In this episode I speak with Ross Kenyon former VP of Strategy at Nori, a carbon removal marketplace that recently shut down. We explore his journey from political philosophy to carbon removal, and discuss:
How his humanities background shaped his approach to climate work, bringing a generalist perspective focused on questioning assumptions.
His engagement with Christianity through Tolstoy's radical interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, while balancing ideals with family life.
Why attributing ecological degradation to Christianity's concept of "dominion" oversimplifies both religious teaching and historical causation.
The complex tension between altruistic missions and profit motives in scaling climate solutions within capitalism.
His view that climate change will likely increase global conflict and migration rather than cooperation, driving his urgency beyond environmental concerns.
The importance of acknowledging human imperfection in climate work, advocating for pragmatic engagement with high-emitting industries.
How his carbon removal experience balanced skepticism of techno-optimism with recognition that technological solutions may be necessary given human nature.
David Valerio: Howdy! My name is David Valerio and this is Discern Earth, the podcast where I ask people who work in nature and climate about why they do what they do. Today I have my friend Ross Kenyon on. Ross is a carbon removal enthusiast with a background in political philosophy, has done some podcasts himself, and we're going to be talking about a lot of very interesting topics today that I won't give you any spoilers about. I'll hand it over to Ross for him to introduce himself a little bit more before we dig into it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I'm unemployed. Which is an interesting experience given that it’s for the first time in seven years. I was one of the co-founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace. Nori worked primarily with farmers, helping them transition to regenerative agricultural practices both for the carbon removal benefit and for the ecosystem benefits that come along with that.1 And I'm looking for my next gig. I led creative and marketing there. I led strategy there at the last couple of years so my departing title was VP of Strategy where I worked on a lot of the big questions. I see a lot of continuity between my work with ideas and podcasting and strategy. If you are looking for a career move and you come from the humanities, you should just style yourself a strategist and add some of those skills because being broad-minded in that way could help you. Also it looks better on a job application.
David Valerio: Amazing. I love that tip about just making yourself a strategist. I was thinking about that for myself. I have a background in the sciences, but strategy folks sound like they get to do a bunch of cool different things. So to start off with, given that you've been working on carbon removal the past seven years, I want to know why you care about it. How did you get into it? What motivated you? Was there anything particularly spiritual, has there been a religious inclination to your work on environmental stuff?
Ross Kenyon: I knew this question was coming, so I stared at it for the longest time. But no, there wasn't. I think my involvement in carbon removal is a good reminder of how contingent one's life is. There have been many things that have happened in my life, I'm 36, that seem fatalistic, seem random. If you're Christian, maybe it's a Holy Spirit moment. If you're not it's just entropy, chaos, randomness. I don't know. But I never would have predicted I would have worked in an environmental field, let alone carbon removal. And even when we started in carbon removal, it was so early in that space. I mean, there's still the great big pantheon of early carbon removal leaders, but there wasn't really a lot of business activity happening in there. It was Carbon Engineering and a couple of others. It was closer to geoengineering in that fringe climate space when we started, and now it's totally a mainstream activity with lots of startups and VC activity and PE involvement and stuff like that.
I've been interviewing a lot, and I have an idea for the kinds of jobs I might be well suited for, but I've been telling people that I'm trying to leave a little room for benign chaos to find me. Because there's probably something I'd be good at doing that I don't even know about yet, and I don't want to be so prescriptive that I close myself off from that. So I would advise anyone listening, you might be invited into some environmental field for reasons outside of faith, outside of logic, outside of anything, it's just the best opportunity that presents itself to you. You are invited in and you should go with it. At least in some cases you should go with it.
David Valerio: Amazing. And it's funny that I asked that question. I was literally talking about this with my wife the other day, this narrativization that we are forced to do as part of job interviews in particular. Like explain how you got into the field and what your motivations are and all these things. Whereas I had the same experience of getting into nature-based solutions to climate change broadly. I was studying oceanography, pursuing my PhD. Mastered out because I didn't want to do academia anymore. I had no idea what I was gonna do. But a professor of mine just happened to be starting up a new carbon credit registry and I got in. Whereas when you're asked questions like this, you have to somehow say, “Oh, yeah, you know, this was my plan all along.” When in reality, who the heck actually knows? So I love that answer. Given that this was sort of a random path running through a chaotic universe that led you to carbon removal, while your background's in political philosophy, I want to understand how that shapes your work specifically within carbon removal? And how does that make you different from other people who are in the space, given that you come from this humanities background?
Ross Kenyon: I hope it differentiates me in a positive way. I'm just a very broad, active learner. I think pretty much everything is interesting. I got into the humanities pretty hard, primarily through politics and political philosophy, but since this transitional period of my life I've become obsessed with math. Things like Euler's number. I'm like, how does this exist? Like why? And math has been blowing my mind lately. Everything's interesting. And I think that's probably good work advice that you could probably find your way into anything being fascinating, if you just find the right point to strike to get into it. For me, that's oftentimes, I need to know how did this come about? Like, why do some of these irrational numbers exist? And what even is a number anyways? And go back to Euclid. Like, okay, so there's this pure math and it exists in this plane that is not accessible to us. It's sort of purely deductive reasoning that helps us understand these concepts. I don't know. I've just been tripping myself on that lately. And it turns out that all the nonsense I just spewed can turn you into a strategist if you have enough bravado, where you just want to be able to make connections between disparate things.
Many people you'll work with in carbon removal or elsewhere, they are specialists and they're trained in depth rather than breadth. And if you attempt to be a leader in any capacity, being somewhat of a generalist is a good idea. So I have a background in filmmaking and I concluded my time doing filmmaking, writing, and producing. And as part of my training and being a producer, my goal was to be on set and to work in pretty much every department that I could possibly work in, because I worked with producers who skip those steps and they have no idea what they're asking people to do. They don't know how to lead people like that. They don't know how to not drive them absolutely up a wall. And I think generalists in a space like this, even though it feels STEMy, it feels very sciency. What do I know? I'm just some sort of humanities. I have a history degree. What am I even doing in carbon removal? I think that can actually make you a really smart, thoughtful person that can see things outside of what everyone else thinks, because if people all have the same training and they believe the same things, they all broadly end up in the same conclusions. And sometimes that means they're clustered around the right answers, but not always. Sometimes they will all share the same blind spots and it'll be a blind leading the blind thing, they're both going to fall in a ditch kind of thing, and it doesn't have to be that way. And that's the role I think of the generalist, the strategist, the leader. That if you're good at it, that is potentially what you can do, or at least help do.
David Valerio: That's a great answer, and I completely agree that it's very important, especially in climate. For generalists, humanities, maybe that's something we can talk about, whether humanities people are more likely to be generalist and or ask those why and how questions more deeply than perhaps the STEM folks out there, myself being one of them. But given how complex climate is as a topic to address and that it literally touches every part of the human economy and the entire Earth's ecology, it seems to me that we need to have a lot of very different approaches to thinking about how to address this problem and even framing what the problem is that we're trying to solve. Whereas now in the year 2024, in carbon, there's a lot of sort of groupthink around, “Here's the thing we need to do.” The what and the how immediately is thrown out there in terms of “Here's how we need to do this. Here's what we need to do.” But that's just one path among many into the future. So I think skillsets like that you have, and I think I have, if anything, they're more important in this industry than perhaps any other that's out there because it's not as established and the future is so uncertain for this kind of deal that we need more brains like that, if you know what I mean.
