There are stark political divides between the people (including Christians) who care about the environment, and the ones who care about the unborn. But instead of viewing these issues as unrelated (or even as “opposing” issues), is there a Christian case to be made for pro-life environmentalism? Here’s what Pope Benedict XVI had to say.
Speaker 1:
You are listening to Shameless Popery with Joe Heschmeyer, a production of Catholic Answers.
Joe Heschmeyer:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m your host, Joe Heschmeyer. I want to talk today about the idea of pro-life environmentalism and what’s going to be called human ecology. It’s the idea that there should be properly speaking a nexus between the pro-life movement and the environmental movement. Now, if you know anything about politics, you know how insane that probably sounds. I don’t just mean that the pro-life movement and the environmental movement are two separate issues. I think it’s fine to acknowledge they’re two separate issues. I’m not just one of these people who says environmentalism is a pro-life issue. We have to be a little nuanced. But what do we mean by all of these things? No. I mean, not only are these distinct issues, these are issues in which people who care about one tend to be from a Christian perspective on the wrong side of the other.
I’m going to give some examples from American politics where this is, I think particularly true. This is less true in Europe, but I think you’ll find tendencies in this direction in a lot of countries and in a lot of context. So here’s some numbers just to start with. The Pew Research Center in 2020 said that among those who say the environment should be a top priority for the President and Congress, it was around 39% of Republicans and those who lean Republican and more than twice said 85% among Democrats, and those who lean Democratic, so slightly more than double Democrats care about the environment as a political issue, as a legislative and executive priority. When you get to abortion, on other hand, this is a pew again now from 2022, we find a very similar partisan gap among those who say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, we’re looking at 38% of Republican and lean Republican compared to 80%, again, just a little more than double of Democrats and those who lean democratic.
So in both cases you’ve got just a tick under 40% of Republicans who put a premium on tackling environmental issues, just a tick under 40% of Republicans who are pro-choice instead of pro-life. And in both cases it’s about 80% for Democrats. To break that down, we could say Democrats tend to be better on environmental issues from a Catholic perspective and tend to be worse at almost the exact same rate on the abortion issue. That’s just an important thing to maybe bear in mind, an important thing to think about, and I’ll get in a minute to even how that breaks down a little further among Catholics. Like what do Catholics do when their party and their church part companies? So who do they listen to? It’s not going to be inspiring when you find out. But I also think it’s worth considering why. Why is there not a robust pro-life environmental movement?
And I think that’s a complicated issue to answer, well, to answer accurately. But part of the reason is that there is some really doctrinaire folks who insist that if you’re going to join them in fighting to protect the earth, you have to believe in the legalized killing of the unborn. Now, when you say it like that, hopefully someone’s saying that’s actually insane. Even if you’re pro-choice and whatever my views are on school vouchers, if I said, you can’t help me put out this fire unless we also agree on vouchers, you would say, look, not only is that insane, but you’re now an obstacle to this thing you claim to be caring about. If you actually care about it, don’t demand that everyone else trying to join the fight has to agree with all of your other pet issues. But this is coming down not from some fringe lunatics within the environmental movement.
This is coming down from mainstream environmental movements that have been hijacked by this radical fringe. So let me give a couple examples. The Sierra Club, one of the largest and oldest environmental groups in America had a piece called Reproductive Rights and Environmental Justice are Deeply Connected. And that’s the argument I was making. I mean just very clearly, if you are going to be in favor of Sierra Club and you’re worried about national parks or you’re worried about taking care of the outdoors, you need to also believe abortion should be legal. You need to also believe in Roe v. Wade. Doesn’t matter that those things are totally conceptually unrelated, that there’s no real reason to believe that, this is the argument being made. And I was so struck by how bizarre this was and how poorly thought out that kind of reasoning was that it was like, okay, I want to know more about this author.
So it’s Tianna Scozzaro and in her bio she says she’s been an advocate at the intersection of gender and climate advocacy for more than 15 years in that she’s built a national coalition on women’s health and environment, partnered with the Women’s March, Planned Parenthood, and led campaigns on issues such as paid family leave, reproductive rights, protection from gender-based violence, and toxics free products. And I just want to point out, you’ve basically just let someone who is a fanatical pro-choice advocate hijack your environmental movement. Clearly what her concerns are are these feminist pro-choice issues. Now look, some of them are non-controversial. Right? I’m all for cracking down hard on gender-based violence. That said, I don’t think that’s the Sierra Club’s role because things exist for a reason. Like environmentalist groups should be environmentalist groups. They shouldn’t be voucher groups. They shouldn’t be doing 20 other unrelated things.
