The more radical environmentalists foresee a grim future in twelve years if we don’t take immediate action. Icebergs melting. Seas rising. Violently unpredictable weather. Droughts, floods, plagues, fires, wars, and famines. Fracking-induced earthquakes and poisoned water. Desperate people trying to move to safer spaces.

The more radical fundamentalist Christians also foresee grim times in the not-so-distant future, based on their understanding of Revelations, the last book of the New Testament. Among other things, this book predicts hail and fire mingled with blood assaulting the earth, causing one-third of all trees and all grass to be destroyed. A mountain burning with fire slamming into the sea, transforming one-third of all seas into blood. A star falling from heaven, poisoning one-third of all fresh water. Sunlight, moonlight, and starlight diminishing by one-third. Locusts with men’s faces torturing non-believers for five months, after which fire and brimstone kill one-third of all humans. Wars, plagues, a massive earthquake, and stars falling to the earth.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a project to encourage pro-life and pro-choice activists to find abortion-related goals on which they could work together to accomplish. Over time, these activists discovered that they could comfortably collaborate on preventing teen pregnancy, promoting adoption, and speaking out against the abusive language and actions that were unnecessarily polarizing the debate — all without changing their beliefs about abortion. Might a similar process encourage radical environmentalists and apocalyptic Christians to work towards finding ways to prevent their predictions from taking place?

I’m not optimistic, for many fundamentalist Christians — those that think that the Tim LaHaye Left Behind series is God-sanctioned instead of lousy science fiction — believe that God will snatch them away from non-believers into Heaven prior to the arrival of wars, falling stars, bloody waters, and other horrors. They reason that if God is behind these calamities, fighting against them is both sinful and fruitless. Environmentalists believe that we have a sacred duty to do what we can to prevent these disasters from taking place.

In the meantime, endless arguments concerning Humankind’s role in creating climate change are blocking our efforts to harness our ingenuity to address our relationship with the environment. How might we prepare for rising seas and increasingly erratic weather? How might we address the pollution choking China, India, and other countries? How do we find a new balance between our needs and God’s creation?