Do not conform yourself to throwaway culture!
When I first visited UD, the things that I remembered most vividly were the trees. The university’s buildings seemed nestled in a forest.
Yet, while the Art Village remains as it was then, every year that I have been a student, UD has been losing trees. What’s more, if you take a close look around campus, you will notice signs everywhere of a degraded landscape, most notably the bare, severely eroded soils.
A parallel phenomenon has afflicted the hearts of many of today’s Christians. We have richly present in our tradition the truth about nature, both our own and that of the rest of creation. We once knew nature’s value and its purposes. Yet, we have let the tradition run dry in our lives and hearts. We have forgotten our duty to preserve the planet which God put into our care.
10 years ago, Pope Francis wrote his second encyclical, “Laudato Si’:On Care for our Common Home.” In it, he brilliantly summarized the fundamental problem with modern man’s relation to nature, calling it the “technocratic paradigm” of modern life. Moreover, he called Christians to an “ecological conversion” in the face of the unprecedented realities of global warming and ecological destruction.
Yet, we have not only remained as entrenched as ever in what Francis calls our “throwaway culture.” We have, furthermore, almost completely abandoned the fight against climate change to the ideological left, encouraging an unjustifiable partisan divide between preservation of the natural world on the left and respect for human nature on the right.
Many people object to any mention of climate change, dismissing it as a socialist dog whistle. Yet climate change is no longer only a well-supported scientific theory. We are observing it in real time.
In 2024, global temperatures for the year reached the much-discussed threshold of 1.5°C above pre-industrial temperatures for the first time in recorded history. One cannot avoid concluding that we are almost certainly the cause for global warming, without denying obvious scientific facts such as the reality that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
Moreover, while climate change is admittedly a challenge to a consumerist lifestyle and to modern American conservatism, it does not thereby require socialism as a solution. Real-life socialism, indeed, has generally ended up causing at least as much environmental destruction as big-business capitalism, without any of the latter’s economic benefits.
Rather, as Pope Francis emphasizes, today’s environmental destruction is a product of our pride. Our modern idea of “progress” in mastering nature and freeing ourselves from its constraints, a goal no less central to socialism than to liberal capitalism, is nothing less than an expression of man’s original attempt to “be as gods.” When man thus “sets himself up in place of God,” Francis points out with a quote from Centesimus Annus, that he “ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature.”
If the destruction of the natural world is rooted in a philosophic and spiritual crisis centered on pride, then the answer must be found in nothing less than a conversion of heart to humility, on both a personal and societal level.
In the first place, we Christians must reject any interpretation of our dominion over creation as absolute rule. This dominion is a trust given to us by God and thus requires us to govern as stewards of that which ultimately belongs to Him. It gives us no right to overthrow the preexisting order of ecosystems and the planet.
Francis calls us further, however, to nothing less than an embrace of the “humble life.” Rather than viewing the simple, the seemingly insignificant and even the materially poor life as evils to be escaped, could we contemporary Christians not embrace, as Christ did, the virtue of lowliness?
With contemporary society characterized by isolation and rootlessness, the Church needs people who choose to give up career or prospects to root themselves in their homes and in our local communities, making smallness a virtue in a kind of social “Little Way.”
If we embraced such a life, our society would become much more sustainable. If, after we graduate and start a family, instead of living the usual suburban life, we live near other like-minded families and build up town-like communities that give the family and the home their proper priority, we would simultaneously be healing the social fabric of society and also reducing our carbon footprint.
Christian family values and the environmental movement belong together. The new club I am leading, the Little Flowers’ Gardening Club, was founded partly to unite these principles. My hope is that, in working to make our campus more beautiful and sustainable, we at UD might foster this vision, this “Little Way.”
William Saylor is a junior politics major. He is the president of the Little Flowers’ Gardening Club.