That’s not how it is supposed to work. And it’s certainly it’s not supposed to work if you care about the environment because what this is doing is it’s turning pro-life environmentalists away from Sierra Club, and I would argue away from environmentalism more broadly. That one of the reasons it’s been really hard to get conservative Christians on board is they see insanity like this and they say, I’m not touching the environmental movement with a 20 foot pole. And moreover, I don’t believe now anything they tell me. And I think that’s actually a problem. I mean cards on the table, I think that’s a problem because I think there should be greater trust. It’s possible for someone to be deeply wrong on abortion and right on something else. But it should be noted that these groups do themselves no favors when they get fanatically political on issues that are outside of their actual reason for existence.
Now, this was May 22nd, 2019 Sierra Club came out with this. Just like a few weeks later, May 31st, of the same year, Greenpeace, another massive environmental group, has Why We Can’t Have Environmental Justice Without Reproductive Justice. And the subheader just, look, I understand people overuse phrases like communists and Marxist and the like, but it reads like something you would find from a fanatical communist outlet, not from Greenpeace because they say the environmental movement and abortion access are fundamentally connected, impacted by intentional systems of power that harm our bodies and the planet. That’s really, again, just a really crazy way of understanding the issue that pro-lifers are part of some intentional cabal to intentionally harm women’s bodies on the planet?
It’s not pro-lifers believe life begins a conception and they’re well intended, but we think they’re wrong. It’s like, no, no, there’s actually this diabolical conspiracy to destroy the earth and women. And so that’s why we have to be pro-choice in order to be pro-environment. And again, that kind of insanity, and I don’t think I’m using that word too strongly, that’s total detachment from reality, does not help the environmental movement one iota and Greenpeace doesn’t stop there. They have an actual statement when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Now I want to point out Greenpeace has no business having the statement on Roe v. Wade. It is totally outside their wheelhouse. Nevertheless, Ebony Twilley Martin, the Greenpeace USA Co-Executive Director and I will point out that should be Executive Co-Director, but nevermind the Co-Executive Director said Greenpeace USA is beyond disappointed that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.
The consequences will be devastating and we know exactly who will be impacted by this decision, poor women of color, the women who do not have money or access to birth control, the women who do not have access to healthcare, the women who cannot get emergency care for sexual assault, racism, economic insecurity, and immigration status, multiply the already massive barriers to abortion care. So our solutions must include racial, economic, and immigrant justice. Now I want to pause here and just point out that low income women of color are massively overrepresented for abortion. The idea that the problem that say African American women in New York who are more likely to have an abortion than a live birth are facing is that they don’t have enough abortion is just from a different planet. It’s just not reality, but nevertheless it goes on. It’s really would tear down a long health protection on women’s rights and open the door for future attacks on our health and our already corroding democracy.
Our democracy and the rule of law are both at stake here. Now remember, the Supreme Court decision doesn’t say, it doesn’t even outlaw abortion, it just literally turns it back to democratic processes. It just says you can democratically decide this issue. But apparently democratically deciding issues destroys democracy. Nevertheless, our democracy and the rule of law are at both at stake here. This decision would change the course of history as we know it. It’s reminiscent of slavery. We must fight back. Now, I don’t know if you noticed this, there was literally nothing in the statement even remotely related to the environment. It was just, if you don’t think that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, then obviously that’s just like slavery. And Greenpeace for some bizarre reason needs to tell you that. And it’s bad legal theory. It’s bad political advocacy. It has nothing to do with the reason for existence.
It looks like just ridiculous mission creep. And so I begin with all of this to say I get why Christians stay far away from the environmental movement because there are some crazy groups out there. There are some crazy activists out there who have totally hijacked it. Nevertheless, I think that’s a tremendous mistake and I think it’s for two reasons. Number one, because when there’s just a crazy group of people who’ve controlled an industry, if your solution is just like don’t let your kids go into that industry, you’re guaranteeing that that’s going to continue to be the case forever. See for instance, Hollywood, see journalism, see any of these other fields that got taken over by kind of extreme groups and then conservative Christians said, well, I guess we’ll have nothing to do with that anymore. And so then they’re just stopped being good conservative Christian actors or journalists or whatever.
