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I. Our World and Pope Francis’ Encyclical, Laudato si’

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/688094

1539-7718

Peter H. Raven,

Climate Change and Geoengineering

Previous articleNext article FreeFour Commentaries on the Pope's Message on Climate Change and Income InequalityI. Our World and Pope Francis' Encyclical, Laudato si'Peter H. Raven and Handling Editor: Daniel E. DykhuizenPeter H. RavenMissouri Botanical GardenSt. Louis, Missouri 63110 USAMember, Pontifical Academy of Sciences Search for more articles by this author and Handling Editor: Daniel E. Dykhuizen Search for more articles by this author Missouri Botanical GardenSt. Louis, Missouri 63110 USAMember, Pontifical Academy of Sciencese-mail: [email protected]PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMorePope Francis' inspiring Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si' (Be Praised), titled in such a way as to remind us of St. Francis of Assisi's Canticle of the Sun (1225 ad), calls forcefully on everyone to care for the Creation that makes our lives possible. In the light of the limited progress that we have made over the years in achieving global sustainability, many of us have come to believe that to achieve real and sufficient change it will be necessary to introduce a moral or spiritual element into the discussion. I personally believe that only by doing so will we come to confront the problems we face seriously and effectively. By doing so, we would have a chance to save ourselves and our civilization from the consequences that await if we blithely continue with "business as usual," assuming that what has worked before will work equally well in the very different world of today. This is the reason that Pope Francis has given us his Encyclical, stating, "It is my hope that this Encyclical Letter … can help us to acknowledge the appeal, immensity and urgency of the challenge we face" (Laudato Si' sec. 15). Many actions have been suggested to preserve the Earth's living systems, and we must pursue them as actively as we possibly can if there is to be hope for the future. To gain sufficient strength to take these actions up individually and collectively, however, we must collectively decide that there is a problem that demands our utmost effort, and that to make that effort is absolutely necessary. It is to that end that the Pope Francis' Encyclical was written, and to which this analysis is intended to contribute.To provide a context for the discussion that follows, I shall review the situation in which we find ourselves in the year 2016. Hominids have existed for the last 2.7 million years of the 4.54 billion year history of the planet. As our ancestors developed, the species Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and migrated from its area of origin to Eurasia about 60,000 years ago. Once in the north, the early members of our species apparently killed the remaining Neanderthals and Denisovians in Eurasia, the end products of a much earlier hominid migration from Africa. Human beings continued to live as hunter-gatherers until about 12,000 years ago, when crops began to be cultivated in various places, and by 10,000 years ago, agriculture had assumed an important role in feeding people in parts of Eurasia.At about that time, the human population of the Earth is estimated to have been about one million people, approximately 100,000 of whom lived in Europe. With the development of agriculture, however, our ancestors had for the first time a reliable source of food that they could use to survive through unfavorable seasons; their numbers began to increase rapidly. In the villages, towns, and cities that they built in places where food could be grown successfully, the elements of what we call civilization developed. In settled communities many people lived together for long periods of time, perhaps their entire lives. In such a setting, individuals had the freedom to specialize in various ways and to take up individual professions such as civil leaders, religious leaders, farmers, builders, storytellers, musicians, and all of the varied roles that bring us both the possibilities and the enjoyment of modern civilization. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made the transmission of our history dependable and the reliable accumulation of knowledge possible for the first time.For better or for worse, people began to form groups with civic leaders and to compete with one another for material advantage. It is now believed that the early farmers who swept into Europe, perhaps from Anatolia, about 8,000 years ago, seized the lands they wanted, killing their original inhabitants and then planting crops in the fertile regions they had won. Certainly as the Bible tells us, the ancestors of the Israelites moved up the eastern shore of the Mediterranean from Egypt, conquering and killing the people who were living there when they arrived and taking possession of a land where, unlike Egypt, there was adequate rainfall for them to grow their crops, consolidating their fields as the years went by. With the availability of dependable supplies of food, the human population grew rapidly, probably to at least two hundred million at the time of Jesus, half a billion in Renaissance times, and about 850 million in the 1790s. In that decade, the Reverend Thomas Malthus warned us of what he considered to be the impossibility of raising enough food to feed the growing world population. That challenge was partly overcome by cultivating more farmland with better access to water, plows, and technology, although tens of millions of people fell victim to famine during the 19th century and subsequently.Over the past two centuries, the challenge has become enormous, with the global human population increasing from 1 billion to 7.4 billion today. Growth of this character represents a tenfold increase in our numbers since the start of the Industrial Revolution (250 years