At the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, countries signed an agreement on a series of measures to address climate change. The agreement includes key decisions such as a commitment to phase out coal, regular reviews of emission reduction plans and more financial support for developing countries. Climate change, which can be defined as “changes in the average state and variability of the climate over decades or longer, regardless of cause,” is in fact the scream that resonates off the walls of the ecosystem. Unless addressed in tandem with population growth, migration, rapid and unplanned urbanization, surging scarcity in resources and food, extreme poverty, socioeconomic inequality, infectious diseases, and pandemics, climate change will cause erratic and insurmountable problems facing humanity and, as during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, it can upset established social behavior patterns.

The greatest danger knocking at our door

In 2021, the World Health Organization declared climate change “the greatest health threat facing humanity.” Climate change and increasing carbon dioxide emissions cause extreme heat, environmental destruction, and difficulties in the water and food supplies. Using fossil fuels, the main source of greenhouse gases, leads to air pollution and associated premature deaths. Increases in carbon monoxide, lead, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, ozone, and respirable particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns are the main drivers of air pollution. The vicious cycle between climate change and air pollution is associated with reproductive, respiratory, and cardiovascular diseases, as well as public health problems such as diabetes, cancer, premature aging, and psychiatric diseases. Climate change causes an increase in air pollution through extreme temperature and weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts), natural (wildfire smoke, dust storms), and human and animal factors (air conditioning, litter). It also contributes to infectious diseases through expanded habitats for disease vectors such as mosquitoes and ticks, and to non-communicable diseases through increasing food shortages, malnutrition, and longer and more intense pollen seasons.

Temperatures and Drought

Although humankind is not fully aware of the impending catastrophe, the gravity of the situation is highlighted by reports on Europe experiencing its driest spell in 500 years, with more than half of the continent facing the threat of drought. Drought threatens not only Europe but the whole world, leading to water and food shortages as well as an increase in forest fires. It is noted that around 2.3 billion people live in areas at risk of drought, that drought has directly caused the deaths of 650,000 people in the last 50 years, and that millions of children are still affected by severe and prolonged drought. It is also estimated that as many as 3.5 billion people could face “unlivable” temperatures in the next 50 years because of human-induced climate change. As more people are impacted by drought, chronic poverty, war, or chaos, they will continue to migrate to “milder” locales.

Impact on marine ecosystems and ocean pollution

The quality of marine environments is also essential for protecting public health. Environmental pollution, contamination by chemicals, and pathogenic microbes hurt marine ecosystems; marine pollution also threatens marine animals and human health. Ocean pollution, exacerbated by global climate change, also negatively affects these ecosystems, with petroleum-based pollutants causing a decrease in photosynthesis in oxygen-producing organisms. Increased carbon dioxide absorption in the seas causes acidification, negatively affecting coral reefs, disrupting shellfish growth, dissolving calcium-containing microorganisms at the base of the marine food web, and increasing toxic effects from pollutants. Meanwhile, plastic pollution, which accumulates in large mid-ocean gyres and threatens marine mammals, fish, and seabirds, decomposes into chemical micro- and nano-plastic particles that enter the tissues of many marine organisms, including those consumed by humans. Industrial sewage increases the frequency and impact of harmful algal blooms, bacterial pollution, and anti-microbial resistance, while dangerous pathogens such as Vibrio species and other factors result in global declines in fish stocks.

Effects of air pollution

Climate change puts the three pillars of health—nutrition, shelter, and access to water—at risk. For instance, natural disasters destroy crops and people’s homes and contaminate safe water sources. This leads to malnutrition and water-borne diseases and contributes to 12.6 million preventable deaths in the world each year due to climate change. Since more than half of these deaths are caused by exposure to air pollution, it is clear that there is an association between climate change and air pollution and other environmental exposures. Longer wildfire seasons lead to more smoke exposure; climate change affects ozone and particulate matter formation by increasing the rate of chemical reactions in the atmosphere and increases the amount of pollen by extending the pollen season. The direct effect of each event is airway inflammation and lung damage due to the production of reactive oxidants. Ambient ozone and chronic accumulation of particulate matter in alveolar macrophages, impaired phagocytosis, oxidative stress, and poor mucociliary clearance jointly trigger airway inflammation. In addition to weakened antioxidant defenses, immunological and epigenetic (environmentally induced) changes play a role in the pathogenesis of lung diseases such as asthma and chronic bronchitis. Toxic effects in the respiratory tract and lungs eventually impact the cardiovascular system, causing autonomic disorders and increased inflammation. Ultimately, climate change-induced air pollution affects nearly every organ system (including the lungs, heart, kidneys, brain, and nervous system) through a complex interplay of increased oxidative stress, systemic inflammation, and immune dysregulation.