And then a generation later, everybody complains, why aren’t there good films depicting things we care about as Christians? Why isn’t there better press coverage of issues we care about? It’s like, well, because the people who would’ve done that, the people who would’ve been really well qualified to handle that, were told by their parents don’t go that direction because it’ll destroy you. And again, I mean in fairness to them, it will be a challenge. Going into an area like this trying to survive in a world in which groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club say you actually have to be pro-abortion to be able to care about the environment, that kind of insane kind of again, hijacking, the monomaniacal way that abortion has dominated everything is worth acknowledging. That’s out there. So you do have to be strong. You have to fight against this to be someone who is an impassioned defender of the environment, to not lose your faith, to not compromise, and then to also care about this issue that you’re allegedly not allowed to care about as a pro-lifer.
Second reason though that we should get in this. Because I think we have actually something unique to offer as Christians. We have a different vision of the world that doesn’t sound like communism, that doesn’t sound like… What unites all these issues together racism, abortion, environmentalism is that we hate the same group of people, this cabal of people trying to destroy our bodies on the planet. No. It has a much saner vision, a vision rooted in human dignity rather than in trying to unite people around hatred. It has a vision that’s rooted in recognizing the gift of human life, the gift of one another, and the gift of the earth. So let’s lay out a little bit of what that looks like and what we might call again a human ecological vision. So I want to start with the Psalms in Psalm 8, one of my favorite psalms, the psalmist says, “When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou is established, what is man that thou art mindful of him and the son of man that thou does care for him?”
So the first reaction we should have to the beauty and grandeur of creation is a sense of our own smallness. And this is sometimes an argument raised against Christians, oh, you think you’re so special, so unique as a species, but look at this tiny dot in the middle of the cosmos. That’s the earth. And the psalmist is right there and saying, yeah, isn’t that crazy? It seems like we’re so insignificant, but he doesn’t stop there. He goes on. “Yet thou made him a little less than God and does crown Him with glory in honor thou was giving Him dominion over the works of thy hands, thus put all things under His feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea.” So I think this is really beautiful because, yeah, we’ve been given this dominion in nature, but it’s not because we are so great and the natural world is so small. It’s actually pretty miraculous to be in a world where mountains and waterfalls exist and to still say, and we’re still the pinnacle of material creation. We’re still the highest species that none of these majestic eagles are contemplating the way that we are contemplating, that there’s a whole interior life that we have as a species that nobody else comes close to.
There’s something really beautiful and really remarkable about that, because you’re recognizing the gift of the cosmos and the gift of humanity in one breath. And so call it if you will, the astronomers paradox. The astronomer be out there in the space shuttle looking at the cosmos and feeling so small and insignificant and yet can know in the next moment. And yet we’re the only creature that’s managed to do this and then feel quite significant in a different way. There’s something that Psalm 8 has really capturing about our place in the cosmos, our place in creation. And I just think it’s worth recognizing because I think a lot of the problems we’re facing are that we’ve become cut off from the natural world. And I’m saying this is this person who’s lived in urban areas and suburban areas basically my entire life that is easy to not really know what a starry night looks like out in the country.
It’s easy to not really know the beauty of the outdoors. Now I live in Kansas City. I live in one of the flattest areas of the country, if not the world. And so going to somewhere like Shenandoah National Park and going through the mountains there is staggering. It has this incredible kind of awe inspiring effect that I imagine it has for other people, but maybe is even a little more accentuated in the case of those of us who are from the plains who didn’t realize topography was even a thing, that earth moved in three directions, not just two. That all of that’s to say if we have lost that sense of awe and that sense of wonder at creation, that is a problem. That’s going to be a problem in how we relate to others and the world around us is a spiritual problem. That getting reconnected with nature actually is a way of getting reconnected with God, not in some weird hippie dippy way, but just in recognizing the gift in the beauty of nature.
It certainly seems to be the case that people in rural areas have an easier time keeping the faith than people in urban areas. It’s hard to say exactly why that is, but seemingly one of the reasons is because of this connection to the natural world, this connection to the cosmos. So for both environmental and theological reasons, it’s really good to be connected to nature. That’s something that we should care about as Christians. It’s something that the psalmists seem to be caring about. And if you’re wondering why wasn’t there a major environmental movement at the time of Jesus, it’s because there didn’t need to be one. People weren’t in a toxic relationship with their environment. They weren’t massively destroying the world around them. That comes much later, and that’s where we are suddenly faced with the excesses where our dominion becomes a harmful domination and we have to really wrestle with that.
