Brian Drayton on a Quaker Approach to the Climate Crisis

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1. Brian emphasizes the need for “spiritual formation” and “training” now, so we are prepared to respond with mercy when situations become even harder. What specific daily practices can help build the “durable compassion” needed for a future of displacement and distress?
2. Brian attempted to give nature its “own voice” through vignettes, noting that some truths can only be expressed as an “oak tree” or a “pupfish” rather than in human text . How might our theology change if we viewed species not as “resources,” but as unique revelations of God?
3. Rather than relying on terrifying statistics, Brian argues that teaching people to truly love a specific part of the non-human world is a far more powerful motivator for climate action. What specific piece of your local landscape or environment do you deeply love, and how does that affection shape your daily choices?

Zack Jackson
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Zack Jackson

Welcome back to Thee Quaker Podcast. I’m Zack Jackson. Today, we want to bring you a really special interview about one of the most pressing issues of our time. Well, actually, it’s not just one issue, but as our guest describes it, a polycrisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and human dislocations.

It’s a massive, often overwhelming topic, but to help us navigate it, I’m joined by Brian Drayton. Brian is uniquely equipped for this conversation. He’s a recorded Quaker minister in New England Yearly Meeting and he has also spent 40-years as a plant ecologist and science educator. He expertly weaves the hard scientific data and deep Quaker wisdom in his new book, The Gospel in the Anthropocene: Letters from a Quaker Naturalist. The Anthropocene, by the way, is a term that some social scientists use to describe the modern, human-centric world and all the messiness that comes with it. We connected recently, and I asked him what inspired him to write this book, right now. What keeps him up at night and why does he think that a book of letters, meditations, and illustrations might provide a way through this polycrisis?

Brian Drayton 

Because of my understanding about the situation in the world with regard to climate change and biodiversity loss. I feel like not so much my generation. I’m 73 so your generation and my grandchildren’s generation are going to be facing some really terrible stuff. So I was thinking, well, how are we going to respond to this time of conflict and fear and anxiety and distress and still live the Christian message. And that’s a perfectly relevant question at every era, of course, and even now, when there’s so much false Christianity around. But now would be a really good time for for us to take seriously the sort of growth and commitment it takes to to do that, so that when we’re met with new new situations, new challenges that are harder than they have been than we’ve encountered before, we’ve done the training, we’ve done the growth, we’re in a condition where we can, we’re more likely to be able to respond in the way we would wish to. And so that’s really the point of the book, in some ways, is to that’s why I wrote it as letters, although it’s more than letters. I’ll come back to that in a minute, because the goal really is the whole book is intended however, it works as an instrument for spiritual formation.

Zack Jackson 

So can you tell me a little bit more about why you chose this format? Like I’ve read a lot of books about the climate crisis, and most of them feel frightened and frantic and dogmatic, and your book is like reflective and imaginative. What’s behind that? Why approach the crisis like this?

Brian Drayton 

So what I’d like to do is read some passages from the introductory letter, which I hope will explain what I’m up to and why I’m doing it this way. 

Dear friend, we have entered a time when global warming, the destruction of biological diversity and other ecological crises are intensifying and mutually reinforcing in ways that will make the Earth we have always known increasingly hostile to human society and life, even though many refuse to accept what is happening. Climate anxiety and even despair are becoming widespread, and young people are especially affected. How can we live in this era, the Anthropocene, in durable compassion, prompt in doing well, steady in truth, patient in disorientation or desolation, willing to serve, to wait, to suffer and to enact mercy. 

See, the Anthropocene and its implications present a disturbing spiritual challenge, and I have come to believe a very great spiritual opportunity to mitigate the worst versions of the Anthropocene will require massive changes from us, changes in expectations, self image, values and way of life, but the challenge of living with the world we have reshaped in our own image will require resources of mind, emotion, will and orientation. Here is where gospel enters the picture. Now is the time to reclaim the early insight, the felt knowledge that the work of Christ in me or you, so intimate and individual, is continuous with the power that creates and sustains the cosmos. In so doing, we can and must learn to live in the spirit of love and justice that Christians call the Spirit of Christ in this Anthropocene, which otherwise seems more and more to be an insuperable challenge for that spirit is against despair and indifference or wrath and contention.

