chp2: Flannery's criticisms of climate apocalypse

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@@ -198,6 +198,41 @@ catastrophism is that by leaning on 'Anthropocene' discourses, green rhetors
 flatten out social relationships. This, say the critics, is the death of all
 genuine politics. \[EXAMPLES\]
 
+For Frances Flannery, Professor Emerita of Religion at James Madison University,
+the upshot of all this is that 'We Must Stop Saying "Climate Apocalypse"'
+[@flannery-2024].
+
+Flannery emphasises that in popular imagination, 'apocalypse' signifies nothing
+more than the end of the world, ignoring the world-creating aspects of biblical
+apocalypses [@flannery-2024, p. 209]. This may be a legacy of Cold-War era
+nuclear rhetoric and science fiction, which re-purposed the symbol 'apocalypse'
+to describe the consequences of a nuclear war, while deliberately stripping the
+disaster of any redemptive afterward [@wojcik-end-of-the-world, p. 1]. Thus, she
+argues, the result of raising the threat of a 'climate apocalypse' is to 'create
+passivity rather than spur on quick and cooperative climate action' and inspire
+mass climate anxiety. Such a fatalist narrative can also imply that human action
+is irrelevant, or encourage audiences to put their hope in 'savior figures such
+as inventors, scientists, or governments who might rescue humanity in the nick
+of time.' [@flannery-2024, p. 210]
+
+Flannery also adds a couple further reasons why apocalypse in particular, apart
+from its connotations of catastrophe, might be an unhelpful symbol to apply to
+climate change. For one, if millenialist Christians, who are politically
+influential in places such as the United States and the Congo which are
+significant for the global climate, are persuaded that climate change is a 'sign
+of the times,' there's a risk that they will welcome climate change instead of
+fighting it.
+
+For another, she notes that in the Apocalypse of St John, the wicked are
+punished and the righteous vindicated. Meanwhile, in the climate case, it is
+people living in the Global South who are expected to suffer the most from
+climate change. Thus, telling a narrative of 'climate apocalypse' from the
+Global North suggests that people living in the Global North are the suffering
+righteous who will be vindicated, and those in the Global South the wicked who
+will be punished. But, in Flannery's view, this flips the script on the
+historical facts, which show that climate change is if anything a result of the
+'wickedness' of those living in the Global North.
+
 In fact, the Apocalypse of St John is very different from catastrophism.
 
 For St John, there is no impending catastrophe that his audience can avert. The