So that’s the first thing that we should get back to a vision of nature. Now, I want to pivot to the thought of Benedict the 16th, and I love that the media dubbed him the first green pontiff, or the first green pope, because they’re recognizing something in him. Benedict doesn’t look like Sierra Club’s vision of an environmentalist or Greenpeace’s vision of an environmentalist, but it’s hard to argue that he is, or in this case I suppose was. He recently passed away, but his real push for taking care of the environment struck people, probably partly because they just didn’t expect it from him, but partly because he was saying really interesting things nobody else was saying. And so for basically the rest of this episode, I’m going to be very heavily leaning on Benedict’s thoughts because I think he really touches on something I’ve never seen another person touch on in the same way, and that I don’t think I could do justice two in the same way.
So he lays his vision out in Caritas in veritate and he says that the environment is God’s gift to everyone. And in our use of it, we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generation, and towards humanity as a whole. Now, just pause on that. But when we talk about the environment, it’s not just, oh, I care about the environment because I care about lands or I care about trees. It’s because, well, no, no. I’ve been given this gift and it’s not mine alone. It’s ours collectively, both now and in future generations. It’s not a great analogy, but imagine you got an Airbnb and you get it with some friends. If you trash the place and you don’t clean up after yourself, that’s an injustice to the people you’re there with. It’s also an injustice to the people who are going to be coming in next and will have to clean up after you, whether it’s the people who own the place or the next guest who come and stay the next day.
And so if you think about it that way, it’s not just like, oh, well you owed the house greater respect. The house isn’t a person, but there are a lot of persons, a lot of people who you’re actually hurting with your bad behavior. Well, the same is true when you’re indifferent on environmental issues. If you’re polluting, if you’re littering, if you’re doing all these things, you’re actually harming humanity as a whole especially you’re harming the poor because they’re the most prone to the toxic stuff. I mean in a very literal sense of toxic, they’re more prone to the environmental effects. They’ve got the trashiest areas. They’ve got the areas most run down. They’ve got the areas most likely to have dangerous chemicals and the like. So as you and as we are indifferent, apathetic, irresponsible on these issues, we do an injustice to the poor.
We do an injustice to humanity. We do an injustice to future generations who had no say in the matter. When I was living in Italy, I noticed the difference in air quality. And I think anyone who’s lived in Italy will tell you that in Rome there looks like a smog that you see in the city because they don’t have as good air pollution regulations. And I knew an American family whose kids developed asthma. It harmed them in a lasting way to be in this city. And so it’s not an exaggeration to say the people driving around in the city and the country that didn’t bother to put in air pollution standards that they would abide by really caused this negative impact. This family did not have asthma in the United States. They got asthma after living in Italy for a few years. That kind of thing is, it’s a real kind of indication that these environmental decisions don’t just impact Bambi, they impact other human beings. And so one of the reasons we care about the environment is because of that.
We want to treat this as a gift and a gift that’s meant to be shared. And when we don’t share it, when we hog it or when we destroy it, we are not being good receivers of the gift. But it goes on though, and he says that “when nature, including the human being is viewed as a result of mere chance or evolutionary determinism, our sense of responsibility wanes.” Now, he’s not saying there that there are no unbelieving environmentalists, obviously he knows better. But what he is saying is that if you’ve got a vision that you and the earth were created specially by God, then including that in the equation should lead you to a greater compassion. Right? If God gives you a gift and you trash it on purpose or you’re just indifferent to the gift, now you’re not just disrespecting your fellow man or future generations or the poor, you’re disrespecting God. And once you understand it, in that sense, it’s like, oh, of course Christians should take environmentalism very seriously.
We should take it more seriously than anybody else does because we have a deeper sense of the actual gravity of the damage being done. If we destroy the earth given to us by God, we’re not just making our own home uninhabitable, we are taking the work God has done, the work He declared good, and we’re making it bad. And that’s not something we want to stand before God on judgment day and say, yeah, I did that. I helped with that. So we should care about environmentalism. “In nature,” Benedict continues, “the believer recognizes the wonderful result of God’s creative activity which we may use responsibly to satisfy our legitimate needs, material or otherwise, while we’re respecting the intrinsic balance of creation. If this vision is lost, we end up either considering nature an untouchable taboo, or on the contrary abusing it. Neither attitude is consonant with the Christian vision of nature as the fruit of God’s creation.” So to put that just in plain language, imagine if instead of the earth, the environment creation, God had given you a car, you know, you just wake up, miraculously you’ve got a car in the driveway, doesn’t matter.
