Second Spring
August - September 1996
Christian Ecology
by Stratford Caldecott
Some time ago I was stuck in a London traffic jam with one of my
daughters, then three years old, in the back of the car. She had
asked me a question which I had to answer by explaining about the
six days of creation. She grasped the point quickly, and got
positively carried away. "And on the seventh day," she added
excitedly, "God created the cars!" "Well, not exactly," I replied.
"He created us on the sixth day, and then we invented the cars."
Gazing at the traffic, I added sadly: "You know, he trusted us to
look after this world he had made, and in some ways we've made a
terrible mess of it." She was silent for a moment, trying to work
out what I might mean by that. "Yes," she concluded. "Especially
the <doggies!">
It is true, London's streets are not exactly lined with gold. On
foot one has to watch the pavement quite carefully. It is the down
side of the English love of pets. But what I had in mind was
something rather different-the internal combustion engine, for
example. Britain alone has over 20 million cars on the roads. Car
exhaust is one of the world's major sources of pollution, and the
purchase of mobility at the price of ugliness and noise seems to
me sometimes a poor bargain. Acid rain, the oil and sewage in the
sea, the growth in background radiation, the extinction of
thousands of species, the loss of the rain forests (the "lungs of
the world"), the advance of the deserts, holes in the ozone layer,
the greenhouse effect, and the general destabilization of the
climate, all of these go to make up a crisis, and all are aspects
of one massive problem: the impact of human technology and
lifestyle on our environment.
The crisis, or any given aspect of it, may have been exaggerated-
or conversely downplayed-from time to time by special-interest
groups trying to manipulate public opinion for their own purposes.
Each of us has a responsibility to decide for himself whether
there is a crisis, how serious it is, and how we should respond to
it. We should try to be aware of the dangers of wishful thinking
and of ideology. Without becoming morbid, we should strive to be
realistic, and that means, in part, being open to any new
information that may present itself.
My own best information on the scale of the crisis is summarized
elsewhere in this section. But what I have to say here is mainly
about principles rather than practicalities. These are principles
that should help to govern our behavior even if it turns out that
the world is not on the verge of ecological collapse. They are
implicit in Catholic teaching-and increasingly, under John Paul
II, explicit too. But in the eyes of many people, on Right or
Left, the Pope does not go nearly far enough. We need to see how
the Pope's statements fit within his overall vision of a "culture
of life," and how this in turn belongs at the very heart of the
Catholic tradition that comes to us from the Apostles.
The Green Pope
The Pope has been making authoritative statements on the
importance of "ecological concern" as an essential element in
Catholic social teaching ever since his first encyclical,
<Redemptor Hominis>, in 1979 (sections 15 and 16 in particular).
But in 1988 <Sollicitudo Rei Socialis> developed these ideas
further, and in his January 1990 Message for the World Day of
Peace he devoted an entire document to the question-his
"manifesto" on Green Catholicism. He insisted that the new
ecological awareness, "rather than being downplayed, ought to be
encouraged to develop into concrete programmes and initiatives."
He called for "carefully co-ordinated solutions based on a morally
coherent world view." He described the ecological crisis as
fundamentally a <moral> issue. For "there is an order in the
universe that must be respected, and . . . the human person
endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave
responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future
generations."
These points have been worked into many speeches and addresses
since, and reaffirmed in his greatest encyclical on social
teaching, <Centesimus Annus> (37-40). There and in <Evangelium
Vitae> in 1995 (especially section 42) he integrated them with his
fundamental teaching on the sanctity and defense of human life,
referring again to "human ecology" and describing man as "called
to till and look after the garden of the world."
The Pope's concern for ecology also influenced the <Catechism of
the Catholic Church>: for example in the section on "respect for
the integrity of creation." (2415-18) This section also enjoins
kindness to animals, Citing the examples of St. Francis of Assisi
and St. Philip Neri. (But when did you ever hear of a saint who
was <cruel> to animals?) The <Catechism's> commentary on the eight
days of creation and resurrection (337-49) is noteworthy for its
emphasis on the interdependence and solidarity of all creatures.
