A01=Susannah Crockford
anthropologist
anthropology
apocalypse
Author_Susannah Crockford
belief
catastrophe
catastrophic
Category=JBSR
Category=QRM
Category=QRMB3
Category=QRVG
christian
discourse
ecology
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
extinct
extrac
forthcoming
global
left
meditation
messiah
millenarian
original
progressive
prophecy
prophet
rebellion
revelation
rhetoric
sacrifice
sin
sustainability
sustainable
warming
Product details
- ISBN 9780226849805
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 10 Jul 2026
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A moving study of how religion shapes Western climate discourse.
Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why?
In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together.
Our ecological system is disturbed, and with it, every other system we’ve built to inhabit it. We do not face inevitable destruction, yet many of us cannot conceive of climate change as anything but the end of the world, an apocalypse with all its biblical trappings. Why?
In A Perturbed System, anthropologist Susannah Crockford argues that we must understand the climate emergency as a spiritual crisis, a result of Christian colonialism that we (religious or not) still struggle to describe without religious language. Climate discourse in the United States and northern Europe, Crockford shows, is framed by the same theological motifs that drove extraction, including ideas about prophecy, mediation, sacrifice, original sin, cult, messiah, and apocalypse. By listening to people on the edge of the crisis, A Perturbed System reveals a world in transition, what happens when worlds end—ecologically, socially, politically, and personally—and how we might live through these endings together.
Susannah Crockford is a lecturer at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Ripples of the Universe: Spirituality in Sedona, Arizona, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
