THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT?

The natural world is constantly changing through organic cycles of growth, death and regeneration, but it is also being inexorably changed by the humans that inhabit it and enjoy its resources. Every age has its own notion of ‘the end of the world’. Our current climate crisis and planetary emergency seems particularly urgent, given the warnings issued by multiple scientific and political bodies about the dire consequences of failing to halt global heating now. But is this sense of exceptionalism new, given that the end of the world has often been thought to be nigh? And how do we know that the order of change in the natural world is now critical? Hosted by the Cambridge Inter-Faith Programme, three speakers from the Divinity Faculty - Hjördis Becker-Lindenthal, Simone Kotva, and Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe - will discuss how different thinkers from antiquity to today have conceptualised the idea of a dying world in theological terms, and will explore the range of ways in which they have linked this phenomenon to human activity. Whether the cause of planetary death is a punishment sent from God for human sins, or a self-wrought disaster brought on by heedless consumption, the incremental contributions of billions of humans to the end of the world poses an enormous challenge to our moral imaginations.