Indications of Moral Failure

Climate Crisis and the Lectionary for July 20th

Buncombe County, North Carolina (where my mother and brother live) after Hurricane Helene in the fall of 2024. Hurricane Helene was almost certainly made worse by climate change. Image from NCDOT Communications, taken from Wikipedia, and used under license with CC BY 2.0.

Indicator species: A species or group of species that reveals the status of the environment.

Indicator species are fascinating. Indicator species (which are sometimes also called bioindicators) act as bellwethers for the rest of their ecosystems. As species within ecosystems that are especially sensitive to something in the environment—to pollution, or temperature change, or destruction of habitat—indicator species are often the first ones to show stress or alarm, and they give some warning before the rest of the ecosystem begins to be broadly affected. Indicator species can be plants or animals or fungi. They can be large and visible or small and hard to find. But they are the canaries in the coal mine that tell us at a micro level that something is going wrong at a macro level. Indicators do just what their name suggests—they indicate what else is happening all around therm.

I think something similar happens in the Bible.

In the Bible, it’s not a certain species that acts as an indicator, and it’s not even a group of species that tells us when something has gone awry in the world. Rather, the Bible often uses the whole of the natural world as an indicator of various kinds of disruption, trouble, or distress. In an ecosystem, it might be a species of lichen or a population of birds that’s the indicator for an ecosystem, giving early warning of some kind of trouble. But for the Bible, the earth itself gives us signals about the universe’s spiritual and psychic well-being. And the earth itself tells us when something has gone wrong.

The lectionary for July 20^th gives us a great example of this. Amos 8:1-12 is full of images drawn from the natural world: agricultural products like wheat, grain, and a basket of summer fruit, but also the land, a river (the Nile), the sun and the moon, and the daylight itself. This passage describes places and times where humanity intersects with the natural world, such as in the experiences of famine and thirst, but also the grand sweep of the earth’s landscapes: the people “shall wander from sea to sea and from north to east,” says Amos 8:12, never finding what they are looking for.

There are tons of other examples of this in the Bible—places like Mark 13 (and its parallels in Matthew and Luke) where the earth becomes disrupted and chaotic, and places like Isaiah 24-27 where God’s judgement shows up as widespread natural destruction. And of course there’s Revelation, which is really an extended telling of the earth’s undoing—an almost-liturgical unmaking of the world. Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Daniel, even perhaps Romans—the Bible is full of these references to the natural world in distress or disruption.

When the earth is suffering or in chaos, in the Bible, what does it mean? Just like indicator species in an ecosystem, the authors of the Bible use the natural world to show how something has gone wrong. And usually, in the Bible, what has gone wrong has something to do with human behavior. Take a look at this week’s passage from Amos, for example. Picking up in the section that’s in the lectionary, Amos is in the middle of a vision of a basket of summer fruit, and God has given Amos an oracle about tremendous human suffering in 8:3. Then in 8:4, the prophet addresses the reader: “Hear this, you who trample on the needy and bring ruin to the poor of the land,” speaking directly to the camera. Amos recounts some of the specific examples of that trampling and ruin: extorting the poor through price gouging, cheating people with dishonest weights and measures, and stinginess and greed. Then in 8:8, we see this moral injustice show up in the natural world. “Shall not the land tremble on this account,” Amos writes, “and everyone mourn who lives in it, and all of it rise like the Nile, and be tossed about and sink again, like the Nile of Egypt?” Amos goes on, zooming all the way out to the skies, predicting that the sun will fail and the earth will darken—all because of the selfish dishonesty of human beings.

Chaos in the natural world, then, is an indicator for the moral failings of human beings. When things are disrupted in the rivers and the skies and the land, Amos is saying, it is because human beings have acted selfishly and greedily, thinking first and only of themselves and not considering the well-being of anyone else.

There’s a saying among climate scientists: this is probably the coolest summer of the rest of your life. And there are other ways of putting the same sentiment, too. This is probably as much snow as you’ll get for the rest of your life, even if it’s a lot less than you used to see, or and you’ll probably think more about floods and wildfires ten years from now than you do now, even in the midst of a summer and a year defined by those things. The natural world is in chaos right now, and everything our experiences have taught us to expect from the natural world has been overthrown and disrupted.

