Easy answer, no ethics or religion involved.
Laurie Zoloth is deeply convinced that climate change represents a great moral challenge for modern times. But she doesn’t spend time complaining about those who deny the scientific consensus of human-induced global warming.
“What I want to think about is my denial, our denial,” she told a group of about 250 people Thursday at the conference, “Integrity of Creation: Climate Change,” which began Wednesday and continues through today at Duquesne University.
It is denial, she said, to acknowledge global warming but continue a lifestyle burning fossil fuels for nonessential travel and eating foods such as meat with a high-carbon footprint. While it’s difficult to make such changes all at once, as president of the American Academy of Religion last year, she proposed that her group take a sabbatical year in 2021 by skipping the annual conference that fills the jet streams with thousands of scholars converging on one city.
It would be just a step, but in reducing one’s fossil fuel use, “then we’re believable, then we have integrity.”
Ms. Zoloth — who has a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., and is professor of religious studies, bioethics and medical humanities at Northwestern University in Chicago — is one of several speakers at the conference.
The conference was based in part on the Catholic mission of Duquesne and the Spiritan religious congregation that founded it, said Gerry Magill, chair for the Integration of Science, Theology, Philosophy and Law at the university.
“God has created us,” he said, and “we have to look after God’s creation. We have been renegades on that commitment.”
The conference has drawn high school and university students and the public. It was designed to provide time for discussions in small groups, he said. “We want them to integrate it into their personal lives. That way they can do something about it.”