Organized religion has been on the decline in recent decades, but in times of disaster many people turn to religion for strength and comfort. 2020 Pew Research Survey found 24% of American adults say the COVID-19 crisis has strengthened their faith.
However, in another 2022 Pew Research study, found That another type of life-threatening crisis, climate change, is not causing the same type of response. In fact, Pew says that in the United States, religion tends to inhibit pragmatism and action on climate change.
So what role should religion play in catastrophes like climate change? And, more specifically, what about its roots here in Boston? Dan McKeinanRalph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, joins GBH Taking everything into account Host Arun Rath details how climate change activism and Boston’s history are intertwined with religion, ancestry, and spirituality. Below is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: You participated in an interesting series of conversations on religion in times of global crisis hosted by Harvard Divinity School, and your talk focused on ancestors and climate in Boston. Before we get into some of these specific stories, could you explain what you call the “ancestral crisis”?
Dan McKeinan: I specifically talked about the beginnings of concern in the Boston area about how human activities were disrupting the climate. This goes back much further than people think, as Colonial New Englanders deforested much of New England.
Boston residents already began to realize 200 years ago that deforestation was changing the climate. That was the period I’ve been focusing on, the early moment of the realization that without trees, the climate would be dry. Without trees, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase.
Russ: Let’s dig into that moment 200 years ago. What was the nature of that crisis? What was happening?
McKernan: Over the course of 200 years of New England settlement, New England’s great white pine forests have been used for firewood and as masts for sailing ships. The landscape was very different from his 200 years ago, and frankly, much different than it is now. Because 200 years ago Bostonians were able to turn things around and begin the process of reforestation seen in the Great Forest. In the parks of the Middlesex Fells and Blue Hills, and in the forests of many small towns.
From my perspective, this change was closely related to the realization that they had done great damage by disrupting the traditional patterns of connection of their ancestors. Most traditional cultures have sacred groves, and people go to sacred groves to remember their ancestors. Just being around a 200-year-old tree is a very powerful way to foster a connection to your ancestors. Because you can imagine your ancestors, your great, great, great, great, great-grandfathers and grandmothers, touching that 200-year-old tree. It was small. Now, that’s a nice pine tree.
Without trees, we cannot feel connected to our ancestors. So the first step nineteenth-century Bostonians took to reestablish this connection was to create so-called country or garden cemeteries in places like Mount Auburn and Forest Hills in Cambridge. In Boston, trees were intentionally replanted near grave sites to encourage people to connect the memory of their human ancestors with a deeper connection to their non-human relatives.
Russ: This is the world’s first garden cemetery, right?
McKernan: yes. Mount Auburn is commonly understood as the beginning of the garden cemetery movement. Beaverbrook in Belmont and Waltham, along with Middlesex Fells and Blue Hills, were the first state parks in the United States.
These are two ends of the story, and the work of creating rural cemeteries gives people the sense that city dwellers would be healthier if they had natural spaces to walk, play, and interact with other species. It means that it was given to The generation that created garden cemeteries began the work of creating these forest parks.
Russ: Your perspective on this history really sets it apart for those of us living in the Boston area today that our ancestors were these amazing transcendentalist and natural thinkers that you’re talking about. It’s exciting.
McKernan: Of course, there’s a lot of practice you can take back today.
Elizur Wright, one of the activists who helped create the Middlesex Fells, held what he called a “forest festival” where people just gathered in the Middlesex Fells woods. They spent the morning just observing the plants and animals they found there. They spent the afternoon listening to speeches. It was at one of these festivals that Wright gave what is believed to be the first speech in which he identified increasing carbon in the atmosphere as a problem that people should come together to try to solve.
It was activism and recreational and scientific engagement with nature all rolled into one big package. That legacy was forgotten for generations, but through organizations like Friends of the Fells and Earthwise Aware, our Transcendentalist predecessors preserved it for us. In many ways, it is alive again today by drawing people into these spaces that have been given to us, and by using both of them. We not only contribute to our personal health, but also to the well-being of the world by promoting biodiversity.
Russ: Could you tell us a little more about the current flowering, or re-flowering, of this kind of spirit? How do we view this in contemporary environmental activities?
McKernan: During the pandemic, I started a habit of walking through all the spaces preserved by activists in the 1890s. One of the things I continually find him in these spaces is that he encountered this public land at a time when it was completely ignored, in the activist monuments of the 1970s and his 1990s. did. No one even realized it was public land.
Inspired by the environmental movement of the 1970s, these activists said, “We need to take better care of these lands that already belong to our people.” They laid out the promenade. They removed invasive species to renew people’s direct connection to the land in their neighborhoods.
This was often very local, such as a half-mile walk along the Charles River that served only a specific neighborhood. After the man passed away, his neighbors erected a small memorial at the entrance to the walk.
This is, in fact, the landscape given to us both by our ancestors in the 1890s and by our ancestors just a generation before, who reclaimed this heritage.
