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Long Time Coming, Long Time Gone
Long Time Coming, Long Time Gone
Puyé Cliff dwellings, Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico.
On the day Pope Francis released his encyclical on the fate of the Earth, I was struggling to climb a near vertical cliff on the Parajito Plateau of northern New Mexico. My fingers gripped tightly to handholds notched into the rocks hundreds of years ago by Ancestral Puebloans, the anodyne phrase now used by modern anthropologists to describe the people once known as the Anasazi. The day was a scorcher and the volcanic rocks were so hot they blistered my hands and knees. Even my guide, Elijah, a young member of the Santa Clara Pueblo, confessed that the heat radiating off the basalt had made him feel faint, although perhaps he was simply trying to make me feel less like a weather wimp.
When we finally hurled ourselves over the rimrock to the top of the little mesa, the ruins of the old city of Puyé spread before us. Amid purple blooms of cholla cactus, piñon pines and sagebrush, two watchtowers rose above the narrow spine of the mesa top, guarding the crumbling walls of houses that once sheltered more than 1,500 people. I was immediately struck by the defensive nature of the site: an acropolis set high above the corn, squash and bean fields in the valley below; a city fortified against the inevitable outbreaks turbulence and violence unleashed by periods of prolonged scarcity.
The ground sparkled with potsherds, the shattered remnants of exquisitely crafted bowls and jars, all featuring dazzling polychromatic glazes. Some had been used to haul water up the cliffs of the mesa, an arduous and risky daily ordeal that surely would only have been undertaken during a time of extreme environmental and cultural stress. How did the people end up here? Where did they come from? What were they fleeing?
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Earthcare, Literally Speaking
Earthcare, Literally Speaking
A version of this essay appeared in the May-June 2015 edition of BeFriending Creation, the newsletter of Quaker Earthcare Witness (QEW), with the title “An Earth Testimony.” In light of the Pope’s climate encyclical, it seems appropriate to share more widely. From the beginning, care for the living Earth and all its creatures has been woven throughout Quaker theology and testimonies, always united with what has come to be called environmental justice. QEW was formed in 1987. At that time, the founders wrote: “We have concluded from our worship and our study that there is, indeed, a need for Friends to give forceful witness to the holiness of creation and to demonstrate in their lives the meaning of this testimony.”
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| George Fox By Violet Oakley, Pennsylvania State Capitol, 1906 |
Historical Note: George Fox, referenced below, was one of the founders of the Religious Society of Friends during the 17th century; his journals are seminal to Quaker thought and practice. The 17th century was a time somewhat analogous to our own. Global climate disruption in the form of the Little Ice Age caused extreme weather events, floods, droughts and failed harvests; it was a time of religious and civil wars, sectarian violence, empires jockeying for position, extreme income inequality, a time of polluted cities, impoverished rural areas, and vast human migrations.
Remarkably, and counterintuitively, in Europe one result of this tumult was the formation of several “peace” churches. In England the Religious Society of Friends managed to get in trouble with both the Church of England and the Puritans for their refusal to fight in wars; their belief in equality (including women preachers), freedom of worship and continuing revelation; their lack of paid clergy; and their insistence that the Bible was not the inerrant word of God, but was “written by Man.”
Beyond the Real Time Catastrophe of Capital
Beyond the Real Time Catastrophe of Capital
Dystopia Now
A Pundit Takes on the Pope: “Dynamists” and “Catastroophists”
In a recent column on Pope Francis’ latest encyclical, Laudato Si, the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says that “After this document, there’s no doubting where Francis stands in the great argument of our time….But,” Douthat elaborates, “I don’t mean the argument between liberalism and conservatism. I mean the argument between dynamists and catastrophists.” Here’s how Douthat understands that “great argument”:
“Dynamists are people who see 21st-century modernity as a basically successful civilization advancing toward a future that’s better than the past. They do not deny that problems exist, but they believe we can innovate our way through them while staying on an ever-richer, ever-more-liberated course….Dynamists of the left tend to put their faith in technocratic government; dynamists of the right, in the genius of free markets. But both assume that modernity is a success story whose best days are ahead.”
“Catastrophists, on the other hand, see a global civilization that for all its achievements is becoming more atomized and balkanized, more morally bankrupt, more environmentally despoiled. What’s more, they believe that things cannot go on as they are: That the trajectory we’re on will end in crisis, disaster, dégringolade…that current arrangements are foredoomed, and that only a true revolution can save us.”
Douthat puts Pope Francis in the “catastrophist” camp because of the pontiff’s call for humanity to take climate change seriously by undertaking global action and “radical change” to move off fossil fuels and selfish profiteering and consumerism. Thanks to anthropogenic global warming, the Pope writes, “Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.”
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The Delusion of Control
The Delusion of Control
I’m sure most of my readers have heard at least a little of the hullaballoo surrounding the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. It’s been entertaining to watch, not least because so many politicians in the United States who like to use Vatican pronouncements as window dressing for their own agendas have been left scrambling for cover now that the wind from Rome is blowing out of a noticeably different quarter.