The Pope teaches that the ecological crisis is the bitter fruit of
a long war with nature that began under the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. Adam and Eve "destroyed the existing harmony" of
man and nature established by grace. "This resulted not only in
man's alienation from himself, in death and fratricide, but also
in the earth's 'rebellion' against him." That reference goes back
to the Book of Wisdom (5:20), in a line much quoted in the
Franciscan tradition, for example by St. Bonaventure in the first
chapter of <The Soul's Journey Into God> ("apply your heart, so
that in all creatures you may see, hear, praise, love and worship,
glorify and honor your God, lest the whole world rise against
you"). Quoting St. Paul's Letter to the Romans concerning the Fall
(8:20-21), the Pope adds: "All of creation became subject to
futility, waiting in a mysterious way to be set free and to obtain
a glorious liberty together with the children of God."
It is evident that the Pope bases his teaching on Scripture, as if
to counteract a body of literature (starting with a much-reprinted
article by historian Lynn White in a 1967 issue of <Science>)
which blames the crisis on the Biblical injunction to "subdue the
earth" (Gen. 1:28). The mastery which God has given man over other
living things must not be taken out of context, he seems to be
saying. From the beginning, man is master of the earth but subject
to God, and he is to subdue the earth not to his own selfish
purposes but to the purposes of the Wisdom that created, sustains
and continually loves it.
Christianity gives us no excuse to plunder the planet-but it does
perhaps help to explain the reasons why we do. The doctrine of
Original Sin describes the beginning of the process. Death,
suffering and disorder were the results of a deliberate sin, in
which we are all implicated- not just the eating of an apple, but
the conscious decision to destroy an order of nature established
by God. From the effects of this, the world can only be liberated
by Jesus Christ, in whom all things "hold together." (Col 1:17)
Exactly how we understand the nature of that first sin, and the
relationship of the original state in which we were created to the
historical (and biological) reality we know today, is a profound
and difficult question. The Pope is following an ancient tradition
of biblical interpretation, but that tradition is not
"fundamentalist" or "creationist" in the modern sense, for it
assumes a multiplicity of levels and states of being. His
catechesis on Genesis show that he is well aware of the "mythical"
character of these ancient texts, but that he sees in them
nonetheless a profound revelation of what it is to be created, to
be human, to be male and female. The Pope also shares with the
early Church Fathers the sense that the rest of creation
constitutes the "extended body" of humanity. It is part of our
flesh, and what we do to it is intimately related to what we do to
ourselves-for how can you isolate one part of nature from another?
Modern physics, sometimes called the "new physics," itself
confirms this ancient intuition in its own way. But it was not
necessary to wait for quantum theory before we could know what the
mystics have always said: every gesture we make, every breath we
take, every mouthful we eat, every sight we see connects us to the
entire fabric of creation, on which we depend, and which we affect
in our turn. Therefore it must be that all nature that surrounds
us (as the Pope writes in an address to German youth in March
1990) "shares a common destiny with us, in God himself, to find
its ultimate destiny and fulfillment as the new heaven and the new
earth." Not for John Paul II the sad, bleak view that, since
animals and plants have no immortal souls, they will not in some
way share in the Resurrection. No, the cosmos will be
transfigured, eternalized, perfected <in its living integrity.>
But it will pass through death as through a refining fire, and
emerge re-molded in the image and likeness of God.
A New Religion?
The sciences have certainly done a great deal to illuminate for us
the order and harmony that exists in nature. The mutual
interdependence of creatures is the specific
subject matter of the new science of ecology. The
famous photograph of the earth from space, and of
"earthrise" on the moon, became the banner and the
inspiration of the Green movement in the 1960s. However the
Green movement, like the New Age movement with which it
is entangled, is a very diverse phenomenon, with many
different scientific, political, economic, moral, and
religious strands. For one thing, in the absence of
any generally accepted metaphysical framework, scientific
hypotheses are soon and easily swept up into more ambitious
ideological or speculative systems. That has been the fate of
scientific ecology.
New versions of the old pagan religions, of course, are big
business. They sell books. I remember being told by one
leading San Francisco publisher [<not> Ignatius
Press!] many years ago that he was actively looking for
the bestseller who would create a new religion with maximum
appeal to all those who were then becoming interested in ecology,
women's issues, and liberation theology. The new religion would
contain many elements of the old: a Fall from the matriarchal
harmony of the Garden, brought about by the Original Sin of
industrialization, leading to the threat of planetary Apocalypse.
By identifying industrialization with capitalism it would bring in
the Left. By describing it as the "rape of the earth" by
patriarchy it would bring in the feminists.