It is not some great mystery why these things are happening, even though some people like to pretend not to understand. The world is in chaos because of the moral failings of human beings—just like Amos predicted.

Every year these days is in the top five or ten hottest years on record. Every hurricane season is exceptional, every drought is severe, every flood is a 500-year flood, even when they come year after year. Species are blinking out of existence at an alarming rate—the ones we know and can see, like White Rhinos and Carolina Parakeets and the Dodo, but also ones we cannot see or don’t notice—or species that go extinct even before we know that they are there. The natural world is going haywire, and it’s because of us.

Sometimes we frame the climate crisis in scientific terms, and that is true, as far as it goes. Many of the factors that led us to this moment were technological, brought on by the dramatic revolutions in science of the past couple of centuries. Most of us drive cars, most of us buy goods shipped from around the world, and most of us rely on extractive industries that mine or strip the earth of resources and burn or reshape the earth to serve our needs. And on a bigger scale, our societies have evolved with logics of exploitation, incentivizing governments and corporations to strip value out of the world as quickly as they can, unless someone manages to stop them. Each of us probably has a carbon footprint that’s larger than five or ten generations of our ancestors, because we live lives that are predicated on and fed by advances in science and technology. I’m writing this Substack post on a laptop made of aluminum and silicon and plastic, manufactured halfway around the world, and powered by fossil fuels. I’m writing it in Memphis, where I’m gathered for a denominational meeting—a city that is only really inhabitable anymore because of widespread air conditioning—which also burns fossil fuels. I drove here in a car, and you’re reading this on your own devices, which are also powered by fossil fuels, and the data behind this web page is stored on servers that require power, and so on: all of us are deeply enmeshed with these systems of exploitation and extraction. We are all in some sense complicit, most of us to a pretty severe degree, whether we want to be or not.

This is slightly different, I think, than what Amos is talking about. Amos is pointing to forms of moral failure that are rooted in dishonesty, and most of us are not engaging in dishonesty when it comes to our role in climate change (though some of us are). Most of us are simply caught in a system that is too big to escape, and our choices within that system are limited. But the thing that our situation has in common with the ones being described by Amos, I think, is that we—like the dishonest merchants and the heedless rich of 8:4-6—are locked into patterns of exploitation and extraction. Amos is imagining individual moral failings, but we are all part of a collective moral failure, in the ways we strip the earth of resources and pump destruction back into the world.

For Amos—and for other books of the Bible—chaos in the natural world is evidence of moral failure. The earth, for many biblical authors, is the indicator species for the cosmos, the way we know that something has gone very wrong.

It so happens that we live in a time of chaos in the natural world, and a time when its destruction and destructiveness are on our minds and in the headlines every day. And it so happens that we can make an easy connection between environmental destruction and human moral failure in our own time. Amos warned us that greed and theft and dishonesty lead to degradation and destruction in the natural world, and here we are, confronted by those things as a legacy of decades of corporate and governmental dishonesty and capitalistic greed and sometimes outright theft.

Amos does have something of a happy ending. In the chapter after this one, in the 9^th chapter, Amos ends his oracles on an upbeat note. “The time is surely coming,” he writes, “when the one who plows shall overcome the one who reaps,” when God “will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them.” And in that future time of restoration, Amos points to the healing of the natural world—again using the natural world as an indicator for the rest of the moral sphere. “They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,” he writes, “and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.” Amos ends his book with an image of human beings and the natural world thriving together in a kind of moral equilibrium, with human beings integrated into—and not separate from—the natural world. “I will plant them upon their land,” he says, “and they shall never again be plucked up.”

It's an optimistic vision—a hopeful way to dream about the future of human beings. But it comes on the other side of a great deal of chaos and distress. We are living through the chaotic part now, and we are feeling the pain brought on by our collective failure to live as moral beings. The question is: for how long?