Take Rick Santorum, a loudly Catholic Republican who used to be in the US Senate and now spends his time entertaining a variety of faux-conservative venues with his signature flavor of hate speech. Santorum loves to denounce fellow Catholics who disagree with Vatican edicts as “cafeteria Catholics,” and announced a while back that John F. Kennedy’s famous defense of the separation of church and state made him sick to his stomach. In the wake of Laudato Si, care to guess who’s elbowing his way to the head of the cafeteria line? Yes, that would be Santorum, who’s been insisting since the encyclical came out that the Pope is wrong and American Catholics shouldn’t be obliged to listen to him.
What makes all the yelling about Laudato Si a source of wry amusement to me is that it’s not actually a radical document at all. It’s a statement of plain common sense. It should have been obvious all along that treating the air as a gaseous sewer was a really dumb idea, and in particular, that dumping billions upon billions of tons of infrared-reflecting gases into the atmosphere would change its capacity for heat retention in unwelcome ways. It should have been just as obvious that all the other ways we maltreat the only habitable planet we’ve got were guaranteed to end just as badly.
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How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world
How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world
In my life there are two things that have the effect of at least somewhat isolating me from others. The first is being a writer on climate change, peak oil, and the economic crises bound up with those modern predicaments. The other is being a Christian environmentalist.
In the first case, my essays, as well as my social media presence, fairly well run counter to the whole of my society and culture, even when a few outliers add concurring thoughts to the mix.
But in the end, by writing a write a blog about what people shouldn’t do, about the things we should give up and forsake for a concept of the greater good, about the ways our habits imperil the world and especially our children and future generations, I can kind of come off like a scold even in my most mild iteration. And forget about those times when I’ve lost all patience with the excuses and indifference to our shared world — then I’m sure I can be a real jerk.
By contrast, my friends who write blogs on the 40th new way to redecorate your home, the best new destination to jet off to, and the greatest products to try as a mommy blogger, are infinitely more popular and beloved than me.
I end up feeling like I stand alone, or at best with a small group of similarly-minded, possible loonies, who together are spitting into a hot and rancid wind.
Crossroads
As an eco-conscious Christian, my experience is not dissimilar.
While I love Christ unreservedly, and without wavering, and that relationship is the most meaningful and important in my life, still, in my life with fellow Christians and with the Church, I have found little immediate commonality on the issue of creation care.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/how-pope-francis-climate-encyclical-is-liberating-the-world/#sthash.SbPvipm7.dpuf
The climate encyclical: hang the pope?
The climate encyclical: hang the pope?
Image above: an internet site with wild accusations against Pope Francis. That’s, of course, just the work of an isolated crackpot, but, a hundred years ago, Pope Benedict XV was widely accused of “defeatism” and threatened with hanging when he requested to stop the “useless slaughter” of the first world war. Could something similar occur because of Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change?
The Pope’s encyclical on climate is out. I went through it, I think I agree with just about everything in it. From a scientific viewpoint, it seems to me flawless (at least after a first read). In terms of its ethical and human approach, it is even better. I don’t see myself as a very religious person, but I think we badly need ways to overcome that peculiarly evil view of the world that sees each one of us as a mere economic agent, interested only in maximizing profits and accumulating capital. That can’t be the way to run things on this planet and if we need a religion to tell us that we should do better than that, then welcome religion!!
This said, now what? It was Stalin who mocked the pope by asking how many division he could muster on the battlefield, but – apart from armored divisions – if I were a denier, I would feel dismayed. The beauty of the pope’s intervention is that it demolishes right away one of the main stumbling blocks that prevented most people from understanding the gravity and the seriousness of the situation. So far, the forces of denial could paint the whole story of climate change as a silly idea concocted by an isolated group of crackpot scientists. But, now, not anymore. You may agree or not with the pope, but you can’t ignore that he represents more than a billion Christians. Not an isolated group of crackpots, for sure. Clearly, the pope’s encyclical has forever changed the terms of the debate.
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Pope Francis’ Encyclical Is A Sincere Call For Climate Action, Economic Justice
Pope Francis has released his long awaited encyclical, or teaching document, on climate justice and the environment, and it flies in the face of everything climate deniers stand for.
The encyclical is officially called “Laudato Si (Be Praised), On the Care of Our Common Home,” and it makes a compelling case for humanity’s moral responsibility to “protect our common home” by tackling the root causes of two of the greatest interlinked global crises of our time: climate change and poverty.
“[T]he earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor,” Pope Francis writes. Echoing his earlier critique of capitalism and inequality, the Pope links the pollution and waste degrading our environment directly to our “throwaway culture” that, unlike nature, does not seek to reuse and recycle every resource as a valuable constituent of the circle of life.
“We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations,” the Pope writes. He faults this mode of consumption for creating global warming, and concludes: “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.”
The Pope unequivocally embraces the science showing mankind is responsible for global warming:
“A number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity.”
He specifically calls for policies to change the way we power human society:
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