In the early 1970s, a scientist named James Lovelock tried to show
that the entire ecosystem of the planet functions like a single
organism, imbued with a kind of instinctive intelligence, able to
regulate the temperature of the atmosphere within a certain range
to enable life to continue. His "Gala Hypothesis" was merely an
elaborate metaphor, but the application of the name
of a Greek goddess to the planet earth caught the
popular imagination. It appealed to eco-
feminists, who were already speaking of the earth and
nature as the feminine victim of male aggression,
and to "process theologians" who saw God as somehow
evolving with nature out of matter. "Deep
Ecology" is another example. Developed by Arne Naess,
Joanna Macy, and others, it over-reacts to the limitations of
scientific ecology and piecemeal conservation by identifying
humanity, and even God, with the entire natural world, dismissing
as "shallow" any attempt to judge relative values from a merely
human point of view. The feminist version of Deep Ecology simply
identifies the divine cosmos as feminine, stressing everywhere the
metaphor of connectedness and relationship at the expense of
hierarchy and stewardship. The intellectual enemies of Deep
Ecology include two of the founders of modern science at the
beginning of the 17th century: Francis Bacon (who wanted to "put
nature to the rack") and Rene Descartes (who saw mind as a "ghost
in a machine").
Now a Catholic or Orthodox Christian may agree that Bacon and
Descartes were radically mistaken.
The trouble with Deep Ecology, and most of the other new religions
and philosophies of nature, is that they are so <narrow> compared
to the great pre-Cartesian tradition. Their founders tend to take
a fragment of the tradition and blow it out of proportion. For
example, take the view that God is immanent, <within us>
Christians can agree with that, but in a profounder way and
precisely <because of> God's transcendence, his otherness or non-
identity with his creation. Thus Christian tradition maintains
both sides of the paradox.
Similarly, we can agree that everything in nature has inherent
value, that all being is good, and that there is no <simple>
hierarchy of values to be determined by reference to human
purposes alone. But we must add that precisely because all things
exist in relationship to one another as an (imperfect) expression
of the attributes of God, they each have different roles and
importance. The behavior of the human race affects the system as a
whole: that fact alone (admitted by every conservationist)
establishes a hierarchy of sorts. The existence of an order of
archetypes and principles-even if we limit these to the
mathematical principles and natural laws as discerned by science-
establishes another.
The post-Christian goddess-worship that we find in Europe and
America seems to be in part a response to the loss of a sense of
the <feminine nature of the Church> and of her cosmic
significance. For any deeply Catholic or Orthodox mind, the Church
is a person, typified in the Virgin Mary. The institutional
aspects of the Church are subsidiary-or else they represent the
"skeleton" that performs a necessary but ideally hidden function
within the Body of that person. Her actual boundaries extend far
beyond her formal membership, into the realm of nature itself. It
is in her that the flowers bloom and the rivers flow. Through his
telescope the atheist scientist gazes at her stars. One can in
fact only <exclude> oneself from her by a conscious act of
rejection.
The responsibility for the loss of this poetic or mystical sense
of the Church as a cosmic, supernaturally organic community lies
with the same dualist mindset that has pervaded Western society
since the 17th century, and which is associated with the rise of
industry and of the merchant classes. In other words, it is
associated with a list of "isms": rationalism, postivism,
scientism, communism and capitalism. The answer to that industrial
mindset, however, is not Deep Ecology, it is <Deep Christianity>.
In one way Lynn White was right. Christians helped to get us into
this mess. They became shallow. And if Christians got us into it,
Christians might bear a special responsibility for getting us out.
Population Control
Around the time of the Cairo Conference on Population and
Development (September 1994) I was sitting on a plane and struck
up a conversation with an elderly American. We got along fine for
a few minutes-until he told me he was part of an organization that
believed "we have to stop the population growing in the Third
World." What right did he and his fellow Americans have to do
that, I wondered. If the 30 percent of the world's population
living in the richest countries use 80 percent of the world's
resources (another of those famous free-floating statistics), it
could certainly be argued that the global "problem" was as much
the lifestyle of the average Westerner as the number of children
born to a poor family in the Third World. It would take 9 billion
Indians to do as much environmental damage as all 300 million
Americans.
