Climate Activism and Catholics

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Music generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

The Catholic intellectual tradition is one that celebrates both faith and reason as valid sources of knowledge, which means that when those things are working together, the human person is optimized to be what they are as a rational soul. This means that the last thing a Catholic should be willing to do is abandon either their faith or their reason, one for the other, or altogether.

And there seems to be a lot about the environmentalism and climate activism movements that do require us to embrace some suspiciously incoherent ideas or at least, solutions that don’t benefit from embracing the full spectrum of what human thought can offer, both scientific as well as ethical and metaphysical.

One example that really hits me sideways is this idea that we must “save the planet.” This is language that is inherent in every environmental campaign as well as green legislation policies – we gotta save the planet.
Now, the problem with this line of thinking is that the planet doesn’t need to be saved. A slightly warmer global temperature is hardly the destruction of the world. Apart from us, it really doesn’t mean anything to save the planet for its own sake. The planet has existed in all manner of conditions that we would consider far “worse” than what might happen due to climate change.

Apart from us and our needs, there’s nothing you could say about the planet or certain environments that makes value judgements about them. For example, the artic tundra featuring temperatures below -60C and hardly any visible signs of life, is a perfectly valid environment – there’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about it.

The slope of an active volcano, with lava flowing down the side, is a perfectly valid environment. The surface of the moon or another planet like Mars or Jupiter, these are perfectly valid environments.
The only way you can begin to say that one environment is preferable or better than the other, is if you are judging it based on how hospitable it is to human life. So, any attempt to say that a certain vision or constitution of the planet earth is better than another, is to say that one is more conducive to providing for human life than another.

Any attempt to try to discuss saving or improving the planet without accounting for human need as the primary consideration is completely nonsensical. It’s smuggling in all kinds of desires and variables without admitting that they are intrinsic to it – it takes too much for granted.
Therefore, any attempt at preserving the environment must be informed by the fundamental question of what will best promote human flourishing. And sometimes that might mean cutting a forest down or mining coal. It might even mean a warmer climate – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

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