Pope Francis on Families and the Environment

On a trip to Indonesia in early September, 2024, Pope Francis signed a declaration on religious harmony and environmental protection at the Istiqlal mosque in Jakarta with the mosque’s grand imam. The Pope said that our species was facing a “serious crisis” bought about by war and the destruction of the environment.[1] Of war, the tremendous destruction of civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and Gaza that had been taking place was doubtless on the cleric’s mind. Of the environment, climate change was undoubtedly on his mind. In addition to volcanoes and wild fires, human emissions of carbon into the atmosphere were poised to push the global temperature increase above the critical threshold of 2.5 degrees C above the pre-industrial level. What connects the two problems at the root—the source of the two problems—went unmentioned. In fact, the Pope made a statement that, if acted upon, stood to exacerbate the underlying problem: the exponential explosion of growth of the human population in the twentieth century.

The full essay is at "Pope Francis on Families and the Environment."

1. Joel Guinto, “Pope and Top Indonesian Imam Make Joint Call for Peace,” BBC.com, September 5, 2024.

Hidden Warnings of Climate Change: A Paralyzed Species Looks On

Global warming has been so difficult to slow down through political means at least in part due to the fact that most of the action has been going on in the Arctic Ocean and the surrounding permafrost land (which, it turns out, is not so permanently frozen after all, so methane is leaving that ground for the atmosphere). All this is far from almost all of the world’s population, so social consciousness has not been changed nearly enough for demands by voters that governments act in enforceable ways, globally. In short, what has been occurring in that far Northern region has both dwarfed consciousness of the impact of human-released carbon/methane.  The proverbial canary in the coal mine has been hidden from view for all but a few (e.g., scientists). The implications are truly astonishing.
According to Alan Buis at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California in 2013, “Climate change is already happening in the Arctic, faster than its ecosystems can adapt. Looking at the Arctic is like looking at the canary in the coal mine for the entire Earth system.”[1] In general terms, if the pace of global warming outstrips the ability of the ecosystem sustaining the human race to adapt, the species can be expected to suffer with inadequate prior notice. The planet's climate may get warmer too fast to allow us to adjust, for instance, in terms of such essentials as food and water. Hotter summers may be just part of the challenge. Lest it be forgotten, the more complex the organism, the less adaptable it is to external change. In addition to the biology of complexity, the motive of greed makes us even less adaptive when the costs are up-front and the benefits totally or even mostly in the future. 
So what is it that was going on up North that had Alan Buis so concerned in 2013? In his article, he points out that over “hundreds of millennia [that’s a very long time], Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon [because dead plants and animals do not decompose in the top soil]—an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons).”[2]  This amount of carbon is significant for two reasons. 
First, the carbon is in the soil that is likely to thaw. Once thawed, that soil, which has been warming even faster than the Arctic air, releases carbon into the atmosphere.  Second, the 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams dwarfs “the 350 petagrams of carbon that have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850.”[3] If you are reading this essay while eating in a restaurant, this is when you flag down your server and calmly say, “Check please!” so you can get your affairs in order.
In the frozen soil that covers 9 million square miles, melting would also emit “massive amounts of methane into the atmosphere,” according to Terrell Johnson of weather.com.[4] He adds that methane is “much more potent as a heat-trapping greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, with more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2 over a 100-year period.”[5] Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Erasmus University in the E.U. have predicted tremendous economic costs as a consequence of the expected release of a 50-gigatonne reservoir of methane in thawing permafrost under the East Siberian Sea.[6]. That is by no means all of the permafrost up North.
According to Buis, climate models at least as of June 2013 had not yet adequately incorporated the impact of carbon and methane that could be released into the atmosphere from the “permafrost” soils, which, by the way, had warmed as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees F (1.5 to 2.5 degrees C) in 30 years.[7] Regardless of the decade, we could have absolutely no idea where the Earth’s climate would be headed—and thus whether our species would even survive.
Although humans beings have not been holding blow-torches to the frozen tundra as if playing some sick joke on nature in the middle of the night, the vast majority—98 percent—of climatologists agreed in 2013 that the “human contribution” had been a significant factor in the carbon dioxide having reached the 400 ppm (parts per million) benchmark for what Johnson calls “a new danger zone."[8]
We as a species may have inadvertently helped light the fuse on a process even more significant than carbon in impacting global warming. To be sure, at the time, it was difficult to ascertain how much or even whether that methane-process would be mitigated or reduced in its extent should reducing our burning of fossil fuels mean that the Arctic air would not warm up quite so much as would otherwise be the case. Nevertheless, the sheer magnitude of the carbon and methane still caught in the frozen soil and the gigantic effect those gases would have if released into the atmosphere suggest that it is in our own best interest as a species to do what we can to reduce the amount of additional warming of the Arctic air as much as possible.
Making the matter more confusing, the warming at the Arctic has been more than at the equator. The slope between cold and warm air between the two areas fuels the Arctic jet-stream, or "the Polar Vortex." Less energy means the circling river of air around the Arctic is loosens and thus can belch Arctic air southward. Think of that high river of air as like a wobbly rubber-band. The wobbles send more Arctic air further south, the last week of January, 2019 being but one instance. Together, the instances give the false impression that global warming is not occurring. "We had a really cold winter last year," a man in Chicago, Illinois or Berlin, Germany, might say. He might conclude that global warming is a hoax, then he might vote. Hence Jefferson and Adams agreed that a viable republic (and we might generalize to world) requires an educated and virtuous citizenry. 

