studies and environmental humanities to scholars of religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and social theory. Can you talk about your approach to writing a multidisciplinary book about ethics and wicked problems, and any suggestions you might have for others seeking to navigate a similar path?

KO: My advice would be to co-author everything, with Whitney whenever possible. When I write things alone, I tend to get very focused on a single academic discourse, perhaps because I’m trying to prove to myself and my readers that I actually know what I’m talking about. But writing for this project, and others we’ve done together, I knew that the first audience for my ideas was Whitney. I mostly trust that Whitney doesn’t think I’m stupid, so I’m less self-conscious as a writer. I can focus on the ideas. I knew that first reader wasn’t worried about disciplinary boundaries, and so I became less interested in them and explored connections instead.

WB: Haha, Kevin. It really has been a pleasure to work with both Kevin and Rick in what has turned out to be about a 15 year collaboration with many texts. These texts emerged from our informal conversations but also thanks to the habitat that many of our mentors and organizations have created for us. The ISSRNC, the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale, the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Ecology group, and the Trans-Disciplinary Theological Colloquia at Drew University just to name a few of the organizations. We are fortunate to have many people who have created our intellectual playground before us.

I think part of our process, being in the second (or maybe third) generation of folks reflecting seriously on “religion and nature/ecology,” is that we are able to move in different directions that were not possible before. These conversations (and environmental thinking in general) have been happening for decades, thankfully. But, the problems still seem to keep getting worse. Might there be something in the very shape of Western university disciplines and thinking that doesn’t enable us to think differently, but rather enables us to keep re-creating the same worlds as we have in the past? It takes multi-disciplinary thinking, and frankly for me, thinking with people outside of religious studies and outside of the Western world, in order to think this type of difference. Yes, Rick, Kevin and I are still three white dudes when you look at it one way, but we have benefitted from conversations with many, many others who are not, and we work to include those voices in all of our work. The attempt to think in new ways, outside of the reductive and productive model of knowledge, also pushed me and another ISSRNC colleague to start a small think tank, Counterpoint: counterpointknowledge.org. There, we try to bring voices from outside of the modern Western understanding of the planet, and alternative voices from within Western traditions that do think seriously about humans as part of the planet, together. Other ISSRNC members such as James Miller have also been an integral part of this type of work, especially in James’s case on China; and ISSRNC treasurer Elaine Nogueira-Godsey does such work through the decolonial networks she is engaged in: dialogoglobal.com/compostela/.

ISSRNC: One of your arguments in the book is that it is essential to develop an “ethics housed in ambiguity” in response to the problems facing humanity in the 21st century. Can you unpack this idea of an ethics of ambiguity for us? Are you arguing that the “wicked problems” of today require a more flexible, or ambiguous, ethics in order to tackle them?

Professor Kevin O’Brien (Photo: John Froschauer/PLU)

KO: Our ethics of ambiguity stresses that the problems facing industrialized, Western people in the 21st century absolutely require flexibility, an openness to uncertainty, and a tolerance for messiness. I’m not sure if that’s more true for us, now, than it was for other people in other times, but I’m sure it’s true now.

We had some doubts about this approach when we started because, after all, isn’t it an appeal to “uncertainty” and “messiness” that justifies those who deny or raise skepticism about whether climate change is real? The election of Donald Trump actually helped to clarify this for us, because in him it’s pretty clearly and openly revealed that the appeal to “uncertainty” in climate issues —as in issues of truth in media or election meddling— is not actually about uncertainty. President Trump sees the world in incredibly simplistic terms. Things are either good or bad for him, people are either with him or against him. Our argument is that this is not unique to the current president, that he is a profoundly malignant expression of a temptation that’s widespread in our culture: the aspiration for certainty. Our ethics of ambiguity is trying to build people who can tolerate uncertainty, because people who can tolerate uncertainty won’t feel inclined to tolerate a lot of the worst in contemporary politics.

WB: Again, yes to what Kevin has already said. “Alternative Facts” and “Fake News” can only exist when one approaches problems from a monological perspective. That is, one has fully formed ideas no matter how much pushback from other voices (both human and non) one gets: climate, drought, fires, species extinction, and those people affected most by reductive, productive, and extractive methods of Modernity.