ago). Notwithstanding the improved agricultural methods just mentioned, some 750 million people (10% of the world's population) are malnourished at present, with about 100 million people on the verge of starvation at any given time.Considering that the world is not succeeding in adequately feeding its people now, projections for the future are alarming. The Population Reference Bureau (http://www.prb.org) projects that the current world population of 7.4 billion will increase over the next 34 years, by 2050, to roughly 9.8 billion, and that of Sub-Saharan Africa will grow from its current 950 million to approximately 2.1 billion people. At the same time, the population of the United States is projected to increase from 331 million to 398 million. Given our very high levels of consumption, the growth here will alone represent a serious challenge to the world's ability to attain sustainability, as we shall see below.Global Footprint Network (http://www.footprintnetwork.org) estimates that we are currently using about 156% of the sustainable productivity of our planet, taking all forms of depletion into account; this proportion of use represents more than a doubling since 1970. In general, industrial nations are using much more per person than developing ones, so at their present standards of living, the United States is using about 1.8 times per person what we have internally, China about 2.5 times what they have internally per person, and Japan about four times what its internal capacity for sustainable productivity per person would allow. It follows directly that such industrialized countries are drawing the products of sustainable productivity that they consume from all over the world. It is not strange, in this situation, that China is buying and renting agricultural land throughout the world, importing timber widely, or that their further capacity to develop even higher consumption levels should be hitting a wall as poorer nations strive to take care of their own needs.In our time it has become evident that the only hope for world sustainability is a shared sense of hope and a love for one another that would result in equality and mutual respect. It is easy to forget that the kind of world envisioned in the 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development or of the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals depends on a degree of sharing that the world has never known. We seem perhaps to be all too good at attacking one another, but remain poor at the skills of respecting and helping one another. That very relationship is why the Encyclical we are considering here, addressed as it is to all people, offers so much hope and inspiration for so many of us.With respect to global climate change, a major subject of the Encyclical we are discussing, the Swedish Nobel Prize Winner Svante Arrhenius first suggested in the 1890s that the gasses we were emitting would eventually cause the Earth's climate to warm. When scientists and the general public became concerned about the matter in the 1960s, there were arguments on both sides of the issue, but by the 1970s, the warming effects of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were generally accepted. It gradually became evident that greenhouse gasses were involved in most climate changes and that human-related emissions were causing serious global warming.As this consensus was building, the need for accurate information, including projections, became evident. In 1988, to provide the best and most accurate scientific information that could be developed, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization that was promptly ratified by the U.N. General Assembly. IPCC Assessment Reports were published, starting in 1990, which led to the organization of a number of conferences on the topic. In 1992, at the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, a U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was proposed and eventually established.The successive IPCC reports have made strong contributions to developing the science of global climate change since 1990, and it is worth summarizing the most recent, the Fifth Assessment Report (2013–2014) to establish how it was organized and what it concluded. To establish the scope of the report, scientists from throughout the world were consulted and governments and organizations were invited to suggest subjects and experts for the study. Some 831 expert authors, selected from about 3000 nominations from around the world, were selected to draft the assessment. Panels were established and examined the available literature. In this process, for example, 9200 peer-reviewed papers were considered in developing the physical science section of the report alone. A number of workshops were organized and all of the available information was carefully considered.The findings of the IPCC panels were expressed in the careful language of science after extensive scientific and national review. The atmosphere and ocean are certainly warming, with the rate of sea-level rise since 1950 is unprecedented in the human record. It is extremely likely that human influence has predominated in bringing about these changes. The longer we wait to reduce our emissions, the more expensive it will become. The concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere has increased to levels unprecedented on Earth for 800,000 years. Depending on the actions we take, the global surface temperature is projected to reach 1.5–2°C more than the 1850–1900 level by the end of the century, the global water cycle will be seriously altered, the oceans will continue to warm, sea level will continue to rise at a rate very likely higher than that of the past few decades, and the oceans will become increasingly acidified. The effects of such changes on biological extinction are estimated at 20–30% by the end of the century.In evaluating these results, it is necessary to understand the thorough and comprehensive process by