Ross Kenyon: I think so. Both because it's self serving and I think it's inherently true, or at least I hope it is. There's certainly cases though where I've had to polish other types of skills, or I feel like I've been deficient in some way, and had to play catch up. But I think overall it's a good approach. Cause people always try to scare you with humanities degrees too. If you earned a degree in history or English or philosophy, I'm sure one's parents probably told you how terrible of a decision that was and "I can't wait to get a job at the philosophy factory." Asking good questions is very valuable and I often respect that of people more than just having the right answers because there's a lot of ego tied up in having the right answers. Being able to ask the right questions, I often respect a lot more. I wish there was just more of that because I don't really feel like I have a lot of finite fixed beliefs about a lot of things. Which makes me a sort of bad dogmatist, if we're going to talk about religion. At least in business, it can be very good in the right kinds of roles.
David Valerio: Absolutely, yeah, and I think that asking why is something that I've come to appreciate even more as a very big skillset. And I'm trying to get better at it. You mentioned earlier about economics and history folks. I was one of those people that was taken off that path for the exact reason you were laying out. Like I wanted to do economics and history going in undergrad. But my dad was like, “Get a job.” And I was like, “Okay, cool. I'll do that.” Got into science and started in chemical engineering. Hated that. Got into geology, which is like history writ large. But by nature, I'm more of this sort of, I don't even know what kind of characteristics you would ascribe people who are attracted to humanities, broad thinking. I'm trying to be like one of those like the men of science of the 19th century, who's interested in a lot of things and knows a lot about a lot of different things, but is not tied to any particular area. But I think it's interesting, for me at least, to like have this balance of the technical skills, but then also the broader philosophical orientation, just as a person. Because it means I can sort of talk both languages to the people that are super in on little things and then also very broad on things. I wanted to actually go back, pull back on a thread that we had talked about earlier, you'd mentioned sort of this history being something that is unpredictable, personal histories, oh, I have no idea how I actually got here going forward thing. I'm sure you've read War and Peace by Tolstoy.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, I love it. Yeah, several times, yeah.
David Valerio: One of my favorite books. The whole fourth part of whatever version of the book is basically in my view just like historiography, philosophy of history, right? And he's anticipating complexity theory in the nineties and he's bashing this sort of great man theory of history. I think that having that view of the world breaks you out of the approach where you think, “Oh, we have all the answers.” This is why you need to open up your possibility space by asking a bunch of why questions, because history is not determined. Projecting into the future, with things like climate, is much more complicated than that. And the reason I bring up Tolstoy is because he had a religious philosophy. That was a really big deal to me and a lot of it was based on taking literally the Sermon on the Mount. That's a lot there. There's not even a question there, but perhaps you could reflect on it and sort of give your own ideas.
Ross Kenyon: It's okay, you pretty much pulled something together that was custom crafted for my brain to enjoy. War and Peace is great. His thoughts on Napoleon and whether the same things would have happened in history just because the broad currents of history would have pushed someone into that role is sort of a really fun exaggeration of the debunking of the great man theory of history. It's almost like the mirror image of it. It's like personality doesn't matter. It's all forces that are acted upon individuals. Which is weird because Tolstoy is also a great celebrator of individual conscience and the beauty of individual lives, and he renders them with such care. But at the same time, he almost seemingly says it doesn't even seem to matter because we're all just sort of actors being pushed along in history, too. So I wonder how he might synthesize those two broad currents of his literature and his thinking on history. I've loved his writing on aesthetics and on religion. But you're sort of in a weird little niche yourself as a Byzantine Rite Catholic and Tolstoy very prominently fought with the Orthodox Church. I doubt Catholics like him very much either. He made a huge impression on me. I could just go and start talking about why he was like a big influence that got me thinking about Christianity again for the first time as an adult. Or I can just pause cause I've already given you a lot.
David Valerio: No, please. I literally have the same story in terms of Tolstoy getting me interested in Christianity, but I want to hear yours first.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if you and I have parallel stories because game recognizes game. I've revisited the Gospel several times. I was raised Catholic and then moved to Arizona and my family went to sort of evangelical, Congregationalist churches, a couple of them. And that sort of turned me off. I didn't really love it. To be fair, I really didn't like going to Mass as a kid. I thought it was pretty boring. I think Mass in general is pretty boring for kids (if there's kids out there who got a lot out of Mass I'd love to hear from them) but it certainly was not me. I remember reading the Gospels in college and then later and every time I'll revisit them, it's so striking to me how radical they are and how much it asks of you. I think there's some pop-cultural version of Jesus that is so focused on forgiveness and so focused on grace, but he's actually very moody. There's a great Nick Cave introduction to the Gospel of Mark that I love where he talks about how Jesus comes across as kind of truculent, kind of fighty. The pop cultural version of Jesus is very tolerant and understanding. And then realizing all of the stories that spoke to me so brutally, especially... if you're reading the Gospels and you're not super familiar with them, you're like, “Love it. This is great. I can do all this.” And then there's all these stories about, oh, a guy says, “I've kept these covenants since my youth, what else can I do?” “Oh, you know, sell all your stuff and give it to the poor.” He goes, “Oh crap. Do I really have to do that?” There's all this invocation to pick up your cross and follow me. And it involves so much sacrifice. And can you even live a non-celibate life and be a Christian? I mean, Paul tries to deal with this later, but at least if you're reading Jesus's words himself it doesn't really seem like that's his first choice for you to live a good life. And that sort of explains the Shakers and people who were celibate that came after that. I just loved how strict it was and how beautiful it was in that way, but it always scares me reading it. Cause I'm in the worst position as someone who's sympathetic and a Christian where, “He who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is not worthy of the Kingdom of God.”2 I'm like, “Ah, that's me!” I'm the person that's in the literal worst spot. The person who hasn't heard anything, that's a relatively safe position. The person who acknowledges that they're a sinner and is like really trying, but the person who's like a foot in both camp and kind of thinking about it. I don't know how many instances in the Gospels there are of people like that who are castigated for that, but it is several and that always freaks me out some.
David Valerio: I think you're right that we have very similar paths in this way. As I mentioned, I've read almost all of Tolstoy's work, not his like diaries and stuff, but like his short stories and novels. And I think I've always been a Russophile in some ways. I don't know why. I have a secret take that Mexicans and Russians are very similar, in terms of like both historically being utterly, just constantly ground down, the peasantry, right? And there's a sense of stoicism and drinking, partying. This kind of like radical, I don't even know what it is. Just like lust for life, but then also utter depression that I very much sympathize with. And so I was reading Tolstoy and read his literature first, then moved on to his religious philosophy because I loved the stuff that Tolstoy was writing about in his literature. But then he basically disavowed all of his literature and started writing this religious philosophy stuff, right? And I would say the key message I took away from Tolstoy's religious philosophy was to take the Sermon on the Mount literally. What you were talking about, the utter radicality of it. Like I think in one of his books, I think it's The Kingdom of God is Within You, he says, “If you want to be a Christian, go and read the Sermon on the Mount as if you've never heard any of the stories before, you've never read it, you don't know the pop culture Jesus that you were referring to, just go read it and see what happens if you try to live your life that way.” So I read the Sermon on the Mount, and it amazed me with what you were saying, the radicality. Like, I was into anarchism before that, sort of philosophical anarchism, read a bunch of histories of it, read various writers, which is probably how I initially got into Tolstoy anyways, and I read what Jesus was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. And I'm like this is the most radical thing that I've ever read, and I was a radical. And I guess I'm still a zealot in a lot of ways. But I started trying to do it. In particular, one of the lines that really struck me was "Give to those who would ask of thee, and of those who would take from thee turn not away."3 I was living in downtown Houston at the time, and there are a lot of homeless around. It was COVID times. So I started doing that and I sort of instrumentally saw the good fruits that were coming about, which is what Tolstoy talks about. Basically, just live this life and see it's good. My grandmother was Catholic and I'd been away from the Church for a while. The reason I ended up becoming Catholic and becoming an institutional Christian, because I knew my grandmother would come down and slap me from heaven if I dared not do it. But I took that radical approach that Tolstoy espoused for reading the Sermon on the Mount literally and applied it in my daily life. And then I was like, well, I'm going to apply this radicality to my Catholic faith. Believe what the Catholic Church believes, live the way the Catholic Church wants me to live. And having come in from a state of skepticism, I just started doing it. I was very works driven in terms of coming in, doing the things, but then going to Liturgy, imbibing all of this stuff, at some point I believed. And like you said, Tolstoy is very anti-institutional Christianity. But in my case, given my contrarianism and desire for doing radical stuff, in today's day and age it is very radical to be a devout Catholic. That's what really got me into it.
