It wasn’t a brilliant year, and it wasn’t a bad one. But for climate tragics like me, in the broader scheme of things 2015 was a good year. It gave you a sense that we were moving in the right direction.
It was the year Australia’s leading climate denier, prime minister Tony Abbott, lost his job to Malcolm Turnbull, who at least took climate change seriously. It was the year of the Paris Agreement, under which the world’s governments committed to set and act on targets to cut carbon emissions. And it was the year a pope spoke for the climate – the year of Laudato Si.
Hundreds of papal encyclicals, or formal letters by popes to the bishops of their church, mostly about how to be a good Catholic, have been issued at the rate of about one every year since the 1700s. As a heathen I’m no judge of their worth to the faithful, but I can judge the worth of Laudato Si (roughly translating as “Praise God”) because it’s addressed to all of us.
To this outsider, two Catholic popes stand apart from all others. In my youth there was John 23rd, best known for modernising his faith and as the author of a landmark 1963 encyclical on world peace and the arms race, addressed to “all men and women of good will”.
The second of those, having adopted the name of nature-loving St Francis of Assisi, in death will be known as Nature’s pope. Like John in his peace encyclical, Francis addressed Laudato Si to all people, but focusing not on what people do to each other but what we’re all doing to the planet.
Our common home, wrote Francis, “is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us” – analogies reminiscent of what the British physicist James Lovelock called Gaia, or Earth’s biosphere, the vast array of interconnected ecosystems which Lovelock saw as a kind of self-regulating, life-sustaining organism. Mother Earth, if you like.
We, the billions of humans living on this planet, are part of the biosphere. Yet many of us, especially in rich countries, act as if we’re not, as if Earth’s natural systems will always be there for us. The idea that we’re separate from the natural environment, says Francis, is based on a false doctrine circulating in Christianity. We were never meant to dominate the rest of God’s creation.
The most telling of many insights in Laudato Si is the concept of “integral ecology”. Humans are part of the wider world, it says; we can’t understand one without understanding the other, so studying each in isolation is pointless.
Integral ecology as envisaged by Francis expands the science of ecology, the study of ecosystems, to take in how humans relate to each other and to the natural world. It draws on human culture and belief, on community and family, on virtue and respect for the common good.
Laudato Si was published late in the prime ministership of Tony Abbott, who with fellow-Catholic and confidant, the late Cardinal George Pell, preached that climate science had it all wrong. It must have irked them no end to read Francis’s call to arms against those with resources and political power “concerned with masking the problems [of climate change] or concealing their symptoms”.
Francis was a humble man who disliked pomp. As a bishop he used public transport, as a pope he avoided the papal palace. And he was practical, teaching that the church “is not a museum of faith but a field hospital for everyone”. On climate change he spelled out the threat and ways to respond – a shift to wind and solar power, energy-efficient industry and transport, better forest protection.
Francis’s ringing defence of the natural world was heard in places not otherwise exposed to such information, in pews and pulpits, schools and seminaries throughout the far-flung Catholic faith. And that made a difference.
The penetration of that message more broadly – the fact that ordinary people living ordinary lives around the world now know about climate change and want something done about it – is underlined in a German-led study published in February in the leading science journal Nature Climate Change.
Looking at people’s willingness to combat climate change, the study recorded the views of 129,902 people in an unprecedented world-wide survey. It found that 89 per cent of people globally wanted strong government action, and that a clear majority – 69 per cent – would be willing to contribute one per cent of their personal income to the fight.
For Catholics – for everyone – there can be no going back. That’s the legacy of Francis.