What can be done?

Climate change negatively affects several social determinants, such as equity, livelihoods, and access to health and social support services. Its impacts are felt disproportionately by the most vulnerable and disadvantaged, including women, children, ethnic minorities and impoverished communities, migrants or the elderly, and those with disabilities. Due to climate change, health services are in greater demand, while infrastructure is negatively affected. Faced with these challenges, experts recommend climate change adaptation and mitigation actions. Climate change adaptation means preparing society for actions and is known as the ‘secondary prevention.’ This is about improving people’s ability to cope with changes—such as increased cases of asthma and malaria or mental illness caused by forced migration—and giving them ease of access to health services. More importantly, it is also about tackling the causes and putting in place the “primary preventions.”

The earth is a trust on the shoulders of humanity. We humans should act as stewards of God on earth, to respect this trust and protect it meticulously. Measures like afforestation and preventing waste should be emphasized. Since the estimated (2.5 billion) tons of food waste ending up in landfills annually contribute to about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, we must avoid waste and sort our garbage for recycling.

As a requirement of social responsibility, we should support efforts in finding solutions to problems like the global change. Since this social responsibility imposes on us the mission of “leaving our world and its entire eco-systems clean and problem-free for future generations,” we should contribute to the formation of a more livable world by prioritizing the protection of the environment. Climate change and the deterioration of the ecological balance remind us of this fundamental duty, and we must not hesitate to take responsibility for combating climate change for both individual and public health.

References

• Churruca-Muguruza C. The Changing Context of Humanitarian Action: Key Challenges and Issues. In: International Humanitarian Action, Springer, 2018, pp. 3–18.
• World Health Organization. COP26 special report on climate change and health: the health argument for climate change. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2021.
• Keswani A, Akselrod H, Anenberg SC. Health and clinical impacts of air pollution and linkages with climate change. NEJM Evid, 2022;1(7).
• Toreti A, et al. Drought in Europe August 2022, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2022, doi:10.2760/264241, JRC130493. https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/news/GDO-EDODroughtNews202208_Europe.pdf
• Xu C, Kohler TA, Lenton TM, Svenning JC, Scheffer M. Future of the human climate niche. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2020;117(21):11350-11355.
• Landrigan PJ, et al. Human Health and Ocean Pollution. Ann Glob Health 2020;86(1):151.

How generous of us. How condescending, actually! It implies that I can bear up under the difference which is exemplified in the other: I won’t criticize you openly or make comments, but deep down, I know you to be “different” and myself to be virtuous and probably superior. I may catch myself, when speaking of someone I actually do not like, saying politely: “Well, she’s different.” With that comment, I am off the hook. I refrain from telling you I reject this person. But “different” here may support a polite tolerance, yet it harbors an inner rejection.

So can we count tolerance a virtue? Perhaps developing tolerance is a stepping stone to something deeper? It might be the beginning of wisdom and exemplify a necessary patience with what feels painful, uncomfortable, unfamiliar, possibly frightening, in fact “foreign” to us. “Unfamiliar,” literally means: Not of my family. I am ill at ease with this because I do not know it. It is not part of my family, my tribe, my beliefs, my language, my religion, my race. In the spirit of tolerance, I might begin to open myself to tasting, hearing, learning something about that which is not “ours.” It is a beginning, but it still holds fast to the comfort of what it knows and only tolerates what it cannot fully accept.

Still, we have all had the expansive experience of traveling outside our zones of comfort and making a new relationship. We have launched a friendship with someone who seems unlike us.

An obviously poor man has taken charge of the garden plot next to mine in our neighborhood community garden. Perhaps he is homeless? He rattles up to the garden on a dilapidated bicycle. His clothes are worn and he has a scruffy look. His nails are dirty and that might be because he has been working his plot. I sense a certain unease in myself as we scratch the soil in our plots. Part of me fears him. That might be because I feel guilty about the growing number of homeless who make camps under the overpasses in my neighborhood. I can let my mind race with objections: They might bring disease. They certainly clutter the surroundings with litter. What if, in their need, they take what they want from yards and sheds? And the police told us recently they found a cache of machetes, sticks and knives in the park behind us. Oh, I can build dungeons in the sky as fast as anyone.

