She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World, with the following results:
Page 99 of A Perturbed System is just one paragraph at the end of chapter two:Learn more about A Perturbed System at the University of Chicago Press website.The language of salvation, of saving the planet, leads not to answers but to further questions: Can the planet be saved? If so, who will save us? What will we have to sacrifice to save ourselves? News media employ theological motifs that lead toward individualized solutions, while diminishing collective action, whether in the form of private retreats or public protests. This results in an implicit denial of systemic change, a denial constructed through omission. Some things are rendered unsayable, which perpetuates an inertia that maintains political-economic systems. This inertia is not possible for those in high-intensity struggles, like the residents of Lake Charles, because they are already fighting for their continued existence, living through sacrifice on a daily basis. For those still, for now, in low-intensity struggles, who have a degree of separation from the material-somatic effects of their environments and climate, mediation remains necessary.The Page 99 Test works relatively well for my book. It makes clear that the book is about climate and environment, about how religious language, such as salvation and sacrifice, features in climate discourse, and how this can limit and constrain climate action. However, it only provides a partial understanding of the range of the book. For example, the reference to Lake Charles may lead readers to think that the book is about Louisiana, the state that the city of Lake Charles is in. It may mislead further, depending on what Lake Charles means for readers outside of the US, as it is also a location in Nova Scotia, Canada. In fact, the book is a multi-sited ethnography that incorporates fieldwork undertaken in Arizona, Missouri, England, Belgium, and Sweden, as well as Louisiana. There is also little in this specific paragraph that makes the ethnographic methodology apparent. The reference to news media may lead the reader to assume this is a work of media criticism, rather than an anthropological work. The test is limited in its efficacy because there is just one paragraph, and it would be difficult to understand the entirety of this book in one paragraph. Beyond the argument that religious language, rooted in Christianity, constrains and enables climate discourse, this is a book about how people in English-speaking Global North contexts respond to climate change. It is a book about how people are living in a time of endings, when ecosystems are collapsing, mass extinctions are underway, and political systems are stymied. How do we live in a time of death? The book makes the argument that religion is essential to understanding how climate discourse is framed, and it also makes the argument that a new climate ethics, a new theology of climate, is required to navigate between despair and denial and find a way forward in this time.
--Marshal Zeringue
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