Carl Olson comments todayon Magister's piece and adds his own relevant citations. I will omit his opening paragraphs which cites excerpts from Magister:
Vatican vs Copenhagen:
By no means of one voice
about the environment
by Carl Olson
Dec. 19, 2009
... Some have attempted, either through misunderstanding or misrepresentation, to portray Benedict as a thoroughgoing environmentalist in the mold of Al Gore and Co.
Now, Benedict and Gore do share the general belief that how man treats the environment is intimately related to spiritual and religious questions and issues. But they take very different paths thereafter. The difference can be located in considering an essential distinction made by G. K. Chesterton in
Orthodoxy:
If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continues to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature.
The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother.
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity.
Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.
Chesterton highlights one of the two basic errors made when it comes to the environment: approaching nature with a subservient attitude, one that often leads to forms of pantheism, or, even worse, to an apocalyptic, anti-human ideology. NRO's Jonah Goldberg noted this in a recent column:
So consider instead Diane Francis, a ballyhooed Canadian pundit. In a recent Financial Post column, Francis wrote that the “‘inconvenient truth’ overhanging the U.N.’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.”
She insists that “the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate” is to implement a “planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy.”
Population control has always been at the heart of the progressive project, so it’s no surprise that it’s in fashion once again.
Examples of such thinking abound; they dominate the various environmentalist groups and movements. In this ideological paradigm, man is the problem, and he must eliminate or subjugate himself for the sake of "Mother Nature," "the planet," Gaia, etc.
The second error completely avoids forms of neo-pagan mysticism and anthropomorphic sentimentality and instead adopts a cold-blooded utilitarianism; it sees nature as merely a material resource to be used however man wishes, to be plundered with impunity, consequences be damned.
Benedict, of course, sees both approaches as being seriously flawed, reflecting views of man that are, in their own respective ways, inhuman. This is explained in an especially powerful passage from
Caritas in Veritate:
The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. She must above all protect mankind from self-destruction.
There is need for what might be called a human ecology, correctly understood. The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence: when “human ecology” is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits.
Just as human virtues are interrelated, such that the weakening of one places others at risk, so the ecological system is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society and its good relationship with nature.
In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society.
If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology.
It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves.
The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.
Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other.
Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today: one which demeans the person, disrupts the environment and damages society. (par 51).
That passage echoes an equally strong section from Pope John Paul II's encyclical
Centesimus annus (1991):
37. Equally worrying is the ecological question which accompanies the problem of consumerism and which is closely connected to it. In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way.
At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment lies an anthropological error, which unfortunately is widespread in our day.
Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of the things that are.
Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray.
Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.
In all this, one notes first the poverty or narrowness of man's outlook, motivated as he is by a desire to possess things rather than to relate them to the truth, and lacking that disinterested, unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them. In this regard, humanity today must be conscious of its duties and obligations towards future generations.
38. In addition to the irrational destruction of the natural environment, we must also mention the more serious destruction of the human environment, something which is by no means receiving the attention it deserves.
Although people are rightly worried — though much less than they should be — about preserving the natural habitats of the various animal species threatened with extinction, because they realize that each of these species makes its particular contribution to the balance of nature in general, too little effort is made to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic "human ecology".
Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given to him, but man too is God's gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed.
In this context, mention should be made of the serious problems of modern urbanization, of the need for urban planning which is concerned with how people are to live, and of the attention which should be given to a "social ecology" of work.
As I read various accounts of "Climategate" and the summit in Copenhagen, I am struck by the plainly religious fervor and spiritual nature of the environmental movement.
Equally disconcerting are the despotic undertones, the apocalyptic intensity, and not-so-uncommon hysterical language about ice caps disappearing in a few years, oceans rising several feet in decades, polar bears dropping like flies, and so forth — even while these "facts" continue to be challenged by more and more scientists.
Why, if Dan Brown really knew how to research and write, he could put together quite a story of a religion bent on fabrication, manipulation, power, and control through the misuse of sacred texts/data and the coercion of political and cultural powers.
But what is truly unfortunate is that the balanced, pro-human, and pro-environment wisdom of Benedict and John Paul is likely to be ignored by many or most.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/12/2009 20:33]