On December 6, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama offered his weekly online/radio address in the wake of news that in November, 533,000 American jobs had been lost. This was the highest number in 30 years. In light of the current economic crisis, the Obama transition team has made revitalizing the economy a cornerstone of its agenda.

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The new administration will be promoting a “green recovery,” focused upon investment in energy-efficient infrastructure and attempting to create 2.5 to 3 million new jobs. Obama’s dream team of energy and environment advisors, including a “climate czar,” will be integral to planning the recovery.

Contrary to the idea that environmentally sensitive policy runs counter to economic growth, the Obama administration plans to use green investment as a platform for economic recovery.¹ As CNN’s Brandon Griggs writes, “Maybe this time, green will help get us out of the red.”² This agenda is consistent with an increasingly transparent spiritual moment in environmental politics—one that Christians should care about.

Though details of the plan are not yet known, its emerging contours match those of a report by the Center for American Progress and the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. The report outlines the economic benefits that can come with environmental investment.³

The report and the Obama administration’s plans to act upon it are part of a shift in the way environmentalism is conceived. This newer version, known as post-environmentalism, conceives environmental policy as effective only to the degree that it addresses fundamental aspects of human life and being.

Michael Shellenberger, one of post-environmentalism’s leading lights, characterizes it as a “thought movement of former environmentalists who view the so-called ‘ecological crisis’ as conceptually and politically inseparable from the human crisis.” It speaks to the “universal, non-material need for fulfillment, community, love, happiness, and well-being” and breaks with traditional politics, which “fails to speak to higher needs.”  Just when evangelicalism has begun wrestling in earnest with environmental issues, Shellenberger and his colleague and co-author Ted Nordhaus come along and change the game.⁴

This is not Al Gore’s environmentalism. In his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore suggests that the potential effects of climate change threaten human survival. “Inconvenient” environmentalism suggests that we must subordinate all other concerns to the ecological crisis and that environmental quality is largely at odds with economic growth and development.

Systems of production, distribution, and consumption must be drastically altered in order to reduce environmental impact and limit human-induced changes. Even spiritual concerns are subordinated to the more pressing agenda of supposedly transcendent environmental issues.

Post-environmentalism is different. Post-environmentalists argue that effectively addressing environmental issues will require a comprehensive and coherent approach to economic, political, and environmental realities. This approach must also address the role of the spiritual in human life. As author Paul Hawken argues, “fixes won’t fix unless we fix our souls, as well… [S]piritual deeds and acts of moral imagination lay the groundwork for the great work that is ahead.”⁵

Make no mistake: Hawken believes that a spiritual awakening is the “groundwork” and that environmental sustainability and justice constitute the “great work.” However, Hawken wants a generic spiritual awakening. Any spiritual awakening will do, so long as the seriousness of our current environmental and social situation is met by a resourceful and resolute approach.

Although environmentalism has appeared for some time to be an exclusively technical area, for nearly a decade some environmentalists have called for the inclusion of the spiritual. Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that mainstream environmentalism has lacked the ability to connect material concerns to the deeper realities of being human. In fact, inconvenient environmentalism constitutes a religious order unto itself.⁶

Post-environmentalism does not reject the spiritual. It suggests that only an all-encompassing and deeply rooted spiritual vision can empower and sustain change. As Shellenberger and Nordhaus write, “It is hard to imagine creating a politics powerful enough to transform the global energy economy that is not fundamentally grounded in people’s lives.”⁷

The most important aspect of such an approach may be the suggestion that pre-existing, spiritually compelling values, and not environmental conditions, can make sense of seemingly competing agendas and resolve their tensions. Post-environmentalism subordinates concerns for ecological change to this larger vision.

Post-environmentalism prioritizes the spiritual and does not demand changes to what we value. The bad news about post-environmentalism is its lack of anchorage. While “inconvenient environmentalists” regret human-induced changes to an otherwise good environment, “convenient” or “post-” environmentalists lack any foundational or transcendent commitments. Faced with many potential visions for nature-society relations, post-environmentalists resort to “the possible” as a standard for judging which is best among them. Without a single, shared vision of what must be done, they resort to a vision of what can be done.

The rejection of “the must” and the embrace of “the can” as justification for what should be done are an effort to be like God. As post-environmentalist Stewart Brand says, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”⁸ As Shellenberger and Nordhaus write, “Whether we like it or not, humans have become the meaning of the earth…. [W]e have given birth to a new world. It is a world at once beautiful and terrible. And this world, too, we shall overcome.”⁹ “Take heart,” suggest post-environmentalists, “for we shall overcome the world.” In this idolatry, Shellenberger and Nordhaus echo Peter Teague, who suggests that “It isn’t God we need to be addressing our concerns to—it’s us.”¹⁰

There is no doubt that Christians should be involved in this discussion. But environmental catastrophe (and, make no mistake, climate change of an entirely plausible sort could be catastrophic) is not our inconvenient truth. Christians must not embrace the notion that environmental conditions are the transcendent, inconvenient truths that must shape spirituality and other concerns. Nor can we accept the humanist hope and facile pragmatism of convenient environmentalism.

The world’s truly (in)convenient truth is the gospel. Participation in God’s story of creation, fall, and redemption should ground our concerns for, and actions toward, stewardship and justice. While inconvenient environmentalism suggests we should sacrifice material well-being at the altar of the environment and convenient post-environmentalism suggests we create multiple environments in our own image, Christians must take seriously the study and practice of theocentric creation care.

In the end, Christians may find themselves welcome at the table of post-environmentalism. But Christian participation in the new environmental politics should witness to the truth of the gospel. Grounded in our (in)convenient truth, Christians should take seriously our responsibilities to tend, serve and guard the non-human created order. Considering others more highly than ourselves, we should deeply value environmental justice, knowing that some of our neighbors suffer disproportionately from the environmental risks we take.

To the degree possible, we should curtail patterns of production, distribution, and consumption that threaten the well-being of others or undermine the integrity of the creation-gift God has given us. These efforts symbolize and signify that creation will one day be loosed from its bondage to decay and people will no longer suffer the effects of the fall.

When our efforts are frustrated, we should lament and repent of our inability and our corporate responsibility. In these times we should demonstrate in word and deed our hope in the one who has reversed the curse and in whose kingdom creation will be transformed into its intended glory.

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¹”American Recovery and Reinvestment,” change.gov, http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/american_recovery_and_reinvestment/, <1.5.09>; “President-elect Obama lays out key parts of Economic Recovery Plan,” change.gov, http://change.gov/newsroom/entry/the_key_parts_of_the_jobs_plan/. <1.5.09>
²Peter Dykstra, “History of environmental movement full of twists, turns,” cnn.com, http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/12/10/history.environmental.movement/. <1.5.09>
³Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, James Heintz, and Helen Scharber, Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy (Amherst, MA: Political Economy Research Institute, 2008).
⁴“Interview with Michael Shellenberger, Co-Director of The Breakthrough Institute,” cthings.com, http://www.cthings.com/blogger/people/2006/02/michael-shellenberger-co-director.html. <1.5.09>; Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World (Berkeley, CA: The Breakthrough Institute, 2004); Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
⁵Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming (New York: Viking, 2007).
⁶Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through.
⁷Ibid.
⁸John Tierney, “An Early Environmentalist Embraces ‘New Heresies,’” New York Times, February 27, 2007.
⁹Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Break Through.
¹⁰Peter Teague, “Foreword,” in Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World (Berkeley, CA: The Breakthrough Institute, 2004).