In addition, the “progressive” narrative (from the left) tends to still move at the pace of progress and certainty. The attitude of: “we know what is best and we have to do it now. No time to debate.” This too leads to the silencing of many human and other voices. What if we moved, instead, at the pace of ambiguity, a meandering, slower pace that allows for a multiplicity of perspectives to inform how we want to live into a planetary future?

ISSRNC: You engage with a number of important social figures over the course of the book, including Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Frank Lloyd Wright. What made these particular figures important to questions of ethics and wicked problems for both of you?

KO: Of course part of the choice of these figures came from our awareness of identity and social location. We’re middle class white guys who are aware that the environmental movement and environmental scholarship have problems of being dominated by whiteness and maleness. So we wanted a way to meaningfully learn from and bring others into the conversation. I think Whitney had the idea of engaging with Marjory Stoneman Douglas, about whom I knew almost nothing but was brilliant and fascinating. We put her into conversation with Rachel Carson to offer a broader narrative of the roots of ambiguous activism in the environmental movement. Then we wanted to learn from beyond the movement, and thought a dialogue between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr, would bring in new perspectives that we hope environmental folks will take seriously. Finally, our co-author Rick suggested Frank Lloyd Wright, who had some great ideas but also serves as a kind of counterexample. He failed to embrace ambiguity in some key ways, and it led to problems.

WB: Yes. I’m currently working on a small book that offers Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Rachel Carson as two people who might give us a different “historical narrative of environmentalism,” that is different from wilderness and whiteness. Both were women, and both understood that the “urban and wild” or “nature and culture” were always and already together. They were both also influenced to different degrees by religiosity (the historical Quakerism of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s family, and the admitted admiration on the part of Rachel Carson for Albert Schweitzer’s “reverence for life.”) They were, of course, both white women, but they understood all humans (and our technologies and ideas and art and cultures) as also a part of the rest of the natural world. Finally, they both led somewhat non-heteronormative lives. Douglas didn’t really care much for the married life or kids; Carson had a long-term female partner. I think this is important in terms of the way in which our institutions (here traditional heteronormative marriage and family) need to shift in order to think differently about human-earth relations.

ISSRNC: This is the third book the two of you have written together. Was writing a co-authored book easier or harder the second or third time around? Do you have any sage advice for others who might be contemplating a co-authored book?

KO: I think my advice would be to see it as a conversation and see where it goes. The more the writing grows out of dialogue, the more interesting and engaging it is.

We start everything we write with a conversation, generally about a problem we’re all thinking about. In earlier work, we were thinking about the state and direction of our field, which led to Inherited Land and the challenges of teaching in it (which led to Grounding Religion). This time we were thinking about the relationship between scholarship and action, and we talked about it for a few years before it coalesced into a perspective we shared and wanted to write down.

In a funny way, I think the conversational nature of our process leads to what I hope is a fairly coherent final product. Some co-authored works preserve a lot of the dialogical nature of a conversation, keeping voices distinct. We didn’t do that, largely because our conversations are the kind where our ideas start intertwining and I’m usually not sure if Whitney or Rick or I was the first to think of something or articulate it a certain way.

WB: Yes, I will also add that the longer you are in dialouge with writing partners, the less urgency you feel about the speed at which the book is published from idea to press. I think Inherited Land and Grounding Religion were both about a 5 year process. The pace of progress and production drove us as non-tenured faculty to produce those books at a much more rapid pace. (They are still great.) But, this book went through a 10 year process, and that allowed for more ambiguity and experience to continually seep into our ideas and process. In the end, I think the tone of the book matches the conceptual idea of moving at the pace of ambiguity.

ISSRNC: Can you tell us a little about how you see your work fitting into the sort of questions that many ISSRNC scholars are interested in? How do you connect your work to a broader audience who might not see the intersections of religion, nature and culture as that important?

WB: I see a big move in ISSRNC and in other discussions around “religion, nature/ecology, and culture” away from historical and comparative approaches, and toward recognizing that religiosity can take place anywhere. In order to examine that, we need to feel free to move beyond the historic disciplinary model and into a more trans/cross/multi/inter disciplinary mode of thinking. This is not to say that we don’t need “experts,” but it is to say that we need to re-tool the university and our disciplines in a way that takes more account of the globalized and climate changed planet of which we are a part.