For all our amazing accomplishments technologically beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the human race has shown itself to be remarkably blind concerning not only its own footprint, but also what might be unleashed in nature itself as a result of our thrashing about. In the film Avatar, Neytiri chastises Jake Sully, saying “You are like a baby. Making noise, don’t know what to do,” on account of his ignorance on how to conduct himself in the forest. The irony is astounding in that we humans have been able to get to the moon, and yet we are so ignorant—arrogant even—regarding how we are impacting our climate and ecosystems, both of which we rely on for our very survival as a species. In all likelihood, the sheer clumsiness in our corporate footprint and the astounding arrogance in our socialite swagger will be outstripped sooner than we suppose by the subtle yet enduring ways of nature. For all our power and money, for all our numbers across many lands, we are indeed a small species that presumes itself to be great.

[1] Alan Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?” NASA News and Features, June 10, 2013. Accessed July 16, 2013.
[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs,” weather.com, July 15, 2013.  Accessed July 16, 2013.
[5] Ibid.

[6] Nina Chestney, "Arctic Methane Release Due to Climate Change Could Cost Global Economy $60 Trillion, Study Reports," Reuters, July 24, 2013.

[7] Buis, “Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?”
[8] Terrell Johnson, “Beneath the Arctic, a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirs.” 

Climatic Presumption: What is the Forecast?

Al Gore stated that we face a choice regarding whether the earth’s ecological system will remain viable for our species.  He cites the carbon that is frozen in the permafrost in the north.  As the permafrost melts, carbon is added to the atmosphere, making it “difficult” for the human species to live.   I am not a scientist so I have no means of knowing what the state of the research is on these matters.  Nor am I particularly interested in debating it.   In my view, if there is a chance that we could be effectively ending our our species, we ought not to be held back from acting in a prudent fashion even if it is “just in case.”   I understand the economic costs, and that some are particularly attached to short-run costs (and less enamoured with long-term benefits).  Still, that the debate itself would be allowed to stall even a “just in case” response reflects badly on our species.   At a worse case, it could be something like two parents debating which of them will get their baby out of their burning house.  Meanwhile, the baby burns.   We would call that a dysfunctional family, would we not?  Still, no such appellation goes to those involved in the continuing debate on climate change.

