Who Cares?

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I haven’t recently written about the care of our earth because every time I do, I can almost feel the collective yawn. Data on my readership on Blogger always takes a hit. Fact is, unless we live on a coast, or are poor, we don’t think climate change is much of a threat.

Poor? What does that have to do with anything?

Ok, we’ll start there. I live in a small town south of Denver, a non-contiguous suburb. We live in a 26-year-old town home, but the town is considered to be among the wealthiest in the Denver area.

Nearby is Daniels Park, where I stop at least a couple times a week on my daily bike ride. It has a lookout where you can see practically the whole front range of the Rocky Mountains as well as downtown Denver in the distance.

Bunched-up Smog 

On many days, you see smog bunched up against the foothills and covering much of downtown Denver and nearby neighborhoods. Those neighborhoods are inhabited by much of the Denver area’s poor. We who live in the suburbs are almost always breathing clean air while people there are bothered by coughing, asthma, and allergies.

If you think about it, when you see on TV or in a video natural disasters happening anywhere in the world, it’s usually in poor areas. According to an AI source I use, “researchers consistently find that the poor are disproportionately affected — often by a large margin – by natural disasters.”

There’s an island off the coast of Sierra Leone in Africa, for instance, whose coast is home to 2 million people. It’s an area that is one of the most threatened because of global warming, according to national and international agencies, causing heart-breaking displacement of the population. The study “highlights the impoverishment of these populations, whose food security and health have deteriorated.”

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Because of the vulnerability of the poor – where they live, their lack of health care, the unavailability of food, their economic stress - floods, cyclones and other natural disasters almost always cause more harm when they occur in poor areas of the world. That results in deaths and disabilities among people who have no control over their fates.

Is the fact that the poor are disproportionately affected a reason so many Americans are indifferent to the threat of global warming? 

Much of this indifference is due to denial about the importance of human activity in the phenomenon of global warming. But unless you know an awful lot about climate, you have to depend on people who do know – the climatologists and other scientists who study it - and they are overwhelmingly of the opinion that global warming is caused mostly by human activity.

The bottom line here is that we humans are causing harm to the planet and are, at best, indifferent about it. So, what does this have to do with the search for God?

Plenty. We are charged with being good stewards of the planet God has given us. Not overlords, who can do anything we want with it, but good stewards, who care for it and nourish it and all its inhabitants.

Obviously, a change of heart is needed. If you want to draw closer to God, in my view, you have to take that job seriously and look for practical ways to be a good steward. And a good start is caring about it.

Hopeful

In a recent blog, commenting on Pope Francis’ two encyclicals on the subject of care of our common home, Fr. Dirk Dunfee, S.J. – after lamenting the sad state of the deteriorating care for God’s creation – is hopeful if not optimistic.

“…Pope Francis’ cry for conversion, so beautifully articulated in Laudato Si’ and carried forward by our dear Pope Leo, is a sign of hope. To be sure, prophets have long had, shall we say, mixed receptions, but inherent in the prophetic cry for justice is the assertion that justice is possible.

“Things do not have to be as they are. Worth repeating as a mantra: Things do not have to be as they are. There is hope. In God’s world there is holy work to be done; it’s work that we are called to do as beloved stewards. Happy news indeed.”