Al Gore's book EARTH IN THE BALANCE: ECOLOGY AND THE HUMAN SPIRIT (1992) is a classic about climate change.
In an endnote accompanying her incisive introduction to Pope Francis' eco-encyclical, Oreskes calls attention to the following four books as noteworthy:
(1) Bill McKibben's DEEP ECONOMY: THE WEALTH OF COMMUNITIES AND THE DURABLE FUTURE (2008);
(2) James Gustave Speth's THE BRIDGE AT THE END OF THE WORLD: CAPITALISM, THE ENVIRONMENT, AND CROSSING FROM CRISIS TO SUSTAINABILITY (2009);
(3) Paul Gilding's THE GREAT DISRUPTION: WHY THE CLIMATE CRISIS WILL BRING ON THE END OF SHOPPING AND THE BIRTH OF A NEW WORLD (2012);
(4) Naomi Klein's THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: CAPITALISM VS. THE CLIMATE (2014).
In his eco-encyclical, Pope Francis often sounds like a technophobe, especially in certain quotes from Fr. Romano Guardini's book THE END OF THE MODERN WORLD. The endnotes indicate that the pope is quoting the 9th German edition and that that edition can be found in English translation in the 1998 American edition.
In the book THE GREAT REFORMER: FRANCIS AND THE MAKING OF A RADICAL POPE (2014), Austen Ivereigh reports that Pope Francis (born in 1936) in 1986 seriously explored the possibility of writing a doctoral dissertation on Guardini (pages 197-200), but he did not do that.
As a result of certain quotes from Guardini as well as Pope Francis' own commentary in his eco-encyclical, both Guardini and Pope Francis sound like technophobes similar in spirit to Postman in his book TECHNOPOLY, mentioned above.
In certain other respects, Pope Francis' critique of consumerism, which he characterizes as throwaway culture, resembles the spirit of Postman's critique in his book AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH, also mentioned above.
POPE FRANCIS' ECO-ENCYCLICAL
Now, despite the numerous quotations from other popes and official church documents, Pope Francis, for understandable reasons, explicitly states that he is addressing "all people of good will," not just practicing Catholics (par. no. 62). But apart from professional Catholic theologians, and professional journalists and pundits, how many other practicing Catholics are likely to read the pope's lengthy eco-encyclical, and how many other people of good will would be willing to read a document overloaded with so much Roman Catholic ideological baggage? I would liken the flow of the pope's thought in his eco-encyclical to the meandering flow of a long river such as the Mississippi.
The following paragraph (no. 23) outlines what I consider to be the pope's central concern in his admittedly wide-ranging eco-encyclical:
"The climate is a common good, belonging to all and meant for all. At the global level, it is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life. A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades the warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it.
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