On May 24 of this year, Pope Francis issued his encyclical, a teaching letter, on climate change. Its title is Laudato Si’, the opening words of a song by St. Francis of Assisi praising God for the beauty of nature. Its subtitle is “On care for our common home.” At times, the writing is lyrical, almost beautiful; at others, hard-boiled and fierce. In English translation, though, it is clear and readable.
In his writing, Francis paints a powerful picture: The environmental crisis we are all facing is tightly woven into the economic and social arrangements of modern capitalist societies – and into the psychology that such societies and arrangements engender. Here are two paragraphs (203 and 204) from Laudato Si’ that highlight this tight interconnection:
Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism is one example of how the techno-economic paradigm affects individuals. . . . This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. . . .
The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness” [quoted from John Paul II]. When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume. It becomes almost impossible to accept the limits imposed by reality. In this horizon, a genuine sense of the common good also disappears. As these attitudes become more widespread, social norms are respected only to the extent that they do not clash with personal needs. So our concern cannot be limited merely to the threat of extreme weather events, but must also extend to the catastrophic consequences of social unrest. Obsession with a consumerist lifestyle, above all when few people are capable of maintaining it, can only lead to violence and mutual destruction (emphasis added).
The Pope’s equation is straightforward: Excessive consumerism drives social instability through the psychological mechanisms of insecurity, self-centeredness, even greed.
Elsewhere, Francis makes the obvious connection between consumerism and environmental crisis: Everything in the postmodern capitalist economy depends on the consumption of energy, and the selfishness of large fossil fuel companies obstructs the development of alternative sources of energy. The excesses of capitalism lead to consumerism, which in its turn reinforces the excesses of capitalism, to the detriment of our social and economic health and the destruction of the natural world.
As ecologists and systems thinkers have known since the pre-WWII era, everything is interconnected. And there’s another writer on this topic who knows it too, as do all Buddhists.
Compare Pope Francis’s writing to that of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in his 1990 teaching, “Ecology and the Human Heart”:
So when the environment changes, climatic conditions also change. When it changes dramatically, economic structures and many other things also change, even our physical body. So you can see the great effect from that change. So from that viewpoint this is not only a question of our own survival.
Therefore, in order to achieve more effective results and in order to succeed in the protection, conservation and preservation of the natural environment, first of all, I think, it is also important to bring about internal balance within human beings themselves. Since negligence of the environment – which has resulted in lots of harm to the human community – came about by ignorance of the very special importance of the environment, I think it is very important first of all to instill this knowledge within human beings. So, it is very important to teach or tell people about its importance bring own benefit (emphasis added).
In both these writers, you read the same ideas about interconnectedness among individuals’ psychological makeup (fear, greed, and ignorance leading to consumerism), social and economic relations (competitiveness and unfettered capitalism), and ecology and nature (climate change). Both insist that the problem exists at all levels, and that a solution at only one level will ultimately fail.
I don’t mean to suggest, nor do Francis or the Dalai Lama suggest, that everyone must be active at all levels for effective positive change to occur. Rather, the message seems to be: We each can contribute, at whatever level we prefer, to solutions for the planet, our people, and our civilization.
Here’s how Francis writes this in Laudato Si’:
Not everyone is called to engage directly in political life. Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place (a building, a fountain, an abandoned monument, a landscape, a square), and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges. Thus, a community can break out of the indifference induced by consumerism. These actions cultivate a shared identity, with a story which can be remembered and handed on. In this way, the world, and the quality of life of the poorest, are cared for, with a sense of solidarity which is at the same time aware that we live in a common home which God has entrusted to us. These community actions, when they express self-giving love, can also become intense spiritual experiences.
My books are not environmental treatises. They are fiction, set in ecologically distinct and robust places, similar to where I live in north Idaho, but they aren’t based on environmental themes. Still, I write this blog, in which I focus on psychological, literary, or spiritual aspects of both writing and being. The pressing issues of environmental and ecological degradation and climate change concern me, as they concern millions. I was struck by Francis’s use of writing to address the issue as not merely an economic and social issue, not only a psychological issue, but also a moral issue.
In our small communities, Sandpoint and Hope, Idaho, many people and groups who are deeply engaged in these matters, such as Wild Idaho Rising Tide. One manifestation is a growing concern and movement to counter the growing threat of coal, oil, and gas trains funneling through our communities.
These trains are coming from the North Dakota Bakken oil field and the Powder River Wyoming coal mines and going to the Pacific ports for export to Asia. Sightline Daily estimates that coal and oil train traffic through Sandpoint and across Lake Pend Oreille will more than double from its current levels, leading to hours of road crossing closures and, of course, the risk of derailment and explosion or waterway pollution.
Efforts to stop the coal trains and the so-called “bomb trains” carrying crude oil are not NIMBY selfishness.
They are serious, thoughtful, and concerned social actions to raise attention all along the routes taken by these trains, from the Midwest to the Pacific coast. They embody what Francis calls “civic love.” As a writer, I can do a small part to bring these things to readers’ attention; it is not the most I can do, but it is certainly the least I can do for the world, the country, and the land that I love.
