An Ecological Covenant
“Much as liberation theology’s ‘option for the poor’ went from being perceived as avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s to being seen today, as Benedict XVI recently put it in Brazil, as ‘an intrinsic requirement of the Gospel,’ so ecology has moved to the center of Catholicism’s social concern.” – John L. Allen, “Catholic Environmentalism: Green teachings, initiatives take hold among Catholics worldwide”, Aug. 8, 2008, National Catholic Reporter.
Pope Benedict XVI declared recently, “Before it’s too late, we need to make courageous choices that will recreate a strong alliance between man and Earth. We need a decisive ‘yes’ to care for creation and a strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk making the situation of decay irreversible.” – John L. Allen, “Catholic Environmentalism: Green teachings, initiatives take hold among Catholics worldwide”, Aug. 8, 2008, National Catholic Reporter. Ecological crime has now been officially elevated to rank of mortal sin.
Beyond words, what has the Church done to live out this commitment? The Pope has “… authorized the installation of more than 1,000 solar panels atop the Vatican’s Paul VI audience hall to provide electrical current, light, and heating and cooling. The Vatican has also inked an agreement to become the first ‘carbon-neutral’ state in Europe. Under a pact with Planktos/KlimaFa, an eco-restoration company, a ‘Vatican Climate Forest’ in Hungary’s Bükk National Park is being planted with enough new trees to offset the Vatican’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.” – John L. Allen, “Catholic Environmentalism: Green teachings, initiatives take hold among Catholics worldwide”, Aug. 8, 2008, National Catholic Reporter.
The foundation of these initiatives is the perception of a covenant between human beings and the environment. This “covenant” is an unshakable agreement between God and humankind of a human commitment to care for creation and God’s promised fulfillment of the potentials of that creation as that care is given. That the Pope is intensely aware of the current political situation regarding the ecological crisis is revealed in his “World Day of Peace” message for this year, “One area where there is a particular need to intensify dialogue between nations is that of the stewardship of the earth’s energy resources. The technologically advanced countries are facing two pressing needs in this regard: on the one hand, to reassess the high levels of consumption due to the present model of development, and on the other hand to invest sufficient resources in the search for alternative sources of energy and for greater energy efficiency. The emerging counties are hungry for energy, but at times this hunger is met in a way harmful to poor countries which, due to their insufficient infrastructures, including their technological infrastructures, are forced to undersell the energy resources they do possess. At times, their very political freedom is compromised by forms of protectorate or, in any case, by forms of conditioning which appear clearly humiliating.” A careful examination of this major address reveals many themes that leftists would agree with, but it lacks an overarching sense of the ideology that binds the ecological and economic abuses of global capital together. Nascent as his political understanding is, we can build on these beginnings and find many allies in Church organizations that are part of the movement for ecological justice.
Though largely unknown to both leftists and Catholics alike, Catholic social teaching contains the elements of a powerful critique of global capital. In a future article, I will go into detail on these teachings, but for now I would refer readers to the Nonviolent Jesus blog for many articles and examinations of this teaching. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on the political vision which is lacking in the Pope’s understanding and how we might present this to potential Church allies.
The True Depth of the Crisis
What is most critical at this stage is to emphasize the depth of the crisis. While many tree-planting initiatives and denunciations of corporate ecological criminals have been forthcoming, Catholics have no more sense of the true nature of what is facing us than other groups controlled by the corporate media. One of the strongest recent statements is from James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the leading U.S. climatologist, who wrote the following in an article on June 24, 2008 after his testimony to Congress on global warming, "Climate can reach points such that amplifying feedbacks spur large rapid changes. Arctic sea ice is a current example. Global warming initiated sea ice melt, exposing darker ocean that absorbs more sunlight, melting more ice. As a result, without any additional greenhouse gases, the Arctic soon will be ice-free in the summer. More ominous tipping points loom. West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are vulnerable to even small additional warming. These two-mile-thick behemoths respond slowly at first, but if disintegration gets well under way, it will become unstoppable. Debate among scientists is only about how much sea level would rise by a given date. In my opinion, if emissions follow a business-as-usual scenario, sea level rise of at least two meters is likely within a century. Hundreds of millions of people would become refugees, and no stable shoreline would be reestablished in any time frame that humanity can conceive" – James Hansen, "Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming", Huffington Post, June 24, 2008
Root Cause Analysis
Once we have established the sense that we are dangerously close to a tipping point that involves the brutal death of hundreds of millions of human beings and the extinction of a large percent of current animal and plant species, we must identify the cause of this crisis. I would suggest that rather than naming “capitalism” as the agent of our rapidly deteriorating planet, that we describe this degradation in “phenomenological” terms. By this I mean that we should focus on describing the elements of the destructive process itself, rather than focusing on a personified agent of this destruction.