There are two ways you could handle that gift badly. At the one extreme, you could say, well, this is a miraculous gift, so I’m going to leave it in the garage and never use it. And then you’re just failing to use the gift for what it’s meant to be used for. The other way that you could err would be to just be reckless with it. You go joy riding, and you crash the car into stuff. You just cavalier about it. Because you’re saying, well, it’s my gift. It was given to me. And that went also be a sort of sign of in gratitude toward the gift you’ve been given. So likewise, we don’t want to just treat nature as some untouchable taboo as if it’s so sacred we can’t eat meat or vegetables or whatever. We can’t interact with nature. We can’t build human environments within the natural world. We don’t want to act like that. We don’t want to go to the other extreme and be cavalier. We don’t want to be indifferent.
We don’t want to lose sight of the fact that every time we interact with nature, we’re interacting with something given to us by God and not only to us. And I think that not only to us is a pretty important caveat. So then Benedict gets to the heart of this vision of human ecology, and I’ve been promising this for a while, so let’s get squarely to it. He says, “there is need for what might be called a human ecology correctly understood. The deterioration of nature is in fact closely connected to the culture that shapes human coexistence. When human ecology is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits.” Now I’m going to unpack what all this means, but I’m going to quote them a little more for here. Just as human virtues are interrelated such that the weakening of one places others at risk so the ecological system is based on respect for a plan that affects both the health of society and its good relationship with nature.
All that’s to say ecological problems don’t exist in a vacuum. How we treat ourselves is interconnected with how we treat the earth. And so if culture is spiraling out of control and kind of the vision of the human person, then it stands for reason that we’re going to spiral out of control in our vision of our relationship to the environment. We’ll go to one of the two extremes he described. On the flip side, if we have a really unhealthy relationship to the environment, we’re likely to have a really unhealthy relationship to how we treat our neighbor. And there’s innumerable examples that could be used to kind of point in this direction. For instance, those who abuse animals are more likely to become serial killers. Right? They have an unhealthy relationship with non-human creation and it’s very closely connected with an unhealthy relationship with human creation.
On the other hand, a culture that treats people as disposable, as malleable is almost certainly going to treat nature as disposable and as malleable and vice versa. It’s very difficult to isolate one from the other. I mean, you may notice Benedict actually, he says that just as the human virtues are interrelated, such as weakening of one places others at risk, the same thing is true with human ecology and natural ecology that the environmental system doesn’t exist in isolation from the rest of human society. And that’s just a good thing to bear in mind. And I’ve actually reminded of this recently because of all of the changes that kind of happened with COVID. Now, and look, I’m not trying to get on a soapbox about COVID stuff. I get why people made changes. I get why people were worried, especially in the early days when they didn’t really understand how transmission works.
The last thing I’m trying to do is start that debate, but but I think it’s important to note that once upon a time, in the very recent past, people like myself were raised with the mantra, reduce, reuse, recycle. That one thing you can do no matter how old you are, is you can reduce your consumption, you can reuse things, and then if you can’t reuse them anymore, then you recycle them. So don’t get the plastic cup in the first place, if you can avoid it. If you get it, refill it. And then if it gets to a point where it’s unsafe to continue to drink it because it’s leeching chemicals or something, well then you throw it in the bin to recycle it. That’s the idea. That basically disappeared in 2020. And maybe you don’t know what I’m talking about, maybe I noticed this in coffee shops.
I spend a fair amount of time working in coffee shops on writing and things like that, and I like to just get a coffee and a water and I might get food depending on where I’m at. And then I refill my coffee and refill my water if I’m there for a couple hours and hopefully not taking up an important table. But don’t judge me for this. That’s not the point. And what happened with COVID is that they stopped accepting the cup back. They would just throw out the cup or have me throw out the cup and give me an entirely new one. And before I could just take the lid off, pass the cup over, have it refilled, I’d put the lid back on, you know, you make a reasonable attempt to do the health provisions, et cetera. All that kind of changed.