Zack Jackson 

So interspersed throughout your letters are these reflections on nature and our sort of shared experience of life. I found these vignettes to be so beautiful, and I think they’re important because they teach us what it is to notice, like, like, it’s like, we’re getting a glimpse into the way that you see the world, and through that immersion, maybe we can learn how to see that world, too. Would you? Would you mind reading one for us?

Brian Drayton 

Here’s a… Okay, here’s a meditation. This is the first one, the Devil’s Hole Pup Fish. Maybe I want to read one other thing about the meditations. These are mostly vignettes from nature or the boundary between human life and the rest of nature. They are not optional or superfluous to the message. Indeed, as I suggest below, they are a theology, because they reveal God’s truth in ways that words alone cannot. Though they are written in words, they will, it is hoped, move you beyond words. Sit with each of them at first as an exercise of the imagination in quietness and reverence of mind and body, give them time, as with meditation on the words of Scripture, try to see each scene from more than one point of view. Don’t worry about not knowing all the details. Let ignorance be one of the frontiers of wonder. This kind of seeing must be part of our spiritual practice in the Anthropocene, and you are surrounded by an infinite host of materials. So think of these as samples to which you will add your own.

Okay, you move across a semi arid landscape, sparsely vegetated, punctuated by rocky hills and outcrops. You pull off the road at a sign and then climb up to an outcrop through warm March, mid day sun, until you reach a simple metal platform from which you can look down into a cleft in the rocks. There’s water a few yards below, much of it shadowed by the steep walls of the cleft. Sunlight happens to fall on a rock shelf that lies. About a foot below the surface, about three yards wide by five yards long. Beyond the edge of the shelf, the still water is black, the depth unguessable. On the shelf, there is green algae fuzz and a few dozen small blue fish, each perhaps an inch in length. They do not dart and school like some little fish do in the sun, but each moves about, foraging for tiny things according to its own preference. Sometimes a fish swims off the rock and over the depths, but it does not dive nor stay there long, soon returning to the shelf and the sun you are seeing, at a glance, the entire population of the Devil’s Hole Pupfish. For them, the landscape, the subterranean water bodies and the whole supporting Earth are focused on the fluctuating conditions of water and sun as experienced on that 15 square yards of rock suspended over an inhospitable abyss. Since you do not cast a shadow on their shelf, you don’t exist for the pupfish. Though we are ignorant about fish’s mental powers, it is likely that their future, the time beyond sundown, casts no shadow on them either.

Zack Jackson 

So what struck you about this observation? Why? Why does this feel important?

Brian Drayton 

I wanted nature to be present as it’s with its own voice, to the extent that that can be done by words. That’s also why the illustrations are there as a different just a hint at other modalities. And I take very seriously the very old idea, which I discovered myself, and then realized that people have been talking about it for centuries, and nobody bothered to mention it to me, which is the idea that that in addition to the, you know, the revelation being from the Spirit, yes, and from the scriptures, but also from the book of nature, and that each of those things requires of us, intrinsically requires of us, reflection and interpretation, none of it comes to us as plain text, and that there are certain things that many things in the world that cannot be put into words. Their only mode of expression is as a Devil’s Hole Pupfish or oak tree or whatever. So these things stand on their own for me, and actually, I take great comfort in the fact that they, the pupfish, have no idea that we exist. They’re doing their thing.

Zack Jackson

We’re going to take a quick break. When we come back, Brian explains why 40 years of science education has taught him that the secret to climate advocacy isn’t better data or a more compelling argument. It’s learning to fall in love. Stay tuned.

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Lottie Blunden  

For a really long time, I think I have been searching for a way to, I suppose, give my life meaning, to make sense of the world in a more meaningful way.

Zack Jackson  

That’s Lottie Blunden. She lives on the east coast of England, and her journey to finding that meaning was born out of a profound, unimaginable loss

Lottie Blunden  

Three years ago now, one of my sons got very seriously ill. He had a brain tumor, and then the doctor said, which I wasn’t expecting, there’s nothing that we can do. We can’t do anything else, and your son will die

Zack Jackson  

In the years after her son’s death, Lottie searched for meaning, and one day she noticed a book about Quakers that had been sitting unread on her shelf for almost a decade.

