Early in November 2006, the documentary The Great Warming: Call to Action opened in several U.S. cities. This film is notable for the involvement of Christian Evangelicals in its development, funding, and marketing. There’s an interview with Rev. Richard Cizik, V.P. of the National Association of Evangelicals, over at Living on Earth about the movie.

The most interesting part of Cizik’s statement is that he was “converted in 2002 to the science of climate change.” The main topic of this blog is the modes of change people will undergo in response to global warming. And, to make a truly productive change in one’s life — a change which leads one to act in carbon-neutral ways, and leads one to stop particiating in the most wasteful parts of consumer society — a conversion experience may indeed be what many people need.

Responses to climate change, if they are to do any good, will need to involve “reappraisals of values,” (p. 524) as Jared Diamond puts it in Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. To pull off a significant reappraisal of values, and to discard the value of spectacular wastefulness in favor of something more fitted to nature and more reasonable in the face of a changing climate, we will need the leadership — and then some — of converted evangelical and other deeply devotional leaders.

On the 11/23/06 broadcast of Democracy Now, Shelia Watt-Cloutier, former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, discusses several effects global warming is currently having on the Inuit — and everyone else in Alaska, Greenland, Canada, and Russia. She describes:

…[S]everal communities already as we speak are so damaged by global warming and climate changes that relocation, at the cost of millions of dollars, is now the only option. … [J]ust to give you an example of the damages is to the roads and the runways that are already damaged the eroded landscape, the contaminated drinking water, the coastal losses because of erosion, the melting permafrost that is now causing beach slumping and increased snowfall in some areas, not enough snow in other areas, longer sea ice free seasons, new species of birds and fish, and insects have arrived in the arctic, which we don’t even have names for half the time, there’s unpredictable sea ice conditions, glaciers are melting, creating torrent rivers instead of streams, and now we have more drownings, and we have, as a result of the unpredictability and condition of the ice … where our hunters thought they could cross safely.

Best to take the word of an expert at snow and ice, an Inuit, on what is continuing to happen. As far as attempting to shift in the face of a shifting climate, the Inuit will likely be the trendsetters.