Engaging Voices: A Q&A With Roger S. Gottlieb

Roger S. Gottlieb is professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the author or editor of sixteen books and more than 100 articles on environmentalism, religious life, contemporary spirituality, political philosophy, ethics, the Holocaust, feminism, and disability. He is internationally known for his work as a leading analyst and exponent of religious environmentalism, for his passionate and moving account of spirituality in an age of environmental crisis, and for his innovative and humane description of the role of religion in a democratic society. He is editor of six academic book series, on the editorial boards of several journals, and contributing editor to Tikkun Magazine. Currently in the Patheos Book Club , we're discussing Gottlieb's new book, Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming. Here, he answers some questions about his new book including why he chose the genre of fiction for this subject matter, why religious people should care about environmental issues, and how people learn to listen to each other even when they totally disagree. You're a professor of philosophy who has written books on religion, politics, spirituality, and the environment. Why did you write a book of short stories? I wanted to do two things: explore our collective response to environmental problems, and see if I could shed some light on why it is so hard for us to talk reasonably and openly to people who disagree with us. Yet too often religious or philosophical books are written as if ideas are disembodied, simply hanging around in space waiting to be evaluated as true or false, rational or nutty. In real life every idea is believed in by a real person—someone with fears, hopes, hurts, and a personal history. In fiction we can see why this person loves nature, or that one is suspicious of environmentalists, or this one believes he's doing the right thing when he paves over the wetland to build a mall. And we can see how people change their ideas by listening to others, admitting to themselves (even if not to others) that they have doubts and confusions, and understanding the human reality behind people on the "other side." In stories we can also sense people's grief and despair—and how we might, just might, heal our own pain. And there is the question of how we can talk to and learn from each other, even when our disagreements are so intense, when other people seem so crazy to believe what they believe. This is not just an intellectual problem, but a personal and spiritual one. To show how this works, you need characters, not just abstractions like 'tolerance' or 'civility.' Why should religious people care about environmental issues? Because they have bodies, because they don't want their children to die from pollution, because they love the earth, because (for Jews, Christians, and Muslims) the earth is a gift from a loving God who instructs people of faith to care for it, because you can't love your neighbor or live non-violently or not cause suffering if your way of life is poisoning the water and air and changing the climate. Because polluting the earth and extinguishing other life forms violate the basic moral teachings of virtually all the world's religions—and religious leaders from the Pope to the National Council of Churches to the Evangelical Environmental Network to respected Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist teachers are all telling us this. Is this a spiritual book? I believe it is. I think to face the fear we have of other people's ideas—a fear rooted in the severity of the problems in our world and the scary fact that none of us really have a sure—fire method of solving them—we need what I call a "spiritual" support. This might be trust in God, or Goddess, or the miracle of life, or our own desire to live more compassionately. We need to trust in something, feel held by something, if only our own seeking of emotional maturity and kindness. And this is something I personally need as much or more than other people. Look, I'm so far to the left I fall off the planet every once in a while—but I'm trying to get to a point where I can hold all the political, moral, religious and spiritual views I have, but hold them lightly and graciously—so that I can learn from others, or at least understand and respect them. It's not that I want people to give up their religion, morality and politics, but I do want them to be honest about their limitations, their confusions, and the fact that every movement and group—from scientists to capitalists to socialists to religious people—has done some terrible things and has only a partial answer to the problems we face. I'd like to see us have the honesty and humility to open ourselves up to each other. Who are your favorite characters in the book? Ahh...I love them all! But I suppose I have some favorites. Jacob is a young assimilated Jew whose mother was killed in a terrorist bombing in Israel. To deal with his pain and loss he turns to Orthodox Judaism. Studying in a yeshiva in Israel he gets exposed to Jewish environmentalism, becomes committed to it, and then meets Ibrahim, a devout Muslim who is also an environmentalist. They become close friends and travel the Appalachian trail together, blogging at 'JewMuslimplanethope.org.' Then the terrible struggle in Gaza turns Ibrahim against Jacob. Abandoned by his friend, Jacob is lost in despair, feeling that no one else understands