Tag Archives: capitalism

Against the Anthropocene

Against the Anthropocene, by Thomas.J. Demos

An annotated bibliography, by Lala St. Fleur.

Core Text

Demos, Thomas J. “Against the Anthropocene.” Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017): 132.

Summary

Demos’ 2017 book is firmly against using the term “Anthropocene” in reference to the ongoing concerns around climate change. In Demos’ view, it only foists the blame of the military-state-corporate interests off onto universal accountability held by all of humanity, rather than to those truly at fault or most responsible for the world’s mounting eco-catastrophes (Demos, 2017: 19). He also challenges the emphasis put on geoengineering projects as solutions to environmental problems. Because the authority to conduct such experiments inevitably favors an imbalance of power between individuals, governments and corporations, Demos is skeptical of anthropocenologists (i.e.: military-state-corporate agents) having the final say as to what measures should be taken to see positive change and real environmental improvement.

Because the “Anthropocene” holds all humans accountable for global climate change, Demos argues that it disavows the unequal distribution of resources, aid, and responsibility between parties who either suffer or benefit the most from its causes and effects. It is the “underlying heteropatriarchal and white supremacist structures” whose fossil fuel industries are the worst perpetrators of environmental abuse, (Demos, 2017: 53). Meanwhile, disenfranchized and poor minorities are most severely affected by the slow violence of government policy, corporate interests, and climate impact. But the consolidated efforts of grassroots activism inside those very communities are also in a position to resist such pressures and hold corporations accountable for their harmful operations. In place of “Anthropocene,” Demos proposes the adoption of the term “Capitalocene” instead. Demos sees this as a “more accurate and politically enabling geological descriptor” for more precisely putting the blame on corporate globalization and industrialization as the main culprits of unchecked climate change (Demos, 2017: 54).

Demos’s methodology involves looking at the utilization of photo imagery circulated by the media and academia, as visualizations that either help shed light on climate crises that corporations would otherwise see silenced (local activism against fracking or development in communities; the victims of marine pollution and oil spills); or help divert attention away from environmental concerns by glorifying mankind’s dominion over nature (incredible mines seen from space; the downplay of the effect of said oil spills; etc.).

Teaching Resources

  • Crutzen, Paul J. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” In Earth system science in the anthropocene, pp. 13-18. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen is the scholar who popularized the use of the term “Anthropocene,” in 2000. In this 2006 article, he doubles down on his notions that the current Anthropocene age (starting with the Industrial Revolution) is distinct from the Holocene’s epoch of pre-industrial human activity. Despite Earth’s cycles and systems of global change, Crutzen argues that anthropogenic activity has gone far beyond the bounds of natural atmospheric, chemical, and geological fluctuations.  
  • Stengers, Isabelle. In catastrophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism. Open Humanities Press, 2015. In this rapidly changing epoch, Stengers’ book acknowledges the sense of impotency that the climate crisis can often put in the mindset of people today, who can be informed and educated about the causes of and effects of climate change (and capitalism) yet still participate in overbearing systems that perpetuate it. Stengers challenges the notions of progress and barbarism in the context of modern capitalist structures.
  • Stoekl, Allan. “Marxism, Materialism, and the Critique of Energy.” In Materialism and the Critique of Energy,” edited by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, 1-29. MCM, 2018. Though Stoekl’s article focuses on Marxist concerns of capitalist fetishism that turns both people and nature alike into commodities, he ultimately argues that “merely changing the name of the Anthropocene (to Capitolocene or whatever) would not solve the underlying social and material contradictions” of today’s climate crises (Stoekl, 2018: 55). Market-based approaches to environmental issues only serve to abstract, invert, obscure, and detract from the root problems inherent within fossil duel industries and corporate interests. Geoengineering solutions, therefore will only be protracted over millennia, “effectively implicating dozens of future generations” in an ongoing climate crisis that might never be resolved (Stoekl, 2018: 59).

Discussion Questions

  1. Beyond Crutzen’s interpretation, there are various other understandings of when the Anthropocene began, and what its catalysts were. Is the Anthropocene indeed the product of the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, or is it instead a far older culture we inherited from the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of the first major civilizations, over 10,000 years ago?
  2. Stengers’ book focuses a light on the issue of capitalism not being all that is was cracked up to be. In the face of the various problems of modernity (climate change being only one crisis of many), what is progress, and what is barbarism? Is it progressive or barbaric to keep pushing forward with technological advancement, even at the cost of environmental decay? Or, is it progress or barbarous to actively try to dismantle institutional systems that have proved ineffective, and even dangerous to humanity and Gaia’s (the very world’s) well-being?
  3. What does a world without capitalism look like, and is it at all possible as long as people continue to be reliant on carbon-based technology? To what ends would any geoengineering models benefit the environment, so long as the earth’s natural resources are commodified and exploited for fuel?
Laudato Si: On the Care for Our Common Home

Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home

Core text

Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common Home. The Holy See: Vatican Press, 2015. The Holy See.