But to be honest, deep down, I would dread being homeless myself and in this economy… my mind races. How much of this is all our responsibility? Other members of the community garden, I notice, walk well out of his way. Sometimes they whisper to one another making comments about their discomfort.

But this is, after all, a Community garden! What does that really mean. If you sign up and pay the nominal fee to tend a plot and use the garden tools, this man has a right to be here. So the gardeners put up a front of tolerance. “We shall see. We’ll give him a chance.”

Tolerance invites us to stand before the unfamiliar and allow-but it still has no relationship to the ability to be empathic. Empathy is a vulnerable frame of being. It is to feel with what is “other” or different. Tolerance does not yet stand in the shoes of the other, knowing exactly what it feels like to be that person, living into a sense of that person’s culture, situation, history, biology, with those talents, bearing those wounds or offering those gifts.

Empathy would be the greater quality to embrace and cultivate in ourselves if we want to conduct real dialogue. Empathy is a quality that comes with maturity, practice, humility, a vulnerable openness and, of course, prayer. There is nothing guarded, “tolerant” or superior about it.

“Hey!” Two of us greet the man one morning as we hoe our plants. What’s your name? What have you just planted there? I make a point of walking over there and taking responsibility for my own feelings, I try to make contact with the fellow devoid of my prejudices. I am not an extroverted, chatty person to begin with, so it takes a concerted effort on my part to walk over there, discuss our gardens, and share our experiences.

Dempsey is his name. He does indeed live at the homeless shelter downtown and bikes up hill here to work his plot. He has lost the place he once lived. There is a story hiding in him. Turns out he knows quite a bit about the soil and gardening. He introduces me to his beloved collards. I show him my chard and spinach. Eventually we share some of our produce and though I do not take a shine to his collards, no matter how I try, I feel somehow honored by his generosity.

He has a plan. Even a vision. If he can grow enough produce, he will bring it to the kitchens at his shelter. As a kid, he had gardens which he and his mom tended. When everything in a row turns ripe and ready at once, it is quite an armful and he would like to make a contribution to his shelter. He has more plans. There is some land at the back of the shelter that, if he can convince them, he would like to turn into gardens that the homeless can help cultivate. Right now it is just a dumping ground for old bottles and litter.

“Of course, we’d need to contain the kitchen waste for compost first to get some soil. Gardening is more about making good soil than about growing plants!”

Before long, I am hearing amazing things from Dempsey. What if I had avoided him in my fear, guilt, and prejudice?

I think about my feelings against his reality. When we were young and growing up, we all made choices: We chose this over that, we chose right over wrong. We chose right over left and light over dark. We learned not to talk to strangers or to walk in certain neighborhoods. All the world is split in halves and with our choices we made judgments to match. We learned to define ourselves in a certain way, convinced that we have chosen the better part and have left “the other,” the misguided, the sinful, the messy, and unenlightened behind. This is how we formed our identity. With this we were approved of by our families and accepted by our tribe. It was, perhaps, a necessary developmental process.

In time, we may become so comfortable in this identity that it takes wisdom and maturity to discover that the world isn’t so black and white as we would like to define it. Our “black and white mentality” is often acted out literally. Here in America, we have suffered and visited great suffering on people of color deeming white to be more worthy than black. Getting stuck at this stage of development has literally given advantage, education and wealth to whites and this on the backs of those we first imported as slaves to our country and then continued to enslave in our intolerance, injustice and rejection.

Everywhere in the world, we have seen these simplistic conflicts bloom and fester causing injustice, war, and dreadful human misery. Tolerance, then, might be the first step to healing an unjust society but then, it has to develop further, into a true virtue.

Empathy-that true virtue-allows us to viscerally feel with the other and learn a third way which stands over and above the simplicity of a merely “black and white” mentality. Perhaps fundamental rights and wrongs may well be necessary to growing up and learning to become someone.

