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Image from GreenGrenwich.org

This post was inspired by a meeting held last week in Florence on the subject of the Pope’s climate encyclical, and, in particular, by the presentation given there by Father Bernardo. prior of the San Miniato church. I had been thinking about the relation of religion and the environment for some time and, as a comment, I reproduce below a text that I wrote on the interpretation of an ancient Sumerian myth that, in my opinion, describes an ancient ecological catastrophe, not unlike the one we are facing nowadays. Many elements of the ancient Sumerian religion have survived through the millennia and are still with us; in particular the concept that humans have both power and responsibility: they are there to serve the creation, not to use it for their purposes. (h/t Antonella Giachetti)

When I started my career in scientific research, I could hardly have imagined that the Catholic Pope would, one day, teach to scientists (and not just to them) how to do their job. And yet, it seems that we have arrived exactly to this point.

The attempts performed so far to settle the debate on the various disasters befalling on us (and that we ourselves created) have led to nothing. For how many decades have we been trying to get an agreement to avoid the climate change disaster? Now we are putting our residual hopes on the Paris conference of this year, but do you really think that a group of politicians and bureaucrats dressed in dark suits will be able to save the planet?

What we are seeing, instead, is the utter failure of a way of thinking that we call sometimes “positivism” that has its origins in the 19th century with thinkers such as Condorcet, Saint Simon, Comte, and others. At that time, it seemed to be a good idea to use the reason and science to settle all questions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Greater Fools and Bigger Liars

September 28, 2015

Greater Fools and Bigger Liars

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries
– Anaïs Nin

The moment we heard that John Boehner would resign, the first thing that came to mind was: the next one will be a Greater Fool and a Bigger Liar. For all of his obvious faultlines, Boehner is human. As was evident for all to see Thursday when the Pope -Boehner’s as Catholic as JFK and Jesus Christ- came to see ‘him’ in ‘his’ Senate. Even smiled reading that the Pope had asked Boehner to pray for him.

But Boehner was really of course just a man who through time increasingly became a kind of barrier between a president and his party on the one hand, and Boehner’s own, increasingly ‘out there’, party on the other. He moved from far right to the right middle just to keep the country going. In essence, that’s little more than his job, but just doing your job can get you some nasty treatment these days in the land of the free.

So now we’ll get a refresher course in government shutdown, though there’s no guarantee that Boehner’s successor will be enough of a greater fool to cut his/her (make that his) new-found career short by actually letting it happen. At least not before December.

The government shutdown is a threat like Janet Yellen’s rate hike, one which always seems to disappear right around the next corner, a process that eats away at credibility much more than participants are willing and/or able to acknowledge. Until it’s too late.

Now that it’s clear they lost on Obamacare, Republicans demand that funding for Planned Parenthood must stop, as the women’s group is accused of ‘improperly selling tissue harvested from aborted fetuses’, something it vehemently denies. And there we’re right back to the shadow boxing multi-millionaire tragic comedy act the US Congress has been for years now.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Long Time Coming, Long Time Gone

August 30, 2015

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?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Does Capitalism Cause Poverty?

August 23, 2015

Does Capitalism Cause Poverty?

Capitalism gets blamed for many things nowadays: poverty, inequality, unemployment, even global warming. As Pope Francis said in a recent speech in Bolivia: “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”

But are the problems that upset Francis the consequence of what he called “unbridled capitalism”? Or are they instead caused by capitalism’s surprising failure to do what was expected of it? Should an agenda to advance social justice be based on bridling capitalism or on eliminating the barriers that thwart its expansion?

The answer in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia is obviously the latter. To see this, it is useful to recall how Karl Marx imagined the future.

For Marx, the historic role of capitalism was to reorganize production. Gone would be the family farms, artisan yards, and the “nation of shopkeepers,” as Napoleon is alleged to have scornfully referred to Britain. All these petty bourgeois activities would be plowed over by the equivalent of today’s Zara, Toyota, Airbus, or Walmart.

As a result, the means of production would no longer be owned by those doing the work, as on the family farm or in the craftsman’s workshop, but by “capital.” Workers would possess only their own labor, which they would be forced to exchange for a miserable wage. Nonetheless, they would be more fortunate than the “reserve army of the unemployed” – a pool of idle labor large enough to make others fear losing their job, but small enough not to waste the surplus value that could be extracted by making them work.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/does-capitalism-cause-poverty-by-ricardo-hausmann-2015-08#ZHmOTir0drCVm34s.99

Pope Francis’ Appeal for the Future

August 12, 2015

Pope Francis’ Appeal for the Future

Pope Francis is pleading for world leaders to defend the rights of mankind and the future of nature against the power of corporations and the pillage of “free market” dogma, a warning about the planet’s survival that vested political and media interests reject out of hand, writes Daniel C. Maguire.