Summary

The urgent need to preserve our planet has emerged as an issue of science, politics, economics, justice — and morality, as evidenced by Pope Francis’ 2015 publication of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. The title of the encyclical comes from the pope’s namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. “Laudato Si’” means “Praise be to you Lord,” from the beginning of a prayer of St. Francis that continues, “through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.”

While Francis joins leaders of many other faiths — including his own predecessors — in defining environmental concerns as moral concerns, publishing an encyclical addressed to the world elevates and develops these concerns in an unprecedented way. In doing so, he defines environmental degradation and social degradation are inextricable.

Laudato Si‘ is more than a call to lower carbon emissions. In fact, Francis calls the buying and selling of carbon credits “a quick and easy solution” (if only it were quick and easy in the United States) that does not allow for the radical change these circumstances require. Instead, Laudato Si’ is a call to change the way we live: to decrease consumption, to be in solidarity with future generations, and to value every creature. The current pace of consumption and waste, of extreme consumerism, is not sustainable.

So, too, is unrestrained capitalism. As if writing directly to the United States, Pope Francis says that our current economic model is too rooted in individual success and self-reliance. He links the mindset of those who lack concern for the most vulnerable of society with the mindset of those who have no concern for the environment. He devotes an entire section to global inequality, reminding us that the environmental deterioration will affect the world’s most vulnerable people.

The message of Laudato Si’ will be familiar to those on the frontlines of the environmental movement: Extreme consumerism has led to a grave environmental crisis, and human beings need to change their lives radically to solve this crisis.

Teaching resources

  • Klein, Naomi. “A Radical Vatican?” The New Yorker, 10 July 2015.

    This essay in The New Yorker — also a chapter in Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal — tells the story of her trip to the Vatican to participate in the announcement of the publication of Laudato Si’. A self-described “secular Jewish feminist” Klein describes the juxtaposition of her presence against the male hierarchy, though she describes many of the Catholics present as either from the Global South — with a different perspective from that which has dominated Christianity for centuries — or those who have felt like exiles under previous popes. When asked in a press conference to address the juxtaposition, Klein responds that she is not present to negotiate a peace deal, but that if she and Pope Francis are correct that responding to climate change requires fundamental change to our economic model, then it will take an extraordinarily broad-based movement to demand those changes. Klein questions how Francis can on one hand understand the gravity of our current crisis and, on the other hand, be hopeful for the future — then realizing that if the Vatican itself, one of the most tradition-bound institutions in the world, could change as rapidly as it has under Francis, then perhaps that gives hope to the world.
  • McDermott, Jim. “At the Front Lines: An Interview with California Governor Jerry Brown on ‘Laudato Si”.” America Magazine, 8 July 2015.

    Former California Governor Jerry Brown has spent more than four decades in public service and has accomplished the feat of serving as California’s youngest governor (1975 to 1983) and oldest governor (2010 to 2018). A former Jesuit seminarian, he was interviewed in 2015 by the Jesuit weekly America regarding the intersection of Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ and public policy. He speaks from the front lines of the fight against climate change — both with dealing with the effects of climate change (longer fire seasons) and combatting it (with policies that have succeeded in reducing carbon output despite an increase in population). The now-former governor acknowledges the tension between our reliance on amassing consumer goods and the pope’s words on the need to consume less.

  • Okpodu, Camellia Moses. “What It Will Take to Do the Work of Laudato Si’: Stewardship for All, by All.” National Catholic Reporter, 26 June 2020.

    Part of a series in the National Catholic Reporter on the fifth anniversary of the publication of Laudato Si’, this piece reflects on Laudato Si’ from three unique perspectives: The author, Camellia Moses Okpodu, is an environmental scientist, she is African Methodist Episcopal, and she serves as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Xavier University of Louisiana, one of the nation’s 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Okpodu explores the need to ensure that environmental programs in academia reach students of color, noting that environmental programs are lacking at HBCUs across the country. She has proposed a Centers for the Environment at colleges and universities serving minority students that would include students trained in the humanities and social and/or behavioral sciences, as well as the sciences. If people of color are to share the stewardship of caring for creation, Okpodu writes, we must make available the training it takes to do that work.
  • Weber, Kerry. “Why ‘Laudato Si” Is the Perfect Encyclical for Millennials.” America Magazine, 18 June 2015.