which they were reached. Contrary scientific views on any of the matters considered in the report are being considered carefully in anticipation of the preparation of the sixth report, but meanwhile it is clear that the current IPCC report presents the best and most accurate estimates possible of global climate change and its probable effects. Nonscientific reports or skepticism from the general public or uninformed politicians should not be taken seriously and certainly not be allowed to slow down our reactions to these serious problems. The immorality of investing millions of dollars in "disproving" the role of human beings should be obvious, and the degree of human suffering that any delay in addressing these problems comprehensively will generate is beyond comprehension.Humanity's effects on our planet have been unprecedented, and most scientists now consider that we are living in a new geological era, the Anthropocene (Waters et al. 2016). Add to the generally recognized environmental trends discussed to this point a few additional alarming facts, for example, since the birth of the universal nation state about two centuries ago, about 200 million people have been killed in wars; that the richest 62 people in the world are estimated to possess as much wealth as everyone else in the world combined; and that Russia has approximately 7700 nuclear-armed missiles, the U.S. roughly 7000, and the future begins to look truly threatening. At a recent meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the nondenominational body that advises the pope about matters of science and technology, Academy President and Nobel Prize winner Werner Arber observed that it was not so much the conditions that would confront our children and grandchildren that should concern us, but rather the fate of civilization during our own lives if we continued down our current path of environmental destruction.Given the political impossibility of addressing most of the world's issues or drawing close enough together to make global sustainability feasible, one can readily see why many of us have come to believe that a moral or spiritual revolution will be necessary if we are to keep our civilization intact.Religions assumed ever-greater importance as civilization developed over the past 10,000 years. Concomitantly, the growth of the human population and that of the intensive agriculture that made it possible began to cause obvious damage to the environment—something that had not really been evident before. Many consider that the severity of the flooding associated with the story of Noah's Ark may have had to do with environmental damage and in the Bible (Genesis 2:15) humans are instructed not only to cultivate the Earth but also to care for it. Most religions have called for a reverence for life and for adequately caring for the Earth through the millennia, and there is general agreement now that such attention is both fully justified and necessary.St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226) displayed a special love for Creation that has caused him over the years to be considered the Patron Saint of the Environment. In his famous Canticle of the Sun, St. Francis writes: "Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and You give light through him. … Be praised, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air, and clouds and storms, and all the weather, through which You give Your creatures sustenance. Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure. … Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us, and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs" (translation from Wikipedia).This beautiful and explicit recognition of our complete dependence on the Earth is, as mentioned above, the basis for the name of the Encyclical we are considering here: Laudato Si', "Be praised" (in medieval Italian), nine centuries after the time of St. Francis of Assisi. The environmental pressures have increased as I have cataloged above, and the leaders of the Catholic Church have taken them seriously as they have become increasingly evident. The connection between environmental degradation, poverty, and our moral obligation to one another should cause any thoughtful person to worry about the serious situation I have outlined above.As a few exceptional thinkers like Malthus caused us to become concerned about the adequacy of our common food supply, environmental concerns began to grow along with population pressures and famines. After the horrible experience of world wars, however, most of our public attention has been focused on the need to avoid war between nations. This was the aim of the United Nations when it was established in 1945, just at the end of World War II. Subsequently, the U.N. founders worked hard to win the adoption by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, a document that would have saved so much bloodshed had its precepts been followed fully in the subsequent decades. In the 1940s, however, there was as yet little recognition of our care for the global environment as playing a telling role in determining the welfare of individuals. Two influential books, both published in 1948—William Vogt's Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn's Our Plundered Planet—started many people thinking and wondering about the global situation and influenced the thinking of many who became leaders subsequently.In the United States, an industrialized country that had drawn full support from the advances of the Industrial Revolution, citizens came out of the enormous disaster of World War II to find a peace that for them was filled with optimism for the future. A common concern for the Earth, however, grew as signs of strain became increasingly evident. Two very original books in particular became landmarks in that growing awareness: Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall's This is the American Earth (1960) and, of course, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). They, with