For Francis, the Environment is the Center of Everything

Pope Francis chose the environment as the topic of a major encyclical for a good reason. In the environment — or call it nature — he sees something that knits together the principles and values that are most important to him and his global flock

The smackdown of nature relates to the suffering of the poor, the worship of money, the wealth gap, the nature of capitalism, the value of families, a world mired in materialism, the discarding of inconvenient people, the threat to life in all its forms. Climate change affects the poor more than the rich. They tend to depend more on nature. Natural disasters hit them harder. They have fewer options when besieged by drought, storm, flood, pollution, or the social unrest that follows radical shifts in the basics of an economy.

Materialism — the pursuit of happiness through things — runs contrary to nature. Every product produced, without exception, requires the destruction of something in nature. Nature can reproduce some of those things, but others cannot grow back.

Under the principles of capitalism, a forest is worth nothing unless cut down. Capital-oriented accountancy has no way to value the oxygen lost, the extinction of species, the warming of distant seas, the far-removed effects on rainfall, the lives of people who depend on the slow, sustainable use of living forest.

The worship of money removes humanity and nature from the center of life. Nature and the dignity of humans are lost in the pursuit of cash. As nature suffers, humankind suffers, especially the poor. The poor become disposable, inconvenient consumers of dwindling resources.

Without much effort, the principle of disposable people extends to foreigners, people of other religions, the elderly, the unborn, the marginal, future generations, and whoever's economies are in conflict with capitalism's need to grow more, consume more, destroy more, discard more.

Pope Francis’s encyclical embraces the importance — the miracle — of all life. Many lives and forms of life are threatened by the destruction of the natural environment. The extinction of life on our planet, already taking place, cannot possibly lead to any good. Nature is central to everything. As a moral leader, Pope Francis is obligated to defend nature in the defense of people everywhere. He sees the defense of nature and the prevention of climate change as a moral issue.

How ironic that the head of the Catholic Church is using reason and scientific evidence to counter institutionalized myths based on improvable claims! How ingenious to base a morality on a global reality.

This encyclical should mark civilization’s most significant turning point since the Industrial Revolution. With the industrial production of wealth, society began to turn away from God and the Church, increasingly believing that more physical wealth — more stuff — would bring about happiness.

But something has gone wrong. Physical wealth has not brought spiritual happiness, and the power of commercialism has perverted values to the point where the pursuit of happiness is confused with the pursuit of stuff. We pursue more and more stuff at the expense of nature and disposable people. It looks like progress, but as Pope Francis makes clear, we are moving in the wrong direction.

If we don’t turn around, we are going to be very sorry.

Glenn Alan Cheney is the editor of Be Revolutionary: Some Thoughts from Pope Francis and the author of Law of the Jungle: Environmental Anarchy and the Tenharim People of Amazonia.