    This article — by a millennial who bought her copy of 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth at age 8 — notes that Laudato Si’ addresses all of the primary concerns of the millennial generation, as reported by a Deloitte survey: unemployment, resource scarcity, climate change/protecting the environment and inequality. The encyclical recognizes the power of human connection, values ethnic and cultural diversity, appreciates innovation, offers a call to humility and urges greater efforts for equality and solidarity — all accessible to the generation that grew up with the 50 Simple Things series, Weber writes. Laudato Si’ was a needed reminder to this young writer that “our use of technology, love of the poor, and care for our environment are integrally connected, and that cultivating love and respect for all God’s creation is, in fact, a timely and timeless concern.”

Discussion Questions

  1. Quoting his predecessors, Pope Francis writes, “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.” How has American individualism and the sacredness of private property rights contributed to environmental degradation? Is it even possible in this country to view private property rights as anything less than inviolable?
  2. Pope Francis also writes “Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack.” Could spirituality — of any faith or background — be a tool toward turning away from consumerism?
  3. More often than not in this country, many faith communities have been publically allied with politicians who do not support greater environmental protections. Is that changing? Is there a unique role that faith communities can play in combating environmental degradation?

Reaching the Grassroots across the World: Suffering as Motive for Global Climate Justice

In his essay “Translocal Climate Justice Solidarities,” Paul Routledge emphasizes the significance of transcending personal and spatial limitations by widening basic conceptions of solidarity, particularly as it pertains to climate justice and climate-related conditions of hegemonic structures, so as to posit achievable means to alternative models for just and efficient co-habitation.  

Touching on capitalism’s structural “accumulation by dispossession,” especially in contrast to factors such as “food sovereignty,” Routledge’s essay harks on the understanding that the current climate system already works translocally but by the means of exploitation of resources and of peoples. The political counter-power rests, therefore, in the people affected by these exploitations.  

But which people? How are they affected? These questions may not be able to be answered by those functioning at the top of the hegemonic power structures, but rather, the answers to these questions, too, emerge from below, from the people affected by the injustices. There are differences between peoples and differences between consequential climate injustices.  

Image by Sam-Lund Harket

https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2018/nov/19/climate-justice-and-extinction

Routledge writes:  

[A] key issue concerning the forging of meaningful solidarities is how the 

network’s ‘imaginary’ is visualized and developed at the grassroots: how to construct 

senses of shared (or ‘tolerant’) identities (della Porta 2005) concerning climate justice 

amongst very different place‐based communities. This will require the co‐recognition and 

internalization of others’ struggles in a ‘global’ community. In part this must be based on 

shared values and principles (common ground) concerning economic and political justice 

and ecological sustainability (9). 

Local, cultural and linguistic differences may pose further limitations, but, as Routledge supports, co-recognition and solidarity based through chains of equivalence can be the starting point of a power that rises against the hegemony at the strings of climate change. Routledge believes that climate justice networks can be formed from this starting point and can develop a medium through which local place-based and group-based concerns can be acknowledged and implemented. 

Determining an “imaginary” of the network, as Routledge describes it, relies, at root, on the basis of shared values and principles. This inevitably roots the issue in discourse; but through discourse, what is at heart of the issue can extend beyond discourse, into practical and effective bonding for social change. As Rob Leurs explains, Laclau’s and Mouffe’s “chain of equivalence” provides a discursive practice that goes beyond essentialism, without turning things into eclecticism. Meaning of the issue may be subjective to local groups, but meaning from the issue, as it is agonistic to hegemonic injustices, becomes grounds for solidarity translocally.  

Upon first reading, Routledge’s essay appears a bit dense in build-up of referential discourse on the challenges and pathways to solidarity; but further analysis has me wondering whether communication technologies (such as social media) could facilitate climate justice network models and whether third spaces and fourth spaces could produce alternative effects through changing cultural structures and avenues to access of information and participation. Routledge believes that the imaginary must begin at the grassroots, but how is a grassroots accurately conceptualized without linguistic and cultural conventions? We end up at de-contextualized values and principles that discursively operate as a mode of charged symbolic meaning-for (for justice) in order to reach a meaning-from (from structural change). The core grassroot non-distinction, therefore, is a matter of mutual impressions of suffering.  