Ross Kenyon: I love that you outflanked Tolstoy there. I'm pretty sure I took the same advice because The Kingdom of God is Within You made a huge impression on me, I think in my earlier mid-20s when I first read it. And yeah, I think there's something about the Bible that, it just seems like a stinky old dusty book. And if you do read it, some of it, with fresh eyes, the Sermon on the Mount especially. Like, you know, the lilies don't toil nor spin kind of deal, like you're supposed to be that trusting that you will be taken care of, and not be planning for tomorrow and giving away your things. I also think that forgiving seventy times seven is just a ridiculous standard to be. Like, wow, what would it mean to behave in this way? And if this is what is expected of me, I'm supposed to be perfect? Wow like, I understand why forgiveness is such a key part of this because the standard is basically—the goal is to become a saint. I forget who said it. Maybe it was, was it Dorothy Day or someone said the only real tragedy in life is the failure to become a saint.4 It could be Dostoevsky or something too. You can just choose someone who's vaguely Christian and you're a decent chance of hitting it. And then you compare that with, you know, we're generationally not that dissimilar and the Christianity that came of age during, had sort of that Joel Osteen kind of vibe to it. It was sort of evangelical and wealthy mega-churches. And you read the Sermon on the Mount, you're like I don't really get what the connection between these two activities are. Because one of these these things is like, you're barely able to get married under some of this, seemingly, unless you start reading the Epistles and then there's sort of accommodations for, okay, when can you be married and things like that. But it seems like the demands there are basically to live a life of monkhood, of poverty, of chastity, of trust in God. And that is not for the average person and certainly not for the average family person. Tolstoy obviously gets mad though at Paul. He's like, “Who is this interloper who comes along?” Cause these words are beautiful and radical and then Paul tries to wrap a bunch of stuff about what men can do, and what women can do, and how this is supposed to work. Why does Paul get to add a bunch of stuff on here after Jesus already said everything that he believed needed to be said? I've struggled with that too. I don't know how you feel reading the Epistles, but sometimes reading them. Why is this a thing here? Cause I have read the same Gospels you did. Why is this commentary added? I've never really figured that one out. And I sort of stopped asking about it, but I was going to an Anabaptist church for a while and they were more trusting of my interrogations of Paul the Apostle. But that's always rankled me a little bit. And Tolstoy, of course, hated him.
David Valerio: Yeah, he definitely talks about this distinction between, like, Pauline Christianity versus what Jesus actually said. And I also held that view before of like, I don't know, disdain for Paul? And I think, and it's not really anything intellectual that made me change. It's like I said, I decided to live as a Catholic and so I started doing the things. And then as I was reading the Scriptures with the eyes of how Catholicism reads the Scriptures, it just started to make a lot more sense to me. I can't really say there was like a particular moment where I was like, “Oh, now I get Paul is a good guy.” But now when I read Paul's Epistles, I'm just like, this stuff is amazing. And I don't really understand why. It must just be like living in the life of the Church, it changes the way that I interpret it. I also do read a lot of commentaries now. Whereas I used to just read my Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible. I read a lot of ancient Christian commentary on the Scriptures. People like St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory Nazianzen—all those kinds of guys. So I have like the historical context as well now. And I'm like, oh, this seems to align with what the Catholic view is, and these guys are the earliest Christians commenting on it. But again, I think it was mostly just like I decided to live this way and I'm going and doing it. I want to go back to that quote about, the greatest tragedy of the day is that people don't live like, say, or aren't called to be saints. I think this is a very unfortunate thing that is very true. When you see what's going on in the Gospels, you see how radical everything is. And you're like, there's no way I can do that. So people just go for the minimum, if you will. Like, I'm trying not to sin, basically. It's like, okay, here are the rules, here are the things that you're not supposed to do. Versus the center of the Christian life, from the Eastern Christian point of view, is this concept of theosis, divinization, deification. “The Son of God became man so that man might become God.”5 And in that framing of things, there's that universal call to holiness, in which it's not just for the monks, it's not just the priests. It's for laypeople, everybody is called to live this radical life of charity. And it's extremely hard, but I think maybe what holds people back is pride, actually, which is the worst sin. Which is like, I can't do this. Well, that's true, you can't do this. But God living within you and the Holy Spirit residing within our hearts, he enables us to do these things. If everybody who says that they're a Christian actually lived that way, the world would have a radically different view of what Christianity is and what it teaches by seeing the fruits of the lives of saints. I am a sinner. The first of sinners. I'm the worst. But like, that's something I'm really passionate about in terms of, like, getting into Christianity, having these sort of radical, zealot tendencies. Now it's like, oh, it's actually calling me to something really crazy to do.
Ross Kenyon: That's a beautiful thought. I definitely think the perception of Christians would be a lot different if there were more of an attempt there. I even know that to be true. Intellectually I agree with it. And still I'm like, yeah, I'm just very deeply a sinner and sure I'll go to confession and I'm right back at it the next day. And probably later that day too. I'm back to what I was doing before that. It's just a real shame to know what some humans are capable of and yet to essentially choose something worse or less ennobling for some venal desire. So it's hard. Whatever relationship between Christianity and carbon removal or environmentalism I have, I don't really like it when it's that politicized. I sort of like the Tolstoyan individualist anarchist vibe on this some too, because, there's just so much inside of my own heart that's deeply troubled. I don't know that I'm looking for a lot of beams in other people's eyes right now. I'm like, I got my hands full just inside me. So I'm not sure how to make rules for the entire planet or country or even my own street. I'm like, I'm still grappling with the nature of my own soul. I wish that was maybe a little bit more common cause that's where I'm stuck at.