others, had a huge impact on the American public, which became increasingly environmentally aware and active through the 1960s. Particularly important was Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968), which stressed the overall impact of uncontrolled population growth on every other aspect of the global environment. During the same decade, the human population growth rate in 1962–1963 reached its highest level ever, 2.2%; the global population, then 3.1 billion people, had nearly quadrupled since the time of Malthus. Since then, the world population has more than doubled again, to 7.4 billion, with a current growth rate of 1.3%, and the signs of our impact on the population are evident throughout the world. Despite the fact that we are surrounded by evidence to the contrary, utopian thinkers subsequently have continued to argue that the environmental warnings perceived in the 1960s were overdrawn, and that there really has been no problem subsequently—simply unbelievable. No wonder E. O. Wilson (1993) was moved to ask, "Is humanity suicidal?"At any rate, the environmental activism of the 1960s culminated in the U.S. on Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when 20 million people, one-tenth of the American population at that time, turned out to demonstrate in favor of a cleaner environment. Similar movements formed in other countries, and a number of excellent environmental books were written during the course of the 1970s, inspiring further action. The Stockholm Conference on the Environment, held in June 1972, could justifiably be called the first truly international discussion on the global environment. It was a U.N. conference, and the Secretary General of the conference, Canadian Maurice Strong, grasped the fundamental issues and served the cause of world environment and peace well from that point until his death in 2015. Also in 1972, the Club of Rome organized a conference that resulted in the book The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). The pushback to the growing environmental movement was powerful, however, with only a few nations or corporations changing their behaviors in a meaningful way at that time.Against this background it should not be surprising that the three most recent popes, experiencing these global trends, have preached in one way or another that it is immoral for a family to have more children than they can support adequately. Most striking was Pope Francis' statement last year, "God gives you methods to be responsible. Some think that—excuse the word—that in order to be good Catholics we have to be like rabbits. No." The populations in predominately Catholic regions are growing relatively slowly, those in Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia the most rapidly.One of the remarkable features of the Encyclical we are considering is the particular attention that it pays to the loss of biodiversity. The local loss of individual species has been noted since Classical times, and people have remained concerned with what they experienced in their own areas. It was not until the late 1960s that scientists began to realize collectively that we were likely to be driving huge numbers of species of animals, plants, and other kinds of organisms to extinction in a short period of time.In 1968, Norman Myers, who had originally gone to Kenya as a consultant for the British government, wrote many of us inquiring about what we thought about the problem, and thus called our attention to the fact that it might be more than a local phenomenon. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) started producing "Red Lists" of species that were in different degrees vulnerable to extinction, the first one on plants in 1970. The scientist Thomas Lovejoy invented the word "biological diversity" in 1980 and in the same year became the first person to chart projections of massive extinction. In 1986, a group organized an important meeting sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution, and in the book resulting from that meeting, the now very popular term "biodiversity" was proposed (Wilson 1988).Current science-based estimates of species number and extinction rates are as follows. For eukaryotes (all organisms except bacteria and archaea), I estimate that there may be some 12 million species (as opposed to the estimate of about 2 million species that was current until about 1980), with only about 2 million of the 12 million having been given names at this point. For some 40 years it has been estimated that as many as one-half of these species might become extinct by the end of this century, and perhaps 20% of them by 2050, just 34 years from now. The most recent report from the IPCC estimates that 20–30% of all species are likely to become extinct during this century as a result of global climate change, and although it appears that this estimate may be too high overall, it is a sobering one. Taken together with habitat destruction, the effects of invasive species on existing populations, and the overharvesting of species for food, medicine, and other purposes, this additional cause of species loss strengthens estimates of a loss of a majority of all species during the lifetimes of our grandchildren are probably well founded (Pimm et al. 2014 summarizes the situation). A majority of the species that disappear permanently during the course of our lives and those of our children will never be seen by any human being: in view of this sad fact, one can readily understand E. O. Wilson's point that the loss of these species is likely to be the crime for which our descendants will be least likely to forgive us.Considering that our life depends wholly and directly on living organisms, the destruction that we are driving now will certainly have major negative consequences for the quality of our lives in the future. All of our food, many of our medicines, and a high proportion of our building materials are derived from living organisms. In