Leurs, Rob. “The ‘chain of equivalence’. Cultural studies and Laclau & Mouffe’s discourse theory,” Politics and Culture. Issue 4. NOVEMBER 9, 2009.

https://politicsandculture.org/2009/11/09/the-chain-of-equivalence-cultural-studies-and-laclau-mouffes-discourse-theory/

Memorializing Loss: The Convergence of Funerary Art and Climate Change

An Art Review by Carol Joo Lee

To talk about Climate Change is to lament what we have lost – land, water, air, and the species that depended on them, human and non-human. The onset of the sixth mass extinction looms large over our collective minds – at least those who don’t deny the indisputable data – and it creates existential conditioning that vacillates from dread to despair. Throughout history artists have been moved to memorialize the losses and traumas that have been inflicted upon humanity: a 14th century illustration depicts Black Death; Poussin’s “The Plague of Ashdod” records the horrors of the plague outbreak of the 17th century; and Picasso’s 1937 “Guernica” captures the inhumanities of Nazi bombing. In the face of tragedies of epic scale, art can universalize the unimaginable and humanize the incomprehensible. Contemporary artists of the Anthropocene, for many decades now, have tried to contextualize, eulogize and memorialize the losses/deaths stemming from ecological and environmental collapses. Essentially, the losses spurred by the Climate Crisis is the loss of home – literal and metaphorical, biological and geological, material and immaterial, multitude and one. 

An early illustrated manuscript depicts the Black Death (Credit: Courtesy of Louise Marshall/ Archivio di Stato, Lucca)
Poussin’s The Plague of Ashdod in 1630-31 (Credit: DEA / G DAGLI ORTI/ De Agostini via Getty Images)
© The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation

“I control the pain. That’s really what it is.” – Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Felix Gonzalez-Torres‘s works do not explicitly speak of the climate. Nonetheless, they exemplify governmental negligence and political inertia during the AIDS epidemic, which began in the 1980s, thus in the wake of the woeful bungling of the Covid-19 pandemic on the part of the federal government and the continuing denialism of Climate Crisis, it seems apt to re-examine his most famous piece “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” from 1991 in our current context. Commonly referred to as “candy spill,” this participatory work, a mound of wrapped candies weighing approximately 175 pounds, the healthy weight of his lover before succumbing to AIDS, spill out from one corner of the room. As visitors take candy from the pile, the artwork shrinks then eventually disappears altogether. The candy has a twin function – representing the body and the placebo. In taking the candy, the audience becomes complicit in the erasure and masking. The site of the installation becomes an in-situ memorial to his lover and all who perished during the AIDS epidemic. It is sweet and heartbreaking. It is also a foretelling of Gonzalez-Torres’s own life, who died 5 years later of the same disease. We can very well imagine the mound of candies as our home, Earth, and the work, already powerful, begins to take on a whole new meaning.

How, when, and why do we invest culturally, emotionally, and economically in the fate of threatened species? What stories do we tell, and which ones do we not tell, about them?
– Ursula Heise

What Is Missing?

“What Is Missing?” is an interactive web project spearheaded by artist and architect Maya Lin, who’s most well-known work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. No stranger to liminal sites where the dead and the living collapse to create a third space, Lin’s “What Is Missing?” is a portal of remembrance, reacquaintance and resurgence that works on several levels: a digital tribute to the now extinct species; an anthropogenic record of places; and a depository of people’s personal biocentric memories of “what is missing.” Flickering dots of various colors and shapes indicating different categories like disaster, conservation, timeline and stories across the darkened map of the world bring to mind constellations in the night sky. One can click on East Asian Cranes (coming back) or Heath Hens of Martha’s Vineyard (extinct) and get an overview of their survival history dating all the way back to 600 in the cranes’ case and 1620 for the hens. Launched in 2009 and updated up to 2018, the site itself feels like a digital relic given the further exacerbation of the planetary conditions under which all living species struggle to survive, and losses of an untold number of species from our biosphere since the site’s launch. 

© 1982 Agnes Denes

In 1982, Hungarian American land artist Agnes Denes transformed 2 acres of landfill in lower Manhattan into a wheat field. Created at the foot of the World Trade Center and a block from Wall Street, the golden patch of agriculture, titled, “Wheatfield – A Confrontation,” on the land valued at $4.5 billion, which has since become Battery Park City, was “an intrusion of the country into the metropolis, the world’s richest real estate.” Denes and volunteers cleared the piles of trash brought in during the construction of the Twin Towers, then dug furrows and sowed seeds by hand. In four months time, the land yielded 1000 pounds of wheat. The harvest became horse feed for the city’s mounted police and the rest traveled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called “The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger.” The seeds were also given away in packets for people to plant them wherever they may end up in. Denes, in her prescient ways, was calling attention to what she deems as our “misplace priorities”: “Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns.”

