“Time to Act”

“May our struggles and our concern for this planet never take away the joy of our hope.”—Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Sec. 244

The environmental and the social are inseparable. Environmental degradation, economic injustice, and human suffering are an intertwined and complex crisis. Any attempt to treat them in isolation risks misunderstanding the challenges ahead of us.[1]

By identifying the linkages between them, we can initiate the complex ethical, social, and institutional work that bridges the gap between environmentalism, which focuses on protecting nature, and justice work, which is often viewed as purely social. They are the same work.

The relationship between power, poverty, inequality, and lack of political participation is mirrored in the damage to the natural world. They cannot be divorced from each other.

Science and policy are essential tools for achieving sustainable development, but in the face of the climate crisis, they are not enough. Instead, the problem is profoundly ethical and moral. When thinking about stirring a society to action, I think it might be better to start with ethos. By ethos, I mean the spirit of a culture that embodies and animates the core of our beliefs, customs, and practices. From that, we might construct what constitutes ethical behavior across institutions. We’ve seen how the ethos of a culture can change over time as our moral sentiments inform and redirect our actions. The environmental movement overall, and especially the environmental justice movement, has produced enormous concrete changes in our secular and non-secular institutions since the promise embedded in the formative statutes passed in the 1970s.

An Ethos Encompassing All

Today, our efforts require an extra dimension of hope and joy, as Pope Francis argues. By tying hope and joy to the struggles arising from our concern for the planet, the pope’s Laudato Si’ encyclical links hope to action and thus makes joy an expression of grace. Joy here differs from individual pleasure or excitement because its focus lies outside our self, on something beyond us. That something is not just the natural world, but the social world too.

Indeed, the unavoidable challenge today is to cultivate an environmental ethos that values the moral significance of all life. It is an ethical system that is both complex and seamless. The relationship between power, poverty, inequality, and lack of political participation is mirrored in the damage to the natural world. They cannot be divorced from each other.

Slow Violence

Solidarity with the vulnerable insists on acknowledging that those least responsible for climate change are often those most harmed by this “slow violence,” a concept that captures the processes and consequences of unsustainable economic and environmental practices.[2] The very nature of the change we need makes achieving consensus hard. Even the debate over the nomenclature of our current moment is instructive. The term Anthropocene was first proposed in 2000 to mark the era in which human activity has become the dominant force shaping the Earth’s climate.[3] But in 2024, the term was rejected by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which explained that it had difficulty defining a universally accepted start date for the proposed epoch, with some arguing that the era emerged decades earlier, in the mid-20^th century.[4]This definitional impasse complicates efforts to name when climate change began—and, by extension, to connect environmental disruption to specific histories of displacement. Some date the onset of human-induced climate change to 1769, the year James Watt patented the steam engine.[5]  

I want to suggest an earlier starting point: October 12, 1492, the day Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas. That initial encounter triggered centuries of colonization, genocide, and forced labor. It not only shaped societies, old and new, but also physically altered the planet. The massive population decline of Indigenous people in the Americas led to the abandonment of agriculture and widespread reforestation, which absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide and contributed to a global cooling of approximately 0.15 degrees Celsius—a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “Little Ice Age.”[6] That fateful landfall in Hispaniola marked the beginning of modern globalization—a massive surge of economic, political, and ecological exchanges that reshaped the Earth’s climate and set the stage for the climate crisis we now face. Framing climate change within this colonial turning point underscores the prospect that contemporary environmental issues were never divorced from social changes.[7]

A Conversion Has Begun

By understanding that we cannot divorce our proposed solutions from a deep engagement with the past and its consequences, we will be better situated to assess our current commitments and take our next actions. None of it will be easy. Change rarely is. But adopting this perspective will reinforce hope and the joy it entails, because it underscores to us that we have the imagination and the capacity to create a better future for all. In many instances, we have already begun the conversion from the tradition of dominion to an ethic of stewardship. Stewardship implies a very different, less violent relationship with nature and with one another. The resolution of the climate crisis through carbon capture, geoengineering, renewable energy, and other technological advancements is already underway. 

Still, its success depends on an ethical transformation—one that guides the reconstruction of our social and economic relations rather than blindly relying on a mechanical technological fix. How fairly we allocate responsibility among historically polluting nations and developing nations will be the measure of our commitment to justice. So will our moral duty toward future generations and non-human life: it serves as the metric for assessing whether we are living up to our claims. Joy, as expressed through our actions, is the antidote to despair.  

We face enormous challenges reconciling the global pluralism of beliefs and cultures, and we must all avoid believing we have the only answer when promoting climate-ethical agendas in complex religious and secular societies. We must guard against deceptive corporate or governmental greenwashing or co-optation. Yet, we must face these challenges with humility, joy, and gratitude that we still have time to act.

Gerald Torres is the Dolores Huerta & Wilma Mankiller Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment at the Yale Law School. He has taught at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools and served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice. He served on the Board of the Environmental Law Institute and the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and was the founding chairman of the Advancement Project. An internationally known scholar of Indian law, he has also done significant research in agricultural law and policy, especially on the environmental regulation of food and fiber production, and in water resource management.