The Right has no applause for Pope Francis’s powerful encyclical Laudato Si (See, for example, David Brooks’s June 23 column) What the pope sees and his conservative critics do not is that the world economy is in crash mode, an accelerating train hurtling down the track and ignoring all the signs that say Bridge Out Ahead.

The instinct for self-preservation is strong: but in the human species, it seems, not strong enough. Like any good preacher, Francis tries to stir hope as he calls for radical reforms – and the reforms he calls for are radical – but the shrill of despair keeps peeking out at the brim of his Jeremiad.

At no point in this eloquent cri de coeur is the pope playing Pollyanna, but at times he seems close to Cassandra who was blessed with the knowledge of the future but cursed with the realization that no one will believe her.

The oceans with their coral treasures and rich animal life are dying of acidity and poison. The pope asks: “Who turned the wonder-world of the seas into underwater cemeteries bereft of color and life?” Arctic ice is in a death spiral and ice sheets are melting in Greenland as well as in the Himalayan-Tibetan glacier that provides water to hundreds of millions. The portents are nightmarish.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Transformative Power of Climate Truth: Updated w Encyclical Material

July 29, 2015

The Transformative Power of Climate Truth: Updated w Encyclical Material

I published “The Transformative Power of Climate Truth” 3 months ago.

This updated version addresses, Laudato Si Pope Francis’ recent Encyclical, which is one of the most profound, and sure most powerful, statements of climate truth that has ever been made. This version also includes The Climate Mobilization’s recent successes.

It was extremely easy for me to integrate several quotes from Laudato Si into this essay. Reading that Encyclical, I felt that Pope Francis was a kindred spirit. He is also a beautiful writer. He has given us such a gift. I hope you enjoy my updated essay, available below or as a PDF.

The Transformative Power of Climate Truth
The Climate Mobilization: Spreading Truth, Demanding Mobilization

The Climate Mobilization launched in September, 2014, when we began spreading the Pledge to Mobilize at the People’s Climate March in New York City. Our mission is to initiate a World War II-scale mobilization that protects civilization and the natural world from climate catastrophe by eliminating net greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.

We believe that the climate movement’s greatest and most underutilized strategic asset is the truth: that we are now in a planet-wide climate crisis that threatens civilization and requires an immediate, all-out emergency response. We believe that this mobilization can only be achieved through the valuing and active spreading, of climate truth. The Pledge to Mobilize, a one-page document that any American can sign, is our tool for spreading climate truth and channeling the emotions it inspires into political power.

This paper explores the transformative power—and strategic necessity—of climate truth. It explains why we believe the Pledge to Mobilize approach contains such incredible potential for change. It addresses concerns that The Climate Mobilization is too frank and frightening about the climate crisis, and hence should push for a more appealing and “realistic,” though inadequate, solution.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

After the encyclical, lessons for climate activism?

July 21, 2015

After the encyclical, lessons for climate activism?

Note: This blog is based on and extends a short presentation at aLighter Footprints climate action group monthly meeting in Melbourne on 24 June.

Washington Post advertisement

When I first heard early this year about the forthcoming papal encyclical on nature and climate change, my first reaction was that this could be one of the biggest moments so far in climate politics but, like many scientific “tipping points”, that can only be judged well after the fact. That Pope Francis will be addressing the UN General Assembly and the US Congress on consecutive days in September 2015, the drawing of his title from Francis of Assisi (patron saint of nature), and his training as a chemist all suggest that this issue is a core concern and his advocacy is far from over.

Laudato si, on the care of our common home was issued on 18 June and described by an editorial inThe Guardian as “the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years…[it] sets out a programme for change that is rooted in human needs but it makes the radical claim that these needs are not primarily greedy and selfish ones”. Some key points:

It is addressed to everyone, to “every person living on this planet”, and not just to Catholics: “Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.”
Nature is not separate from us: “When we speak of the ‘environment’, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature…”…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s Wrong with Our Monetary System and How to Fix It

July 14, 2015

What’s Wrong with Our Monetary System and How to Fix It

Something’s profoundly wrong with our global financial system. Pope Francis is only the latest to raise the alarm:

“Human beings and nature must not be at the service of money. Let us say no to an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules, rather than service. That economy kills. That economy excludes. That economy destroys Mother Earth.”

What the Pope calls “an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules” is widely evident. What is not so clear is how we got into this situation, and what to do about it.

