Laudate Si

[biffvernon]

Whether or not you believe in god, and if you do, whatever your religion, Ladate Si is well worth reading. Encourage everyone in the world to read it.
http://eastlincsgreenparty.org.uk/Docs/LaudatoSi.pdf

[emordnilap]

Whether or not you believe in god, and if you do, whatever your religion, Ladate Si is well worth reading. Encourage everyone in the world to read it.
http://eastlincsgreenparty.org.uk/Docs/LaudatoSi.pdf

Is this what Monbiot wrote about?

Nicely put:

Who wants to see the living world destroyed? Who wants an end to birdsong, bees and coral reefs, the falcon’s stoop, the salmon’s leap? Who wants to see the soil stripped from the land, the sea rimed with rubbish?

No one. And yet it happens. Seven billion of us allow fossil fuel companies to push shut the narrow atmospheric door through which humanity stepped. We permit industrial farming to tear away the soil, banish trees from the hills, engineer another silent spring. We let the owners of grouse moors, 1% of the 1%, shoot and poison hen harriers, peregrines and eagles. We watch mutely as a small fleet of monster fishing ships trashes the oceans.

[emordnilap]

“the book of nature is one and indivisible”, and includes the environment, life, sexuality, the family, social relations, and so forth. It follows that “the deterioration of nature is closely connected to the culture which shapes human coexistence”.

Grrr. Paedos. Stick to the message.

[PS_RalphW]

This pope may be the pick of the recent bunch, but the effect of this will be zip.

He has very little influence in the major polluting nations and little moral influence left in Europe after decades of scandal and corruption, and teachings completely out of touch with modern Western society.

He will get rock star reviews in his home territory in central ans south America, but they are not the primary problem.

[biffvernon]

Be that as it may, the Pope is pretty near the top of the rankings of most influential individual in the world. Laudato Si is inevitably going to reach a very large number of people. Definitely more than my blog, but then he has ~6.34 million more twitter followers than I have.

Before dissing it one really ought to read it.

[biffvernon]

From America:

Leaders of the Catholic church in America took their “marching orders” from the pope’s encyclical on Thursday, fanning out to Congress and the White House to push for action on climate change.

The high-level meetings offered a first glimpse of a vast and highly organised effort by the leadership of America’s nearly 80 million Catholics to turn the pope’s moral call for action into reality.

“It is our marching orders for advocacy,” Joseph Kurtz, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Archbishop of Louisville, said. “It really brings about a new urgency for us.”

Representatives of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said they would hold two briefings for members of Congress on Thursday and visit the White House on Friday to promote and explain the pope’s environmental message.

Those efforts will get a new injection of urgency, when the pope delivers a much-anticipated address to Congress during his visit to the US in September, church leaders said.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/j ... s-response

[adam2]

I feel that the Roman Catholic, and other, churches should lead by example.

Most Churches are relatively large but simple buildings, ideal for solar power.
Many rural ones could be best heated by a wood burning appliance instead of oil.
Religious charities often build schools or healthcare facilities in the developing world, these should be solar powered.
In more affluent nations many churches have large parking lots, another good place for PV.
The Church owns a lot of land, and should consider wind turbines or other renewable energy infrastructure on such land.

However on of the biggest problems is over population, and the policies of the Catholic Church are most unhelpful in that respect.

[biffvernon]

I think it's worth separating what the Catholic Church has done in the past, and over the centuries it's clocked up a pretty bonkers list of atrocities, from the contents of Pope Francis' Encyclical, Laudato Si.

[adam2]

Agree that we should not worry excessively about the distant past but should be more concerned about the present and the future.

The opposition to birth control is however not just history but is the present policy of the Catholic church and the leader thereof, and most unhelpfully so at a time of rapidly rising population and declining resource availability.

[Mark]

Agree that we should not worry excessively about the distant past but should be more concerned about the present and the future.

The opposition to birth control is however not just history but is the present policy of the Catholic church and the leader thereof, and most unhelpfully so at a time of rapidly rising population and declining resource availability.

+1

I'm not speaking from a position of knowledge as I haven't read it, but I'd be interested to know if 'papa' says anything at all about Birth Control.....?
Biff ??

There was a terrible report on C4 the other day about children mining for gold under water in the (very Catholic) Philippines - extremely dangerous to them and very environmentally polluting due to the use of mercury..... They interviewed 3 families I think.......... all were struggling just to survive, but all had 4/5/6 kids......... I felt like screaming at the telly........... a big part of the solution is FEWER KIDS......

[biffvernon]

but I'd be interested to know if 'papa' says anything at all about Birth Control.....?
Biff ??

Only rather tangentially, but this is the section that gets closest.

50.
Instead of resolving the problems of the poor and thinking of how the world can be different, some can only propose a reduction in the birth rate. At times, developing countries face forms of international pressure which make economic assistance contingent on certain policies of “reproductive health”. Yet “while it is true that an unequal distribution of the population and of available resources creates obstacles to development and a sustainable use of the environment, it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development”.28 To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption. Besides, we know that approximately a third of all food produced is discarded, and “whenever food is thrown out it is as if it were stolen from the table of the poor”.29 Still, attention needs to be paid to imbalances in population density, on both national and global levels, since a rise in consumption would lead to complex regional situations, as a result of the interplay between problems linked to environmental pollution, transport, waste treatment, loss of resources and quality of life.

[Mark]

it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development

Hardly a conversion on the 'Road to Damascus' then......
Same old tripe.....

[clv101]

So I actually read all of the pope's little book this weekend. Not something I ever expected to be saying!

It's really good - I agree with a most of it, it has a very down to earth tone and I wasn't distracted from the message by the god stuff that kept creeping in. He even tells us at one point to turn the lights off when we're done using them!

[clv101]

it must nonetheless be recognized that demographic growth is fully compatible with an integral and shared development

Hardly a conversion on the 'Road to Damascus' then......
Same old tripe.....

Naw, he's spot on with his point on population and consumption:

To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption.

IMO this is one the key points to understand about our predicament. A small number, just the wealthiest billion (so likely everyone reading this forum) out of seven billion are screwing it up for everyone through our gross overconsumption.

[Little John]

Yes.

AND there are too many humans.

An imbalance of consumption by some humans was inevitable given the nature of humans. If it hadn't been Western Europe and the USA it would have been somewhere else. This is not to excuse or condone over-consumption in any way. It's just a logical observation given our known history, at least since the dawn of all human civilizations thousands of years ago. Though, if the sudden disappearance of huge swathes mega fauna from the fossil record around 50 odd thousand years ago is anything to go by, we humans have been living out of kilter with our environment's carrying capacity for a very long time indeed. The only reason we got away with it hitherto is because we could up sticks and reboot civilization in new territories, But, that option is now closed to us. We have literally run out of environments to F--k up.