It strikes me that we as a society may be too innured in our own presumptuousness to even realize how badly we are handling such decisions.  I can’t believe that the society is predominantly made up of the two, rather vocal, extremes on the matter.  The extremes are presumptuous in their determination to continue the debate unless they get exactly what they want while the rest of us have been guilty of allowing them to dominate the decision-making process.  Consider, for example, a reasonable person saying, “ok, we need to make a decision,” and one is made.  The refusal to make compromises (whether an extreme in the US following a rigid ideological agenda or the Chinese government presuming that national sovereignty is absolute) is not only childish, it is rather arrogant concerning that the eventual demise of our species might hang in the balance.  Even this “might” should be a wakeup call that posturing and debating evince a selfishness that the rest of us ought not to countenance.  Yet we do.  We are too passive, those of us without a dog in the fight.   The truth is, we all have a dog in this fight.  Are we to be survived by cockroaches?   Wouldn’t it be fodder for a divine comedy were the antics of the cockroaches superior to the presumptuousness of humans?   The species left standing is the one that wins.  

I can visualize a later generation (of humans) looking back at our generation as incredibly selfish and incompetent even to reach a decision.  “They knew what might hang in the balance, and yet they were so caught up in their own petty circumstances.”   It is like we are captains on the Titanic debating which way to turn after it being reasonable to believe that there is an iceberg somewhere ahead.   It could even be that we see the iceberg and still we debate.  Such pettifoggery is mere dribble in the divine comedy that may well already be in Act III.  

We are so small, even smaller than the cockroach, and yet we presume ourselves to be so big.  We we to have the distance of perspective such that our immediate pathos would not blind us, how would we view our society…ourselves?

Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere Outstripping the Planet’s Absorption: A Major Turning-Point

The human species has reached such a size—and with the population of Africa expected in 2017 to double by 2050 from an incredulous and oblivious fertility rate (i.e., as if there were no tomorrow) in spite of life-threatening impacts on that continent already from global warming—that profound changes to the planet can from now on hardly be avoided unless or until nature’s swift hand acts through pestilence, famine, or over-crowding conflict. Making matters worse, we are flying without having bothered to detail a navigation flight-plan, for even homo sapiens’ cognitive wiring has been outstripped by not only our inherent selfishness and preference for instant gratification, but also our sheer presumptuousness. In hindsight, we can say we have acted rashly in having polluted so in the twentieth century—the benefit of hindsight being shown in our shortcomings even in being able to keep tabs on the extent of the damage.

By 2017, human activity was estimated to be adding almost 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air annually; the atmospheric concentration of the heat-retaining gas had risen by about 43 percent since the Industrial Revolution.[1] In a particularly ominous sign, the “excess carbon dioxide scorching the planet rose at the highest rate on record in 2015 and 2016,” with a “slightly slower but still unusual rate of increase” continuing into 2017.[2] These “telltale indicators” point to the way human activity was already “altering the planet on a major scale.”[3] Lest it be concluded that tightening emission targets is the answer, the amount of the gas being emitted by human activity had largely stopped rising even as the amount that stays in the air was going up faster than ever. Perhaps the oceans were becoming saturated, hence no longer nearly as able to absorb the gas from the air. From decades of research, scientists had established that less than half of the gas emitted by humans was remaining in the atmosphere, and thus warming the planet, because the rest “was being absorbed by the ocean and the land surface, in roughly equal amounts.”[4] Of particular concern, even as humanity had felt entitled to pollute as if there were no tomorrow in the twentieth century, the species could not even ascertain whether or not the amount of gas in the air had finally outstripped the “natural sponges,” such as ocean water and trees. Furthermore, not even scientists had any idea how much methane, which traps heat even more efficiently than carbon dioxide does, was escaping from the melting permafrost in the extreme northern climes such as in Siberia. In short, humanity in its short-sightedness and presumption tends to dismiss the limits in the human ability to know things.

It is as if we were starting out on a long distance road-trip without bothering to check the balance in our bank account, so we are anxious because we cannot calculate exactly how much money for gas will be necessary to reach the destination and return home. To fear being stranded and yet not know how much money is available is obviously irrational, yet it may be part of the human condition. I actually had that dream last night. I had outstripped my own cognition in racking my brain over how much gas I would need, and yet I was presumptuously going to set out on the long-distance trip anyway. No doubt my dream was prompted in part by the highs of 114F on three days last week (followed by days at 108F)—heat neither I nor any of my ancestors from Europe had ever experienced for days on end. Just living in a desert is itself presumptuous from the standpoint of the many centuries of natural selection behind my pale-skinned genetics, whose inherent limitations I should honor. 

