Sam Harrelson

I’ve been watching some coverage of Pope Francis’ passing this morning and I keep asking out loud, “Why isn’t anyone talking about Laudato Si??”

This feels like such a dark day, just a few hours after we Christians celebrated Easter. I pray that we all have the power to speak up about the importance of integral ecologies and the ecology of the cross in the coming days/weeks/months/years as technocratic oligarchic capitalistic interests will surely challenge the concept Francis championed…

I’m thankful for Bill McKibben to pointing out this aspect of Francis’ legacy…

Pope Francis and the Sun – by Bill McKibben:

The ecological problems we face are not, in their origin, technological, says Francis. Instead, “a certain way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.” He is no Luddite (“who can deny the beauty of an aircraft or a skyscraper?”) but he insists that we have succumbed to a “technocratic paradigm,” which leads us to believe that “every increase in power means ‘an increase of “progress” itself’…as if reality, goodness and truth automatically flow from technological and economic power as such.” This paradigm “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” Men and women, he writes, have from the start

“intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand.”

In our world, however, “human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.” With the great power that technology has afforded us, it’s become

“easy to accept the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology. It is based on the lie that there is an infinite supply of the earth’s goods, and this leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.”

The deterioration of the environment, he says, is just one sign of this “reductionism which affects every aspect of human and social life.”