A Vatican conference held earlier this month not only publicized the church’s ongoing involvement in ecological discussions, it also elevated the conversation itself.
“Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Nature: Our Responsibility” was sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. It fostered conversation and cooperation between two branches of academia that don’t often speak to each other—the natural sciences (such as physics and biology) and the social sciences (such as economics and sociology).
In doing so, the conference encouraged new insights about how we might live in sustainable, healthy environmentally friendly ways that respect human dignity.
The academies offered this inter-disciplinary event in large part because of unsuccessful attempts by others to meaningfully address our growing ecological and social crises. Conference organizers pointed in particular to the United Nation’s 2012 Rio+20 Summit on biodiversity preservation.
The pontifical academies noted that Rio+20 failed in many respects because it fostered “no collective endeavour among natural and social scientists.”
“We propose instead to view humanity’s interchanges with nature through a triplet of fundamental, but inter-related, human needs — food, health and energy — and ask our respective academies to work together to invite experts from the natural and the social sciences to speak of the various pathways that both serve those needs and reveal constraints on nature’s ability to meet them.”
In an interview for my blog in February, atmospheric scientist and Vatican conference co-organizer Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan said that at a 2011 Vatican conference on climate change, “I realized our political leaders need help from religious leaders to exercise moral authority to ask people to protect the air and the water. […] The world urgently needs religious leaders with moral authority like Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama.”
Towards the end of the sustainability conference a few weeks ago — as participants were applauding the inter-disciplinary dialogue — Dr. Ramanathan said that thanks to “the convening power of the church,” the participants had learned a great deal from each other and were now “all charged up about solutions, [and] taking that knowledge into action.”
Timothy E. Wirth, a former U.S. senator from Colorado and vice chairman of the United Nations Foundation (and who is not a member of either pontifical academy), said he hoped Pope Francis — who he called “the single most important person in the world” — could lead the world through a “global vacuum” of leadership, especially given a host of environmental, economic and social issues that disproportionately impact the poorest of the poor.
Andy Revkin of the New York Times, who was both participating in and covering the conference, said presenters had demonstrated that “it’s a combination of knowledge of data — faith, will and love that will determine the quality of the human journey in this century.”
“Yes, love,” he added to stress the point.
Love is an odd word to hear at a conference on environmental and economic sustainability. But there it was and there it stayed not only as a topic of conversation but as a solution to so many of our ecological and social ills.
As Dr. Martin J. Rees of the University of Cambridge noted, “We must be guided by the best science — both natural science and social science — but also by values that science itself can’t provide.”
By the close of the pontifical conference, there was strong sentiment that the gathering of secular scientists should carry on in some form. This seems likely, given that Pope Francis continues to express his predecessors’ social and ecological concerns. This is a blessing, because there are limits to what human reason can do by itself — which is why we must appeal occasionally to humanity’s soul.
William Patenaude, M.A., KHS, serves on the diocesan pastoral council, is an engineer with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management, and is a parishioner of SS. Rose and Clement Parish, Warwick. He also writes at catholicecology.blogspot.com