Lottie Blunden  

I came across a Quaker book and read it, and thought, hang on these Quakers book, loads of ideas that seem to chime with what I really feel is really important.

Zack Jackson  

From there, she found Thee Quaker Podcast.

Lottie Blunden  

I just, I kind of binge listened when I found your podcast, I just to hear other people’s voices, other people that were negotiating, or had negotiated like a spiritual path,

Zack Jackson  

Having been encouraged by the stories on the podcast, she felt a small voice urging her to actually step inside a Quaker meetinghouse. She went during the anniversary of her son’s passing,

Lottie Blunden  

For nearly the whole hour, kind of, I just had was just crying very quietly, just silently, just tears were coming, and I just sat. And then one of the other people stood up and gave some ministry, and I just it was something about death and what and people dying, and people that we love dying. I just found that so incredible that that can happen in meeting for worship, and that feeling that another person has to have a message, to stand up and to say it, and that it’s, you know, for somebody, it’s for somebody. And I felt that it was for me, and that was just amazing. 

Zack Jackson  

Lottie told me that the podcast is especially helpful these days when her work schedule doesn’t allow her to get to Meeting. So I asked her why she decided to become a monthly supporter.

Lottie Blunden  

I just felt it was important to kind of recognize that, and to think actually, it’s really useful and helpful to me, and it can’t just run by itself. It needs a community of supporters that’s really important. Otherwise. How can it? How can it carry on? You know, because there’s all, there’s quite a lot of content of like, you know, would you consider being a supporter? And then I was just listening to that, and just thought, actually, this message is not just for everybody else. This is for me as well. And I can’t afford to give loads and loads, but I could actually afford to give something, because I think it is really important

Zack Jackson  

This show only exists because of the community behind it. So if this podcast has been a companion on your own journey, please consider helping us to sustain it. Just go to QuakerPodcast.com and click support in the top right. That’s QuakerPodcast.com. 

And now back to the show.

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Zack Jackson 

One of my struggles in this work is communicating, is getting people who don’t care to care. There’s a host of reasons why people don’t care. Either it’s like, well, I’m going to be gone and it doesn’t matter to me, or it’s, I don’t believe that any of this is real and it’s a liberal conspiracy. You know, it goes along the spectrum, but it seems that spouting graphs and facts and figures and pictures of starving polar bears that’s not cutting it anymore. We’re in a real crisis, and it’s getting worse. How do we get people to care?

Brian Drayton 

Good teachers have been engaging with environmental issues of various kinds for, you know, decades, and indeed, there was the nature nature study movement in the 20s, which was full of insight. I just love that stuff. But it sort of arose at a time when, when the country, our country, especially, was rapidly urbanizing, and people were back even then, people were thinking about a certain sense of deficit in their experience of nature. People were leaving the farms and, you know, but so much of environmental education has focused on and including, like, the if you do like AP, environmental education in high school, right? A lot of it is like waste management, pollution control and stuff like that. It’s like all the things that they’re really important things, and they’re things that a high school kid can really sink their teeth into. But there’s something missing if, if the learner, whoever they are at any age, has no relationship to the non human world, to their landscape. 

So I always pushed educators to find some time, make some time, early on and periodically, to help the kids, and even say it explicitly, help the kids learn to love something that’s a really powerful motivator. And there’s actually, you know, you can get you can read papers with graphs and charts that suggest this too, that if people care about their city block or their countryside or the local pond or something, then they’re much more interested in it being in good health. So that’s the angle I take out. Trying to think about engagement is to find something where people’s emotions are engaged and say, but you know, bringing mind into this enriches the experience. It doesn’t, doesn’t make it colder. But, you know, one, no one solution is going to reach everybody. So we just got to keep throwing the you know, if somebody says, what’s really getting me is the economic argument, the imminent collapse of capitalism, okay, wherever it got, you know, whatever, whatever it takes. But, but I think reverence or gratitude, needs to be introduced early on, because that engages things, that engages compassion and can challenge other kinds of responses in useful ways.

Zack Jackson

So if we’re starting with reverence and gratitude as our foundation, you know, just learning to love the dirt and the ecosystems that we find in our own backyard, how then, does that small, localized practice actually connect to this massive overarching work of healing the world? Like, how do we, how do we link these small daily actions to our larger goal?

