How can we Respond to the Pope’s Call?

by Sarah-Leah Pimentel · July 21, 2015

What is your carbon footprint? That’s a popular question that pops up sometimes when we speak about the environment.

Copies of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’, are stacked on a table prior to a presentation at UN headquarters in New York City. (Photo: Gregory A Shemitz/CNS)

We are regularly encouraged to reduce our carbon emissions and there are frequent campaigns that encourage us to use public transport to travel to work, ride a bicycle or car pool with neighbours or colleagues.

But what about all the other ways in which we daily add to gradual wearing down of the environment?

Pope Francis’ new encyclical Laudato Si (Praise be to you) urges us to take greater care for our common home, this planet that we share with seven billion other people.

The first section is quite discouraging. The Holy Father reminds us that we are abusing the earth’s resources by using them wastefully, and it is the poor who are most affected.

Pope Francis highlights that international political responses have been weak in addressing the adverse effects of climate change and the disproportionate use of the earth’s resources.

He therefore calls on world leaders to find solutions towards an environmental, economic and social ecology that takes into account the fine relationship between nature and the society that lives in it.

Many climate conferences have been held, and governments seem unwilling to implement solutions in which the most developed countries take greater responsibility for the rampant abuse of the environment, often at the cost of less developed countries.

Clearly the pope is calling on the leaders who will gather in Paris in December for the 21st climate change conference to think of one world with a common plan in order to find enforceable policies that can be applied at local or regional level, rather than a global solution to the problem of climate change.

As a natural cynic, I feel that too many vested international economic and political interests would make finding such a solution very difficult. Yet, the last part of the encyclical heartens me. Pope Francis encourages a change in lifestyle [which] could bring healthy pressure to bear on those who wield political, economic and social power.

With this, he is putting some of this power for change into our hands, the hands of ordinary people. If each of us changes our patterns of consumption, we can place pressure on the greater economy that governs relationships between international interests and power plays.

Perhaps we can live the spirit of Laudato Si’ by reflecting on our own consumption patterns, perhaps by looking at the very simple things we do in our daily lives, from the moment we turn the kettle on in the morning.

Do I fill the entire kettle, have a mug of coffee and throw out the rest of the water when I come home again in the evening? Or do I boil just enough for what I need now? Do I take long showers where litres of clean water just flow down the drain, while there are people on this planet clamouring for just a few drops of water?

Do I buy processed foods or do I cook my food from scratch? Think of the amount of packaging that goes into a pre-prepared meal and compare that with the reduced amounts of plastic and cardboard used to package fresh ingredients.

Do I buy those little yoghurt tubs, where I throw away a small piece plastic every day or do I choose rather to buy a larger tub that I spoon a little yoghurt out of every day? Better yet, am I like my mother, who used to make her own yoghurt, occasionally buying a small tub of yogurt as live culture to make litres and litres of yoghurt?

Do I need a new cellphone every two years and am I caught in the cycle of upgrades offered by service providers? Similarly, do I really require every technological device to conduct my daily activities? Is it really necessary for me to own a home PC, laptop, tablet, and Kindle, all of which perform slightly different functions, but ultimately do the same thing?

If each one of us changes even one element in our pattern of consumption, we already make a small difference to the amount of waste that we generate. Now imagine what happens if 53 million South Africans use up a little less of the world’s resources.

Better yet, imagine the impact if every single Catholic in the world consciously took a little better care of the planet that God made us the custodians of. That would be one billion people making better individual decisions about the future of our common home.

If one seventh of the world’s population consumed differently, then world leaders would have no choice but to reassess economic, environmental and political policies.

God chose one man, Noah, to preserve the earth’s resources when the great flood came. This Bible story may be an allegory passed down in biblical history for the God-given task that humanity has in caring for the planet, but it is a wonderful reminder that we can change our world, one person at a time, one less yogurt tub at a time.

As Pope Francis says at the end of his encyclical, we are all called to come together to take charge of this home which has been entrusted to us, knowing that all the good which exists here will be taken up into the heavenly feast.