David Valerio: Yeah, this is something that I very much agree with. There's a lot in the climate and environmental circles where you point the finger at everybody else and how they're ruining the world. Aa key example is the oil and gas industry, right? These guys are ruining the world. Scapegoating, if you will. Versus the realization that, hey, look, we live in a world that's run by oil and gas. And it's not to say you have to shill or anything like that, but like, it's reality that we are engaged in the system. No matter what we want to say, our personal choices do have an impact. They're not the thing that's going to change everything, but like imbibing and living out the life that you want the rest of the world to hold I think is something that is easy to not do because it's actually really easy not to actually change yourself, right? And I think that if people who engaged in this work on climate, biodiversity, whatever the major problems are, fully integrated and appreciated what we are, recognize within ourselves, that I am a broken human person. I fail all the time. I am a sinner. That would give us a lot more grace when interacting with other people in industry and recognize that the idea that there are these evil people out there that are ruining everything is an illusion. From my understanding of human nature, whatever that means, people are striving for the good in whatever way they think the good can be implemented. And so the moralism is not very practical or instrumentally valuable for people who care about these things because it just turns people off. Whereas love and charity and being friends with others and all these sorts of things, those bring people together, those bring us to—and this all sounds like really wishy washy woo woo stuff, but it's true, actually. That if we lived in a way that we want other people to live, people will probably try to follow it because they see the fruits and the beauty of your life and see that you're living the life and you're not just putting a bunch of words on LinkedIn, if you know what I'm saying.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I think this is why I value humor and questions so much because I'm sort of distrustful of people, as I mentioned earlier, who suppose themselves to have a lot of the answers and want everyone to follow them and take their word for it. I've never really been. That if you've listened much to Reversing Climate Change, which is the podcast I host, I'm not offering a lot of editorial advice on this is how things should be. A lot of it is like, I'm interested in these questions and ideas have consequences and there's tradeoffs to these ideas. And you have to weigh those things and be very thoughtful about it. I think that approach and also humor, especially when it's mocking of one's self and one's own grandiosity is good. We have a like prominent Carbon Removal Memes account that did a lot of this. I feel like bringing that self-importance down is a good way of getting the ego out of it, and allowing for there to be room for there to be grace and to have fun and be curious again. Because I think the desire to professionalize and to be so self serious, I don't think it's good. I don't think it helps us learn. I think it makes the space much more status-oriented than we want it to be. I think this can be a grand intellectual adventure for people. I'm like constantly learning. I'm interviewing for jobs right now. One of my main things, once my needs and my family's needs are met, is like, am I going to learn stuff here? Am I going to be thinking every day? Cause I love that work. And I also want to be laughing with people, but people who take it too seriously or have too much status investment in it, I think that's sort of a less Christian and damaging approach to do. I feel like putting on airs is also, as you noted, pride is not the best sin to indulge in but it's pretty hard to avoid. Especially when you're doing things that are ostensibly important.
David Valerio: Yeah, and especially when you're doing things that are ostensibly important, right? We can get into the crusader thing, like, I'm trying to save the planet. Get out of my way. You know, we're going to do X, Y, Z. Don't question me, because we're trying to do something very good. But that can lead us down really wrong paths. What if we're actually wrong? If we're wrong about what we're doing, what are the consequences of me taking such a dramatic, crusader mentality to it? It could actually have negative effects on what we really want to strive after. And so again, you can even make the instrumental arguments for this sort of Christian “don't be proud.” But the instrumental arguments I think are very strong. I want to pivot to a very different topic. What do you think about the thesis that Christianity has caused the ecological degradation that we're seeing in the world today? What is your opinion on that?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah everyone always points to dominion and Genesis for this. And I find it to be a rather lazy shorthand. I mean, granted, dominion has been used in that way, but I think of that as very much a post-hoc rationalization of what people just wanted to do. And that was an intellectual, theoretical, philosophical, spiritual tool that was at hand for them to use that was somewhat credible. I don't think you have to read Genesis in a non-stewardship oriented way. I think a lot of thoughtful Christians would agree. I've never really understood why, in the same ways that if you read or listen to some of the right wing commentators now they'll point to like William of Ockham like he's the founder of postmodernism because of his work on nominalism and that set us on the course to catastrophe and now it's all cultural Marxism. I think whenever a story like that is brought about, immediately be suspicious because that isn't really how history works. There's not one single idea that can cause that amount of consequences. And certainly it is not the only explanatory force that is out there at the same time. I think humans basically do what they want to do, and then they think up reasons for why they did it afterwards that are in line with their self-concept. I think that's true for a lot. It isn't universally true in every case, but a lot of behavior can be determined in that way, and that's fairly well backed by science as I understand it, at this point. But I think, yeah, Genesis and dominion is used like this constantly. In fact, when I hear it there now, it's like in the same way when I hear someone say discernment or discern, it's a dog whistle for their Christianity because Christians just love discernment as a concept.
David Valerio: I know I do!
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I know. It's just part of it. But in the same way, when I hear someone say dominion causes or whatever, it's sort of a dog whistle for me not wanting to pay very much attention. I think it's sloppy and it sounds smart, but it's actually not very thoughtful. The Bible is an amazing book. So take any belief in it out of it, you should read the Bible no matter what. Because it's the most important book of all time. It has influenced more people about more things than anything else by a huge margin. And just like understanding the world and history and why we live in the moral universe we do, you got to read the Bible or at least be somewhat familiar with it. But it's also a really weird and funny book too. Have you ever read Amy Jill Levine? Do you know her?
David Valerio: I have not, no. I have not.
Ross Kenyon: She's awesome. She has a bunch of Great Courses lectures, but she's a Jewish scholar of the New Testament, which as you can probably ferret out is not that common of a combination. But she has so many interesting observations about how the Bible was composed. She'll talk about things like, there's a section in Proverbs where juxtaposed one verse after another is “Do not argue with a fool because the other person won't be able to tell who's the fool and who is the wise person.” And the next line is, “Correct the fool in his foolishness so he does not persist in it.”6 And you're like, wait, so am I supposed to argue with the fool or not? That's a way of the Bible saying it takes wisdom to discern what is the right thing to do here. I'm not just offering you all of the answers. In many ways, it explains a lot of Jewish tradition too, where you have people arguing the Talmud for centuries, and that being a major part of Jewish culture, because the answers are not just given to us. There are questions that are being posed to us in a lot of these cases. Whenever someone offers just, “Genesis-dominion, therefore the world has been corrupt and we left Eden because of that.” I always think that's just very lazy and it means you probably haven't done enough of the homework and read the source material.
David Valerio: Yeah, I agree with you, which is why I asked the question, of course. I feel like it's again, this sort of finger-pointing mentality that we were talking about earlier, where it's like Christianity is the cause of all this. If we somehow get rid of Christianity, somehow the world's going to regenerate and everybody will go back to the amazing primordial animism that we're all into nowadays. Indigenous spirituality, all that kind of stuff. But like you said, it's lazy, you probably haven't actually read Genesis and haven't read about the sacramental worldview of medieval Christianity. Obviously, Christianity is tied up in the history and is at the foundation of Western civilization, whatever that means, and therefore inherently must be involved with the Industrial Revolution and all these kind of things that have led to, or supposedly have led to, the way that we treat the world nowadays. But it's kind of like correlation isn't causation. To point to, “Oh, Christianity was here, therefore Christianity caused it.” It's an easy out to again, not really think about the more fundamental questions about human nature and like what would have happened if the Industrial Revolution kicked off in China? In my view, probably the same thing. But it's interesting how quickly it's brought out. I don't know if I told you this, I'm doing a part time masters of arts in theology through my church's seminary and what I want to do for my thesis is sort of like a critical reevaluation, not specifically of that thesis, but digging into like the Early Church Fathers and trying to actually understand what their views were on the Creation and what man's responsibility is to it. We're seeing a lot of new scholarship come out in the wake of Laudato Si from Pope Francis, trying to understand what the proper Catholic orientation to creation care, another dog whistle, is. But I feel like combating that narrative is something very important. I mean, for myself as a Christian who loves nature and the Creation, but is also extremely devout. To say, no, here's why my faith actually motivates me to do the things that I do. Because God created the world, he created it good, and gave man stewardship over this creation. And like, if we're given stewardship of something, surely we don't just want to go trash it and make it terrible. It seems kind of logical to me. That's something that I'm very interested in exploring and trying to figure out how this actually ties into my regular everyday work. Like I have the spiritual motivation for what I do, but then how does my view of my faith change the actual problems that I'm solving and seeking to address? Another question I have for you. Given that you are now on the job hunt and are seeking your next thing, what are you trying to work on and why?
