Ecocide: it’s not leftism but a ‘crime against peace’

If you are wondering about the climate emergency that humanity is currently experiencing, the book you need to read is The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future by David Wallace-Wells.

The science is clear enough that a reasonable person will recognize the need for drastic action. We need to mitigate the unusual climate catastrophes we have already begun to experience. (Three unmissable recent examples are California wildfires, Venice flooding, and intensifying summer heat waves.)

At this point in the crisis, it is important not to succumb to what philosophers call “confirmation bias.” Confirmation bias is the fallacious habit of consistently resisting evidence contrary to one’s beliefs, instead preferring confirming evidence. Confirmation bias also refuses to look too hard, preferring only easy-to-find evidence.

The Uninhabitable Earth exhibits the opposite of confirmation bias: no one wants this nightmare to happen, and the author is haunted by doubts about his own optimism.

For any Catholic thinking about climate change, it should be burden-lightening to simply submit one’s intellect and will to Pope Francis’ teaching. His urgently important encyclical on the topic, Laudato Si’ (“On Care for Our Common Home”), consistently proclaimed the theological link to faith and morals, namely, the millions of poor people who are suffering from climate effects and who come to us as Christ in our midst.

Very soon it will be billions who are suffering and plunged into deeper poverty. But if you doubt that entirely plausible projection, then you need to read The Uninhabitable Earth in order to wake up from your unjustifiable complacency.

The book’s merit is to get us to consider what an untenable gamble it is to risk any of the worst-case outcomes ever coming true.

Even if only some of those scenarios come about, or even if some of them afflict us only in relatively weaker versions, nonetheless hundreds of millions will still suffer greatly.

Even in attenuated scenarios, their suffering will still be an entirely unnecessary and therefore morally culpable consequence, since (as Pope Francis has been tirelessly proclaiming) there is both scientific and moral certainty about what needs to be done right now.

The book’s author is David Wallace-Wells, deputy editor of New York magazine. He wrote The Uninhabitable Earth as its July 2017 cover story about multiple worst-case scenarios for climate change.

You can read that article online, but now in 2019 it has been expanded into an impressively sobering book with the same title. Wallace-Wells apologizes for being alarming; but as he says: any sane person should be alarmed.

The paperback edition of the book has just been published, in which Wallace-Wells writes an afterword with an update. He explains that the original manuscript was completed in September 2018; since then, he has travelled in California to investigate the future of wildfire. It’s worth buying the paperback for his most current reflections.

The online article discusses heat death, famine, plagues, unbreathable air, perpetual war, permanent economic collapse, and poisoned oceans. The book expands those treatments and adds discussion of widespread drowning, wildfires, freshwater drain, unnatural disasters, and a lengthy consideration of what lies ahead for us logistically (as we will be forced to seriously engage with all of these threats).

But if reading a frightening book like this is too much to ask of most people, perhaps artists and filmmakers can start to assist everyone to imagine exactly what is at stake. Unexpectedly, one of the very best complacency-shattering treatments of our looming climate future can be found in the fifth and final season of the TV series The Affair.

Unforgettably, flashforwards dramatized by Anna Paquin show what lies ahead for the coastline of Montauk. But we also experience the terror of Dominic West and Maura Tierney’s characters fleeing a California wildfire happening in the present.

Thankfully, Pope Francis announced on Nov. 15 that the Catechism of the Catholic Church will be revised to include “the sin against ecology, ecological sin against the common home.”

The Pope argued that an “elementary sense of justice” demands corporations must be held responsible for rapacious behaviour, so that we have “adequate legal protection of our common home.”

His remarks obviously return to central themes of his encyclical Laudato Si’, but the Catechism revision adopts a proposal from the recent Synod of Bishops for the Amazon.

Pope Francis presciently calls on the international order to recognize “ecocide” as a new legal category of crimes against humanity, since “ecocide” is fundamentally a “crime against peace.”

In his encyclical, Francis warns about “proposals to internationalize the Amazon, which only serve the economic interests of transnational corporations” (Laudato Si’, 38).

Rather than dismiss this as naïve leftism, it would be best to learn from his actual teaching. Laudato Si’ spares no one with its profound critique of “the globalization of the technocratic paradigm” (see paragraphs 101 to 136): it transcends merely ideological politics in order to place environmental care on solid philosophical ground.