And so I realized, okay. This is now way more wasteful, way more wasteful, and for very little discernible health reason, because I know of no cases. Now, maybe I’m just in the dark on this. I know of no cases where COVID was even plausibly transmitted through the water supply because someone’s rim of their glass that they hadn’t touched, but maybe it was close, whatever theory was leading to them not taking the cup back meant that just an order of magnitude more plastic cups were thrown out. And there’s something just really tragic about that and something that I think is closely connected with how we view other people, which is to say if you’re constantly in a plastic world, if you’re constantly in a world of one use, and then you throw it out, that’s pretty much what Tinder is for human relationships. And it’s not a coincidence that we are in this world where I’m going to interact with you once for my pleasure and then when it’s done, I’m going to throw you out.
And that’s what I do with plastic cups, and that’s what I do with, I mean, I don’t actually do this with people of the opposite sex. Thanks to God I’m married and I hopefully wouldn’t do that even if I weren’t. But that’s kind of the idea that there’s kind of a culture of disposability and that’s just one example. Right? But there’s lots of examples to that effect that there are all of these ways in which we can interact that are just not respectful of the gift, whether it’s the natural gift, whether it’s the human gift. So that’s the idea. Human ecology, these things are interconnected. So we should draw two major points from this. The first point is that, pro-lifers, we need to get serious about the environment. And I understand why this is really controversial. I promised to get to this earlier, but when I said what do we do in cases where Catholics find themselves pulled in two directions, and Pew again finds that Catholic Democrats are more pro-life at every stage of pregnancy than Democrats overall.
And of course they are. Right? Because some Catholic Democrats are pro-life and that’s enough to move the average, at least somewhat, so that they’re more pro-life as an aggregate. But unfortunately, Catholic Democrats are closer to non-Catholic Democrats than they are to non-Democrat Catholics. In other words, they’re not just hovering at the same rate that conservatives are, that they’re actually worse on abortion than our non-Catholic conservatives, that they’re worse on abortion than non-democratic Catholics, that on all of these issues, they’re not just worse on it, they’re actually closer to the Democratic position. What this means is statistically we can say that when forced to choose between listening to the Democratic party or listening to the Catholic church, they choose the Democratic party. Those numbers are harder to find on the flip side, when you’re looking at environmentalism saying, Republicans, do you listen to the GOP or do you listen to the Catholic church on whether we should care about the environment?
Those issues are harder to find for a lot of reasons. And because of the nature of abortion, it’s a little easier to just say this bill, yes or no. There’s not really an equivalent bill for environmental stuff, so it would be more difficult to find that. But it seems safe to say that there are people on both the environmental issue and people on the abortion issue and people on a thousand other issues who are listening to their political leaders rather than the church. And just as a quick recap, the church has called in scripture the pillar and bulwark of truth, is called the bride of Christ, is called the Body of Christ. It’s founded by Jesus Christ. Like it’s cool that the first Republican president is Abraham Lincoln, but the first Pope is St. Peter, and that’s immeasurably cooler.
And so all that’s to say if we find ourselves where our political leanings are one way and our religious leanings are another, this is a crisis point that we need to take really seriously, that this is a point that if you say, I’m going to follow the politicians rather than the church, that is tremendously dangerous for your salvation, whatever the issue is, because you’re choosing to trust someone or something else. As the psalmist says, “put not your trust in princes.” We don’t have princes, we’ve got politicians. But it’s the same principle. So I mentioned that just as a kind of word of warning and saying what we need to do is bust out of these partisan shells and listen to not what does the GOP say? And what does the Democratic party say? What does whatever your nation’s political party say? What does Christ say? What does the church say? That’s what we should care about. So to that end, pro-lifers, get serious about the environment. Benedict the 16th, we’re going to go back to him. Caritas in veritate.
He says, “the church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere.” In other words, it’d be very easy to treat this as a, I’m personally pro-environment, but publicly, and that is not an acceptable position. This is something that matters. And your personal pollution is only part of the problem. There is this social issue here. Remember the issue of air pollution. You choosing to be personally green doesn’t really do anything about the air pollution problem because you have very little control over it. There are some issues that have to be solved governmentally, or at least a broader level than purely private. So in so doing that is to say, in so doing about a caring about creation and the responsibility towards creation in the public sphere, the church must defend not only earth, water, and air as gifts of creation that belonged to everyone. She must above all protect mankind from self-destruction.