Brian Drayton

I’m going to jump very wide lens for a minute and say, early Christianity had these two terms that are very powerful. I think one is Scopus, Greek, scopos, and the other is telos. Scopos means the thing you’ve got in your eye, the thing you’re aiming for, and a Telos is your ultimate goal. And so an example that Jon Cassian gives in one of his one of his talks is so a farmer wants a prosperous to develop a prosperous life for his family and himself to raise good food and all of that stuff. That’s his. That’s his telos. That’s his goal. In order to do that, he’s got to perform a whole bunch of different operations. He’s got to get the weeds under control. He’s got to till the earth so that it’s, you know, can accept the seeds. You know, there’s a whole bunch of other things that each of which is, in a sense, a self contained task in itself that has its own methodologies, its own beginnings and ends, or whatever its criteria for success. Or, you know, but it’s in the service of some longer goal. And early Christians would say to really widen. This is why I’m widening this out so much. The ultimate Telos for us is complete availability to the Spirit. That is another word for holiness, being so free and available that you’re and the scope us for that is Christ. So you live your way towards Christ. That’s a way to be shaped and formed in such a way that you can you’re heading towards the telos, which is not heaven, but it’s but it’s complete wholeness, or as George Fox would say, you know, coming into the condition that Adam was in before the fall. But stronger because you got because you know that Christ is working in and through you. So the same thing with nature study,

Zack Jackson 

How so?

Brian Drayton 

well, because you know, if what you what you realize you want to do is cultivate a sense of connection with the with the world outside the human, the built environment, to maybe even just to get a richer understanding about how it is we fit into the big picture, cultivating a practice of observation, cultivating an acquaintance with some bits of the world. Is a really important way to get there, as long as you remember that your long term goal is a growth of understanding. There’s a line from Walt Whitman that I love. He says, a mouse is miracle enough to confound sextillion of infidels. And you know, got to start small.

Zack Jackson 

Yes, and that is a fantastic segue into another reflection about a mouse that I would love for you to read for us.

Brian Drayton 

A deer mouse has found my live trap, which I’ve baited with a little snack. There is also a twist of cotton batting so the mouse can make a bed in case things get chilly before I come along the trap line to weigh who’s there and put a spot of color on its back, a tag, so that we can keep track of individuals. The mouse, big, soft, ears, little, hard, hands, dark, bright eyes, is gently poured into a baggie, which dangles from the field, scales, hardly an ounce of mouse before I mark and free the captive. I look at it really. Just look it lies quiet in the bag’s embrace, awaiting an unknown fate, not realizing that I intend no harm beyond this breach of privacy. Amidst the lovely brown and white fur, I see a bulge, the fur looking thinner where the skin has stretched. It reminds me of how the trees thin out as you approach a mountain crown. The swelling seems also a quarter of the mouse’s size. See, what must it be like to haul that around? A more experienced naturalist says, yeah, it’s a warble. It’ll be okay. Most mice we catch that day are bearing such a burden, squirrels and voles too. The swelling is caused by a bot fly larva. A bot fly lays its eggs on the ground near a tunnel, path or run. An egg sticks to a passing rodents fur and hatches incubated by body heat, the tiny larva crawls about, seeking for an opening, orifice or wound, or creates its own entry. Eventually, it comes to lodge beneath the skin, feeding from the host, it grows and eventually pupates, making a case within which it metamorphoses from maggot to short lived fly, transformed. It creates an opening to the outer world, hoping it is rich in botflies and in rodents, and departs, leaving the mouse to heal, as sometimes they do or not. This, too is God’s hand at work.

Zack Jackson 

That last line, this too is God’s hand at work is so I don’t want to say devious, but so unexpected that I love this. That’s why I wanted you to read it. We just think of all things good and fair as the work of God, and we never praise God for mosquitoes and bot fly larva and awful gross things in the universe as well.

Brian Drayton 

Absolutely, I’m reminded, did you ever read Mark Twain’s letters from the earth?

