February 18, 2014

Climate Risk and Communion

Note: The application deadline for ECF's Fellowship Partners Program is March 14, 2014. 

In his 2013 application to the Fellowship Partners Program, P. Joshua Griffin (Griff) noted that “Even within the Episcopal Church, environmental risks and benefits are experienced differently across differences of race, culture, and social class. For some of us, climate change seems far off – something we fear for the sake of our children and grandchildren. Yet for others, climatic risk is already the context for daily life and worship.” Griff’s 2013 ECF Fellowship supports his dissertation research as a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthopology at the University of Washington. Griff discusses his project - a multi-sited approach to the lived experience of climate change - in the following video interview. 


More about the Rev. P. Joshua Griffin:

Griff is a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington, and serves as a priest associate of St. David of Wales Episcopal Church in Portland, OR. His coursework focuses on environmental anthropology, political ecology, environmental justice, social movements, and climate change.

Over the next two years of Griff’s dissertation research, Griff will accompany climate scientists, geologists, and oceanographers into the field, studying the ways in which they measure and understand climate change. He will also interview climate justice activists and organizers across the United States about their ‘theory of change.” Finally, Griff will continue his work in collaboration with the Iñupiaq community of Kivalina off the Northwest Coast of Alaska. Home to Kivalina Episcopal Church (Diocese of Alaska), this village of 400 persons is one of a dozen culturally distinct Native communities in the region now facing an existential threat from the impacts of global warming. Global warming has led to increasing flooding, rapid erosion, and destructive tidal surge on Kivalina, and so Griff will be working collaboratively to write an environmental history of the village as they undergo the complex challenge of relocating.

From 2009-2011, Griff served as Environmental Justice Missioner for the Diocese of California, where he co-founded the Free Farm, created the Episcopal Community Services' Sanctuary Shelter Garden in San Francisco, and organized the Episcopal-Anglican Climate Justice Gathering in the Dominican Republic.