The global economic system in which we are currently embedded exhibits several easily identified and widely-agreed-on factors. A recent article from Monthly Review, “The Moment of Truth – An Introduction” by John J. Simon, states, “The crucial problem from an environmental perspective, [James Gustave Speth] believes, is exponential economic growth, which is the driving element of capitalism. Little hope can be provided in this respect by so-called ‘dematerialization’ (the notion that growth can involve a decreasing impact on the environment), since it can be shown that the expansion of output overwhelms all increases in efficiency in throughput of materials and energy. Hence, one can only conclude that ‘right now…growth is the enemy of [the] environment. Economy and environment remain in collision.’ Here the issue of capitalism becomes unavoidable. ‘Economic growth is modern capitalism’s principal and most prized product.’ Speth favorably quotes Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards’s Understanding Capitalism, which bluntly stated: ‘Capitalism is differentiated from other economic systems by its drive to accumulate, its predisposition toward change, and its built-in tendency to expand.’”
Anyone involved in the U.S. economy instinctively understands this drive. Most U.S. workers are directly involved in promoting this sense of ever-expanding growth in whatever industry they happen to be a part of. It is so pervasive that we rarely question it. In my own technology industry, we are implicitly committed to spreading Internet-related technology and such growth is indeed our “principal and most-prized product”. The end-point of this expansion is the ever-more-efficient exploitation of nature for the purpose of adding to the smorgasbord of commodities. As Catholics, we are part of a tradition that is capable of criticizing this expansive drive. The Church contains a spiritual viewpoint that stands above the drive to endless economic expansion. The Pope declared, “We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole. Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves.” – Pope Benedict XVI, “World Day of Peace Message”, January, 2008.
The “good of all”, indeed the “universal destination of goods”, stands above and criticizes an economic system that can only survive by endless expansion. The weakness of the Pope’s critique is that he believes that “not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests” is a matter of individual choice. In other words, lacking a critique of capitalism in itself, he believes that individuals, corporations and governments can choose to act for the common good without dismantling an economic system based completely on precisely the short-term greed that he criticizes. To put in more “phenomenological” terms, here is a quote from a recent Nonviolent Jesus article which demonstrates the futility of the carbon credit trading system: “James Hansen points to the culprits: ‘CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature. If their campaigns continue and ‘succeed’ in confusing the public, I anticipate testifying against relevant CEOs in future public trials.’ – James Hansen, "Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming", Huffington Post, June 24, 2008. Mr. Hansen blames these CEOs as if they were uniquely guilty, but they can no more break out of their economic preconceptions than can Mr. Hansen. Like them, he believes that the market will eventually correct this dire situation. These CEOs are simply acting as agents responsible to their stockholders, which is their legal obligation under the current economic system. That duty is to maximize the share value of the company. Share value can only be maximized by gaining the highest possible rate of return on the products they sell, which are based on fossil fuels. The more they promote the wide-spread usage of these fuels, the higher the rate of return to their companies. The less they have to pay for carbon abatement programs, the more will accrue to their bottom line. Therefore, their advantage will be achieved by pressuring governments to provide carbon credits for free or moving production to countries which do. Given the current economic crisis, pressurable countries will be lining up gladly to provide credits to transnational patrons.”
This illustrates how corporations are rewarded for ignoring or sidestepping regulations that might address the current crisis. Unless we address the fundamental issue of privileging economic expansion and punishing ecological responsibility, the crisis cannot actually be addressed. A system of international regulation that does not confront this issue will simply be disregarded and weakened by corporations who must perform according to the standards of this one-dimensional reward structure.
Extending the Critique
Beyond simply being rewarded for expansion, we must examine the way in which these rewards are structured. Corporations gain advantage by short-term expansion and exploitation of what are called “externalities”. The easiest way to present the concept of “externalities” is as “hidden costs.” The full cost of fossil fuel commodities are not recovered by the price we pay for them. The widespread ecological destruction caused by exploring for and producing these fuels has not been factored in the price, but must be paid by affected communities such as the Ecuadorians who die from cancer caused by Chevron’s run-off pools. In other words, energy companies have “externalized” the true cost of what they produce by transferring the real costs to other bodies such as the U.S. government. To take one example, the war in Iraq is largely concerned with energy security, but energy corporations are not paying for the war which protects their interests. The costs of the war have been “externalized” to the American taxpayer.
Today’s corporations privilege short-term gain over long-term responsibility. This is not a moral statement or a cry for responsible growth, but a description of widely admitted objective facts, by the corporations themselves in many cases. The reasons behind this tendency are purely economic and form part of the fundamental basis of our economic system. For instance, corporations that pollute without paying for the effects of their pollution are more profitable than those that pay. Wall Street will tend to favor the stock price of the non-paying companies, who will eventually grow strong enough to acquire their more responsible rivals. If a regime of government regulation is imposed to counteract this tendency, corporations will use some of their profits to fund politicians who will remove or weaken these regulations. Only a system that removes the fundamental drive to the relentless pursuit of profit can address this agent of planetary destruction.
In the next installment of this article series, I would like to explore the basics of a Catholic critique of capitalism that might form a standpoint for radical justice activists.
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