Ross Kenyon: I'm open to a lot. I know that we need to get carbon removal to scale and we need all the nature-based solutions that we can as well. We need more temporary sinks. We need ecological restoration. We need carbon being pumped back underground and stored in durable ways, however that might be. And I want to be a part of it. I'm not really sure. I've been thinking a lot about this where, I'm not ready for it I don't think now, but I'd like to be a CEO. I want to be involved in finding the right technical co-founder and launch something. I have a lot of experience that I think could make me pretty powerful at that, and good at it, and have it be rewarding. But I don't think I'm quite there yet. So I'm thinking maybe that'll be for the next job or the job after that. But I just need to be learning and feeling challenged and that the work is meaningful. It needs to be fun too. I think intellectual work and all of this can actually be really fun and funny and good and challenging. It doesn't have to be very serious. And I think it's also good to zoom out a little bit too. I'd like to work someplace where competition can inspire you to work harder and better, but also climate really is a pass-fail endeavor. It is a shame when I see people within carbon removal competing too strongly or being too personally invested in their status, because it is like a sideshow of a sideshow right now. I'm really hopeful it doesn't stay there. I'm really hopeful that it scales, but it is just a negligible amount in terms of ppm and the atmosphere. It does not matter currently. I really hope it doesn't stay that way and I don't think it's going to stay that way. But have you ever heard that expression, the knives are so sharp because the stakes are so small?
David Valerio: No, but it sounds very appropriate.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, carbon removal is pretty nice overall, but sometimes I'll catch a whiff of that. I'm like, ah, I don't feel like that's appropriate to this or I wish we were a little bit more collaborative in a way. I would like wherever I be to try to embody that, or maybe that's something that I can embody and try and steer wherever I end up towards cause I think there's still a lot of room for pre-competitive behavior and cooperation. I don't think we're ready for cutthroat business deals and that sort of thing. You would think with climate it would be different than everywhere else. But there's also a question like, will it ultimately be that way? I was talking to someone who works in AI. She was saying that AI used to have that pre-competitive feeling to it until the big money came. And then of course there was time for everyone to lock down and patent as much as they could and be very competitive. So maybe it's just humans respond to incentives and when it makes sense to cooperate, they will. When it doesn't, they won't. I don't even know what I'm trying to say with that, except I wish we could maintain some of that given that we're supposedly working on a problem of great import. For which your own personal interest should maybe matter less. Does that even happen? I don't know.
David Valerio: This is something actually I wanted to talk about with you, this arbitrage between saving the planet but then also making money. And how a lot of people in the industry can shift rapidly from one versus the other. This is something that I've observed, where it's like, “Hey we're trying to save the planet, don't ask too many questions about it. Give us a lot of money as well in order to do this so that I can fund myself andmake a bunch of money at some point at the end of the day.” But then also there's another side where if you ask them about, “Hey, what do you think about the potential negative environmental impacts of this project?” or “Let's actually take a step back and think more strategically about what you're doing.” There's like, “Well, hey, actually, we're just here to try to make money. We got to go, don't brush me.” I find this sort of shifting to be quite frustrating in that there's the conflation of moral crusade with climate where it’s like everybody's got to get in. We've all got to collaborate. This is a joint effort. But then at the end of the day, it often comes into that knives out thing where it's like, okay, that's something that I hold to intellectually, perhaps, but when it comes to practice I'm still at the end of the day trying to get mine. Maybe this is the naive idealist in me that's somehow still in there that wants to think that maybe humans can do something differently. But from what I've seen working in this space is that at the end of the day it's money. It would be much more appealing to me if everybody was just upfront about that. Rather than doing the arbitrage of like saving the planet, but then also making money and then shifting based on what is most instrumentally valuable to them at heart. Do you understand what I'm saying? And have you seen the same things?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I mean, I have some sympathy for the position too. I think being solely dependent upon altruism is a major potential block for getting to scale for climate action. I think being able to appeal to the more base, avaricious desires of humans and channel that behavior into pro-social ends could be really powerful. But yeah, I think some parts of it can feel a bit mercenary, and I think that's sort of a discernment moment, if you will. You have to judge when you're meeting people. Okay, like, why are they here? Some people are clearly here for the love of it and other people sense a business opportunity. And it's possible that people who don't care about the environment at all can still play a powerful role. Oh God, I'm going to go there. I've been, I've been revisiting the Lord of the Rings recently. Are you a fan? Tolkien man?
David Valerio: Yep, read it, read the books, watched the movies. Books obviously better, but yeah, I'm a big fan.
Ross Kenyon: I love it. Okay. I'm not saying that everyone who is like this is in the way that I'm about to compare them, but it's the way that Gandalf describes Gollum, where he's saying like, “He might still have a role to play. Do not wish that you could have killed him because many who live deserve death and many who die deserved life and who are you to be put in that position? He still has a role to play.” So it's possible that some of these people who literally do not care about anything besides becoming a tech unicorn might still have the biggest impact of all. Even someone like Elon Musk does not seem to be someone who has it all figured out spiritually, but it's also possible that his contributions to the EV space and climate broadly, even if it is there to serve his own Ozymandian kind of ego, still might work out fine. It's like, even if you're there to serve Mammon, but it's pointed in the right direction, I think it might be okay. I might live to eat those words, I don't know. But I'm open to the possibility of it not having to be gooey, spiritual Gaia worship or some sort of Laudato Si Christianity approach to qualify as addressing climate change sufficiently. I hope. You might disagree. Tell me if you do.
David Valerio: No, I just don't really know what the actual way to approach this is. It seems like everybody's implicit version, or not everybody, but most people's implicit version is like the green capitalist view that if we turn the economy towards addressing environmental issues, capitalism will figure it out. But there's a question of whether that's actually true or whether with shifting to renewables, EVs. I mean, you're going to be still mining and taking stuff out of the Earth. You're going to be having negative biological impacts on it. There's embodied emissions in creating this. I guess I'm very skeptical of that vision, the standard view that like just everything goes to renewables. We figure out carbon removal, everything's going to be good. And then we're not going to have environmental issues to deal with. So I think that there is something deeper that needs to be addressed, but that doesn't mean I don't think that capitalism and competition and stuff does not have a role to play. But it seems to me that the inherent question of humanity is we are a species of animals, with a spiritual nature from my perspective, and we've had a lot of energy now coming from oil and gas. And when life gets energy, we go and do things with it. We could change the way that we produce the energy, but will we stop using materials? Will we stop degrading the Earth in that way? That's something I think a lot about and I feel like most people don't really think about. It's not just an energy problem, it's a material flows problem. To date is something that I don't really hear a lot of discussion about. I'm open to capitalism playing a role and I'm open to interspiritual transformation playing a role. I'm not too hot about communism or anything like that, but that's my take on it, at least.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we even started talking about Dorothy Day who got name checked and we talked about the Catholic Worker Movement recently and I feel like that's offered a big challenge to me. That exists within climate change too. I think there's a lot of parallels with people who have a more degrowth orientation, or they're worried about material throughput, and the problem is actually population and consumption. We just can't live these lifestyles. I think there is some wishful thinking because there's an ability to make money with disagreeing with that. Because you're able to say, basically, “Imagine your life. It continues broadly the same as it has in the past, but maybe it's even better and we're all making money. Would you prefer that or to cut your income in half and go live in the Shire?” The Shire looks good to a lot of people on TV, but they're probably not keeping track of what it's like to live in a small town and be more family-oriented and most of your enjoyment is going down to the pub and like hanging in your little community. You're not traveling around the world and putting it all on Instagram or thinking about what you have to give up for that. So I think there's a strong, wishful-thinking vibe for the latter. I still hope they're right. I hope that there's a way to have energy abundance that can serve the planet and the people on it without it crashing us entirely. If for no other reason than politically, it's way more attractive. Saying that we're going to cut everyone's standard of living by quite a lot, and the things that maybe your parents did, or even your older siblings did, you're no longer going to have a chance to do because that's just no longer good for the climate. That's a recipe for political disaster. And I think any politician who really went that far would probably not last very long in that position. I think they'd be voted out. And for good reason. I mean, you saw that with the Yellow Vests in France. I'm sure you'd see that in the US if anything even came close to passing that was rigorous in that way. So basically the only way I think we have is to build our way out of it politically.