Now, those words are really striking that the point there is we can do irreparable damage to the human race. And I think we’ve been too cavalier in assuming that we can’t. And this is not the first time a pope has warned about this. St. Paul XI, Pope Saint Paul XI, speaking to the United Nations said that it took millennia for man to learn how to dominate, to subdue the earth, according to the inspired word of the first book of the Bible. The hour has now come for him to dominate his domination. This essential undertaking requires no less courage and thoughtlessness than the conquest of nature itself. In this decisive moment of its history, humanity hesitates uncertain before fear and hope. Who still does not see this? The most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats, and the most amazing economic growth unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress will in the long run go against man. I don’t know how one disagrees with that.
Because I mean we see it in some obvious ways, the building of the atomic bomb and subsequent nuclear weapons. Right? This is an incredible technical feat that can do tremendous incalculable damage to the human species. There are these other issues, different types of plastic and carbons and these things that are really technical issues and just consumer goods that can do tremendous damage to the ozone layer, to the atmosphere, to the drinking water. Places like Flint, Michigan, happen as a result of deliberate human choices. And if these deliberate human choices are being made without any kind of moral compass that looks at the impact on humanity and on the environment that we’re really into for a world of hurt. That’s at a bare minimum. So part of our concern is pro-lifers should extend to caring about the environment. I think that’s pretty straightforward. I think that’s pretty clear. The more controversial point may be the second point, which is that environmentalists, we need to get serious about the pro-life case that it is not good enough to take the position of Sierra Club.
It’s not good enough to take the position of Greenpeace that we need to take the pro-life case seriously. So Benedict here, I’m going to go back to him again. He says, “it’s contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves.” Well, why is that, you might say. Well, he says, “the book of nature is one and indivisible. It takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations, in a word integral human development. Our duties toward the environment are linked to our duties toward the human person considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other. Herein lies a grave contradiction in our mentality and practice today, one which demeans the person disrupts the environment and damages society.” So two quick points there. One, he’s again stressing that the book of nature is one and indivisible, meaning you can’t just wreck one part of nature and not expect it to impact the other parts.
Now we see this in a very obvious level, on the natural level. If you ruin the water or you ruin the air and say, well, I didn’t hurt the trees, I just hurt the air. Well, obviously it’s all interconnected. That you can’t just destroy one part of nature and not expect it to impact the other parts of nature. Well, likewise, you can’t destroy human culture and not expected to impact the rest of the ecosystem. That when you’re doing a bunch of terrible things to yourself and to other human beings, that’s going to have an environmental spillover. And when we say that, we can think about that in several different ways. So I want to explore a couple different ways we can imagine examples of what Benedict is talking about here, but there are really more examples that I’m going to give. I’m just going to give a few to kind of get the ball rolling sort of. The first one is from a book called Troubled Water subtitle What’s Wrong With What We Drink by Seth Siegel, who is a New York Times bestselling author.
And in it he says, “one pill in particular, a pill so iconic in American life that it is simply called The Pill contributes in the aggregate to a significant amount of hormones and wastewater and potentially in drinking water. Today, nearly 27% of American women who are avoiding pregnancy take a birth control pill, a dose of synthetic estrogen that tricks a women’s body endocrine system and suppresses ovulation. That one variety of pill taken for 21 days out of every 28 adds over 10 million doses to America’s wastewater every day.” That is a lot of estrogen being dumped into the water through the toilet system. And so what does that look like? What are the impacts of that, you may be wondering. What does that have to do with nature? Well, he says, we don’t know.
The EPA doesn’t test this. And it’s not just that we also have a bunch of stuff related to livestock production in what are called estrogen-like compounds. And so he says, while the effects of on humans of all this estrogen and estrogen-like compounds and surface water is still unknown, US geological survey research biologist Dr. Luke Iwanowicz and his fish biologist colleagues have seen what effect it seems to be having on fish. Those exposed to these chemicals have developed a range of abnormalities, has resulted in suppressed fertility, especially in males and population collapse. Now, when he says a range of abnormalities, what he means there among other things, is that we started seeing a tremendous number of intersex fish, fish that had really confused genders. And I mean this very literally, it was partially male, partially female looking fish. And we don’t know whether the estrogen is something that the fish are just particularly sensitive to, and maybe humans are fine.
We don’t know if it’s doing things to us as well, but we know that the effect of birth control in the water seems to be a tremendous damage to fish. And there’s a debate about how much of that is estrogen versus, again, these estrogen-like substances that work in a similar way. And again, the EPA is in no hurry to find out or to test this or to give bad news to the American public, but it certainly seems we’re doing tremendous environmental damage with this. And so in reading all this, this is a big controversy about 10 years ago, and there’s been more stuff in the last 10 years on this.