That, at any rate, seems in part to be the Vatican view, and the
reason why at the Cairo Summit the Holy See was able to make such
a spectacular alliance with countries in the Third World against
the developing consensus of the self-appointed leaders of the
world in favor of population control. Behind a lot of Western
demographic panic, it seems, there lies a deep-seated fear of
losing our own hard-won material and cultural privileges. There is
also a tendency, reflected in all the official documentation, to
generalize the experience of Europe to the rest of the world. The
19th-century myth of inevitable progress, based on a kind of
social or even racial Darwinism, has been replaced by the theory
of "demographic transition" (invented by Frank Notestein in the
1940s). According to this, economic progress eventually results in
the reduction to a new equilibrium of birth and death rates, as
people live longer and lose the desire for large families. But
what if this too proves to be a myth? What if the Third World did
not simply imitate the pattern of Europe and North America? Could
it not, even now, leapfrog the industrial stage into a more
decentralized, community-scale economy using what E.F. Schumacher
called "appropriate technology?" In that case, the picture could
be very different.
None of this is to gainsay the evidence of severe demographic
problems in parts of Asia and Africa. As the Western economies
move into a crisis caused by a declining or aging population,
their active workforce increasingly "liberated" from stable, full-
time work by the new technologies, many nations in the South are
suffering from chronic overcrowding caused by a combination of
high birthrate and economic mismanagement. Pressure from the
population control lobby and the contraceptive industry has helped
to reduce the fertility rate in the Third World from 6.1 children
in the 1950s to 3.7 today, but these are only <average> figures.
And the world's population- up from a billion in 1800 and two
billion in 1929 to five billion in 1989-is likely to grow by a
couple more billion in the next two decades.
In these circumstances, the Vatican's position has been widely
misunderstood and misrepresented. In 1994, the year that the Pope
made his bold and influential stand against the anti-humanistic
assumptions underlying the Cairo Summit, the Pontifical Council
for the Family produced a very clear and helpful document called
<Ethical and Pastoral Dimensions of Population Trends.> While
accepting the idea of demographic transition, the document
concludes that international agencies need to adopt a more
sophisticated concept of human and economic development. Authentic
development "respects women and children and gives attention to
the rich diversity of cultures." Furthermore, if human life is not
respected "from conception to natural death" and the family as its
natural sanctuary, attempts to respond to population pressure will
only result in the dehumanization of society and the creation of a
"culture of death." Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are
evil means to a dubious end.
The causes of "underdevelopment" are not an excess of mouths to
feed, but lie in the relation of the local to the global economy,
the threat or reality of war, and patterns of consumption in the
developed nations. Mouths belong to human beings, and human
beings-with their creativity, their capacity for work, and their
love of life-are potentially the solution to all these problems.
Even if it were possible to create a sustainable economic system
by killing or sterilizing a large part of the population, would we
really want to live in a society built upon the slaughter of
innocents and contempt for life?
Human Ecology
The most common misunderstanding of the Church's position concerns
the issue of contraception-and it has been so ever since Paul VI
issued <Humanae Vitae> in 1968. Long before his election as Pope,
John Paul II was a supporter of that encyclical, and his writings
since then, especially his teachings on the family and his
"theology of the body," have deepened our understanding of reasons
for Paul VI's decision to rule out recourse to "artificial
methods" of birth control both philosophically and theologically.
Yet this strong position, the basis of which we will examine in a
moment, is combined with an openness to recognize that there might
be valid reasons for a couple to wish to limit the number of
children they invite God to create in their own marriage.
Reasons for limiting the size of one's family could be personal to
the couple-having to do with precarious health or extreme poverty,
for example-or they might be connected with social problems such
as urban overcrowding, or a state of civil war. If such valid
reasons exist, Church teaching would recommend one of the several
forms of "natural family planning." These can now be just as
effective as the artificial methods, yet at the same time they
respect the nature and dignity of the human person. The new forms
of "NFP" are easily taught person-to-person even where levels of
literacy are low, and might even form part of a government
population campaign in some Catholic Third World countries,
provided the purpose of the campaign were simply to communicate
accurate information about an existing crisis, without overt or
tacit coercion, leaving married couples free to decide their own
response.
<Humanae Vitae> and the more recent pronouncements of John Paul II
(in <Familiaris Consortio>, etc.) have to be understood in the
context of the Church's long defense of a positive attitude toward
the human body and sexuality. In the early days of Christianity,
Gnostic and Manichean sects taught that the body was a trap from
which to escape. Matter was the invention of an evil deity. Even
the Neoplatonists, while rejecting Gnostic dualism, regarded
matter as ultimately unreal and aspired to transcend it in pure
intellectuality. The Church rejected such positions, and accepted
matter as part of a good creation redeemed in Christ. Great stress
was laid on the fact that Christ's human body rose from the dead
and ascended into heaven: he did not leave it behind. The Virgin
Mary, at the end of her life on earth, was assumed bodily into
heaven.
