Extinction Rebellion is protesting climate change this week. It’s a public spectacle in the lead-up to COP26—an intergovernmental meeting on climate change in Scotland.
As an environmental historian, I applaud nonviolent activists and protests, but it’s still hard to be excited about climate politics.
Environmental policymaking often means fiddling with a new carbon tax or floating another recycling program. While these are commendable measures, they don’t actually change the system of extraction, production, and consumption that led us here.
In Planet on Fire: A Manifesto for the Age of Environmental Breakdown (2021), Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton propose that the climate problem is a socioeconomic crisis. The authors fear that, if socioeconomic action is not taken, then the increasingly-warm world will descend into competition for scarce resources, ethnonationalism, and war. Yet rather than dwell on future ruins, Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton are defiantly hopeful in outlining their vision for a livable planet.
The State of Play
Beyond what you or I can derive from our kitchen tables, the current scientific consensus overwhelmingly identifies a climate crisis.
This month, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 2021 report. The document (drafted by 234 scientists) warned: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.” They further observed that “Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850” and that “recent changes across the climate system as a whole and the present state of many aspects of the climate system are unprecedented over many centuries to many thousands of years.”
Concluding, the IPPC warned that, even if governments take drastic actions right now, we will still suffer the cumulative impact of climate change for decades—which, of course, is what made headlines.
Manifesto Measures
Planet on Fire warns that “There is no freedom on a dead planet.” Rather, the book’s authors argue that a livable future demands an end to “tinkering.” A habitable world necessitates widespread change.
Planet on Fire proposes a form of “ecosocialism.” Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton define ecosocialism as “the collective effort to democratise our economic and political institutions, repurposing them towards social well-being and individual flourishing, rooted in an abundant and thriving natural world.” To support their claim, the authors cite Eric Olin Wright’s assessment that capitalism depends on and grows inequality. They argue we can’t just make inherently destructive systems good, we have to do radically better.
Each Planet on Fire chapter builds to the authors’ manifesto, which then outlines ten steps toward their vision of a humane future. Briefly, they propose:
A new purpose. Profiteering consumerism is destructive. Instead, the individual and collective goods found in a democratic, sustainable society must motivate us.
Financing to flourish. Banks, financiers, and governments already direct socioeconomic behavior. Rather than depleting our children and grandchildren’s quality of life, these institutions could use their tools to build sustainable futures.
Owning the future. Since the future will suffer our consequences, we need to own their solutions. “Future generations are unlikely to begrudge slightly higher, manageable levels of public debt, if it means they inherit a habitable world.”
A twenty-first-century commons. The commons—physical infrastructure like public libraries, parks, and gardens that belong to all, and shared resources like healthcare and education—must be expanded and protected. “The rallying cry of an agenda for a time of breakdown is clear,” the authors argue: “Public luxury, private sufficiency.”
Living, not just surviving. People should possess leisure time to enjoy the public commons, their relationships, and their own interior lives.
Working for life. If workplaces aren’t just and equitable for humans, how can we expect employers to advance environmental goals in a humane fashion?
Caring and playing. “The work of care, nurture, and repair” must be the foundation of our markets rather than our current cycle of extraction, production, consumption, and waste.
Energising our lives. If fossil fuels are toxic, we must turn to renewable energy that is accessible for everyone. (Though, as others have pointed out, how we get to renewable energy matters).
Cooperating to win. We depend on one another and our environment, so saving our planet requires solidarity, not competition.
Ending empire. Empires and imperialism drove (and drive) industrialism, and in so doing concentrated wealth and spread poverty. Globalized supply chains carry this legacy and further its harm.
The book concludes by reflecting on younger generations’ role in the climate crisis:
So, if you are of this age, face the future, and the grief and fear that lies therein. Then reach out, meet others, organise, hold onto one another, and never allow anyone to take from you the one unshakable truth upon which we will build a new world: no matter how bad it gets, an alternative is possible and will always be possible.
Despite its name, Planet on Fire resists the easy story of decline. Environmental historians often target narratives that claim the human-nature relationship is inherently flawed—or will inevitably get worse—because decline stories are simplistic narratives, often incomplete or false, and certainly counter-productive. Planet on Fire gracefully avoids this pitfall. The book faces crisis with open eyes and uplifted spirit.
Catholic Environmentalism
How do Catholics respond to environmental writers such as Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton?
In 2015, Pope Francis wrote Laudato Si, an encyclical on “our common home” and the climate crisis. There’s a lot to contemplate in Laudato Si, but I want to highlight three themes Francis uses to respond to both extractive capitalism and its subsequent climate crisis: seeing God’s hand in nature, ecological conversion, and the solidarity of asceticism.
God’s Hand in Nature
Catholics believe God carefully crafted the world—that He sustains the environment, lights the stars, cares for every insect. We believe that the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, that Jesus’ presence in this world sanctified our embodied lives and those of our nonhuman neighbors. According to Pope Francis, God is always “intimately present to each being.”
Catholics are not Gnostics or Manicheans—we see the world as a good gift. According to Scripture, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). We pray in and with our bodies. We come to know God through the material world. Even the Sacraments, like Baptism and the Eucharist, use matter to mediate grace. God calls us in the Scriptures to “till and keep” the sacramental world as a part of our life with God, not exploit it (Genesis 2:15). Francis argues that this biblical directive implicates us in “a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”
Laudato Si reminds us that the earth is a loving gift. We should bear joyful reverence and responsibility toward our home.
