January 19, 2016
by Joseph Bonasia
Pope Francis’s encyclical about the environment is more than a call for policymakers to take significant action on climate change. To think otherwise is to diminish its meaning and significance.
The Pope does indeed address climate change, taking nations to task for having thus far mustered so weak a response to this issue, but his primary concern is with the root cause of the environmental crisis: our consumer culture, a culture that at once severely compromises the quality of life of individuals and the health of the planet.
Lesser actions — a few laws here or a new policy there — although laudable in their intent and certainly steps in the right direction, will not provide sufficient and lasting change. The Pope calls for nothing less than what is needed: a “cultural revolution,” a dramatic change in lifestyle based upon values and attitudes other than those of a psychologically and spiritually corrosive consumer culture, and this change must begin with the individual.
“The ecological crisis,” the Pope writes, is a “summons to profound interior conversion.”
Real life illustrates the Pope’s point.
“What’s your favorite pastime?” I once asked two students. “Shopping! It’s all about the money!” the first young lady replied. The other quickly added, “I even have shopping strategies. Sometimes I focus on socks, other times I focus on shirts and hoodies. Most of the time, I focus on jeans. I have over 35 pairs of jeans.”
Do these remarks disturb you?
It takes about 1,500 gallons of water to grow the cotton needed for one pair of jeans. It takes another 1,360 gallons to dye and finish the jeans, and 1,500 gallons more to launder them after being purchased and worn.
Furthermore, cotton is one of the most pesticide-laden crops grown: two-thirds of a pound per pair of jeans. Cotton also requires herbicides and synthetic fertilizers harmful to soil and water. Stonewashed jeans are washed using pumice stones that had to be mined with large equipment that burns oil and gas, and spews greenhouse gases into the air.
Much of the stone and the cotton gets shipped — lots of greenhouse gases — to China, because China doesn’t have the environmental protection laws we do, so they can dye the cotton with synthetic indigo made from coal or oil and then send the dirty water into rivers, which discolors the water and kills the river by depleting the water of its oxygen. Then, of course, the jeans have to be shipped to stores and we drive our cars to and from the mall — in both cases involving more burning of fossil fuels, more greenhouse gases. Long before they wear out, these jeans end up in landfills or incinerators.
It is not surprising if the negative impact of jeans upon the planet isn’t what you found disturbing in these ladies’ remarks. The environmental consequences of buying what we don’t need isn’t apparent and isn’t on our minds at the point of purchase. More likely what disturbed you was that something seems unhealthy, perhaps even wrong, in these young ladies’ values.
Why would anyone think they needed or should even want 35 pairs of jeans? Similarly, why, in three months’ time, did 75 million people rush out to buy the iPhone 6 last year? Obviously, they thought having these things would improve the quality of their lives and make them happy. This is the basic tenet of our consumer culture: the acquisition of things makes us happy. And while it is also driving the planet to the brink of ecological disaster, it isn’t true.
My mother is 89 years old and in poor health. Last year, on Christmas Eve, she refused to go to the hospital as instructed by her doctor. “This could be my last Christmas with my family!” she argued and declared she wasn’t stepping foot out of her house, where everyone would be gathering.
Later, when she was saying grace over dinner, she suddenly began crying. For 63 years it had been my father who had been the one to say grace, and he had died just two short years earlier. My mother misses my father every day, still. That’s why she was crying, and there is no number of jeans or new phones that can mean to her what her relationship to my father meant, nor what her relationships with her existing family mean.
When my son announced he was going to marry the lovely young lady sitting next to him at the table, whom we all recognized to be his soul mate, that was, to my mother, a gift far more valuable than any thing under the Christmas tree.
And to whom was she praying, but to the God she has believed in all her life and in whose name her wedding vows were sanctified, the God she prayed to when she and my father had their heart attacks.
My mother can no longer travel to church for Mass, but she never misses watching it on television.
That is meaningful and satisfying to her.
There is a grace there that she can’t get from any material item.
“What do you want for Christmas, Mom?”
“Nothing! Don’t get me anything! I have enough things!”
She knows what makes for the truly good life and what doesn’t.
In his encyclical, Pope Francis makes it clear that a truly satisfying human life is to be found in the cultivation of one’s gifts and in the richness of relationships with family and friends, God and Earth — by living according to the values espoused by the great spiritual traditions and corroborated by modern psychology — not in the shallow pursuit and acquisition of material goods so much promoted by consumer culture that it has become the focus of daily life.
Because “the mere amassing of things and pleasures is not enough to give meaning and joy to the human heart,” modern man — the consumer — is left feeling empty, and the emptier a person’s heart, the Pope writes, “the more he or she needs things to buy, own, and consume.” Driven as it is by our dissatisfactions, “the pace of consumption, waste, and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes …”
The ecological damage we have inflicted upon the planet is, in fact, indicative of how negatively we ourselves have been damaged by our consumerism.
The only viable way to save the planet, because it is the only response that gets to the root cause of the environmental crisis, is to live according to “an ancient lesson…the conviction that ‘less is more’.” One does not need yet another pair of jeans or shoes or the latest phone or a bigger car or house or hot tub. One needs to live simply in attentive appreciation of the satisfactions one experiences in one’s relations with each person and the natural world, and in the creative development of one’s gifts, a life so much richer than one marked by the obsessive pursuit of consumption.
“To be serenely present to each reality,” writes the Pope, “however small it may be, opens us to much greater horizons of understanding and personal fulfillment…It is not a life lived with less intensity. On the contrary, it is a way of living life to the full.” It is a lesson to be taught and learned and lived if we are to help ourselves and effectively confront environmental crisis.
The Pope is not the first to offer such insights. Many other individuals and organizations have said the same, the Worldwatch Institute being a notable one. In its 2010 edition of “State of the World: Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability,” a section reads, “Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism — the cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment and acceptance through what they consume — as taboo and establish in its place a new cultural framework…”
In a chapter titled “Inspiring People to See That Less Is More,” Worldwatch writes, “Voluntary simplicity is an age-old philosophy that advocates turning away from the pursuit of money, possessions, and greed in order to live more deeply and fully — limiting outer wealth for a greater inner wealth.” But The Worldwatch Institute isn’t Pope Francis, whose combination of position and character wields enormous influence. He brings global attention to the root cause of the environmental crisis as few others can.
Of course, revolutionizing a culture is an intimidating task, a great “spiritual and educational challenge” (which would have to be the focus of another article). But the change we need begins with the individual, and moves to a collection of individuals, who ultimately have the power to bring pressure to bear upon the political and economic entities whose actions impact the environment.
If we distort or ignore Pope Francis’s main thesis — if we view it merely as a call for action on climate change and not as one for profound cultural change — we do so at our own peril and that of the planet. If we don’t change on so fundamental a level, it may well be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it will be for us and our children to avoid the environmental and social catastrophes scientists say are coming.
Joseph Bonasia, a member of the Long Island Group, lives in Smithtown.