The Pope’s Green Message Is About a Lot More than Climate Change

This week, Pope Francis is making his first visit ever to the U.S., and there is plenty of speculation about what he will say.  But the pope has already delivered a powerful challenge to Americans in the form of his recent encyclical, Laudato Si:  On Care for Our Common Home.

While many in the media have claimed this encyclical is about climate change, that is like saying the Bill of Rights is about the quartering of soldiers.  Both are mentioned in their respective documents; neither is privileged.  This is not an encyclical about climate change — it is instead a stunning piece that lays out a vision of a meaningful human life.  It also declares that our current institutions and approaches are inadequate to the challenge of allowing this meaningful life for the vast majority of people.

For Pope Francis, much of what is required for a meaningful life obviously (and understandably) centers on spirituality and serving God.  But he has powerful additional messages for believers and nonbelievers alike — that meaning in life derives from how we treat each other, and how we care for nature.  “Everything is connected” is an oft-repeated phrase in this encyclical.  In Pope Francis’s cosmology, we are each individually responsible for all other living creatures on the planet.

However, the institutions that structure our world — our globalized, market-driven economies and the technologies they employ — are not designed to serve those ends.  That is not to say these institutions are without merit — they give us access to life-saving and life-enhancing goods, and help create and disperse knowledge globally.  But no sensible economist would suggest that free markets do anything other than allocate scarce resources efficiently.  They cannot guarantee access to food or water for the poor, cannot guarantee meaningful employment for all who want to work, cannot protect public goods like environmental resources without other regulations in place to do so.  Likewise, we all know that technological innovation has potential to do harm as well as good.

This is what Pope Francis notes in his encyclical — that the markets and technologies that have achieved such a place of supremacy in our world have failed to secure a decent life for most of humanity.  This should not surprise us — they were not designed to do so.  We place too much faith in them, and ignore too many of the other compacts and contracts needed to nurture each other and the planet.

“The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits,” writes Francis, “and we still have not solved the problem of poverty.”  The appalling gap between rich and poor continues to widen:

We fail to see that some are mired in desperate and degrading poverty, with no way out, while others have not the faintest idea of what to do with their possessions, vainly showing off their supposed superiority and leaving behind them so much waste which, if it were the case everywhere, would destroy the planet.

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