addition, they possess the ability to absorb the pollutants we produce, and all of the other ecosystem services by virtue of which the condition of the atmosphere is regulated. We depend on them for maintaining the fertility of our soils, conserving and purifying our water supplies, and providing models on the basis of which we are enabled to practice agriculture and forestry on a sustainable basis. When we demonstrably know nearly nothing about the great majority of species, to drive them to extinction as the basis of our activities is about the worst thing we could imagine doing. We do seem to have left the biblical injunction to care for the Earth far behind in our search for "progress" and personal comfort.What has the position of the Catholic Church concerning the environment been historically? The Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS), established by Pope Pius XI in 1936, provides advice to the Papacy on scientific and technical matters. It is nondenominational, with a statutory 80 members appointed by the pope for life, 11 of whom are from the U.S.; I was appointed in 1990. About half of the members are Nobel Prize winners. In 1994, Pope St. John Paul II established two additional academies, the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (PASS) and the Pontifical Academy of Life, the latter the only one of the three that deals directly with moral and ethical issues, as in medicine. Because of the existence of the PAS and its consistent input of objective scientific advice, the Catholic Church has accepted both biological and cosmic evolution since the 1930s and global warming ever since it was established as an important factor in determining our common future. If only our country could do as well in dealing with scientific information.As the great increases in population and desire for ever-higher levels of consumption became increasingly evident, the "have-nots" of the world increased greatly both in number and in degree of misery. The Industrial Revolution in all of its manifestations began to exacerbate human misery and cause dislocation and inequality in ways that writers, philosophers, political systems, and religious leaders had to confront. The Catholic Church entered the discussion in a notable way in 1891, when Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical Rerum Novarum was promulgated. In this significant document, the pope stressed the differences that had become apparent between classes and the growing inequality between rich and poor worldwide. In doing so, he initiated starting a robust tradition within the Church of treating such matters as central priorities.The revolution in Church thinking that Pope Leo XIII brought about was more than matched by that associated with Pope St. John XXIII, despite the fact that he served as pope for only five years, 1958–1963. Pope John XIII brought the Church much more fully into the modern world than it had been earlier through the results that came from the Second Vatican Council. The pope convened the Council in 1962, and it continued its deliberations for two years after his death, in 1965. The findings of the Second Vatican Council represented a major turning point for the Church, opening the way for its modernization, and thus laying the foundation for its direct concern with the environment, which soon followed. In his Encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963), Pope St. John XXIII argued cogently, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that matters of war and peace were basically moral issues that required spiritual leadership as a basis for their permanent solution. He called for a ban on nuclear weapons, which certainly pose an ever-present threat to the majority of the human population. Half a century later, nuclear weapons continue to be maintained in huge numbers to bolster the competitive strength of the nations who possess them. They are a great danger for us all whether we think about them or not.Over the years that followed the Second Vatican Council, it became clear to religious leaders as it was becoming clear to the world generally that the plight of the poor was closely and increasingly tied to the way we collectively were treating our environment. It soon became evident that neglect and overuse of the different ecological systems of the living Earth were inextricably interwoven with the possibility of global equity.In 1967, Pope Paul VI, in his Encyclical Populorum Progressio, called attention to the social and moral challenges left by the general demise of European capitalism throughout their former colonies. In doing so, he was echoing Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, but in a new context: the exploitation of colonies had environmentally taxed the environmental sustainability of much of the world, but the dissolution of those same colonies gave rise to a whole series of new problems associated with less obvious forms of exploitation. Pope Paul VI may legitimately be regarded as the first pope who fully comprehended the relationship between human progress, justice, and the environment. He called consistently for greatly increased attention to the problems associated with our mismanagement of all three of these factors.Thus it was that in 1971, marking the 80th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's landmark Encyclical, that Pope Paul VI listed the environment as one of 11 social problems that the Church should confront in Octogesima Adveniens. He realized that the proper treatment of the environment would be necessary to correct other social problems, and if the environment were neglected, that would only serve to make them worse. In this regard he wrote, "Man is suddenly becoming aware that by an ill-considered exploitation of nature he risks destroying it and becoming in his turn the victim of this degradation" (Octogesima Adveniens sec. 21). In 1972, Pope Paul VI participated in the U.N. Conference on the Global Environment, the Sto