But fundamentalism is essentially an unripe process in becoming whole, holy, and healthy. It is a spiritual and psychological immaturity. Becoming whole, empathic with “the other” and more than merely “tolerant” of the other requires that we make friends with the deepest part of our own inner selves first. The dark aspects of our own unconscious, which lie under our conscious choices and awareness, are alive and well and sometimes pop out in actions, prejudices, paranoia, and selfish behaviors that actually shock us, surprising ourselves! Where did THAT come from? The impromptu snub? That slip-of-the-tongue? Getting to know what you’d rather repress in yourself takes that washing, even symbolic washing, which takes off the accretions of only “looking good.” To reach into our depth we ask for the graces of God and the courage to know ourselves.

Dempsey proves to be a gifted gardener. Unlike many of us city-slickers who find the idea of gardening a nice, romantic concept, Dempsey knows how to lean into his work and stick with it. He puts a hand to our compost pile and gives me information on the chemistry of compost. He LOVES the compost. And I begin to be enamored with the beauty of this transforming pile of brush and leaves as they become mulch and then good, black earth. It takes time. It takes patience. The vegetable scraps and brush, the kitchen scraps that we reject and find, in fact, revolting as they mold and decompose, become, in time, something so rich and beautiful that I hold a palm full in my hand and run it through my fingers. Dempsey laughs at me. He knows that I have come around. I encourage him to share his knowledge at our garden meetings. Dempsey becomes a valuable member of the garden. And he becomes a friend.

Like the compost, I dig deep into my own unconscious and all that I have deemed objectionable, I take into my awareness. I get to know myself a little more. I get to appreciate what I otherwise throw out and bury out of sight-out of my consciousness-and I find it necessary as the very “ground of my being.” It is a spiritual, a holy exercise. Also the parts of society that I might only tolerate, I take into my awareness and with prayer and God’s grace, I watch the rejected become a valuable source and a piece of God’s holy plan and puzzle.

Richard Rohr, OFM put it this way:

With prayer we change sides from the inside-from a power position to the position of vulnerability and solidarity, which gradually changes everything. Because now we are allowing ourselves to change and grow!
Once we are freed from our paranoia, from the narcissism that thinks we are the center of the world, or from our belief that thinks our rights and dignity have to be defended before other people’s rights and dignity, only then can we finally live and act with any justice or truth. Once these blockages are taken away from us-and that is what prayer does-then we just have to be offered a few guiding statements on social justice or other thorny issues-and we tend to get it for ourselves. We start being drawn by love…

For it is common practice in the human condition to take everything we fear, hate, deny about ourselves and “throw it in the waste bin.” We have, unwittingly, put “the other” in that same place of rejection and waste.

On the other hand, we also project everything we admire onto “the hero” as well. The adolescent makes heroes of the athlete, the rock star, the film star, the super model and decorates her bedroom with their posters. Meanwhile, the adults lean on their gurus, their preachers, their wise men, their favorite politicians and hope to vote in their hero as president and savior-of-the-nation. Our heroes, just like our shadow figures about whom we are passionate, are really aspects of ourselves which we are invited to come to know. These are abilities, virtues, talents, beauties, braveries, and wisdoms that we have not yet met in our own deepest selves but have “found” by projecting them on our heroes. What national leader can be the savior that delivers us from debt, from our enemies, from hunger? Over and over and at every election, we project on “the man who would be king,” and within months, because he is merely human, the populace has become disenchanted if not duped!

Samuel, in Hebrew Scripture, warns of turning away from God in favor of a king (1 Samuel 8). Israel wanted a leader like the other nations. But Samuel issues a final warning (1 Samuel 12:14) “If God’s people will remain faithful to God’s Commandments” and keep God as their ruler.

When our loves and our hates are visceral and passionate, we must take these deep emotions as invitations to examine our SELVES first. By truly “knowing ourselves” deeply, we are able to develop empathy-knowing “the other.” Then we learn to accept the dark and light aspect of our deepest self. We learn to embrace everyone. Our tolerance becomes empathy, even love! Rumi’s teaching often showed that love and empathy is the very path to spiritual growth and insight. Broadly tolerant of every person and all faiths he says:

Whoever you may be, come
Even though you may be
An infidel, a pagan, or a fire-worshipper, come
Our brotherhood is not one of despair
Even though you have broken
Your vows of repentance a hundred times, come.

Life is certain to dish up for us, family members, neighbors, people, situations, religions, countries-myriad experiences that are really invitations to rattle us out of our cozy dualistic and judgmental lives. May we grow surely and bravely from being merely tolerant into fully human beings who are steeped in empathy. Every dualist split that rends us apart personally and tears us one from the other would be healed. The same God reigns over and above us all. The same God guides us. The same God loves us all. The same God is the very ground of our being. Tolerance is only a start on the path to love and empathy.

