By Eliza Griswold, The New Yorker, September 16, 2021
In 2005, Katharine Hayhoe, a Canadian climate scientist and evangelical Christian, moved from South Bend, Indiana, to Lubbock, Texas, a flat expanse of arid grassland that sits at the edge of the Permian Basin, and is one of the largest oil and gas fields in the world. Her husband had been offered a position as a linguistics professor at Texas Tech and a job as a pastor at a small local church. The opportunity was too enticing to decline, so Hayhoe tagged along as the academic plus-one, securing a position as a research professor of geosciences at Texas Tech. One day, a colleague asked Hayhoe to give a guest lecture in his geology class on the carbon cycle—the way carbon travels between water, Earth, and the atmosphere. Soon after, she stood in the dark pit of a windowless lecture hall, before some hundred students, and described how volcanoes, erosion, and the shifting of tectonic plates affect carbon. In the last few minutes, Hayhoe addressed the fact that, since the Industrial Revolution, human activity has increased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Out of the darkness, a student rose to his feet. “Are you a Democrat?” he asked, in a belligerent tone. The question flummoxed her. “No, I’m Canadian,” she replied. There were no more questions, so she packed up her computer and left. It wasn’t until later that she realized the mere mention of human influence on the planet’s warming temperatures was becoming politically divisive.
To Hayhoe, climate science had never been political. She had been raised in Toronto, among the Plymouth Brethren, an evangelical group that adheres to sola scriptura, the notion that the Bible is the supreme authority on matters of faith and for guiding one’s life. Many Brethren assemblies are led by elders, not pastors. Hayhoe, whose father was an elder and a science teacher, grew up listening to him giving talks and showing slides of the stars in church, calling the dotted skies “God’s art gallery.” Her parents were also missionaries, and she spent several years in South America, where they taught in a school. Hayhoe was planning on becoming an astrophysicist, but, in her third year of college, she took a class on climate science that revealed the grave danger global warming poses to marginalized people around the world. “People always talk about saving the planet,” she told me. “But the planet will be orbiting the sun long after we’re gone.” The urgency, for her, was that human beings were imperilled. When Hayhoe attended graduate school, at the University of Illinois, she shifted her focus to study atmospheric science. She went on to research how climate change was affecting aquatic ecosystems in the Great Lakes and the water supply in California.
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