KO: The publisher categorizes this as a book on “Environmental Ethics” and barely mentions religion in the promotional materials. I think that’s because we’ve tried to write a book where our expertise and interest in religion is a bit in the background. It’s all over the book, of course. (Be sure to read for our thoughts on what the apophatic tradition has in common with neti-neti and how Malcolm X’s understanding of God infused his activism!) But readers who aren’t looking for religion won’t see it as any more prominent than philosophy, social theory, or politics.

Scholars in the ISSRNC spend a lot of time identifying the implicit religion all around us, and that’s incredibly important work. But I think we’re trying a complementary move here, asking what we—as scholars of religion who see things most people don’t—can contribute to other fields, what we can say if we don’t first try to convince our readers to pay attention to religion. Our colleagues in the field can make their own judgments about whether that’s a good use of their—or our!—time and expertise.

ISSRNC: Finally, for anyone interested in learning more about these issues, do you have 2-3 resources you would recommend that people could use as entry points to learn more, in addition to your new book?

KO: In working on this book, Whitney introduced me to a lot of what he calls “post” thinkers: postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and queer theory. I had more of a conversational understanding of these fields before this work, and I learned an enormous amount. So, I’d encourage those who are interested but not well acquainted with these theoretical works to take the time—and it really does take time!—to get to know a few of them. Some favorites from what Whitney got me reading were Isabel Stengers’s Cosmopolitics, Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, and Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons.

WB: Yes to what Kevin has already mentioned. A few more helpful areas to look into are the new materialisms (Jane Bennet, William Connely, Karen Barad, for instance) and affect theories (Donovan Schaefer, Karen Bray, for instance). These areas of critical theory really begin to redistribute agency to the entire planetary community and systems, and challenge our (Western) institutions that are based upon the isolated individual human. These critical theories do draw from animisms, pantheisms, and other immanent ways of thinking from the past, but now in a way that understands us as interconnected on a planetary scale. Basically, any critical theory (disability studies, critical race theory, queer theory, feminist theory, post-colonial, decolonial, etc.) gives us part of that more multi-perspectival approach that we aim for in the book. And, there are many from within these critical theories that are taking the rest of the planetary community series (which takes account of the anthropocentric critique waged against Modern and postmodern/postcolonial theories alike).

ISSRNC: Are there any other thoughts you want to share?

KO: Since part of this book involves thinking about environmental activism, I continue to think a lot about what we as scholars can do for and with activists. One of the things I’ve come to is that, by the nature of their work, activists have to live very much in the moment, there is a built in presentism in their work. So I think scholars have the opportunity and the capacity to be a kind of memory for activists, we can help remind activists that they are continuing projects that have been going on for decades and centuries. We tried in this book to remind people concerned about the environment that they are working on a project linked to those of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Rachel Carson, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. I have kept thinking about that, and kept wondering what other stories from the past we as scholars might be telling to help better orient activists in their work and to better develop the sorts of critical engagement that will make activism most productive.

WB: I also want to add that we hope that this book is oriented toward open dialogue and engagement. We have fewer and fewer “public spaces” in our worlds today, with increasing nationalisms on the one hand, and the continuation of neo-liberal capitalism, or oligarchic communism on the other. What we scholars of religion and nature/ecology need to do (at least some of us) is help to midwife “planetary public/political spaces” (in the Arendtian sense for me) so that we can begin to create some notion of planetary citizenry (citizens amongst many other human and more than human citizens). This won’t happen with projecting the same progressive solutions from the past and present onto the future, but, I argue, requires a pace of ambiguity, dialogue, and play.

ISSRNC: I want to thank you both for taking the time to talk to us today!

About the Authors

Whitney A. Bauman is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Florida International University, USA. His books include Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (2014) and, with Kevin O’Brien and Richard Bohannon, Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, 2nd Revised Edition (2018). He is also a former ISSRNC Board Member.

Kevin J. O’Brien is Professor of Religion and Dean of Humanities at Pacific Lutheran University, USA. His teaching and research focus on environmental ethics, stressing the intersections of science, ethics, religion, and social justice; his current project is about race and climate change. His publications include The Violence of Climate Change: Lessons of Resistance from Nonviolent Activists (Georgetown University Press, 2017), An Introduction to Christian Environmentalism (Baylor, 2014) and, with Whitney Bauman and Richard Bohannon, Inherited Land: The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology (Pickwick, 2011). You can follow his work @thatkob on Twitter.