Gertrud Mueller Nelson is an author, artist and retired teacher. She has illustrated and written nine books. She lives in California.

Prophet Moses states that the way to spiritual pleasure and meeting with God, the Divine vicegerency and nearness to Him goes through a stage of fleeing. Ordinary people flee from life’s tumults and sin’s ugliness to take refuge in God’s forgiveness and favor. They declare or consider the meaning of: My Lord, forgive and have compassion, for You are the Best of the Compassionate (23:118). They seek God’s shelter in total sincerity, saying: I take refuge in You from the evil of what I have done.⁴ Those distinguished by their piety and nearness to God flee from their own lesser qualities to the Divine Attributes, from feeling with their outward senses to discerning and observing with the heart, from ceremonial worship to its innermost dimension, and from carnal feelings to spiritual sensations. This is what is referred to in: O God, I take refuge in Your approval from Your wrath, and in Your forgiveness from Your chastisement.5 The most advanced in knowledge and love of God and in piety flee from Attributes to the Divine Being or Essence, and from the Truth to the Truth Himself. They say: I take refuge in You from You,⁶ and are always in awe of God. All who flee seek shelter and protection. As the cons ciousness of fleeing is proportionate to the spiritual profundity of the one fleeing, the quality of the destination reached varies according to the degree of the seeker’s awareness. Members of the first group arrive at knowledge of God. They remember God in everything they see, mention Him, cherish desires, imagine things that are impossible for them to realize, and finally come to rest at sensing the reality of: We have not been able to know You as knowing You requires, O Known One. They always feel and repeat in ecstasy:

Beings are in pursuit of knowledge of You,
And those who attempt to describe You are unable to do so.
Accept our repentance, for we are human beings
Unable to know You as knowing You requires.

Members of the second group sail every day for a new ocean of knowing God, and spend their lives in ever renewed glow of Divine manifestation. However, they cannot be saved from the obstacles that block them from the final station, where their overflowing spirit will subside. With their eyes fixed on the steps of the stairway that leads to higher and higher ranks, they fly upward from one rank to another; however, they also tremble with the fear that they might descend. Members of the third group, freed from the tides of the state and drowned in amazement, are so intoxicated with the “wine coming from the source of everything” that even the Trumpet of Israfil⁷ cannot cause them to recover from that stupor. Only one who has reached this rank can describe the profundity of their thoughts and feelings. Rumi says: Those illusions are traps for saints, whereas in reality They are the reflections of those with radiant faces in the garden of God.⁸ The “garden of God” signifies the manifestation of Divine Unity-the manifestations of one, many, or all the Divine Names throughout the universe. “Those with radiant faces” denotes the Divine Names and Attributes focused on a single thing or being. So, the meaning of the couplet is this: The traps in which saints are caught are the manifestations of the Divine Names and Attributes. These manifestations consist of the illusions in the view of those blind to Divine truths. In the words of Sari Abdullah Efendi, the hearts of the Prophets and saints are mirrors that reflect the Names and Attributes of God. God also manifests His Names and Attributes as the Lord-Ruler, Sustainer, and Master -of the universe, making it a garden with ever-renewed beauties and charms that enrapture the Prophet and the saints.

Notes

1. Sufis view the creation as a shadow of the original, the meaning, the origin, in the Knowledge of God.

2. Sufis consider everything in the world as being no more than a drop, maybe even a mirage, of the ocean. Material existence and pleasures are regarded as having the meaning and worth of a drop of water, while the other world and spiritual pleasures coming from Divine knowledge and love correspond to an ocean.

3. The piece of glass signifies Divine manifestations in the world, while the Sun signifies God, the Origin of these manifestations.

4. Al-Tirmidhi, Dawa‘at, 15; Abu ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Shu‘ayb al-Nasa’i, “Isti’adha,” in Sunan al-Nasa’i, 8 vols. (Beirut, 1930), 57.

5. Muslim, Salat, 222.

6. Ibid.

7. Israfil is one of the four archangels. He will blow the trumpet just before the end of the universe. This may be metaphorical.

8. Mawlana Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, Al-Mathnawi al-Kabir, 6 vols. (Istanbul, n.d.), 1:3.