SNRAS professor trains Catholics on climate change

Catholic Climate Ambassadors gathered for a training in Washington, D.C.

When the Catholic Church in the U.S. decided to train "Catholic Climate Ambassadors," the officials invited SNRAS Professor Glenn Juday to help train them.

The first training workshop hosted by the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change was held Dec. 3-5 in Washington, D.C. The workshop opened with an address by the Rev. William S. Skylstad, Bishop Emeritus of the Catholic Diocese of Spokane, Wash., and former president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Dr. Juday gave three presentations which were followed by presentations by Lucia Silecchia, Professor of Law at Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America. Prof. Silecchia is considered to be one of the leading scholars on Catholic social teaching and the environment and she was a participant in the 2007 Vatican conference on Climate Change and Development, organized by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Dr. Juday's presentations were:

• "Understanding Human Dependence on Climate: An Overview of the Science of Climate Change"
• "How Humans Are Acting as Agents of Change in the Environment, Adapting, Causing Disruptions, and Imposing New Dilemmas"
• "The Trajectory of Climate Change: Energy and Economic Issues, Demographic Realities, Information from Science to Assist Public Policy and Personal Choices"

The primary goal of the Catholic Climate Ambassadors will be to exponentially increase the reach of the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change so that many more Catholic parishioners and students, pastors, and ministers will be exposed to the teaching of the Church on environmental issues and climate change as articulated by sacred scripture, papal documents, and the U.S. Catholic bishops. In addition the speakers will promote the Catholic Climate Covenant and St. Francis Pledge as a key tool enabling Catholics to live out their call to be stewards of God’s creation.

The training programs enabled participants to gain a familiarity with Catholic teaching on the environment as a whole and climate change as a subset and key example, the basic outlines of the science behind climate change, a comfort level with their own ability to convey key themes in presentations to Catholic audiences, and a plan of action to ensure that the expectations of the participants as leaders on this issue are met.

The approach for conveying science and theology to trainees was done in an integral way by weaving together illustrative stories with science, theology, and answering potential “tough questions.” The theme of stewardship was incorporated, a theme that is bigger than just climate change and in many ways the linchpin of the Catholic approach.

Dr. Juday said he agreed to do the training because he is committed to the land grant mission to develop and apply the results of research on natural resource issues by working with the public and constituencies that ask for specific technical assistance.

"During the 30 years I have been professionally involved in the climate change issue, I have conducted activities with diverse groups including resource administrators, elected public officials, news media, energy industries, and environmental organizations," Juday said. "I have done a few projects with local religious and interfaith groups, and I saw this opportunity as a natural evolution of my work in general."

He continued:

"The climate change issue came to the attention of the public as a scientific matter. It quickly moved on to the public policy agenda, although with limited success to date partly, I believe, because the social resources to address the moral and ethical dimensions of the problem are only weakly developed. The Catholic Church is one of the major moral opinion-shaping organizations in the US and has gradually engaged on the issue. The Catholic Church claims as members about 20 percent of the US population, organized into 195 archdioceses and dioceses. The Catholic Church provides elementary and high school education to 2,283,000 students, and operates 234 colleges and universities, which together educate about 795,000 students.

Working with the Catholic Church has some practical advantages in a scholarly and policy context. Catholic moral teachings and principles (not particular policy prescriptions) are specifically stated, including a recent universal compendium of social teachings. There is a body of Catholic teaching to interact with and tools to explore and develop ideas. This contrasts with a great deal of American religious culture, in which religious denominations are numerous and the individual members more often tend to make multiple and sometimes non-compatible judgments on important moral/social matters without recognizing a universal standard. While there are great strengths to the individualistic American tradition (zeal, intellectual ferment, and creativity), making a determination of what is or is not a compatible proposition in moral/ethical matters is more difficult.

While fundamental Catholic moral teachings are offered as immutable (not subject to the possibility of change), they are expressed in ways or forms that represent development over many centuries, based on prayer and reflection and general intellectual development. The time seems to have come when this large institution is moving on the issue of environmental stewardship in general, with climate change as a particular case. Both Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have written and taught directly on these matters in a serious way, and with some sense of urgency for action by Catholics in their lives and by society in general. The Church wants to be guided and updated on the science.

At a personal level, I have always been interested in questions at the intersection of science and faith. A few years ago I was invited to give a UAF campus-wide lecture by the Darwin Society and Socratic Society. It was titled: “Faith and Reason - the two wings by which the intellect ascends,” a direct incorporation of the opening of Fides et Ratio, the Encyclical Letter by Prof. Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II). In researching the talk, it was easy for me to find great men of science (e.g. Albert Einstein) who readily acknowledge the dependence of the entire structure of science on faith/belief/assumption, with the only real issue being what specific form that takes. I have always been confused by the belief that there is a fundamental incompatibility between reason and traditional Judeo-Christian faith, and so I generally welcome the opportunity to explore the topic in more depth.

Finally, the historical record indicates that members of Catholic Church have been institution builders, with decisive roles in inventing the university, hospital, modern law, and other institutions. While nothing so momentous may emerge from the Catholic Church’s attention to this issue, you never know with those folks, so it’s interesting to see what’s going on."

A second training workshop is scheduled for March 2011 at Santa Clara University in California. Dr. Juday will again be the scientific presenter and the theological respondent will be Keith Douglass Warner, a Franciscan friar and coordinator of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara.

Juday (pictured above) is a professor of forest ecology and director of the Tree Ring Laboratory in the School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he has worked since 1981. He received his B.S. in 1972 in forest management from Purdue University, and his PhD in 1976, in plant ecology from Oregon State University. He completed a Rockefeller Foundation post-doctoral fellowship in environmental affairs, 1976-1977, and was on assignment in the USDA Forest Service at the Institute of Northern Forestry in Fairbanks from 1977-1981. Dr. Juday served as president of the Natural Areas Association from 1985 through 1988, and completed a sabbatical in the headquarters of The Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Va., in 1988.

Dr Juday is a senior investigator in the NSF-supported Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research site in central Alaska. His research specialties include climate change, tree-ring studies, biodiversity and forest management, wilderness management, and forest development following fire. He has extensive field experience across southeast and coastal southcentral Alaska, where he identified and documented more than 70 sites as proposed Research Natural Areas in the Tongass and Chugach National forests and Glacier Bay National Park. Dr. Juday has also proposed and documented nearly 30 Research Natural Areas on BLM Public Lands and the Tanana Valley State Forest in northern Alaska. He has collected tree ring samples from over 3,500 trees on more than 200 sites across Alaska.

Dr. Juday was the lead author of the chapter on Forests, Land Management ,and Agriculture (PDF) of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Dr. Juday has served as science advisor for several television programs on climate warming, including the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers. He has briefed and led trips for several member of Congress, including presidential candidates of both parties and transition staff. Dr. Juday was recognized for outstanding accomplishments as chairman of Forest Ecology Working Group of the Society of American Foresters in 2000. He is the author of 40 scientific peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters including Nature, Climatic Change, Global Change Biology, Forest Ecology and Management, and Canadian Journal of Forest Research. He has book chapters published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics. Dr. Juday is the author of a 2009 career retrospective on the evolution of understanding of the climate change issue in the NSF publication Witness the Arctic.