Organized religion has been on the decline for decades, but in times of catastrophe, many turn to religion for strength and comfort. A 2020 Pew Research study found that 24% of American adults say the COVID-19 crisis strengthened their faith.
But a different Pew Research study in 2022 found that another kind of life-threatening crisis is not eliciting the same kind of reaction: climate change. In fact, in the U.S., religion tends to obstruct climate realism and action, according to Pew.
So, what should be the role of religion in a catastrophe like climate change? And, more specifically, what about its roots here in Boston? Dan McKanan, Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to detail Boston’s history with climate activism, and how religion, ancestry and spirituality tie in. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: You took part in a fascinating series of conversations held by Harvard Divinity School about religion in times of Earth crisis, and your talk focused on ancestors and climate in Boston. Before you tell us some of these specific stories, can you explain to us what you call the “Ancestor Crisis?”
Dan McKanan: I talked specifically about the beginnings of concerns in the Boston area regarding the ways human activity had disrupted the climate. This goes back much earlier than people think because colonial New Englanders had largely deforested New England.
Bostonians were becoming aware that the act of deforestation was changing the climate already 200 years ago. That was the period I’ve been focusing on—these early moments of awareness that without trees, the climate will dry out. Without trees, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase.
Rath: Let’s dig into that particular moment 200 years ago. What was the nature of that crisis? What was going on?
McKanan: Over the course of 200 years of settlement activity in New England, the great white pine forests of New England had been turned into firewood or turned into masts of sailing ships. The landscape was very different from what it had been 200 years ago, and frankly, very different from what it is now because the Bostonians of 200 years ago were able to turn things around and begin a process of reforestation that is visible in the great forest parks of Middlesex Fells and the Blue Hills, as well as in many smaller town forests.
From my perspective, this change was closely related to a realization that they had done a great deal of damage by disrupting traditional patterns of ancestral connections. In most traditional cultures, there are sacred groves, and people go to their sacred groves to remember their ancestors. Just being around a tree that’s 200 years old is a really powerful way of fostering a connection to ancestors, because you can imagine that your ancestor—your great, great, great, great, great grandfather and grandmother—had touched that same tree when it was tiny. Now, it’s a mighty pine tree.
Without trees, you don’t have that sense of ancestral connection, so the first step the 19th-century Bostonians took to try to rebuild this connection was creating the so-called rural or garden cemeteries in places like Mount Auburn in Cambridge or Forest Hills in Boston, where they deliberately replanted trees by the sites of graves to encourage people to combine a memory of their human ancestors with a deeper sense of connection to more-than-human kin.
Rath: These were the first garden cemeteries in the world, right?
McKanan: Yes. Mt. Auburn is generally understood as the beginning of the garden cemetery movement. Beaverbrook in Belmont and Waltham, along with Middlesex Fells and Blue Hills, are the first state parks in the United States.
Those are the two ends of the story—that the work of creating rural cemeteries gave people a sense that urban dwellers would be healthier if they had natural spaces to walk, play and interact with other species. The generation that created the garden cemeteries began the work of creating these forest parks.
Rath: Your perspective on this history is really exciting because it draws the line that, for those of us in the Boston area now, our ancestors are these amazing transcendentalists and natural thinkers that you’re talking about.
McKanan: Absolutely, and there are a lot of practices that we can recover today.
One of the activists who helped create Middlesex Fells, Elizur Wright, held what he called “forest festivals,” where people just came into the woods at Middlesex Fells. They spent the morning just observing the plants and animals that they found there. They spent the afternoon listening to speeches; it was at one of these festivals that Wright gave what might have been the first speech identifying increased carbon in the atmosphere as a problem that people should come together and try to solve.
It really blended activism with recreational and scientific engagement with nature all in one big package. That heritage was forgotten for many generations, but, in a lot of ways, it’s very much alive again today with organizations like Friends of the Fells and Earthwise Aware that are bringing people into these spaces that our transcendentalist predecessors preserved for us and using them both for our individual health, but also for the well-being of the world by promoting greater biodiversity.
Rath: Tell us a bit more about the flowering—or re-flowering—of this kind of ethos right now. How are we seeing it in contemporary environmental activism?
McKanan: During the pandemic, I began the practice of walking through all of the spaces that had been preserved by activists in the 1890s. One of the things I continually found in these spaces were memorials of activists from the 1970s and 1990s who had come across these public lands at a time when they were completely neglected. Nobody even realized that they were public lands.
These activists, inspired by the 1970s environmental movement, said, “We need to take better care of these lands that are already owned by the public.” They established walking trails. They removed invasive species to renew a direct connection between people and the land in their own neighborhood.
Oftentimes, this was extremely local, like a half-mile walking path for just one particular neighborhood along the Charles River. After that person died, their neighbors would put up a small memorial at the entrance to that walking path.
This is really the landscape that we’ve been given both by our ancestors in the 1890s and by our ancestors just one generation back who recovered this heritage.
