
A Message from Karenna Gore
Image: August 13, 2018 in Belews Creek, North Carolina, standing with communities suffering lethal effects of coal ash pollution.
Dear CEE Community,
As this is our first newsletter of 2025, our 10th anniversary year, I want to convey greetings and thanks to each of you. I also want to acknowledge that we are in an unusual time, which for many involves a pervasive sense of dissonance, if not alienation. And I want to take a moment to encourage us to see it differently.
We know human-made systems are out of balance with Earth systems. There are many ways of knowing this. One key way of knowing, climate science, tells us that the primary cause of recent chaotic and extreme weather is the greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels: oil, coal and (so-called) natural gas. Yet most public conversations about climate, to the extent they happen at all, avoid facing that fact. That is not because it is impossible to change energy systems—actually, renewable energy technologies are more viable than ever before, as is energy efficiency and reduction of consumption and waste. The reason has to do with something else: a type of power, or force.
In the United States, we just went through an election season in which the national discourse was so twisted that even the candidate standing for climate action spoke enthusiastically about our nation producing more oil and gas than ever before. Now the 47th President has again withdrawn our nation from the Paris Agreement, the global commitment to protect our shared biosphere by stopping the emissions that imminently threaten to decimate it. Even as fires raged in the second largest city of the nation he is supposed to defend, this President declared an “energy emergency” to set up his priority: more extraction, more burning. “Drill, baby, drill.”
There is another way. “We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future,” wrote Thomas Berry, “We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation.” What is he talking about? It can be understood to include responsible use of tools to receive the energy in sun and wind. It is also about something else: invoking the life force within each of us, which thrives and grows through the bonds we have with each other—across space, time, and even species.
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, or so says Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Now is the time for us to draw deeply from our faith and wisdom traditions to build a counterforce to protect life on Earth. Remember that the same activity that is the primary driver of the climate crisis—the burning of fossil fuels—also causes local particulate pollution that kills millions every year. Standing for and with the communities that are impacted by that aspect of the crisis is part of the unfolding of a brighter, healthier, more just future. At CEE, we will be working on all of this in our usual ways—educating, convening and advocacy—and we invite you to join us.
Specifically, we invite you this Tuesday, January 28, to the launch of a book about “activism, environmental justice and finding hope” by our beloved colleague Catherine Flowers. She draws connections between the forces that sparked the Civil Rights movement in her native Lowndes County, Alabama and the forces we have to work with today, on behalf of the whole global community of life. In a time when social and ecological crises are so intertwined, when the past can seem to weigh us down or pull us backwards, Catherine brings us to a place where we can find the reservoirs of strength to break through to a brighter future: Holy Ground.
Sincerely, Karenna
Karenna Gore
Executive Director, Center for Earth Ethics
Visiting Professor of Practice of Earth Ethics, Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York