A political theology of climate change
By: Michael S. Northcott
Publisher: Eerdmans
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9780802870988
Subjects: Geopolitics; Political aspects; Environmental ethics; Global warming; Climatic changes
Description: Much current commentary on climate change, both secular and theological, focuses on the duties of individual citizens to reduce their consumption of fossil fuels. In A Political Theology of Climate Change, however, Michael Northcott discusses nations as key agents in the climate crisis. Against the anti-national trend of contemporary political theology, Northcott renarrates the origins of the nations in the divine ordering of history. In dialogue with Giambattista Vico, Carl Schmitt, Alasdair MacIntyre, and other writers, he argues that nations have legal and moral responsibilities to rule over limited terrains and to guard a just and fair distribution of the fruits of the earth within the ecological limits of those terrains. As part of his study, Northcott brilliantly reveals how the prevalent nature-culture divide in Western culture, including its notion of nature as "private property," has contributed to the global ecological crisis. While addressing real difficulties and global controversies surrounding climate change, Northcott presents substantial and persuasive fare in his Political Theology of Climate Change. -- Publisher
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The geopolitics of a slow catastrophe; title: Coal, cosmos, and creation; title: Engineering the air; title: Carbon indulgences, ecological debt, and metabolic rift; title: The crisis of cosmopolitan reason; title: The nomos of the Earth and governing the anthropocene; title: Revolutionary messianism and the end of empire.