Biography
Vivian Saxon is pursuing a Master of Divinity at Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina. She is interested in theology and the arts, the history of Christian Spirituality, and the Christian responsibility to respond to and create the beautiful.
Paper Abstract
Warming on the scale predicted by the IPCC ensures severe ecological consequences. Loss at this scale necessitates the discussion of grief—how do we process our failures when ecosystems prove unadaptable, consequences defy mitigation, and resilience is impossible? How can we acknowledge what essentially constitutes the death of certain places while appreciating the life that remains? The medical field offers a path forward. Palliative care, the discipline concerned with end-of-life care, recognizes that "when one becomes gravely ill, one may not at first know what is being lost, or...what the illness means for one's history, purposes, and projects." In recognizing that "human life cannot be reduced to functionality, to material and efficient causation," it asserts that "what is being lost is not mere function but orientations, capacities, potencies, histories, projects, and purposes." The dying body in palliative care can be seen as analogous to earth's dying places—how we perceive and care for the former can inform how we approach the latter. As with the body, the earth—the specific ecosystems, cities, histories, and the meshwork of relationships that make up our environment—cannot be reduced to mere "functionality." To acknowledge their death is to acknowledge the fullness of their life and bring us into greater awareness of our intimate dependence on the entirety of creation. Practitioner Farr Curlin argues that palliative care creates the conditions necessary for a patient to die well, in that it does not seek to end suffering but to mitigate the suffering inherent in loss, in line with the ancient religious tradition of Ars Moriendi. In this paper I argue that seeing the earth as analogous to the body allows us to extend medicine's practices of a "good death" to the particular places and histories we will lose as climate change accelerates.