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Karenna Gore: “Faiths Respond to Stockholm+50”

March 6, 2022

I was grateful for the opportunity to speak at a dialogue, “Faiths Respond to Stockholm+50,” organized by Faith for Earth Initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme on March 4, 2022. Below is an extended version of my remarks. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. If I may, I would like to begin by describing my personal perspective on this topic. I was born close to the time of the 1972 Stockholm conference, into a family of Americans descended from Europeans, including Swedes on my mother’s side. I was told that some of my ancestors, particularly those from France and

The Metaphysics of COP26: A Brief Reflection

November 23, 2021

“Power must be challenged by power,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr in “Moral Man and Immoral Society,” and so it felt during the COP26 gathering in Glasgow. There were the representatives of the world’s most powerful governments and the lobbyists who do so much to maintain business as usual (a data analysis identified 503 from the fossil fuel industry). On the other hand there were agents of transformative change lifting up science and ethics. One question at COP26 was whether the growing cohesion and resolve in the second group is becoming an adequate source of power to change the equation. It seems that the

Remarks by Karenna Gore on the Global Biodiversity Framework

September 8, 2021

International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources World Conservation Congress Tuesday, September 7, 2021 Faith communities are calling on governments to strengthen the Global Biodiversity Framework. For too long, economic development has come at the expense of Nature. It is driven by a mindset that measures value according to short term monetary gain, no matter how much pollution, depletion or inequity results. The scale and pace of this pattern has brought us to the brink of unimaginable loss. This loss is indeed economic, in part; all wealth is derived from the biosphere. But it is more than that

Some Thoughts on Inauguration Day 2021

January 20, 2021

Like so many others, I have deep and mixed emotions on this Inauguration Day. This awful chapter is coming to a close and there is a lot to celebrate about the incoming administration, but there is also wreckage upon wreckage to examine, and it goes all the way back to the foundations of our nation. In a moving ceremony at the Reflecting Pool last night, with 400 lights shining to represent the 400,000 lives lost to Covid-19, President-Elect Joe Biden said “to heal, we must remember.” This wisdom is itself a guiding light forward. Rev Dr. William Barber II is