I can now understand by experience how global warming could indeed eventually render some parts of the United States uninhabitable for humans. While I do believe that technological advances yet to come may stave off catastrophe (i.e., by extracting huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air), the limitations of human knowledge on even how the planet has been reacting to our over-reaches gives me some pause. In the end, our presumption—what we feel entitled to in the convenient assumptions we make—may be the seed of our species’ destruction. We may have blood on our own hands, yet presumptuously assume that someone else did it.  

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1. Justin Gillis, “Carbon in Atmosphere Is Rising, Even as Emissions Stabilize,” The New York Times, June 26, 2017.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

The Age of Humans: Snuffing Our Species Out

With California entering its fourth year of severe drought and the planet having its warmest August and September since records began in 1880, one scientist at NASA’s Institute for Space Studies said in 2014 that the warm data points “point toward the long-term trends.”[1] At the time, scientists were already claiming that the planet had entered a new era—that of the Anthropocene—noted for the impact of the homo sapiens species in altering Earth. The implications are profound, even if the huge shift has not fully registered in human consciousness.

According to one geologist speaking in 2014, “humans have become a geologic force on the planet. The age we are living [in now] is really distinct.”[2] Yet we might be too close to it to recognize the distinctness, and so our elected representatives may not feel emboldened to craft public policy to the new reality. The resulting vulnerability has scarcely been contemplated. John Kress, the acting undersecretary of science for the Smithsonian Institution highlighted the mammoth nature of the change. “Never in its 4.6 million-year-old history has the Earth been so affected by one species as it is being affected now by humans.”[3] In addition to climate change, the impact extends to ozone loss, disruption of nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, the acidification of oceans, endocrine disruptors, and deforestation.[4] I submit that we are not even aware of other footprints that could make the planet potentially uninhabitable for our species one day; for without much of a recognition of the new era, we cannot expect to have much of a grasp on the breadth of our species’s impact on the planet.

In his book, Steps to An Ecology of Mind, Gregory Bateson approaches ecological principles from the standpoint of general systems theory. That is to say, he stresses the system-qualities of an ecosystem. His notion of a maximizing variable is relevant here. Such a variable maximizes without taking a break. A species in an ecosystem qualifies as a maximizing variable if that species continues to increase, unhampered even as it butts up against the semi-permeable membrane of an ecosystem’s constraints. When such a species “breaks through” what its ecosystem will tolerate, the state-state equilibrium is disrupted and the ecosystem must “find” another equilibrium. The new resting point may or may not include the species.

Our species is indeed a maximizing variable, with a population of over 7 billion as of 2014. In his pathbreaking work on populations, Malthius postulates that an over-populated species is vulnerable to famine, epidemics, and war. Studies using rats have demonstrated the theory in action. Yet in the Anthropocene Age in which we live, we can add a more “macro” consequence—that of being vulnerable to the planet becoming uninhabitable to our species. As Nietzsche brilliantly writes regarding how people can unintentionally discredit their own conception of God and thus effectively ruin it, we may have blood on our hands and yet not realize that we ourselves have done the deed. Like light coming from the farthest star, awareness of our large-scale impacts already committed has not yet reached us.

Indeed, the Earth’s equilibrium was already on the move in the early 2010s and yet we struggled to separate this out from “natural fluctuations.” Without much recognition of the new era and even less comprehension of the impacts and how serious their respective consequences would likely be, our species could indeed be heedlessly maximizing itself to extinction without realizing it. In genealogical time, our genes could be outstandingly successful in terms of replication only for a short burst of time before burning out like a candle’s flame enjoying too much wick.

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[1] Nick Visser, “The Planet Just Had Its Warmest August on Record,” The Huffington Post, September 15, 2014.

