AAPI Communities Can Uniquely Address the Climate Crisis

Asian American Christians bring particular gifts and perspective that can help heal our planet. 

By Liuan Huska

I

n late August 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall over Houston and stayed for a while. Over four days it poured as much as forty inches of rain on the land. The streets in my Southeast Texas hometown, where my parents and siblings still live, flooded. Water crept nearer to their house. But then the rain subsided, the water started draining, and they breathed relief.

And then—even as the hurricane moved on elsewhere as a tropical depression—the waters started to rise again. In the wee hours of a September morning, water poured under my family’s front door. They grabbed a few belongings and pillows, and were rescued by boat.

In the end, their house was submerged for days in over four feet of water.

Rain had filled the Sam Rayburn reservoir, about eighty miles north of where my family lives. Engineers had decided to release some of the water to prevent the dam from bursting and causing greater damage. But my hometown and other communities along one branch of the Neches River took the hit, becoming, as my high school English teacher put it, part of the river.

In September 2019, Hurricane Imelda brought more flooding to Southeast Texas, and just this August, my family was again bracing for Hurricane Laura, the tenth-strongest hurricane by windspeed to hit the United States on record. Catastrophic storms that supposedly happen every hundred or even thousand years in a community are now happening annually.

My family is part of a growing number of people whose lives have been severely disrupted by climate change. In addition to increasingly fierce hurricanes, this year we’ve witnessed other effects: one of the hottest summers on record, a derecho (a line of severe thunderstorms) damaging crops and infrastructure through the Midwest, and devastating wildfires on the West Coast that have burned areas in California equivalent to the state of New Jersey.

Our global climate has warmed one degree Celsius since preindustrial times. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in 2018 that we have as little as twelve years to slash carbon emissions by 45 percent to cap global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and avoid the most devastating effects.

Yet even as communities throughout the world are already experiencing the devastation and experts use words such as “climate emergency” and say it’s time to panic, many citizens continue to go about their business as usual.

When my second son was born in 2016, I joined the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a grassroots organization pushing for policy-level solutions, including asking legislators to pass a carbon fee on upstream emissions sources—mines, wells, ports of entry—and return the fee as a dividend to households. I was beginning to realize that individual efforts, such as driving a fuel-efficient car or cutting household energy use, would only go so far. Broader level action across communities and through policy was needed.

My journey toward becoming politically active beyond voting has taken years. In my birth country, China, most people don’t speak up. The Chinese Communist Party monopolizes political power, appointing the president and other top positions as well as controlling the People’s Liberation Army.

My parents and I emigrated to the US when I was three, but as I have returned to China to visit relatives and travel, my sense is this: to have a chance at a good life, Chinese citizens keep their heads down and focus on taking care of their own. When it comes to larger issues like the plastic crisis or climate change, individuals can do pitifully little, so they do their best to carve out their little corner (or high-rise unit, in the case of most Chinese) of cleanliness, comfort, and health.

My parents brought this mentality with us to the US. Environmental activists Sarah and Jonathan Nahar, in an article for Geez Magazine, describe it as “resigned pragmatism.” The Nahars have worked throughout the Mekong watershed in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, which was doused with Agent Orange-Dioxin and napalm by US armed forces during the Vietnam War. Unthinkable and ongoing war atrocities (including birth defects caused by the chemical warfare) and violent regimes (such as Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge) “have created a culture of not speaking out or working together.” People switch into survival mode, which prioritizes short-term individual gains over the slow work of bridge-building that would benefit more of us in the long-term. “It’s hard to say NO to exploitative economic help and YES to cooperative ways of operating,” the Nahars write.

The same could be said of many immigrant communities in the United States, including Asian American ones. Some of us bring our histories from other countries where family members had no political voice and learned to hunker down and survive. Here in the United States, many members of our communities are busy trying to climb the economic ladder and may not see issues such as climate change as urgent, or even something they can do anything about. Some of us have learned that respectable people don’t get into trouble, including the trouble that comes with activism.

Climate change disproportionately impacts people of color and immigrant communities, which are lesser resourced than many white communities and tend to live in urban “heat islands.” Yet spaces of environmental advocacy, said environmental scientist Andrea Chu, have often been “really white and rather alienating” to other identities.

As a 1.5-generation immigrant, I can imagine why. The political traumas passed down over generations from our countries of origin play a role, keeping us from speaking out. But here in the United States we have faced other kinds of disempowerment, including hate crimes and voter discrimination. Asian Americans have been stereotyped as the “model minority,” and part of this stereotype is our submissiveness, our willingness to go along with the system instead of fighting against the injustices within it.

As Asian American Christians, we have some unique resources that empower us to recover our voices and address climate change.

I learned from my upbringing that duty to family is first, but Jesus calls us to extend our vision of family beyond blood relatives, to “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matthew 12:50, NIV). In this age of coronavirus and climate crisis, we can see our interconnectedness—our siblinghood—with those in far-flung places, and even with other living members of our ecosystem, including trees that supply oxygen and bees that pollinate crops. Creation joins us, says the apostle Paul, in waiting for liberation, groaning for redemption (Romans 8:19-23). We can draw on the rich theological resources of creation, incarnation, and resurrection—which affirm the value of the physical world and our role as stewards—to advocate for those most affected by climate disruptions and even the natural world because we are related.

Even with these theological resources, our faith is often laced with dualisms carried over from Western philosophy: spirit vs. body, male vs. female, humans vs. nature, individual vs. group. Perhaps this binary way of thinking is precisely what has led to our current climate crisis; we have been unable to see the whole over the parts. We are unable to see, as the poet Li-Young Lee said, that “there is just the one body—nothing is unrelated to the whole.” As Asian American Christians, we can begin to excavate some of the wisdom from our ancestral philosophical traditions, recognizing that God has shone the light of his truth on all cultures through his general revelation. Challenging the idea of individual first, (nuclear) family first, or “America first,” we can explore how we are formed in relationship and interdependent with many unseen others.

As Asian Americans, we know what it is to live in the hyphen, the tension between different identities that could be conflicting. We’ve done the hard work of fusion, of learning “both-and” rather than “either-or.” We also know the power of alliance building, of reaching across ethnic boundaries to organize those who have marginalized experiences in the United States.

And as Christians, we stand on our adoption into the family of God. We know we have a calling, a voice in the conversation, becomes Jesus invites us to his table. As we take in his body and blood, we start to recognize our own bodies as sacred. Through the work of the spirit, we then start to recognize other bodies also as sacred—Black bodies, indigenous bodies, bodies of water, trees, and the body of the earth—which is rapidly warming in ways that are harmful to all life on this planet.

We have the resources we need to face this climate emergency. God has empowered us to do this work. Let’s take a deep breath and dive in.

Photo by Ray Bilcliff from Pexels

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Liuan Huska is the author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness, releasing in December with InterVarsity Press. As a freelance writer she has written for publications including Christianity Today, Sojourners, The Christian Century, Geez, and Hyphen. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and three little boys. Visit her website or connect with her on Twitter.