© 1982 Agnes Denes
© 1982 Agnes Denes

The harvest also marked the end of the physical artwork but the idea lives on through the visual documentation which offers a surreal angle and an uncanny audacity imbedded in the work. It is a rather strange coincidence that the work happened 19 years before the destruction of the World Trade Center and we are now 19 years out from the 9/11 attacks. In 1982, the field was a living, breathing counterpoint to the unbounded appetite for capitalism. Today, the work, at least the photographs with the towers in the background, function as a memorial for both. 

Whether imbued with soft activism like Lin’s digital project or offering interventionist criticism like Dene’s wheat field, art under the umbrella of environment and climate challenges may not offer solutions but by showing and making us confront the losses and our lost ways, art does what it has always done throughout history, it reveals the nature of our time. 

Top Image: Plaque Memorializes First Icelandic Glacier Lost to Climate Change
(Dominic Boyer/Cymene Howe)

Will We Enter a New Wave of Energy Development? Shifting Capital via Shifting Paradigms

Andres Malm’s “Long Waves of Fossil Development: Periodizing Energy and Capital” analyzes how the historic phases of capitalism’s evolution required technological leaps in the sources of energy that drive production. Based on Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff’s theory that capitalism moves in waves consisting of “two phases: an ‘upswing’ characterized by boom conditions, succeeded by a ‘downswing’ of persistent stagnation” (162), we can see how the first long wave of capitalism beginning around 1780 denoted by water-powered industries such as cotton and iron gave way to a second wave propelled by steam, a third run on electricity, the fourth driven by gas and oil, and the fifth long wave we are currently in, typified by computerization of the economy. The transitioning from one long wave to another is not even, incremental growth but rather “proceeds through upsetting contradictions…which impel the expansion and renew the momentum again and again, and it might be these contradictions and the convulsions they generate that do most to produce and reproduce the fossil economy on ever greater scales.” (162).

But it seems that now we have come to an impasse because science is unanimously conveying that humankind has thrown off the balances and processes of the Earth System due directly to continued, elevated levels of C02 emissions from burning fossil fuels. And to reproduce the fossil economy on a larger scale than we are currently maintaining in the name of capitalist gain would have dire consequences to our planet and human civilization. Malm speculates that capitalism could instead propel itself into a sixth long wave by casting off fossil fuels and transition to renewable sources of energy which is exactly what humanity would require to prevent the disastrous scenarios of climate change. Solar, hydro, and wind powered technologies are already established and proven to effectively integrate into our electricity grids but still, our dependency on fossil fuels has not yet been curbed. Malm suggest that a “universal rollout” of these advantageous technologies might “breathe fresh air into languishing capitalism and ensure that we collectively back off from the cliff in time” (181).

Following the theory of long waves of capitalist development and arguing that we have been on the downswing of the fifth wave since the global recession of 2008, Malm implies that we are in fact on the brink of a turning point to a sixth phase. Historically the transitions between phases “are determined by such unforeseeable events as wars and revolutions, the colonization of new countries, or the discovery of new resources—‘those external conditions through whose channel capitalist development flows’” (167).  Our current state of affairs is, quite literally, a crossroads of “upsetting contradictions” inclusive of the consequences of climate change compounded by a global pandemic, severe economic downturn, and political and social instability. Could COVID-19 be the existential threat that pushes us past our paralyzed response to emissions reductions and the climate crisis into the sixth long wave?

Malm asserts that “the eruption of a structural crisis is usually attended by high unemployment, deflation or inflation, deteriorating working conditions, aggressive wage-cuts as capital seeks to dump the costs on labor and widen profit margins—all conducive to intensified class struggle” (171).  And I would argue that we are amid these occurrences right now! But “capital has the power to “lay the foundations for a new epoch of expansion” by creating “a technological revolution, concentrated to one particular sphere” (171).  Historical revolutions, between the first and the fifth long waves of capitalist development have remolded the entire economy, reimagining the technologies of transport and communications systems time and again. “If new life is to be breathed into sagging capitalism, it must come in the most basic, most universal guise: energy” (172). 