Ecological Conversion and Integral Ecology
Seeing God’s hand in nature, Francis calls for “ecological conversion.” By this he means:
…the awareness that each creature reflects something of God and has a message to convey to us, and the security that Christ has taken unto himself this material world and now, risen, is intimately present to each being, surrounding it with his affection and penetrating it with his light. Then too, there is the recognition that God created the world, writing into it an order and a dynamism that human beings have no right to ignore.
Ecological conversion allows us to see the material world clearly. Francis calls for a subsequent “integral ecology” that removes artificial divisions between nature and culture, allowing us to “hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” 1 Since “everything is interconnected” we are challeged “to think of one world with a common plan.” He calls us to embrace the suffering earth and its poor.
The Solidarity of Everyday Asceticism
Integral ecology, that is, solidarity with nature and the poor, means leaving contemporary capitalism behind. Current environmental challenges, Francis notes, “are closely linked to a throwaway culture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish.”
“Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age,” the Pope reassures us, “but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur.” Integral ecology means changing our pace, expectations, and values about material life.
Francis recognizes the role that law will play in restoring ecological justice, but he spends more time describing the “good habits” that individuals must embrace:
A person who could afford to spend and consume more but regularly uses less heating and wears warmer clothes, shows the kind of convictions and attitudes which help to protect the environment. There is a nobility in the duty to care for creation through little daily actions, and it is wonderful how education can bring about real changes in lifestyle. Education in environmental responsibility can encourage ways of acting which directly and significantly affect the world around us, such as avoiding the use of plastic and paper, reducing water consumption, separating refuse, cooking only what can reasonably be consumed, showing care for other living beings, using public transport or car-pooling, planting trees, turning off unnecessary lights, or any number of other practices. All of these reflect a generous and worthy creativity which brings out the best in human beings. Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity.
I’m quoting that at length because it’s such a challenging text. According to the Pope, part of being Catholic is being an everyday ascetic. We are called to “be happy with little” as “a way of living life to the full.” Our love of neighbor and nature challenges us to enter into deeper relationships with them and their Creator. Those relationships, not the latest creepy widget from Google, are where we should joyfully draw our sustenance.
What’s more—this isn’t optional. But Sam, do Catholics have to care about the environment? Yes, yes we do! Francis admonishes us to recognize that “Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or secondary aspect of our Christian experience.” We all have our particular vocations—different strokes for different folks—but everyone is called to care for nature where we are with the resources at our disposal. We always have an impact. We either help or hurt nature as good or poor stewards of creation.
Francis never grows despondent. Rather, as he ends his encyclical, he calls us to “sing as we go.” Indeed, no matter how adverse our climate, we are the Easter people and Aleluia is our song.
Ecosocialists and Catholics
Planet on Fire and Laudato Si respond to a common challenge, share a singular concern, and embrace imperatives for hopeful change. Both provoke us as readers to radically reexamine our role within consumer capitalism. Both help us reevaulate our personal habits and socio-political futures.
Laudato Si does not, however, call for ecosocialism. Let’s fall back on Dorothy Day, who we reflected with in our first post. According to Day, we should study others’ “theory and practice” alongside “Catholic theory and practice” in order to “uphold the latter.” So let’s do that.
Both ecosocialism and Catholic social teaching call us to reject the throw-away culture. Both see care for the poor and nature as the same project. Both champion dignified labor. Both cheer renewed commons. Both see individuals working in concert with laws. And both argue that lives of low-consumption bestow more meaning.
Yet, at the risk of oversimplification, Catholics add a sacramental relationship with the Creator. The integral ecology Francis calls for is not only about material survival, it’s a moral imperative in our eternal relationship with God. Care for the earth and its poor is a response to, and imitation of, the Incarnate Word. Stewardship is joyful love.
Moreover, Catholics can provide a helpful backstop against the excesses of the environmental movement. When environmental lobbies push for renewable technologies, we must remind them that panels and turbines rely on mineral extraction, and that vulnerable mining villages deserve protection too. When extremists say that there are too many people, that humans are the real virus, or that we should encourage abortion, euthanasia, and birth control to reduce the population, we must continue to defend human dignity from conception to natural death. Our integral ecology brings an acute awareness—that nature is a divine gift and that humans are temples of the Holy Spirit—to our activism and policymaking.
So, no, perhaps Catholics aren’t ecosocialists. We remain fans of subsidiarity—handling matters at the lowest level of sociopolitical organization as possible—and seizing levers of power isn’t quite our M.O. Nevertheless, Lawrence and Laybourn-Langton have outlined a particularly compelling case for sociopolitical realignment around the common good. Their vision substantially overlaps with Catholic priorities. I think that we can work together for a livable, humane world.
I enjoyed reading Planet on Fire and Laudato Si together. I hope you did too. Planet on Fire is available from Verso, and the encyclical—like most Church documents—is available for free.
That’s it for today.
See you tomorrow.
Environmental historians have been challenging this nature-culture divide for decades.
Great article as usual! As someone who works in information technology and is an electronics enthusiast, this article makes me wonder and reflect on what a "sustainable technology" would look like. Consumer electronics drive much of the damaging mining practices that go on in the world and the annual release of the next revolutionary, must-have cell phones, graphics cards, televisions, tablets, etc fill landfills and waste precious materials that are largely unrecoverable every time we upgrade. I'm certain that I'm not the first person to come to this realization so I'm wondering if you have any books/resources to recommend on "sustainable technology"?