In reading all this, I was reminded of some conversations I had in college where I knew some young women who were really interested in kind of a hormone-free lifestyle in a lot of areas, not having antibiotics given to cattle raised for beef, or not eating meat at all, or just having a lot of respect for doing things the natural way and all natural, and yet then would give themselves a bunch of synthetic estrogen as birth control, 21 out of every 28 days, and without any kind of even awareness of how dissonant that action was from the rest of how they tried to live, that you wouldn’t give that to a cow because you have too much respect for the cow, but you’re taking it yourself with without even really investigating what the consequences are. Again, that’s one, again potentially controversial kind of example, but it is just one of many, and there are several other examples we can give. I guess at the risk of being even more controversial, I’ll give a few others.
With animals, we believe that there are two sexes with mammals. Right? We know there’s a male and a female. You can castrate an animal and it doesn’t stop being a male. And we have no real doubt or ambiguity about that. And someone who looked at a bull and said that it was a female cow would just be mistaken and they could say, oh, well it’s very feminine in many ways. And you’d say, yeah, fine, it’s a very feminine bull, or it’s a very masculine female cow, whatever that even means, whatever that even looks like. But there’s a great deal of clarity about what it is to be male and female in the world of other mammals. There’s also a great deal of clarity. Life begins at conception. Right? So when you’re looking at a chicken egg, I know chickens aren’t mammals, but bear with me, you don’t think that the egg with the chicken inside is still part of the hen’s body.
In mammals where the child develops inside, in the fertilized egg inside the mother instead of outside as it is with the chicken, there still is a clear sense that life begins at conception. And yet when we get to humans, we profess to be tremendously confused about gender, profess to be tremendously confused about when life begins. And so all of the sanity we have towards the natural world, we seem to lose all of that once we get to the human world. And I think Benedict’s point is that you can’t stay in that level of cognitive dissonance forever, that you either end up in one of two places, either you just tell the truth about male and female, about conception, about all these things that we know, these scientific realities, these natural realities, that we just know.
Or you go to the other extreme and you just say, everything is malleable. Nothing is true. Everything is subject to our modification. And so then the modification of humans and the modification of organisms that aren’t human really is hand in glove. That these are two different ways of viewing the world. One in which it’s a gift that we receive and one in which it’s a tool that we dominate, but that you can’t have it both ways forever. That would be kind of the idea. That there’s something internally inconsistent about trying to teach a respect for nature without having the same respect for the human person and even greater respect for the human person. And so we need to take that very seriously. I can’t go into the woods and crush the egg of an eagle and kill the unborn eagle because it’s an endangered species and I’ve just killed this eagle.
But if you want to go and get an abortion and kill the child in your womb, we claim we don’t know if it’s a child or not. That’s what I mean. And you can do it without any legal repercussion. You can do it without any kind of consequence because we say that’s part of your body, even though we would never make that same mistake about any other animal, whether it’s an eagle or again, some other mammal. So those are just few of the examples. Right? But that’s kind of the idea. That there’s a few different ways of viewing the world, one in which we recognize our place and recognize the gift that is creation and that should lead us to a great respect for our own humanity, our own bodies, the neighbors we have, the human neighbors, but also for animals, for plants, for the creative world around us.
So final thoughts to who else? Pope Benedict the 16th. He said, “in order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrence. Not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there’s a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation, and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and along with it that of environmental ecology.” So that would be the closing challenge I would have, that this is really the reason the book of nature is one is because in no small part, this is a question of how sensitive are our conscience. And I’ve already suggested that we’ve had a sort of dulling of the conscience towards the created world in the move towards cities and suburbs.
It’s just been being cut off from the natural world. Just as it’s harder to care about some conflict in a part of the world you don’t live in as opposed to one down the block is harder to care about what’s happening to the natural world when you’re so cut off from it. But this is all part of the same question, how sensitive are our consciences about these issues, these issues of human life, and these issues of the environment? Because you cannot allow your conscience to be dulled in one area and not have an impact how sensitive or how dull your conscience is in another. So I hope it’s encouragement if you’re pro-life, to care about the environment, if you’re an environmentalist to care about the pro-life issue and to just treat one another, yourself, and the world around you with great respect and to recognize that both you and it are gifts from God. To that end, God bless you. Hope you have a great day. This has been Joe Heschmeyer.
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