Mapping Faith, Flourishing, and the Environment in Los Angeles
Modern scientific research and its discourse fails to adequately embrace the emotional, spiritual and affective impacts of the existential issues of Earth’s future habitability.
Background and Inspiration
The relationship between faith and environmental science holds great potential for our shared civic life. This is especially true in Los Angeles where global religious traditions are well-represented. LA holds potential for framing the modern issues inherent to our current fraught situation, and illuminating local modes of reasoning, acting, and flourishing that have been, and may yet be, worked out toward a view of justice and equity within our shared setting. We hope to locate these powerful forms of public theologies emerging in our context, addressing questions that unlock dynamics between faith and environmental science with a newly-established research agenda that incorporates interdisciplinary observations to challenge, expand, and cross traditional academic disciplinary boundaries and engage various assumptions within today’s practices. This process will lead to sharper insights into contemporary issues like equitable access to housing, food, and other critical matters.
The Predicament
Today’s situation is challenging, with modern scientific research and its discourse failing to adequately embrace the emotional, spiritual and affective impacts of the existential issues of Earth’s future habitability. The ways sustainability science is conducted, based in Enlightenment thinking, leave it unidimensional. Fueled by eugenic logics, sustainability science proceeds with control technologies and leave ignored that religious communities often resist with their own modes of empirical reasoning, which together would lead to stronger results. A perceived divide also depicts scientists as far removed from faith communities. The lack of connections tends to leave scientists to conduct their science at a remove, overlooking moral and ethical implications and thereby stunting potential revolutionary perspectives inherent to what faith and scientific inquiry together may better enable for wider flourishing. Wisdom from faith traditions holds capacity to destabilize modernist hegemonies, environmental injustice, and socioeconomic inequity. Religious communities at the forefront of environmental action possess embedded local knowledge that lays bare modernity’s fractious techniques, technologies, and ideologies, which have so severely instrumentalized life forces. More integrative visions of justice, mercy, equity, and respect are therefore possible inasmuch as religious and scientific communities share commonalities. They are, increasingly, natural collaborators whose partnership has been structurally discouraged by deeply embedded imperial and carceral legacies that have brought about this moment. A reexamination of these legacies, including historically marginalized and globalized perspectives, can begin to heal our places and the social dispositions that have challenged their integrity.
Catalyzing Faith and Sustainability Science
Of significant interest to our work is the incorporation of the social sciences and their tools of inquiry. Ethnographic discoveries from the lived experience of religious communities that order their lives in ways both distinct to and critical of modernist approaches can be conducted with a rich diversity of representation. Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Indigenous, and other traditions engage in combating harmful environmental approaches and unsustainable practices while simultaneously promoting sustainability initiatives in local civic spaces. Under duress from inherited extractivist legacies, theft, and forceful displacement, LA’s faith communities in their own social locations counter-resurge with community gardens, newly developed recycling initiatives, anti-oil extraction efforts, and more. Indigenous scholarship and research within larger traditions—‘insiders’ active in fields of theology—can be found at higher educational research institutions. This shows promise in collaborative scenarios where progressive public theologies are codified and observed. The activity of these groups identifies an emerging genre of traditional religious discourse critical of harmful environmental legacies and unsustainable practices, and which remediate damaging legacies through local participation in civic space for a complex, multi-layered, interreligious local and global conversation concerned with the contemporary ecological crisis. Greater interdisciplinary sharing and knowledge building among faith communities, social scientists and traditional biophysical scientists will bring about transformational knowledge needed for addressing the complex issues before us.
Reorienting Research for Flourishing
Restoring an understanding of the role and capacity of faith for providing moral direction in late-modernity is critical, as is understanding how situatedness can better reorient sustainability goals toward more humble approaches that inform science of contextual factors for stronger collaborations and outcomes. Faith supplies a vision of life lived within the environment, sustained by it, and answerable to it—understanding flourishing not as consumption with the old explore/exploit paradigm, but rather as stewardship. Scientists then should orient their research aims around distinct forms of rootedness in their environment, avoiding both anthropocentrism and technocentrism to reorient a collective conscience toward sustenance and well-being. This call for a reorientation re-centers LA communities, which are too delicate and wonderful to deprecate, especially in light of their particular local histories that local communities share responsibility for. Los Angeles has been the site of substantial environmental science research, including work linked to environmental justice initiatives focused on air quality, soils, exposures, heat, and others in underserved communities. Yet normal science has engineered sociotechnical systems abstracted from classical environmental engineering, policy, and management that nevertheless persistently exclude the contemporary marginalized. Assessing this adequately requires the interdisciplinary approach our research proposes, including insights from the social sciences and ethics, while primed with the humanistic and qualitative scientific research tools to systemize and further the conversation between faith and environmental science. Anchored to this approach is an analysis supported by data and theory, designing a novel environmental science that complements and goes beyond conventional forms of sustainability science with renewed ethical imaginaries from agrarianism to nature spirituality and more. There is even a hybridization of sustainability scientists and geographers, including some personally situated within faith traditions, moving toward a more explicit, visible, active community of collaborators working across faith and science, which characterizes a rich involvement in sustainability science research coupled with practical know-how in particular geographies that highlight sensitivities for flourishing studies.
The Mission and Work Ahead
To pursue this research, we first want to discover what of good environmental science is known and being acted upon in Los Angeles. We wish to categorize the components of this ‘good science’: how it is ascertained, disseminated, and funded. Deeper within these categories are practices, authority figures funding and conducting the science, and the groups entitled to and prohibited from this information. Topics and issues informed by this science will be tracked as they evolve across time and space. Our primary institutional focus will be the environmental science communities with research well underway within the region.
Second, we will inquire about what significant political actions and relationships exist and are known, understood, and have been acted upon within our region. We will focus largely on the issues around environmental justice communities in the region, a movement that arose in Los Angeles during the mid-1980s as a result of a proposed trash-to-energy incinerator that would have imposed hazardous burdens on a largely African-American community. The movement has grown in diversity and scope across a host of issues of concern to different communities throughout the region.
Third, research will inquire about what religious and theological knowledge has been operative and motivating action. This will expand into underpinning the kinds of knowledge that have or are being neglected and denied for various reasons. We will investigate religious congregations and leaders active in the region, both those informally organized as well as larger faith-based activist organizations like PICO, FACE, among others. This work calls for solidarity—a response that is both natural and resistant to social artifice, which can only emerge collectively. We enter LA—its neighborhoods, religious communities—as participatory observers, deepening engagement and amplifying resistance to the carceral regimes actively harming humans, other species, and our planet.