Malm contends that renewable energy technologies “perfectly fit the profile of a wave-carrying paradigm” (181). They are of virtually unlimited supply, allow for costs to be reduced, and have vast potential for applications, “causing productivity to spike, spurring other novel technologies — electric vehicle charging systems, smart grids managed online, cities filled with intelligent green buildings — opening up unimagined channels for the accumulation of capital” (181). The groundbreaking innovation of switching completely to renewable sources of clean, emission-free energy would inevitably call for new government policies and financial systems, public education, and an overhaul of our behaviors and habits.  Malm worries that “society, however, is slow in adapting, for unlike technology, social relations are characterized by inertia, resistance, vested interests pulling the brakes, always lagging behind the latest machines” (174). We have seen just that when new, renewable energy technologies emerge. They are initially received by society as a shock and spur push back in the form of skepticism, NIMBYism, etc. which must be overcome in order for them to take hold. In our current situation wherein the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening both global health and economic security, exacerbated by elevated social and political unrest and the ever-looming climate emergency, perhaps a paradigm shift in society at large is inevitably and necessarily what is being set in motion.

Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home

Radical conversion and our throwaway culture: the intersection of Pope Francis and Naomi Klein

In 2015, Pope Francis published a groundbreaking document, “Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,” an encyclical defining the environmental movement as a moral issue for the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics and calling all of humanity to a radical conversion. 

From the pope’s opening words quoting his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, in praise of “our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us,” the pope rejects the anthropocentrism of Judeo-Christian culture in recent centuries. He also acknowledges something that many in this country do not: that unrestrained capitalism and consumerism have led to a grave environmental crisis, and human beings need to change their lives radically to solve this crisis. 

This is not an academic document nor a call for Catholics to recycle, compost, turn down their air conditioners or buy energy-efficient cars, but rather a 246-paragraph statement that our relationship with creation and our relationship with each other are inextricably tied: “We have to realize that a true ecological approach always becomes a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”

The pope writes in his introduction:

“I will point to the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet, the conviction that everything in the world is connected, the critique of new paradigms and forms of power derived from technology, the call to seek other ways of understanding the economy and progress, the value proper to each creature, the human meaning of ecology, the need for forthright and honest debate, the serious responsibility of international and local policy, the throwaway culture and the proposal of a new lifestyle.”

While the pope’s language frequently references Catholic tradition, the encyclical is explicitly addressed to all of humanity. And as such, many of the pope’s words will resonate with environmental acivitsts of all backgrounds: He writes about the “sufferings of the excluded,” the “globalization of indifference,” the earth as a “shared inheritance,” the rejection of the absolute “right to private property,” “sustainable development,” “intergenerational solidarity,” “rampant individualism,” “excessive consumption,” “compulsive consumerism,” and “an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded and at the same time protecting nature.”

For those in the United States fighting for a Green New Deal, these words should sound familiar, albeit from a source surprising to some.  Just as the Green New Deal takes a wide view, addressing climate change side by side with systemic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices, Pope Francis calls humanity to a more radical conversion that addresses these injustices together. 

The encyclical even led Anglican priest and journalist Giles Fraser to write a piece in The Guardian titled “Pope Francis is a bit like Naomi Klein in a cassock.”

The two certainly have their similarities, at least when they write about the need to reject consumerism. Consider these two passages:

“The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”

“Policy makers are still dancing around the question of whether we are talking about slapping solar panels on the roof of Walmart and calling it green, or whether we are ready to have a more probing conversation about the limits of lifestyles that treat shopping as the main way to form identity, community and culture.”

Can you tell who wrote what? The first is from Laudato Si, the second is from Klein’s On Fire: The Burning Case for the Green New Deal. 

Pope Francis frequently uses the term “throwaway culture.” In On Fire, Klein makes similar references: “It’s a lot like how this culture treats people. It’s certainly how we’ve been trained to treat our stuff — use it once, or until it breaks, then throw it away and buy some more,” or, more bluntly, “it all gets spent on throwaway crap imported from China destined for the landfill.”

Indeed there is a direct connection between the two: Pope Francis asked Klein to co-chair a Vatican conference on the environment upon the publication of Laudato Si, an encounter Klein writes about in On Fire. And Klein urged world leaders attending the Paris climate change conference to read Laudato Si. Not just summaries, she said. The whole thing.

The burning question now is which path this country will take, if any. Should climate activists in this country go big, and seek the radical change that Pope Francis and Klein advocate, and which the Green New Deal calls for? Or focus narrowly on decreasing carbon output? Pope Francis and Klein certainly make convincing cases for the former.