Zack Jackson 

No/

Brian Drayton 

It. was, it was a, it was a late work of his, and unpublished, I think, in his lifetime, it was pretty bitter. And he talks about the bacteria in our gut, and he talks about how they must be saying sending up their hymns to the Creator, and he gives you a sample of a hymn as sung by them, which starts out, constipate. Oh, constipate.

Zack Jackson 

I mean, that’s a theme that shows up in your book too, right? That we are not human. We are essentially a universe for bacteria.

Brian Drayton 

Right? The last line of that, of that verse goes, till man’s remotest entrail shall praise His maker’s name.

Zack Jackson 

Anyway, I love this that so often when we’re talking about like the polycrisis of the world and the climate crisis, and what are we going to do? And it’s all just about carbon reduction, and it’s about recycling and all good things, of course, great things. We love these things. But nobody is teaching us how to see, how to see the world, how to notice, how to rejoice in gut bacteria as a way of sort of falling in love with the world and rediscovering the poetry in life itself. This is just so important.

Brian Drayton 

Well, we, by which I mean some people in every generation and every culture, have always known something about the interdependence of ourselves and nature, but the culture that I know best, which is the sort of Western European, North American culture, has largely ignored the implications of that and we have. I felt free to exploit resources, resources that are common for everyone to the exclusive benefit of private gain or that we’ve we’ve excused and sort of ignored and often been ignorant of the destruction that we’re creating.

Zack Jackson 

Brian, where’s your hope coming from these days?

Brian Drayton 

I long ago. I have lots of Proverbs right in my head, and one of the ones that I learned in college was, was Gramsci, you know, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I think that, you know, from the point of view of the data, the situation is quite bad, and it’s going to get really worse. Mean we’re on, we’re on a trajectory to something like three degrees heating by the end of the 21st Century, above pre industrial levels, despite all of the growth in alternative technologies, and which is real and and all of that, CO two emission emissions continue to rise. It’s a big victory when they don’t rise quite as fast this year as they rose last year. And there’s some indication that the annual rate of global heating, or we would say heat retention is not only continuing to rise, but it’s accelerating. So these are bad trends, and because CO2 has many other downstream negatives, we’re not in good shape at all. 

But if we, if every time people choose life, which can mean political action against the dominance of exploitive economic systems with a more livable world in mind, or Any time they campaign on behalf of an individual species that they love nearby, that’s about the Vaquita dolphin, or whatever it happens to be, if they also remember that this is all part of preserving a livable world where all the species that are here, or as many as possible, can continue to evolve, to work with the world that they live in, including us. So if the telos is clear, if you want to put it that way, then there’s so many things that individuals can do. And I think one of the things about any kind of practice, whether it’s athletic practice or spiritual practice, is that you get to a certain level and you realize that you could now do something more. You could push yourself further, develop a new skill, do it in a different way. You know, grow. Growth is always possible. That’s growth and learning are the same thing. That’s what Jon Dewey would say and and so doing things that are growthful, and they’re not just growthful for your checkbook or your particular community, but for the world eventually, bearing that always in mind, that’s where some hope comes from.

Zack Jackson

Thank you for sharing this time with us, and a special thank you to our guest, Brian Drayton. To explore today’s topic further, you can find discussion questions, a full transcript, and links to all of Brian’s works  at QuakerPodcast.com. And if you haven’t already, please hit subscribe.

This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by me, Zack Jackson, with music written and produced by Jon Watts. We are a part of Thee Quaker Project, a nonprofit organization giving Quakerism a platform for the 21st century.

Creating this space takes a community. If you value what we’re building here, please consider becoming a monthly supporter. Just head to QuakerPodcast.com and click ‘Support’ in the top right corner.

Facing the reality of the Anthropocene can easily lead us into despair. But as we close today, I hope you leave this conversation feeling empowered. I hope you reject the subtle impulse towards cynicism and instead open yourself to falling in love with the world right in front of you. As you step back into your day, we offer you this daily Quaker message as read by Grace Gonglewski.

Grace Gonglewski

Sarah Briggs. 1992. I serve because I love God. My service — my work — is an expression of my love for everything that is of God. So while the work I am asked to do may be difficult and demanding, it is, in the end, the most joyous and wondrous thing we can do.“

Zack Jackson

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day, go to DailyQuaker.com. That’s DailyQuaker.com. 

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

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