and will work with him, and his ability to fulfill God's plan for him to protect the earth is ruined. In the chapter on despair he must take a strange journey to a very dark place to find the courage he needs to continue. Richard is a committed environmentalist who is in prison for blowing up bulldozers. When he gets out he wants to be a great organizer but can't control his temper when the people he's organizing don't agree with him. He prefers nature to people, who make him nervous. He's guilty because he eats meat and he feels like a failure all the time because he hasn't saved the earth. His heart is in the right place, big time, but he can't deal with the pain of the world or his own loneliness. While some of the characters who appear in more than one story reach a higher level of understanding and some wisdom about their lives, Richard doesn't. He's lost. Then there is Charles, who was the executive of an Enron type company. He appears in the first story, in prison for white collar crime. He's ashamed of what he did, but remains a committed free market Republican type who hates Obama and thinks capitalism is the best possible system. Later we meet Benjamin, his son, in the stories about an environmental group (led by Richard) trying to resist a mall being built over a wetland. Benjamin is a quiet, focused, intense guy who is more or less a communist—not in the sense of supporting China or Cuba, but in believing that only a large scale, tightly organized party joining all the political causes (environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, poverty, animal rights, peace, etc.) can succeed in overthrowing capitalism. Well, after Charles gets out of prison, he and Benjamin have dinner in a fancy restaurant. Their conversation is, let's say, both predictable and unpredictable. And Esther...she's the mother of a family about to have Thanksgiving dinner that gets into a very heated argument about animal rights. She listens to her two sons yelling at each other—one is a meat eating political radical who thinks we have to change all the institutions before anything good can happen; the other a dreamy new age type who feels the animals' pain and wouldn't touch a drumstick if he were starving. Esther hates to hear her kids fight, and wishes they could just admit how their beliefs are what they hold onto to get them through the night, deal with their confusions and the pain. She wishes they would just, well, listen to each other. She's an emergency room nurse and doesn't believe in anybody's great solution to the world's problems—she just does what she can to stop the bleeding. There are lots more—the Mall Developer with the special needs child; a rabbi who helps a philosophy professor write a lecture at three in the morning; Lily, a poor little rich girl who never forgave her parents for cutting down her favorite tree; a prison guard on anti-depressants and the psychiatrist who treats him; a liberal minister who loses his family in an environmental accident; a psychotherapist who has magical powers... To get to know them better I invite you to read the book. "Tales of morality and meaning in an age of global warming" sounds pretty serious. Is there any humor in this book? Life can be terribly painful, sad, even brutal—but it's also often pretty funny. You know, even in concentration camps in the Holocaust people told jokes—there are actually books which collect them. So in an age of global warming, as we face all sorts of terrible problems, we should still find a little humor. In this book there's a fair amount of it. Characters point out each other's silliness, make plays with words, and reveal some of life's touching absurdities. At times readers will be laughing at the characters, or laughing with them; and at times readers just might be laughing at themselves. What's unique here? What would the reader find that she or he couldn't get from non-fiction books on environmental religion or environmental ethics ? Engaging Voices looks at many of the difficult questions discussed in environmental philosophy, religion, and politics: from whether nature has rights to whether eating meat is moral, from whether sustainability can exist in capitalism to the best environmental political strategy. But here the reader sees "real" people grappling with these questions. The reader also comes to know these characters as particular individuals who are angry at their parents, or were lonely as children, or feel called by God to serve the needy, or believe that Judaism and Islam should be committed to sustainability. The reader sees these people contradict themselves, find themselves unable to carry on in their environmental work after tragedies strike them, think to themselves that maybe they are wrong, or hold back their criticisms of others because they are afraid to hurt their feelings. One of the stories is about the role of religion, and one is about the role of science. Are you for or against religion and science? I don't think it's possible to be for or against either of these, any more than you can be for or against clothes, food, or music. There are what I'd call good and bad religion, and good and bad science. It's the job of thoughtful people to try to sort out which is which. In the story about the role of religion in the environmental crisis an orthodox Muslim and an orthodox Jew, who are working together to study the condition of the Appalachian trail (they have a blog at JewMuslimplanethope.org) encounter