David Valerio: I agree with you. I used to hold to the degrowth view strongly. Again, being in to radical ideology, anarchism, whatever. All just ideas, frankly. I was still driving cars, flying, everything. My life was not materially changing when I held these views. And I've now come around to the view that, you know, I like driving. I like being able to fly. I like energy. I like having the lights on. I like being able to live in two places at once as I do right now. I've come around to like the energy maximalist, eco-modernist view. Not that I'm super attracted to it, but I'm like the only way through is through. Because human nature is not going to change. Am I realistically going to expect the Global South to only use renewables when oil and gas is there as the easy, energy-dense fuel that's around? I personally don't think that that's even feasible. So if that's the situation, and net-zero is a myth, what do we do then? The only way forward is through is kind of the view that I've come to. How that it plays in my own personal life is interesting. I have a house in North Dakota at the moment. North Dakota is looking good from a climate change perspective. Doing whatever I can to like help make that a better trajectory, even if it's not like my ideal world is something that I think a lot about. I know I put a hot take about net-zero not being possible. I'm curious what you think about that.
Ross Kenyon: Such a hot take. Yeah, I think you're pretty similar to me. I have sympathy for both positions too. In the same way that I'll read the Gospels and be like “Wow, this is so profound and beautiful. I'm on the team, I'm on board,” but I'm still just like, so far removed from even approximating it. I'll read Wendell Berry, like his novels, and be like, “Oh, it sounds really nice to live in this small town, connected, non-deracinated life.” I mean, I'm in Seattle and I'm just doing this sort of anonymized desk flesh kind of lifestyle. I'm just like, none of those things. So I think I have sympathies for a lot of things, but one also faces a lot of constraints in an adult life. In how you're able to make decisions for others, and what you're able to do to get everyone's needs met. There's plenty of compromise to go around, but I don't think anything that you've said has struck me as, as important or worthy of being corrected or challenged. I think I have a lot of sympathies for the spot that all of us are put into. We all make decisions that might be individually rational, but collectively turn out to be irrational. Super common. A collective action problem duplicated pretty much everywhere you look. I can know all of that intellectually and still choose that sort of game theoretic negative outcome that is me looking out for myself and not everyone else. So, yeah, you multi-homeowner. How many thousands of miles is that in your car? Bad person. I don't know. Are you doing the best you can? Is it working out for your family? Are you raising children with love? That's probably the most important thing. More than your emissions, I think.
David Valerio: Yeah, no, I'm not gonna come at you because I completely agree with that. I don't offset of my emissions either, even though I work in carbon credits. For me a big personal shift has been shifting from the abstract, to the embodied and personal. What can I actually do in my real life to make the world a better place? I also feel the same way about striving to regenerate nature from my desk all day. What is actually going on here? Part of the thing that's really appealing to me about Christianity, even if you just view it as like an ideology, which I don't, it actually changes the way you live in your day-to-day life. Anarchism didn't do that for me. I probably just wasn't like motivated enough. I could have, I guess, gotten involved with various groups. But I'm an individualist anarchist, so why would I want to do that? But with Christianity, your goal in life is very clear. It's to become a saint, and becoming a saint has very clear things you need to do. We were talking about the Sermon on the Mount. We talk about what the Catholic Church is teaching. It's about how I treat my wife. It's about how I treat my daughter. It's about how I treat my future children. It's about how I treat you. It's about how I treat all these people that I'm actually interacting with in the real world. It's not an abstraction. Climate is inherently an abstract problem for me. There are individual impacts of it in terms of like my choice of living and how my family's going to live, but realizing that the transformation that I want to see in the world is actually an internal transformation and that everybody doing some form of internal transformation is actually what changes the world at scale. Again, it sounds like, “Oh, that's not actually going to do anything, the world is not going to,”— whatever, man. The only thing I can actually affect are the people around me and the way that I live. The people I care for and that I'm striving to save. So yeah, I mean, what's best for me and my family? Having the split lifestyle with two houses, one in Houston, one in North Dakota. Flying. Using natural gas to power my electricity because I like having electricity in my house. I don't even know, you said doing your best. I don't even know if I'm doing my best. Honestly, I'm just doing. With regards to climate, it's not like a problem that I'm like uber obsessed with. I don't really care about taking carbon out of the atmosphere at all, honestly. I do care about birds, bees, trees, bugs—the stuff that I can go see in my real life. Which is why I work on like nature and climate stuff. I intellectually appreciate that climate change is gonna have impacts on the world and on the things that I do care about, but it's an invisible gas that I can't see, I can't touch, I can't smell, I can't feel, I can't personally connect to it. Whereas nature and the Creation, I can personally connect to it. It's an interesting conundrum for me. Cause like, as I mentioned, I don't really care about carbon removal, but it's like, this happens to be the industry that I'm in. Got to pay the bills. Got a wife, got et cetera. Got all these other things to do, but it's not what I'm really striving for. Like, I want to see more buffalo around. I want to see more grasslands. I want to see more trees. I want to see all these things. Carbon's a convenient tool, in some ways, to do that. It's just interesting to me, not really feeling actually all that passionate about this thing that I'm in, but something that's adjacent to it which I still get to work on. I don't know. Why do you care, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: That's a big question. I agree with you on climate as a hyper-object that can't very well be conceptualized and is super abstract. It's a big problem with storytelling and motivation. Like, does my action even make a difference? Why should I cut back if everyone else is not? Questions of that nature. Why do I care? I don't know. I am pretty interested in the geopolitics of climate change and am fairly scared of them. There are people who think that climate will be our chance to get things right and change the rules of the system so that they're more equitable and lead to a more peaceful and happier planet. I don't think there's good evidence that's going to happen. I hope I'm wrong. I really do. Cause I get the sense that there's going to be fascism and closed borders and mass migration and resource conflict in places like the Arctic. I'd be surprised if there weren't a great power war in the next decade or couple decades as a result, at least partially if not primarily, due to climate stress. So I think that's a good thing to avoid, if we can. I also think there's plenty of reasons to think that there'll be smaller and more regional conflicts that are of course devastating and that we should do what we can to avoid. I think it's just going to introduce a lot of uncertainty. As a family man here, I'm sure you have similar discussions too, like you've even alluded to it. That the Midwest is not a bad place to be in a climate changed world. I don't know, is Seattle good enough for us? Should we be buying property in Duluth right now? Should I be looking into Northern Canada? How far do I need to go to prepare myself? A world where everyone is having those thoughts does not seem like a secure and happy world. I find that to be motivating. But I also just, the topics are great because it's a combination of things that I know less about, but I'm very interested in like chemistry and math and physics, and I love the chance to learn about that. It intersects with plenty of huge philosophical questions about why should we care about this planet and what will happen if we don't act? What are some of the likely scenarios here? Are any of them worth avoiding more than others? It just opens lots of those big why questions about humanity that are true of any major crisis. And then of course, all of the practical questions of I would like for myself and my progeny not to end up in the great climate wars of the 2030s or 2040s or whatever. But if it's not climate, they'll probably be fighting about something else too. Not to be too grandiose.
