Chapter One: What is happening to our common home?

Chapter One: What is happening to our common home?

It is almost as though we cannot catch up with ourselves in the intensified pace of life. The Pope contrasts the “rapidification” of change occurring among the human race with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution. Change is something desirable and yet not all change good change. The impact of all of this is evidenced in several major areas.

We are a “throwaway culture.” We quickly reduce things to rubbish and make a great deal of waste. Unlike nature’s recycling job, “our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products.”  When we add this to the pollution that comes from transporting our goods and selves around the globe, from industrial fumes and agricultural enhancements, the overall picture is not a pretty one.

“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system.” These are not stunning words in themselves except for their power as an endorsement from an unexpected source. We have come a long way from the reactivity of a Church that attacked Galileo, or responded to the rise of the scientific revolution of the nineteenth century by declaring the Doctrine of Infallibility. The gift of the Pope’s engagement among the scientists is his ability to address more deeply the ethical value implications of climate change.

After referring to things we are now sadly too familiar with – excessive carbon footprint, its warming influence, the rising of the seas, its impact on drinking water and the losing of biodiversity and the consequential imbalance created in nature which then affects food supply, in turn giving rise to increased migration and a propensity for war as we wrestle for safe boundaries between us – the Pope laments the indifference to human suffering at an international level. Of course, the migrations in Europe had barely begun at the time of writing, nor was much of the escalation of warring noises across the Middle East, Ukraine and now SE Asia in North Korea and the South China Seas. The very hawkish tone of current Presidential candidates underscores the Pope’s point. Climate change does not only impact weather patterns and create natural extremes; it puts increasing pressure on human behavior with each other and encourages our instinct to self protection at all costs.

“Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some negative impacts of climate change.”  While many of us are numb to the realities around us- “distraction constantly dulls our consciousness of just how limited and finite our world really is. - Financial interests prove most resistant (to address the realities and the impact of the “deified market”), and political planning lacks breadth of vision.”

The pope gives some treatment to each problem cited above, providing the occasional zinger – for example on the eradication of bio-diversity. He writes “we seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something we have created ourselves.” He protests that “we were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature,” noting at the same time that “frequently we find beautiful and manicured green spaces in so called safer areas of cities but not in the more hidden areas where the disposable of society live.” 

This chapter is a hard read as the Pope lays out the issues. He does not write without hope and faith in God’s image in humanity. He believes in the true wisdom of self examination, dialogue and generous encounters among people; and he urges us to real relationships beyond internet communication that may shield us from real pain of our neighbor, or consequence of our actions.

“The lack of physical contact and encounter, encouraged at times by the disintegration of our cities, can lead to a numbing of conscience and to tendentious analyses which neglects parts of reality. At times this attitude exists side by side with a “green” rhetoric. Today however we have to see that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor”.

+Alan