BY Kristin Kusanovich
We are in a unique position no other human beings have been in, cognizant of the realities of mass extinction, understanding the human causes, and poised to lose the opportunity to restore Earth’s delicate balance.
What's our objective?
What's our obstacle?
What's our action?
Who is driving this story and who is not at the table?
How can all of us step up to take real leadership in this emergency no matter how small or large our sphere of influence, given most major faith traditions essentially embrace climate action?
How shall we act?
In a standard five-act play, tensely dramatic or surprisingly humorous plotlines that unfold throughout the first four acts often will be resolved in unpredictable ways in the final act, through various devices of the theatre.
The words, actions, sounds, movements, and elements of the space combine to deliver a tragedy, a comedy, or anything in between. Audiences witnessing a dynamic play know that everything they’ve witnessed before the concluding act will matter somehow. The broken vase will either lead to more brokenness, or be repaired, will be used to etch a love note in a wall, or be transformed into a mosaic.
When it comes to the climate crisis, we are past the first four acts and, unfortunately, they ran long. Those who took charge did not leave a lot of time for the fifth act, the act that determines the viability of all questions of justice, of all that we grapple with in our work in higher education. There is precious little time in this now shortened fifth act for all of the brokenness of relationships, objects, and surroundings to be restored.
Loyola Marymount University students from the ECO (Environmentally Conscious & Organized) service club (above) pose with their global climate strike signs prior to their participation in a youth-led event to demand action on climate change. Photo courtesy of Loyola Marymount University.
Throughout the play, characters offered soliloquy after soliloquy about what leadership is, what management is, what power is, claimed to really understand it, claimed expertise, but those characters led the whole of humanity to the brink of extinction.
We understand that those who are most vulnerable in this fifth act will be those who have already lost their loved ones, or their homes, cultures, livelihoods, and are today losing the ground beneath their feet, trying to persevere through a disaster they did not create. And as the fourth act concludes, all those who contributed the least but are suffering the most stand facing everyone with any means, stability, leverage or resources. As they cry out their compelling demands for a safer, cleaner, cooler world, the curtain falls.
In this last intermission, we examine the facts of the situation: Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing. The speed of warming is astounding even to scientists. The oceans and forests are dying. Fertile soil is disappearing. Insects and glaciers are vanishing. Species are going extinct. Plastic is everywhere, including in our bodies. Climate chaos has arrived. Racism and hate groups are on the rise. Global pandemics are here. Democracies are faltering. The youth of the world are terrified, suffering mental health issues as children. Are Jesuit institutions of higher education asking themselves “who are we in a crisis, and what will we do to change now?”
Overlaying the multiple pandemics of racism (at the root of, and already, in itself, a climate crisis) and the pandemic of COVID-19 (the result of a climate in crisis), we can see that we have created conditions that are devastating for our one human family, our one common home, and virtually all living beings.
As we collectively face the unknown fifth act, besides praying for all vulnerable and frontline people, shall we also pray for everyone who led us into this mess, that they might step back? After all, their script, if we keep following it, and they will tell us we should, has us destroying our Earth.
As we ponder this script, it’s time to ask: What could Jesuit universities do to help recast the show, right now, behind the curtain, perhaps with BIPOC leaders and other less-centered voices, with women in charge, with powerful declarations of peace and possibility?
What if in Act 5 there are no longer any spectators, only spect-actors, as the great Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal called the involved audience? In this rooted activism of an eco-conversion, the seats of the theatre are empty, everyone is on stage. One poisoned well becomes our shared water source. What if everyone with thirsty children heard the line “that’s just the way it is.”
Yes, imagine the widespread involvement in solutions if everyone could experience, or just fully empathize, with this predicament of environmental racism.
We are poised to write the urgently needed ending to this story. How we write it, and who writes it, might determine whether this is the last play of the season of our humanity, or whether a rebirth of new stories will be our destiny.
Can Jesuit universities step both forward and back, facilitating the interdisciplinary processes of major rewrites on this script, while opening up to new definitions of what leadership really looks like and where it leads us? Can we who work in Jesuit higher education help humanity make a much-needed U-turn away from destruction and toward creativity, or will we stay the passive spectator, mired in traditions that comfort us and require very little thought, but that harm, pollute and warm?
Will we fulfill what artist and activist John Trudell calls not a moral obligation, but our spiritual responsibility and make abundantly hopeful new stories possible in the future?
Kristin Kusanovich is a senior lecturer in Theatre and Dance and Child Studies at Santa Clara University. She also directs tUrn Climate Crisis Awareness & Action.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Brian Yurasits via Unsplash.