David Valerio: That's a really good answer. The kumbaya vision of like climate being a way for us to all become socialist or something seems just impossible and contrary to all the evidence that we're seeing in the world. And I agree that if this is going to be a problem that's really solved, you're going to see a form of climate fascism. Mandated emissions cuts. Global South gets no energy, Global North becomes, what is it? Fortress North or something. Let all the Indians not, they can't come up here. This is gonna be too tumultuous. Just let it, let everybody perish. It's really sad. And that human side, as you frame it in that way, makes me care more about it. Even though it's still an abstraction. Like, I live in the United States. I live in a very blessed place tonot actually have to think about the real world implications, to some degree, of a lot of this stuff. Maybe I'm wrong. But that sort of more human side to it, and adaptation, is something that is more motivating to me. It's something I've been thinking about a lot. Part of the reason I don't like the grandiose thinking of climate, like, “Oh, we can hit net-zero by 2050 if we just work really hard enough,” is that it leads us in the day-to-day work to not focus on adaptation nearly as much as I think we should be. Actually thinking through practically, instrumentally, what we are going to do with everybody in the Indian subcontinent if this is going to happen. Whereas now, operating under the assumption that we can remove all the carbon needed to reach net-zero and not have mass scale climate migrations, it seems to me that it actually detracts from like the real, or in my view, the most likely future scenario. Maybe this is just like negative, like not being in an abundance mindset or something like this. The other thing that you mentioned about why you like it is the philosophy part. I definitely agree with that. It's very interesting in that perspective cause like you said, you have to think about future scenarios. It's like philosophy of science of what's the most likely future scenario? How can you even predict the future? I don't think so. It touches every part of the world. So you get to use this lens to go and think about, I don't know, corn production in the Midwest or like Brazilian deforestation. It gives you a lens to think about the world which is really cool. But it's interesting to me how, like, I really get the intellectual value out of it, but I have this yearning to… Like the intellectual stuff alone doesn't really drive me in terms of like my work. And it's weird because this is, I think it's my idealist strain coming out. I want to work on something where I feel like I'm actually doing what I'm supposed to be doing. What God put me in this planet to do. Maybe that's just pride. Probably is just pride. And recognizing that no, I'm a family man. I've got a wife. I've got a daughter. I need health insurance. Just accepting that and taking up that cross rather than always seeking to find that one thing that's really gonna somehow fix me if I'm working on it. Even though I know i'm probably not going to be happy anyways, if you know what i'm saying.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think the saint stories that I most love, they're always the ones where it's like this person was a monk, but they kept breaking all the rules. And the abbot was saying like, “Okay, like you can't, you're living with other monks. You can't just do this. It's distracting them from their duties and their prayers. It's too chaotic.” And they'd be like, “No, I'm radically following Christ right now. Can you leave me alone?” I love these sort of anarchistic monks who just sort of break the rules, but they're chaotic good alignment in the D&D character axes essentially. I think it's actually really hard to pair that family man lifestyle with Christianity because you have to make a lot of compromises just to keep your family going. Even just working and living in the world like that is really difficult. I think independently of any spiritual validity or truth of Christianity, the focus on sin is I think really important because we're just talking about sacrifices where you actually can't really give all your money away as a family person. You're actually not picking up your cross and following Jesus to the extent that is maybe exemplified in the Gospels. And what does that mean? Part of that means acknowledging your frailty, acknowledging that you've sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, as the line goes. And trying to make peace with that, that you're doing your best and you actually are not able to achieve this sainted status. I think that's a good thing for people to keep in mind because it's very humbling. I think people who can't acknowledge sin or who rebel against it, even in this intellectual de-spiritualized way I just put it, I think puts them in a position of self-grandiosity that makes it really hard for them to accept their own limitations. Like the conditions imposed upon them by high standards in an imperfect world that, depending on your definition, may actually be fallen. I don't know if you connect with that at all, but I find that to be an idea that gives me some strength. I think people think sin just keeps people down. But I think that idea actually makes it easier to accept the forces that act upon you. And despite having agency, being quite circumscribed in that agency.
David Valerio: Yeah, I think i'm still struggling to accept sin and its consequences. Even though I do it all the time and I know that I'm a sinner. That's the humble attitude to recognize that I'm a sinner, but I want to be perfect, like you said. I want to be perfect.
Ross Kenyon: You were commanded to be perfect! Be therefore perfect. Can you do it, David?
David Valerio: Exactly, I was commanded to do it, but recognizing that actually, no, I can't do it, but I have to really trust that God will synergize with me, not in the corporate way, to actually make me perfect is something that I'm definitely still coming to grips with. I've been a Christian for five years or whatever, but I have that perfectionist mentality you mentioned earlier of the striver. Being the smart kid in school, doing all the right things. Blah, blah, blah. Going to get a master's degree, doing well in a career. I want to be perfect. When I sin, it's somehow still a surprise to me, even though it absolutely should not be a surprise to me that I'm sinning. It's pride, it's pride. And pride is my worst vice. It's the worst of vices. It's good for me that pride is my vice because it's the worst. So it's so clearly points to me that “You are not what you think you are, David. You are just like everybody else in their frailties and in their problems. You are one of them. You are not this chosen child, the golden boy or whatever.” It's the right cross for me to bear. A way that you can interpret this is that the fact that I cannot be perfect, even though I'm commanded to, is exactly the most Christian thing for me to do. It's very interesting to think about that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think that's a really powerful acknowledgement to do, if you can do it. I'm surprised whenever I sin. Are you? I feel like I wake up and I'm like, “Okay, am I putting myself first? Am I like being as kind as I could be? Am I being that generous?” No, I'm pretty interested in my own needs. I could be a better dad at this moment, or I could be a better husband at this moment. No, I'm going to choose my own selfish needs. It doesn't have to be like, great sin. And one thing I think is dogma, but correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's not like a lot of differentiation between levels of sin. It's like you're just always doing it. Even the standard that Jesus sets out too. If you look at someone in lust that's equivalent to adultery, if you say Raca to them, which I'm not sure what Raca means exactly, it sounds mean, but if you say Raca to someone that's equivalent to murder. You're like, “Wow, if that's the standard, then I'm just like riddled with it. I'm as bad as anyone. I'm the king of the sinners. There's no one worse.” I find that to be a liberating and empowering idea of just like, okay, this is something that I share with humans and that can humble me and make me more compassionate towards them rather than putting on airs. Cause yeah, of course, putting on airs in the Gospels, is there a riskier position to take with Jesus? That's like prime smackdown territory.
David Valerio: No, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I haven't fully appreciated it yet. I still want to be that person.
Ross Kenyon: I hope you do it. I hope you become a saint and figure that out. People do it. I visited a monastery recently and one of the funny things to me was that despite connecting with these monks and having a lot of fun with them and a lot of great conversations. Enjoyed the prayerful existence for a couple of days and the Liturgy was a very great experience. It's interesting also to watch all the monkly politics. So and so is displeased with how this other monk completes their duties or whether or not someone else is as rigorous as they should be or is someone listening to podcasts while they're also cleaning? Is that somehow disconnecting from this way of gregarious living? The Catholic Church became a lot more palatable to me when someone said that just because you're a member of the clergy does not mean you escape sin. And you're like, okay, that explains some of the Renaissance Popes and some of these monasteries I've read about. But it's even funny, like you're in a monastery and still there's jealousy and anger and frustration. I'm sure they're just as riddled with it as anyone else is, even though they have made such an attempt to escape from it at the same time. I find that to be both an ironic and funny observation, but also deeply humanizing. And I have a lot of sympathy for it. And then also just, I recognize that in fellowship. I'm like, okay, we're like very similar. You've, you've made steps greater than I have, but also you're just as sinful or just as mired in it as I am, just in a different configuration.
David Valerio: I completely agree. I think this is actually a particularly Roman Catholic thing. This hierarchy of Christians with the religious at the top, clergy in the middle, and then laity at the bottom, and the sort of reifying of those positions. But in the East, it's very interesting. I forget who said this, but it's like, the people who become monks need it. They need the isolation. They need the hardness to become good. They're the worst, and there's a reason that they go into a “calm environment” away from the world where they're not tempted. There's a reason they withdraw. It’s because they are the people in most need of that kind of space, so that they don't sin, or that they strive for a more perfect Christian life. I don't sense in the Christian East as much of that, where it's like, if I'm not religious, I'm not a real Christian. Or if I'm not a religious, I'm not a real Christian. If I'm not a priest, then I'm just like less than them. It's kind of equivalent to what you said earlier about every, all sin being equivalent. I might be mired in the worst of sins like gluttony, adultery, etc, and it's taking me away from God as a layperson. But the monk, in sinning with his angry thoughts against his brother or with all these other things, they're also away from God. So this path of Christian perfection is like realizing more and more all of the small things that you are sinning in. I've been blessed to speak with amazing religious and priests who like very much say, “Yeah, we struggle with this stuff. We are not perfect. We are like you.” It's a good camaraderie in recognizing that we all suck.
Ross Kenyon: I love that. I feel like that's a nice way to bring us together in that way. One time in Seattle, I saw my priest back out of the church parking lot and almost run over an entire family. I was thinking like, okay, so if a priest who is defrocked offered you sacraments and they are defrocked, does that invalidate the sacraments and I was like, does that apply here? I guess even if he ran over that whole family, I guess he'd still be good. But there is something really funny about a priest almost just like killing an entire family with his SUV. So anyways, I'm just glad that heresy got dealt with because otherwise who knows what would happen to all the sacraments he gave.7
David Valerio: No, I mean, the Church wouldn't exist, honestly, right? The Church being the perfect organism, but filled with cancerous cells, is a good way to think about it. The Church itself is a divine institution, but os made up of flawed human persons. That's part of it. I had this view earlier where it's like if you view all the evil things, frankly, that people have done in the Catholic Church through history, you're like how can this be a divine institution? But recognizing that actually that is part and parcel with this being both divine and human as well. If it were filled with just perfect people, that wouldn't be really believable in some ways. Whereas the Church being as it is, beautiful and amazing, but filled with people like me and you and others who are broken, it makes it more beautiful in my eyes, the more that I've appreciated that. Rather than coming in with it like, “Oh, this thing should be perfect.” And just seeing all the hypocrisy and how is this what is says it is? Blah, blah, blah. It's like, actually, no, wow. There's a beauty to the fact that it is fallen, it's filled with fallen people.
Ross Kenyon: One of the lines that I like a lot as applies to carbon removal or carbon credits, or even just climate work, is that the Church is not a club for saints, but a hospital for sinners. And I think that's true also for the kinds of people that we're trying to reach with climate work. I think trying to reach out for the high-profit, low-emissions tech people that have money to spare, but not that much to deal with emissions wise. Climate action is actually not really supposed to be pointed at them, at least in the medium or long term. At some point we're going to have to go to the “sinners” and work with them, even though the opportunities of being used and abused by these people is higher. But also that's where the sin is. That's where the responsibility is. It has to go there. That quote is so beautiful and certainly makes me more understanding of the Church's various failures. It's easy to point to them both recently and historically, but I think once you acknowledge like, oh, okay, just cause you joined the Church doesn't mean you like opt out of humanity's nature, I think that makes it a little bit more forgivable. I doubt that's going to be that appealing to people who don't already agree with that. But I think if any of these churches who are around for less time existed longer… I think part of that is just a power thing. Like people, when they have power and money and influence in that way there's a corruption that can take place. And you'll see that even with places like Mars Hill and some of the Protestant churches that have had a scandal at them too. It doesn't even take that big of a church to be around that long. And people are attracted to that, people who are charismatic in the right way and dominant in that way can cause a lot of problems. So it's not really surprising that Catholicism has attracted people interested in hierarchy and power and influence in that way. I'm not even sure if I want to say all that, David. Is that a weird sentiment? I don't know.
David Valerio: No, I think it's actually right on. A way you could interpret the climate purists is they're very radical Protestants who want to go back to the basics and make this world perfect, even though it's fallen and terrible. A way to do that is we get rid of human nature and get rid of the people who do not hold fully to the view of perfection that we see. Versus the more embodied sacramental view would be like, well, we're all of that same nature. And like you said, if you actually want to affect change in the world, we have to deal with reality as it is. And the reality is that humans are broken. The purism, puritanism, whatever that strain in American Protestantism comes from, I'm not a Protestant theologian or really know much about Protestantism at all, there's a version of it where it's just like, humans are so bad that we can't do anything about it. So you just gotta like work with the elect. Bring the elect, and those are the people that we're gonna go with. In that view, it's like there are only some people who are chosen, we have to work with these people. Because everybody else is just, is terrible. Whereas the Catholic and Orthodox view is like, no, we're all, we are all broken, but the Church has the instruments to heal us. That more encompassing view and recognition of our embodied broken nature, I thin is something that makes it a lot more interesting to me. But it's also a view that I bring into my work with climate where it's just like, I don't know, dude. This is the way the world works. There are emissions everywhere. Oil and gas, mining, steel, etc. What is it, in the Gospel, it's like, “If you love those who love you, of what merit is it to you?”8 Versus loving the people who are unlovable and doing things for them, like that's actually meritorious and actually going to have affect positive change in the world. I have to think more about that analogy. I really loved it.
Ross Kenyon: I love that line too, like do not even the Publicans do that? You're like, yeah, that's true. People, people love those who love them. It's nothing special. Yeah, he's got a lot of great lines in there. I'm not surprised that like if you read King James and Hamlet, it's like every idiom that is still in use basically originates from those two places, the King James Gospels and Hamlet. So for that alone, I'm always a big fan of re-reading those.
David Valerio: Absolutely. Jesus' got a lot of bangers.
Ross Kenyon: I love how counterintuitive a lot of them are too. So many of the little insights and little quips you're like, oh, there's a lot of depth here to think about.
David Valerio: I think that's what's so attractive about the message, or that that's what makes it so persistent through time is it's not… I mean, it's clear, but it's not clear. So you really have to puzzle over it and think more about it. And the Apostles didn't get it right. Jesus has to explain parables all the time. Everybody go read the Bible. Go read the Gospels, read the Sermon on the Mount first. That's my sending forth. Go and do that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah, that's the best place to start for sure.
David Valerio: Great. Well, Ross, this was excellent. Thank you very much for coming on. As I expected, I loved this conversation.
Ross Kenyon: Thanks for having me. I always like talking about these big ideas. And I hope people listening, too, independent of your faith tradition or what you're interested in, I think it's worth your time just for the cultural knowledge. There's so many things in that book that will make you think and poke at you. I've been engaging with it off and on for a long time, and I feel like I'm nowhere close to even understanding what's happening in that book. So would recommend it even for a purely intellectual exercise.
David Valerio: Absolutely. Great. We'll talk again soon, Ross.
Luke 9:62
Matthew 5:42
Leon Bloy, La Femme Pauvre
St. Athanasius
Proverbs 26:4-5
Luke 6:32
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