two environmentalists who despise religion. As they talk each side has to admit that the other one has some important things to say. I think it's especially powerful when the orthodox Jewish environmentalist points out to the aggressively secular soil ecologist that it was scientists, not superstitious, backward, dopey religious types who made the carcinogenic pesticides, the ozone-layer damaging CFCs, and the huge trawlers that have emptied the ocean of fish. One of the stories is about a philosophy class in prison, isn't that a pretty unrealistic setting? Surprisingly, there are philosophy classes in prison. And there are Buddhist meditation retreats as well—which is why it is not completely crazy that one of the characters became a Buddhist in prison. But as you read the story you see that the prison is also a metaphor for how we are all limited by our beliefs—how we shut ourselves in at the same time that we shut other people out. The characters in the story—Richard, Charles with his love of the free market, the small time crack dealer Raoul who thinks people just live for pleasure, a Christian fundamentalist who is inside for killing an abortion doctor and a fundamentalist Muslim who took out a drug dealer, even Arthur, who became a Buddhist in prison—all of these people speak up for what they believe, but find it almost impossible to listen to others. In the story we see how they limit themselves, and also some of the doubts and fears they keep hidden. Towards the end of the story Kate, the social worker leading the class, realizes that in some ways she is no more open to their ideas than they would be to her feminism and liberalism. She too is in a kind of prison. You have a long story on despair. Is that something you know about personally? Aldo Leopold, the great environmental ethicist, said that to be an environmentalist is to "walk alone in a world of wounds." I'm not sure about the alone part, but a world of wounds? Yes, that's what we are in. So any serious environmentalist, any serious spiritual person, has to face the losses we are creating. All of us who look at the world can find similar losses in poverty, war, crushing injustice, or just the plain, crazy irrationality of a world with magnificent technology and so much unhappiness. I've struggled with despair for the world for a long time, written about it in other books (especially one called A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth) , and try to comfort myself by believing that whatever happens, life is a miracle. And that's it's enough that it has ever existed at all. And that's what some of the characters learn, though they have to suffer personally and have some pretty wild experiences in chapter 8 to get there. A lot of the book is about people learning to listen to each other even when they totally disagree. Is there any limit on that? Are there times when we just can't listen? Sure there are. That's the question I pose to the man who (as I set up the book) "gives" me the stories. "What about Hitler," I ask, "what about the ones you just can't talk to?" And the answer is that learning to listen is where we should start, where we learn to change, where we slow down and face our fear of difference and see what can come to us. In the end we might have to fight, and with some people, sadly, the end comes really soon. But we're always going to be facing somebody who is different—how will we talk and listen to them? Tell me about a time in one of the stories when the characters learn something you'd like the reader to learn. Well, here are two. Fred is a liberal Protestant minister, a really hard-working, good-hearted, committed social justice type. We encounter him in the two stories about the environmental group Richard is starting. But Fred's wife and children are killed when a truck carrying toxic material overturns on the highway. He is in complete despair, and has suffered so much he no longer believes in God. In the story on despair (chapter 8) he has a remarkable experience and finds out that God is not, actually, like the living room couch (simply either there or not), but that God is a relationship of motion, action, transcendence, and love. As long as he cares, as long as he wants to move to something better, he can have God in his life. He faces his pain, cries for an unimaginable length of time, and then goes back to the work of making the world better. In the story about Charles and Benjamin going to dinner, there is a brief moment when each of them admits that they just don't know if they are right. Charles reflects on the enormous disparity of wealth and poverty, the wastes in the global economy, the reality of environmental problems, and wonders if free market capitalism is really the best we can offer. Benjamin thinks of all the failures of the left—from the communists to the social democrats to the way ordinary people don't get involved. And he wonders if his vision of a just and rational and sustainable and democratic society is just a pipe dream. They don't give up their beliefs, and even though I'm a lot closer to Benjamin than Charles that's not what this is about. It's about facing the pain of life right now, the real confusions over what's best, and trying to listen—to engage with—other voices. Read an excerpt from Engaging Voices here. Return to the Patheos Book Club for more resources on Engaging Voices and author Roger Gottlieb.

"Engaging Voices": A Q&A with Roger S. Gottlieb