Climate change fears and associated policies – “forever chemicals” in our water and homes, threats to species and habitats – are among the most prominent environmental worries. In the wake of Pope Francis’s “Laudate Deum,” I have been pondering the question: Why is there so much disagreement about the environment? Is the reason, as Pope Francis seems to suggest, rooted in greed, injustice, or a disordered faith in technology? Or is something else at the root?
Greed, injustice, and a disordered faith in technology—human darkness—certainly contribute to environmental problems, big and small. But my own on-the-ground experience and research that commenced in the 1970s tells me that entering 2024, when environmental consciousness is higher than ever before, there is more to be considered.
Not infrequently, people, organizations, institutions, and governments try to reduce environmental policy to following the science and science’s predicted threats to people, other living species, and/or the planet. We should dispel the simplistic notion that disagreements about the environment can be reduced to those who rely on science and those who are science deniers, or greedy. A better explanation recognizes that Earth’s environment is complex. Environmental matters are not black and white, far from it.
The physical includes streams, oceans, lakes, raging rivers, polar ice, atmospheric water, drinking water. Air above above our cities and wilderness, up into the stratosphere and beyond. Habitats and species, micro to macro, all over the world. Land, atolls, caves, mountains, deserts, prairie, rocky buttes. Climate and weather, the elephant in the 21st century room.
Religious traditions and perspectives shape the attitudes of many. Equally influential are perspectives and policies. Science is how humans decipher physical phenomena. Engineering is applied science that affects the environment. Policy is our articulated response to environmental concerns, including how environmental policy is impacted by political systems.
Religious traditions, sacred texts, admonitions from religious leaders come in to play, as do secular ideologies, value equivalency between humans and all other species. Commerce considers business impacts proceeding from environmental policies.
Media and advocacy organizations, public communications on environmental topics, editorials and op-eds, journalism with a point-of-view play a part. Wars, environmental devastation, survival priorities contribute. Context is last and often least considered—historical context, technology advances, pollutant amounts in relation to human health/environment, unintended impacts of environmental policies.
With this mind boggling complexity in mind, is it any wonder that disagreements occur, even between people of good faith? Environmental policy has never been the strict application of science, nor should it be. Environmental policy has always been colored by a host of other considerations, worthy and unworthy. Focusing exclusively on the “science” is not enough, either, when few understand the science, especially context, and when scientists can’t help being influenced by those things that affect their perspectives, as reinforced during the pandemic when too many scientists publicly discredited the Wuhan lab-leak theory while privately (based on their emails/texts) acknowledging that the lab was the likely explanation. Nevertheless, we are flying blind if science does not strongly inform our perspective on planet Earth’s environment.
In light of this complexity, is disagreement about environmental policy, then, necessarily a bad thing? Is disagreement with far-reaching, high-impact policy proposals necessarily rooted in greed, injustice, or a disordered faith in technology? Is there no place for prudential judgment in matters affecting the planet? Perhaps we are best served by bringing an informed awareness of many things that affect our own perspectives to public and private conversations.
Would that the outcome of such informed and reasoned disputations about the environment be the exclamation, “Laudate Deum!”
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