Meanwhile marriage was dignified by Christ with the supreme status
of a sacrament, the sexual relationship being regarded as an
analogy (or even foretaste) of the eventual communion of Christ
with his bride, the Church. St. Thomas Aquinas speculated that
sexual pleasure would have been <more> intense in Paradise, if
there had been no Fall. The Devil had not invented sex, only
spoiled it.
So it was that Pope Paul VI felt himself obliged to overrule a
majority of his advisory committee, and issue his famous
encyclical against the contraceptive pill. In the light of the
potential population explosion in some parts of the world, that
document encouraged the regulation of births to a level the earth
could support-but only through non-interventive methods (and he
encouraged the scientific improvement of those methods). A leading
figure in the early stages of the Green movement, the economist
E.F. Schumacher (who at that point was not a Catholic) reacted to
the encyclical with the words: "If the Pope had said anything
different I would have lost all respect for the papacy."
The Pope's decision reaffirmed the Church's whole latent, positive
teaching on the body as a vital element of the human person. It
reaffirmed the principles of ecology in the most intimate
environment known to man. If the Pope had encouraged the use of
the Pill, he would have been encouraging couples to pollute the
waterways of the human body with chemicals, deliberately to
prevent the body from functioning in a healthy way. A profane,
industrial mentality would have been extended into the most
sacred, private sphere. He would have been capitulating to the
heresy of Descartes: the body would have become a machine at the
disposal of its invisible pilot, sex reduced to an activity for
giving and taking pleasure-rather than the expression of self-
giving love, in which pleasure is integrated as a blessing.
This all sounds very idealistic, perhaps. But it is the Church's
job to hope and to trust, and to treat the ideal as the true human
norm. She insists that, with the help of grace, the "impossible"
ideal can be realized. What if it is not, either in one case or in
a million? Then she must be compassionate. But she must not
declare to be normal and acceptable any action that would be
unworthy of a saint.
The argument rages on. While the majority of the earth's resources
are being consumed by those who have successfully "controlled"
their populations, leading figures in the World Wildlife
Federation (WWF) and other agencies call for the wider
distribution of contraceptive pills and condoms in the Third
World. (In 1990 the President of the WWF stated: "It should be
obvious by now that further population growth in any country is
undesirable.") In a century of unprecedented bloodshed, life has
become cheap. Thanks to the new technology, it can be kept frozen
on the shelf until needed-if not needed (or past its sell-by date)
it is simply thrown away. At the Beijing conference on women,
abortion came close to being defined as a universal right. The
killing of the elderly and comatose, as well as the very young,
has become standard medical procedure. One might even surmise that
the spread of AIDS is secretly regarded with relief in certain
quarters: an ally against the population explosion on the one
hand; and an undeniable inducement to promote the condom on the
other.
"A New Solidarity"
The Catholic Church is not a political organization, and she is
not in the business of designing legislation as such. <Centesimus
Annus> made that clear enough. But as the largest and most ancient
moral authority on the planet, she cannot fail to be a significant
influence on international policy. Furthermore, while it may not
be the role of <clerics> to develop economic and political
policies, "the Church" is more than its ecclesiastical hierarchy
alone. And it is precisely the role of the laity to involve
themselves in these matters. In his 1990 Peace Day message, the
Pope spells out some of the implications of this involvement.
"The ecological crisis," he writes, "reveals the urgent moral need
for a new solidarity, especially in relations between the
developing nations and those that are highly industrialized.
States must increasingly share responsibility, in complementary
ways, for the promotion of a natural and social environment that
is both peaceful and healthy." Then the Pope becomes more
specific. "The newly industrialized States cannot, for example, be
asked to apply restrictive environmental standards to their
emerging industries unless the industrialized States first apply
them within their own boundaries. At the same time, countries in
the process of industrialization are not morally free to repeat
the errors made in the past by others, and recklessly continue to
damage the environment through industrial pollutants, radical
deforestation, or unlimited exploitation of non-renewable
resources. In this context, there is urgent need to find a
solution to the treatment and disposal of toxic wastes."
He then moves to the structural level. "It must also be said that
the proper ecological balance will not be found without directly
addressing the structural forms of poverty that exist throughout
the world. Rural poverty and unjust land distribution in many
countries, for example, have led to subsistence farming and to the
exhaustion of the soil. Once their land yields no more, many
farmers move on to clear new land, thus accelerating uncontrolled
deforestation, or they settle in urban centers which lack the
infrastructure to receive them."
