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by Roger Pielke, Jr.
The Guardian
June 23, 2015
With his latest statement on science, technology and the environment, Pope Francis has sought to change the debate on climate change. But his statement has broader significance for the way we think about the future
The Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ released by Pope Francis last week has generated a wide range of reactions ranging from enthusiastic praise to uneasy criticism. For some, the Pope’s key message was about climate change, for others about the downsides of economic growth, and some saw in it a reconciliation of science and religion. But the Encyclical also lays bare a debate much larger than each of these perspectives, one that is fundamentally about what kind of world we want to inhabit. The Pope’s message is just the latest intervention in a debate over technologies that has been going on for centuries.
Pope Francis writes of the “human roots of the ecological crisis” defined in terms of deference to a “technocratic paradigm” which contains “the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.”
The Pope’s choice of language is evocative of historian Lynn White, Jr.’s classic essay, “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” written almost 50 years ago in Science. White argued that technological innovation was a “realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature.” A consequence of this mastery, White suggested, is to “give mankind powers which, to judge by many of the ecologic effects, are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.”
White’s proposed alternative to the dominant Christian narrative anticipated the Pope’s Encyclical: “we should ponder the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ: Saint Francis of Assisi” (from whom the Pope took his name). White continued: “the present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science which were originating in the Western medieval world against which Saint Francis was rebelling in so original a way. Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma.”
What Lynn White was pointing to in the 1960s and Pope Francis writes of today can be viewed as a struggle over the meaning of humanity on planet Earth. What is our role? Do we dominate nature? Or are we of nature, even subservient to it? What kind of world do we want? What should we together value? Read more …
