Piety might save the planet – if it
were the piety that is a loving respect
for the other creatures here, their
various ever-threatened habitats and our
own better natures. But the piety that holds
consecrated officials and their fiats to be
beyond criticism is arguably the premier
danger the planet faces.
As all eco-warriors and worriers know, the
elephant in the room is population growth.
Many parts of the world have already
overreached their carrying capacity while
others support their citizens by climate-
destructive importing. This inflicts damage
elsewhere through a wasteful contemporary
lifestyle involving the consumption of cheap
meat, highly processed grains and fossil
hydrocarbons. This destruction increases
with every human birth. To cite just one
figure of many, the population of Africa
is predicted to double by 2050 (Population
Reference Bureau, 2018).
A massive change in infrastructure and
habits will only happen slowly and very
unevenly. While European cities are starting
to invest in new tram systems and vegan
restaurants, the formerly poor of China and
India crave hamburgers and the family car.
Their bikes and largely vegetarian diets are
seen as yesterday’s habits. So population
control and – through time – reduction,
via a low birth rate, is an essential eco-
political goal.
But there is determined opposition to
population control in many places, and,
all too often, behind this opposition are
religious organizations which license and
encourage unlimited population growth.
They fight fiercely against the introduction
of easy access to, and financing of, birth
control measures. The Catholic Church
leads the charge on this fight, and its
influence as the premier single organized
religious corporation has tended to push
other authoritarian religious groups and
leaders (such as many ultra-orthodox Jews
and fundamentalist Muslims) in the same
direction. Sometimes there is even heard
the argument that if ‘we don’t breed, the
Catholics will swamp us’. Furthermore,
in many countries nationalism is tied to
natalism. Turkish President Recep Erdogan,
for example, remarked that, “A woman
who abstains from maternity by saying
‘I am working’ means that she is actually
denying her femininity” (quoted in Bruton
[2016]). This is the same ‘more is better’ tack
as the Church, but at least the influence of
such nationalists is more limited because
more local.
Recently, we have seen the Catholic
Church in Argentina succeed in keeping
abortion illegal (Politi and Londoño, 2018).
A New York Times article has outlined the
great difficulty of obtaining an abortion in
Italy, where it is in fact a legal procedure,
because of pressure from the Church and
its influence over the medical profession
(Pianigiani, 2016). Such examples could
easily be multiplied. It is the poor and
relatively uneducated who take this part
of the Catholic message most seriously –
those, in fact, with the least resources to
nurture eight, nine, ten children.
The Catholic Church, a powerful
and authoritarian organization, thus
constitutes a serious enemy of attempts
to brake population growth and thereby
lessen, rather than increase, stress on
habitats and biodiversity.
A reason to emphasize this in this
particular forum is that the present
incumbent – and they have all opposed
birth control – cut an environmentalist
dash with his first encyclical Laudato Si’:
On care for our common home (Pope Francis,
2015). Sweeping in scope, at over 80 pages
and more than 45,000 words in length,
this encyclical ranges over important
topics such as urban planning, agriculture,
and economic policy. The Pope laments
air pollution, climate change, a lack of
clean water and damage to biodiversity.
“Never have we so hurt and mistreated our
common home as we have in the last two
hundred years,” he tells us (Pope Francis,
2015: §53).
“At the heart of the encyclical there is also rigid opposition to abortion, embryonic stem cell research and population control.”
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However, at the heart of the encyclical
there is also rigid opposition to abortion,
embryonic stem cell research and population
control. “Since everything is interrelated,”
Francis writes, “concern for the protection
of nature is also incompatible with the
justification of abortion” (§120). According
to the Pope, we cannot “genuinely teach
the importance of concern for other
vulnerable beings, however troublesome
or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to
protect a human embryo, even when its
presence is uncomfortable and creates
difficulties” (§120).
Laudato Si’ is thus an eco-sympathetic toffee
apple with a poisoned core. Bill McKibben
(2015), reviewing it sympathetically in the
New York Review of Books, tells us:
Francis reportedly has said that the
encyclical was not really an environmental
document at all. The warming of the
planet is a symptom of a greater problem:
the developed world’s indifference to the
destruction of the planet as they pursue
short-term economic gains. This has
resulted in a ‘throwaway culture’ in which
unwanted items and unwanted people, such
as the unborn, the elderly, and the poor, are
discarded as waste.
There is surely dissimulation in the Pope’s
position. The same old cruel objection
to women having any control over their
fertility is buried within a long statement
of concern for the wider world of living
beings. But the elderly and the poor are
not in the same category as the ‘unborn’.
Abortion does involve curtailing a potential
life, but it is a last resort and avoidable
where there is easy access to contraception
and contraceptive knowledge – something
the Catholic Church has always implacably
opposed.
As McKibben puts it, “The real problem,
according to Francis, lies in the fact that
humans no longer see God as the Creator”
(McKibben, 2015). Or put another way,
according to the Pope we are destroying
the planet and its habitats because much of
humanity does not subscribe to Catholicism.
On this analysis, the real environmental
crisis is one of belief. Consumerism, fossil
fuel use and corporations get a ticking-off
in Laudato Si’, but if we all listened to and
obeyed the Holy Father and rediscovered
the Catholic faith then environmental
destruction would go away.
The Pope’s teachings thus reduce to this
contradictory claim: ‘Let us look after the
planet and the other beings – but human
populations must grow without hindrance’.
Of course a man of religion might, like the
White Queen of Looking Glass Land, believe
as many as six (or even just two) impossible
things before breakfast (Carroll, 1978: ch. 5),
but this viewpoint is a death sentence for
many endangered species, apart from the
cruelties of overpopulation for human
communities.
Francis’s occasional nice words about
migrants and even victims of clerical
child abuse should not lead us to wishful
thinking, and casting him as a hero. To
return to the point with which I began, the
core problem is this very piety and ‘hands
off’ attitude – holding his words and the
teachings of his organization as either
beyond criticism or, at least, as better left
un-criticized. Such piety blocks one of the
most important escape routes from our
human-made ecological crisis.
I hope we can be brave eco-citizens and
name and shame this large self-serving
organization whose campaign against any
form of population control compounds all
the ill effects of big fossil fuel, big auto, big
palm oil and so on – because all these things
are driven by humans as consumers.
References
Bruton FB (2016) Turkey’s president Erdogan calls
women who work ‘half persons’. NBC News, 8 June.
Available at https://is.gd/hcPDUT (accessed February
2019).
Carroll L (1978) Through the Looking Glass, And What Alice
Found There. Octopus Books, London.
McKibben B (2015) The Pope and the planet. Review
of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. New
York Review of Books, 13 August. Available at
https://is.gd/4X6L9y (accessed February 2019).
Pianigiani G (2016) On paper, Italy allows abortions,
but few doctors will perform them. New York
Times, 16 January. Available at https://is.gd/wbsPs5
(accessed February 2019).
Politi D and Londoño E (2018) Argentina’s senate
narrowly rejects legalizing abortion. New York
Times, 9 August. Available at https://is.gd/9z8oW6
(accessed February 2019).
Pope Francis (2015) Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’: On
care for our common home. Holy See, Vatican City
State. Available at https://is.gd/tqn0lW (accessed
February2019).
Population Reference Bureau (2018) World Population
Data Sheet. Available at https://is.gd/wydrSx (accessed
February 2019).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray Keenoy runs a writers’ and artists’ retreat on sustainable and communitarian principles
in Tuscany, Italy (https://sibaris.space). He has published various books on world literature – the
Babel Guides – and an auto-fiction collection, Last of the Yiddish Poets, recently excerpted in
The Ecological Citizen.
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