Php 70.00 Vol. 44 No. 1 • JANUARY 2010 - IMPACT Magazine Online!

COVER
STORY
By Charles Avila
Rome’s Advice to Copenhagen
“If you want to cultivate peace, protect
creation,” said Pope Benedict XVI
in his Message for World Day of Peace
on Day One of 2010. His predecessors,
of course, had always shown concern
for the environment long before such
concerns became fashionable or laden
with economic interest.
From their standpoint nature is
neither an adversary to be conquered or
destroyed nor an evil from which one
must be freed. Rather, it is the garden
from which God fashioned the human
being, and which God gave as gift to
man and woman to keep and till (cf.
Gen 2: 15); it is the place and plan for
which man and woman, who were made
“in his own image” (Gen 1, 27) are to
feel truly responsible.
In their view the Creator willed the
human being to evolve more and more
into a co-creator, not an exterminator,
though this latter role is what we’ve seen
humans often choose to play.
Vatican II affirmed that human
beings are right in thinking that by
their spirit they transcend the material
universe, for they “share in the light
of the divine mind”( Gaudium et Spes,
15). Who can be blind to the progress
made by the tireless application of human
genius down the centuries in the
empirical sciences, the technological
disciplines and the liberal arts (GS,
15) so that “especially with the help
of science and technology, man has
extended his mastery over nearly the
whole of nature and continues to do
so”(GS 33)?
Not all is good news, however,
as one international conference after
another has shown lately. Today a planetary
crisis affects all existents on earth
due to the fact, precisely, that instead
of increasingly becoming co-creators in
the on-going multi-billion-year story of
creation, humans have become more and
more like “exterminators” in the manner
they chose to produce and reproduce
their means of life and livelihood. They
had chosen mainly an extractive rather
than an organic way of undertaking
economic actions and thus became the
one main cause of the massive extinction
of plant and animal species that
characterizes the current era.
Modern technologies and the industrial
establishment went into the unqualified
human conquest of the forces
of nature. The integral functioning of
Earth’s life systems that had been going
on for 4.6 billion years came under the
assault of humans determined to use
and absolutely own Earth’s resources
regardless of the consequences for
the natural systems of the planet or
the integrity of creation. The words of
counsel came late: “one must take into
account the nature of each being and
of its mutual connection in an ordered
system” (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 34),
although much, much earlier the same
thought, long since forgotten, was often
discussed by early Christian philosophers
known as the Church Fathers.
At first humans embraced the organic
economy—which by its nature
is an ever-renewing economy, living
within the bounty of the seasonal renewing
productions of Earth’s biosystems,
making it capable of continuing into
the indefinite future. Later, however,
humans got into an extractive economy,
which by its nature is a terminal or
biologically disruptive economy, dependent
on extracting non-renewing
substances from Earth, surviving only
so long as these very finite resources
endured.
The Church, for her part, cautioned
that the human being must not “make
arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it
without restraint to his will, as though
it did not have its own requisites and
a prior God-given purpose, which man
can indeed develop but must not betray”
(Centesimus Annus, 37). When
the human being forgets this, he “ends
up provoking a rebellion on the part of
nature, which is more tyrannized than
governed by him” (CA 37). Hence,
today’s advice to Copenhagen from
Rome is simple: “If you want to cultivate
peace, protect creation.”
Thus, “it is now clear that [many
discoveries and technologies] in the
fields of industry and agriculture have
produced harmful long-term effects.”
We should not, for instance, “interfere
in one area of the ecosystem without
paying due attention both to the
consequences of such interference in
other areas and to the well-being of
future generations” (1990 World Day
of Peace, 6).
Humans, of course, may yet intervene
in nature without abusing it or
damaging it; then, they would intervene
“not in order to modify nature but to
foster its development in its own life,
that of the creation that God intended”
(JP II, at the World Medical Association,
1983).
Reducing our ecological footprint
It is by now axiomatic to say that
our livelihoods and indeed our lives depend
on the services provided by Earth’s
natural systems. We are, however, consuming
the resources that underpin those
services much too fast—faster than they
can be replenished, according to the
Living Planet Report 2008, a report of
the World Wildlife Fund, the Zoological
Society of London, and the Global
Footprint Network. If our demands on
the planet continue at the same rate, in
less than two decades we will need the
equivalent of two planets to maintain
our lifestyles. Our reckless consumption
as species is simply depleting the
world’s natural capital to a point where
we are endangering not only our future
prosperity but our very survival. Of
course, as Leonardo Boff the liberation
theologian-turned-ecologist recently
pointed out: “Earth can go on without
us, without human beings.”
Clearly we need to reduce our
ecological “footprint” or our impact on
Earth’s services. A country’s footprint
is the sum of all the cropland, grazing
land, forest and fishing grounds required
to produce the food, fiber and timber it
consumes, to absorb the wastes emitted
when it uses energy, and to provide
space for its infrastructure. It measures
the amount of biologically productive
land and water area required to produce
the resources an individual, population
or activity consumes and to absorb the
waste it generates, given prevailing
technology and resource management.
This area is expressed as global hectares,
hectares with world-average biological
productivity.
Right now, our demand on the planet’s
living resources already exceeds
the planet’s regenerative capacity by
about 30 per cent. This global overshoot
is growing and, as a consequence, deforestation,
water shortages, declining
biodiversity and climate change with
the resultant mega-typhoons and fatal
flooding are putting the well-being and
development of all nations at increasing
risk.
The huge quantities of humancaused
carbon dioxide and other green
house gases that get trapped in the atmosphere
are excessive that as a result
the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere—
and oceans—get dangerously higher and
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