[2] Seth Borenstein, “’Anthropocene’ Term Gains Traction as Human Impacts on Planet Become Clearer,” Associated Press, October 14, 2014.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Humanity Getting Ahead of Itself: A Mass-Extinction Event Already Underway

Around 252 million years ago, the “Great Dying” took out 90% of the world’s species. About 66 million years ago, a meteor caused the extinction of three out of four species, including those known to us as dinosaurs.[1] After 1.8 million years of existence, our own species is triggering yet another mass extinction event, according to a study in the journal Science by Stuart Pimm and Clinton Jenkins. According to Pimm, species are now going extinct at about ten times faster than scientists had thought. Prior to the arrival of homo sapiens (i.e., our species), the extinction rate was about 0.1 out of a million species per year; as of 2014, the rate had climbed to 100 to 1000 species per 1 million.[2] Behind this evolutionarily abrupt bump is not only the complicity of our species, but also unforeseen consequences that could easily take homo sapiens out of the equation.

Beyond the positive correlation of our species and the rate increase, Pimm and Jenkins posit a causal relationship, pointing in particular to habitat loss due to the territorially expansive attribute of an expansive human population globally. Climate change and overfishing, both of which are related to the increase in the human population, are also salient factors.

As observable as this leap in the extinction rate is, the implications may elude our cognitive grasp, and thus be especially dangerous for our species. In other words, our collective failure to manage our population level may result ironically in the downfall of the species.

In another study in 2014, Rodolfo Dirzo points to the overexploitation of resources and habitat destruction as examples of human activities responsible for the rise in the extinction rate of species. Since 1500, 322 terrestrial vertebrates had gone extinct, with the remaining species declining in numbers by an average of 25 percent; for invertebrates, the typical decline in population is a whopping 45 percent.[3] With these stark changes naturally come unforeseen consequences. “We tend to think about extinction as loss of a species from the face of the Earth, and that’s very important, but there’s a loss of critical ecosystem functioning in which animals play a central role that we need to pay attention to as well,” Dirzo said in a statement.[4] Even amid all of our advanced technology, we are a species that lives within ecosystems; the collapse of such a system means all bets are off in things like food supply that we take for granted.

For example, “(w)here human density is high,” Dirzo continues, “you get high rates of [animal decline], high incidence of rodents, and thus high levels of pathogens, which increases the risks of disease transmission. It can be a vicious circle.”[5] Rodents and pathogens can of course hit our food sources as well as us. Ironically, our own technological advances can exacerbate the potential harm.

Air transportation, for example, could turn the massive spread of the Ebola virus in Africa during 2014 into a worldwide pandemic. Even as we were congratulating ourselves on finally accepting what climatologists had been telling us for over a decade concerning the harmful impact of our carbon-dioxide emissions on the planet’s temperature, we were blissfully unaware of the contribution being made by methane, a gas with ten-times the “greenhouse” effect as carbon dioxide, through leaks in extracting and distributing natural gas—the “clean” gas—as well as in the melting of the permafrost around the Artic. With the kind of scales to which our technology can be applied, both the unforeseen impacts and the damage can be much greater than we know. Put another way, we have increased the size of our footprint so much as a species that we cannot get our minds around all of the unintended consequences.

In short, we have gotten too big, both in population and the scales in which we chose to operate, for our own good. While our genes are doubtlessly quite pleased with their success in replication, they are clearly not smart enough for their own long-term survival. The human brain seems naturally inclined to assume the absence of unforeseen implications rather than holding as a default that they exist “out there” even if we have not yet detected them. As superior as our species’ brain is, it sports a major flaw in having or adopting a schizogenic (i.e., a variable that maximizes itself without limit) mentality rather than one that is homeostatic, or steady-state (e.g., ecologizing).[6] This explains why we have been so hesitant as a species even to reduce the increases in our carbon footprint, let alone bring it down to a level at which the warming of the planet will allow for the continued survival of our species. In short, we tend to be all about maximizing—even as if it were an end in itself—in line with our greed and hubris rather than valuing the achievement of equilibrium in line with, rather than puncturing, the ecosystems within which we live and breathe.

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[1] Seth Borenstein, “World on Brink of Sixth Great Extinction, Species Disappearing Faster than Ever Before,” The Huffington Post, May 29, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Sara Gates, “Earth Is in the Early Days of a New Mass-Extinction Event, Researchers Warn,” The Huffington Post, July 25, 2014.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] On this distinction, see Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind.