A Perturbed System: Religion and Climate Change from the End of a World

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.

Author: Susannah Crockford
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 07/10/2026
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.79d
ISBN13: 9780226849805
ISBN10: 0226849805
BISAC Categories:
- Religion | Christian Theology | General
- Social Science | Sociology of Religion
- Religion | Christianity | Protestant

About the Author
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.