“Laudato Si” — What did the Pope say? (Part 1)
 
Commentary from S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV, July 18, 2015
 
Several accounts were available, and after reading several of them I began an article to be called “How the news is managed,” using several of the articles. It began this way:
“It has been amusing to follow the coverage of Pope Francis recent Encyclical “Laudato Si, On Care of Our Common Home” in the press. Makes you wonder how many of those authors have read it. And it shows very well that news is managed even ‘masssaged’.”
 
Actually, it’s pretty obvious that the news is not complete or impartial.  Some 90% of the television and much of the press and radio are originated by just six corporations: GE, News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS.

At this point I decided I really should read the letter, Laudato Si, myself, which comprised 184 pages in the original printing. Wow, was I surprised!
 
The writing is a clear, densely written progression through many, many ideas. It could have been written as a source book for sermons, with much scholarship and quotable lines, very compact. It is far too complex to read casually because it links most of the world’s very large problems, not just ecology, to their source. Things as diverse as trash accumulation, declining supplies of sea food, species extinction, the political shift toward totalitarianism, war, and racial conflict come into the picture.
 
The letter begins with relating science to religion, and parts sing praise to “sister earth” which reminds me of American Indian religion. Respect for earth is something religion learns when the population is close to the “carrying capacity” of the region where it exists – the absolute dependence of life on the thin surface area of the earth on which the sun shines. A lesson which is most easily forgotten by protected elites who live indoors and not having to worry about food, shelter and security. Such people who, in our age, enjoy heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, and are free to pursue a single abstract goal, such as profit, where ever it might lead.
 
We soon learn from Laudato Si who this elite is and what it does. Thus the reason big mouth Rush Limbaugh calls it a “Marxist Climate Rant.” That bilge can be read here, if you have a strong stomach.

This is paragraph 2 of 245 paragraphs:

2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
 
I included this latter paragraph for flavor.
 
This is the first little nip at the Dominionists, that segment of Christianity that interprets the Bible as saying we humans have been given dominion by God and we can do what we damn well please with His gifts. This idea gives support to the villains, and occupies space in “he said, she said” media, and doubtless they get their rewards on this earth (and don’t need any in heaven). That attack is repeated over and over in Laudato Si.
 
Several paragraphs are devoted to showing that concern for relations between man and the earth are not new in Christianity. He lists the 1971 “Pacem in Terris” of Pope John XXII, quotes Paul VI, who referred to the ecological concern as “a tragic consequence” of unchecked human activity: “Due to an ill-considered exploitation of nature, humanity runs the risk of destroying it and becoming in turn a victim of this degradation.”
 
He also quotes John Paul II who warned that human beings frequently seem “to see no other meaning in their natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption.” Even one from the Eastern Orthodox Church, Patriarch Bartholomew has spoken in particular of the need for each of us to repent of the ways we have harmed the planet, for “inasmuch as we all generate small ecological damage”, we are called to acknowledge “our contribution, smaller or greater, to the disfigurement and destruction of creation.”
 
Three paragraphs are devoted to Saint Francis of Assisi. Finally, I found this quote from Benedict XVI, who proposed “eliminating the structural causes of the dysfunctions of the world economy and correcting models of growth which have proved incapable of ensuring respect for the environment.” This begins to hint at the importance of political solution, which later becomes a main theme.
 
Now, the reader should be aware that I am not a Catholic; but, to the best of my ability, I write from the standpoint of a science realist, retaining the Christian ethic, with some additions from other religions.  And, it appears that the only institution in the modern world concerned with ethics is religion.

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NOTE: The domains of science and religion cannot be rigid, as seen in Science and Religion: “The Meaning of Life in a Formula,” Michael Shermer, Scientific American, Volume 313, Number 2, Page 83, August 4, 2015.

WVU Distinguished Visitors Lecture:

Prof. Brian Fagan, April 4, 2012, Morgantown, WV

Brian Fagan is emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he has been on faculty since 1967.  He is author or editor of 46 books and over 100 articles in scientific journals. Three of his books are summarized below.   In his lecture at WVU he presented photographs to feature the topics in his most recent book Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.

He said that the earth has experienced a 25% increase in global drought since 1990, due to global warming. And, severe to extreme drought conditions are expected to continue to increase.  He expressed concern about rising sea levels which will displace tens of millions of people around the world.  Already there are climatic refugees exposed to hunger, disease and death in many countries.  “Then there is fracking …….”  He said that no one knows the full extent of fresh water depletion that will be caused by the hydrofracking of shales for natural gas development nor the amount of water that will be contaminated.

Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind,  by Brian Fagan 

Book Review, Publication Date:  June 2011.

This book surveys water management, alighting on every continent and chronologically spanning from the advent of irrigated agriculture to the water works of modern cities like Phoenix, Arizona. He critiques the common impression that centralized control of water, such as that which conjured Phoenix into existence or, in ancient times, Roman aqueducts and Chinese canals, is the main theme in the story of humanity’s capture and distribution of water. He favors a bottom-up view, suggesting that local solutions to water problems were consolidated by civilizations, not invented by them. He describes village-scale technologies to support that viewpoint, going into archaeological analysis to underscore how communities such as Bali, the Maya, and Angkor Wat invested their water sources with sacredness. Well might they have ritualized water, for Fagan recounts how science indicts drought as the agent of various civilizations’ downfalls and a forewarning of our own. Supplying intriguing historical background, Fagan well informs those pondering freshwater’s role in contemporary environmental problems. — Gilbert Taylor

The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, by Brian Fagan

Book Description from Amazon, Publication Date: March 3, 2009

This book takes up how the earth’s previous global warming phase reshaped human societies from the Arctic to the Sahara—a wide-ranging history with lessons for our own time. From the tenth to the fifteenth century the earth experienced a rise in surface temperature that changed climate worldwide—a preview of today’s global warming. In some areas, including western Europe, longer summers brought bountiful harvests and population growth that led to cultural flowering. In the Arctic, Inuit and Norse sailors made cultural connections across thousands of miles as they traded precious iron goods. Polynesian sailors, riding new wind patterns, were able to settle the remotest islands on earth. But in many parts of the world, the warm centuries brought drought and famine. Elaborate societies in western and central America collapsed, and the vast building complexes of Chaco Canyon and the Mayan Yucatán were left empty. The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives today—and our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the “silent elephant in the room.”

The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization, by Brian Fagan

Book Description from Amazon, Publication Date: December 29, 2004

Humanity evolved in an Ice Age in which glaciers covered much of the world. But starting about 15,000 years ago, temperatures began to climb. Civilization and all of recorded history occurred in this warm period, the era known as the Holocene-the long summer of the human species. In The Long Summer, Brian Fagan brings us the first detailed record of climate change during these 15,000 years of warming, and shows how this climate change gave rise to civilization. A thousand-year chill led people in the Near East to take up the cultivation of plant foods; a catastrophic flood drove settlers to inhabit Europe; the drying of the Sahara forced its inhabitants to live along the banks of the Nile; and increased rainfall in East Africa provoked the bubonic plague. The Long Summer illuminates for the first time the centuries-long pattern of human adaptation to the demands and challenges of an ever-changing climate-challenges that are still with us today.