**1. Background and Methods**

One day in the summer, I walked down the street in my Boston home, where smoke filled the sky and burned my eyes. The smoke had traveled here from Canada and the Western United States, where wildfires were storming across the land. Smoke and fire debris had etched the skies across North America, and the western fires continued to break records in terms of heat produced and land destroyed. A few days later, the Dixie Fire in Northern California was depositing smoke and ash in a continual flow within a 1000 mile radius of its flames. Weeks later, the western fires had further heightened the vulnerability of the atmosphere to extreme weather conditions, including raging rains and floods, and culminating ye<sup>t</sup> again in mud slides and radical damage to soil, clean water, hillsides, forests, habitats for animals, and plants. As fires speed deforestation across the world, rising temperatures increase drought conditions, and dramatic increases of evaporation escalate catastrophic rainfalls, some of which are in the very regions where the heat has risen and forests and foliage have dramatically decreased, and some many miles away. Compound events continue to rise.

We in North America are facing ecological crisis on a massive scale, as are lands and peoples across the world. On our shared continent, we face crises of water and habitats as well as forests aflame, intensifying storms, and dramatic changes in temperatures and rain and snow falls. Consider the rivers that no longer provide habitat for salmon and other fish, the aquifers that have diminished or disappeared, the land that has been stripped of its nutrients in the quest for industrialization and corporate and individual profit, and the habitat networks that have been diminished and separated by industrial or human development so that animals and plants are less and less able to travel between habitats in

**Citation:** Moore, Mary Elizabeth. 2022. Responding to a Weeping Planet: Practical Theology as a Discipline Called by Crisis. *Religions* 13: 244. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel13030244

Academic Editors: Pamela R. McCarroll and HyeRan Kim-Cragg

Received: 31 January 2022 Accepted: 3 March 2022 Published: 11 March 2022

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changing conditions. All these issues are interconnected both physically and socially, and are well documented in international scientific studies (IPCC—Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2021; IPCC—Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2022).

A striking example is the Keystone XL (KXL) Pipeline, an extension of Keystone that was stopped after more than 10 years of struggle; it would have run through five provinces and states and through tribal lands. The southern portion of that pipeline extension had already been completed, running through two new states, as it added to the existing pipeline that already ran through eleven provinces and states, carrying tar sands oil from the borealis forest of Alberta, Canada, for conversion into flowing oil in the United States. The KXL project, if completed, would have dramatically increased the rate of tar sands extraction, destruction of the boreal forest, rate of leakage and spills (higher than for other kinds of oil), destruction of farms and habitable land, and greenhouse gases and carbon released in processes of extraction and refining. In all these escalations, the pipeline threatened to escalate the poisoning of indigenous lands and peoples. These are the same people who have been affected by other industrial development projects that have dammed and diverted rivers, leading to water shortage in some areas and flooding in others. Politically, the people most affected—indigenous communities, farmers, ranchers, and others—are rarely included in decision-making before projects are formulated, or even before projects are set in motion by industries and governments. The dangers and disasters described here represent a complex of crises that date back to the arrival of European settlers, displacement of indigenous peoples, and hundreds of decisions that benefited industry and harmed the people who live on this land, while wreaking havoc on the land itself. Innumerable activists protested the KXL crisis with words and actions and helped stop the extension from becoming a reality (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, pp. 10–24; McKibben 2013, pp. 17–44).

What is the nature of these crises, and how do they relate to practical theology? Methodologically, I will focus on the nature of crisis and then turn to the practical wisdom (phronesis) of ecological scholars and activists, theologians and philosophers, and indigenous communities as they approach earth wisdom and earth caring in their unique ways. By analyzing these sources, I will portray their shared wisdom across time, culture, and areas of expertise. Curiously, their various approaches all include some version of reflection on practices for the sake of future practice, disclosing a resonance with the work of practical theology. On the other hand, indigenous people and many of the activists reflect on practices of the entire natural world, not just human beings, thus challenging the dominant anthropomorphic focus of practical theology. The entire study illumines how diverse scholars and activists contribute to practical wisdom, or phronesis, through reflection on their unique experiences, and how they contribute to human ways of being in and with the world. In particular, the study identifies challenges, practices, and alternate worldviews that can potentially reshape practical wisdom and climate action, and it concludes with proposals for practice toward climate justice.