The question of Third World debt is not neglected (the Pope has
since suggested that many of these debts ought to be written off,
in a kind of global Jubilee). "Likewise, some heavily indebted
countries are destroying their natural heritage, at the price of
irreparable ecological imbalances, in order to develop new
products for export. In the face of such situations it would be
wrong to assign responsibility to the poor alone for the negative
environmental consequences of their actions. Rather the poor, to
whom the earth is entrusted no less than to others, must be
enabled to find a way out of their poverty. This will require a
courageous reform of structures, as well as new ways of relating
among people and states."
The structural changes the Pope calls for in society (both here
and in <Centesimus Annus>) must be accompanied by a profound
change in individual lifestyles, especially in the West. If those
changes do not come voluntarily, they will eventually be forced
upon us. "Simplicity, moderation, and discipline, as well as the
spirit of sacrifice, must become a part of every day life, lest
all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a
few." A culture of life would also be a "culture of asceticism."
Peace-including peace with nature-can only be created by the <gift
of self> That universal law operates at every level of society and
of human decision-making: governments and economic systems that
break this law will be humbled and destroyed (as Communism was
humbled in the Soviet Union.) The science of ecology hints at the
interconnectedness of all things, especially of all living things.
The abortion massacre, the readiness of nations to threaten each
other with war or terrorism, the spread of plagues and pollution,
the "export of hazard" by transnational corporations, and now the
exploitation of genetic and other resources of the Third World by
the "First," are also interconnected, springing from a single root
in the heart of man and tending to the same end. Against this
attitude and this tendency toward death stand the great religions
of the world, and among them the religion of St. Francis of
Assisi, the religion founded on a rock deeper than Peter, the rock
of Mary's <fiat>-the love of life in its Source and its unfolding.
Second Spring is edited from the Centre for Faith & Culture at
Westminster College, Oxford.
Some Facts and Figures
Biodiversity. Between 5 and 200 species disappear every day.
Another figure sometimes quoted is 5 to 10 per hour. A million
will supposedly have been made extinct by human activities by the
year 2000.
Forests. In the tropics, these are being cut down at the rate of
17 million hectares per year (an area twice the size of Belgium)-6
percent of the world's total lost in the last 20 years. Tropical
forests form a particularly ancient, rich and important ecosystem.
Other types of forest are more replaceable: there is 30 percent
more woodland today in Western Europe than 50 years ago. (However,
much of this figure is accounted for by plantations of a single
type of tree. )
Agriculture. Some 35 percent of the earth's surface is
threatened by advancing deserts, due mainly to inadequate farming
methods or destruction of the vegetation that protects the
irreplaceable topsoil-75 billion tons of which is lost a year,
mainly in Africa and China. The inbreeding of wheat, rice, and
maize to provide one half of all the world's food creates a
genetic pattern called a monoculture, leading to increasing
dependence on pesticides.
Energy. Global energy use increases by 2-3 percent a year-but a
person in the West consumes 18 times more than someone in a
"developing" country; some say that the average American consumes
510 times as many non-renewable resources as the average Himalayan
villager. There are alternatives. Nuclear power, of course, brings
with it another set of risks-from the possibility of catastrophe
due to human error or terrorist attack to the problem of
radioactive waste.
Climate. Carbon dioxide, methane and CFCs (chlorofluorocarloons)
released into the atmosphere trap the sun's heat to the tune of an
extra 0.31C per decade. The result is the gradual melting of the
polar icecaps (with the release of large quantities of methane at
present trapped in the Arctic permafrost), leading to flooding and
unpredictable rainfall around the world. CFCs from refrigerators
and aerosols have also destroyed part of the ozone layer in the
upper atmosphere that protects the entire ecosystem against
ultraviolet radiation.
The above information is gleaned from a variety of secondary
sources-mainly, but not exclusively, from Celia Deane-Drummond, <A
Handbook in Theology and Ecology>, London, SCM, 1996. Nearly all
such statistics can be criticized for failing to provide a
complete understanding of all the factors involved.
This article appeared in the August/September 1996 issue of "The
Catholic World Report," P.O. Box 6718, Syracuse, NY 13217-7912,
800-825-0061. Published monthly except bimonthly August/September
at $39.95 per year.
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