News from a Changing Planet is a weekly newsletter about what on Earth is happening, with bi-monthly articles and essays about climate change and the environment and a weekly news roundup.

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News from a Changing Planet -- #45 -- Towards An Effort of Collective Understanding

Here's hoping to a holiday season/year ahead/eternity full of peace, justice, hope, wonder, work, faith, understanding and joy.

December 20, 2023

For largely seasonal reasons (and others that may become evident in the new year), I have been thinking a lot about the relationship between faith and religion and environmental stewardship (and its opposite).

Over the last few months, I have revisited Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, which was a powerful call to the faithful (and everyone else) about the crisis of climate change and the injustice of its effects on the world’s poorest people, asking us all to reimagine our relationship to nature, to consumption, and to our responsibility to (what he believes is) God’s creation.

St. Francis of Assisi by Antoniazzo Romano (Antonio di Benedetto Aquilio). Credit Metropolitan Museum of Art

He wrote specifically about Saint Francis of Assisi, whose name he chose when he became pope, the patron saint of animals, the environment, ecology and poor people.

The life and work of St. Francis, he wrote:

shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace…Francis helps us to see that an integral ecology calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human….If we approach nature and the environment without [an] openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously. The poverty and austerity of Saint Francis were no mere veneer of asceticism, but something much more radical: a refusal to turn reality into an object simply to be used and controlled.

One of the reasons I liked that passage is because of how much it reminds me of the writings of scientists and environmental activists, and its emphasis that justice is (or should be) at the center of any conversation about climate change and the environment.

But it really reminded me of Rachel Carson, the marine biologist and author of Silent Spring, among other important environmental books.

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