Pope Francis and the Sun – by Bill McKibben

Source: Pope Francis and the Sun – by Bill McKibben

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But he brought that moral resolve to the question of climate change, making it the subject of his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si, the most important document of his papacy and arguably the most important piece of writing so far this millennium. I spent several weeks living with that book-length epistle in order to write about it for the New York Review of Books, and though I briefly met the man himself in Rome, it is that encounter with his mind that really lives with me. Laudato Si is a truly remarkable document—yes, it exists as a response to the climate crisis (and it was absolutely crucial in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks, consolidating elite opinion behind the idea that some kind of deal was required). But it uses the climate crisis to talk in broad and powerful terms about modernity.

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