Most people take our monetary system for granted, and are shocked to learn that the government doesn’t issue our money. Almost all of it is created by loans made “out of thin air” as bookkeeping entries by private banks. For this sleight-of-hand, they charge interest, making a tidy profit for doing essentially nothing. The currency printed by the government – coins and bills – is a negligible amount by comparison.

The idea of giving private banks a monopoly over money creation goes back to seventeenth century England. The British government, in a Faustian bargain, agreed to allow a group of private bankers to assume the national debt as collateral for the issuance of loans, confident that the state would be able to service the debt on the backs of taxpayers.

And so it has been ever since. Alexander Hamilton much admired this scheme, which he called “the English system,” and he and his successors were finally able to establish it in the United States, and subsequently most of the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Pope’s Letter: Neoliberalism and Fukushima

July 7, 2015

The Pope’s Letter: Neoliberalism and Fukushima

Japan’s Social Disintegration

Japanese sociologist and Tokyo Metropolitan University professor, Shinji Miyadai argues that European nations progressed from the communal self-governance of food to the communal self-governance of energy after World War II. Miyadai compares Europe’s post-war developments with those of post-war Japan in his article entitled ‘Pitfalls of the Nuclear Power Reduction Movement’. His contention is simple: As opposed to Europe, Japan had actually “accelerated its dependence on the market through trade liberalization and deregulation…”

Post-war economic indenture was exactly what the United States wanted from Japan. Moreover, the US was able to procure Japanese market dependence through discussions on the trade liberalization of agricultural goods (and later, the US-Japan Structural Impediments Initiative talks). Miyadai claims that the hollowing effects of these US-sponsored neoliberal adjustments would exact their toll on Japanese communities in the 1980s and 1990s.

Neoliberalism’s averse effects climaxed when the 1997 recession – induced by the Asian currency crisis – washed over Japan. Miyadai recalls the serious outcomes of a barely functioning Japanese economy, which then finally ceased to function. Among the consequences were: Japan’s heightened rate of suicide (four times that of the UK and twice that of the US); the scandal of the missing or long-dead elderly; ubiquitous infant and child abuse or neglect; and a third of Japan’s dead, cremated without funeral.

Indeed, as Miyadai laments, “Well before the Great East Japan Earthquake, Japanese society had already begun to disintegrate.”

Distorting Japan’s Foreign Policy

After WWII, the US meddled in Japan’s foreign policy. Miyadai offers the Kuril Islands dispute as evidence of this. The dispute actually begins with something Miyadai labels as Japan’s “castration experience.” This “castration” entails America’s dropping of atomic bombs, Japan’s US-written post-war constitution, and the US-Japan Security Treaty signed under Washington’s persistence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Earthcare, Literally Speaking

June 29, 2015

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.”

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.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Beyond the Real Time Catastrophe of Capital

June 28, 2015

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.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Delusion of Control

June 25, 2015

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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world

June 24, 2015

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

Peak oiler? Not Catholic? You should still stand with the pope on climate

June 21, 2015

Peak oiler? Not Catholic? You should still stand with the pope on climate

support pope on climate

I get it, you believe in peak oil. So do I, despite gas at $2.50 a gallon. But peak oil is no excuse for either you or me to just sit around waiting for the final oil crash to make the climate problem moot by bringing down industrial civilization.

Even if you’re the world’s biggest doomer, you have to admit that the timing is too uncertain — will the über-crash come in five months or five decades? Nobody knows for sure.

So far, the puppet masters of the world economy have been pretty good at keeping the party going longer than anybody had a right to expect. Who’s to say that oil wars, extreme energy production and various accounting tricks can’t keep mass consumerism running in many places into the middle of the century or beyond?

So don’t hold your breath waiting for collapse. Instead, leave your cynicism behind and let Pope Francis inspire you to finally get serious about climate, a problem that we know is already here and whose future consequences will be unthinkable — unless the world seriously changes its ways, oil crash or not.

A blessing of papal awesomeness

And if you do care about climate change, then what’s not to like in the pope’s encyclical that came out this week?

OK, well, maybe he could have been better about recognizing overpopulation as part of the climate problem. But he’s right that it’s hypocritical for rich countries to use climate as an excuse to pressure poor ones about population. All poor countries put together have done almost nothing to warm the atmosphere compared to the real culprits, the rich nations of North America and Europe.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/not-catholic-you-can-still-stand-with-the-pope-on-climate/#sthash.roDZr6r3.dpuf

The climate encyclical: hang the pope?

June 19, 2015

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.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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