But the dangerously degraded planet, for Francis, is a manifestation of a deeper problem, for “we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships.” Though the Pope would not say so, Trump is an embodiment of the moral pollution that generates atmospheric pollution, a sign that something has gone gravely wrong in the way we humans relate to one another. Trump, the compulsive tweeter, is a product and exploiter of the digital overload that generates, in Francis’s words, “a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and displays than with other people and with nature,” that leaves us blocked from “direct contact with the pain, fears, and the joys of others.” The disorder is widespread; when the President divides the world between winners and losers, many people agree with him. The Paris accord, which upholds the ideal of human solidarity, rejected this paradigm, which, ultimately, is why its maestro rejected Paris. But the zero-sum mode of organizing life—personally and internationally—brings nothing except death, and the planet is telling us so.
Unlike most environmentalists, Francis locates the heart of climate degradation in the economic and social degradation of human beings. As the inverter of hierarchies, he views every problem through the lens of those on the bottom. It is not enough to save Earth. Francis criticizes “economists, financiers, and experts in technology” who, using “green rhetoric,” promote the eco-capitalism and technoscience that might clean the water and the air, or cope with rising sea levels, but would still preserve the cult of unlimited growth, promote open-ended consumption, reinforce an inequitable distribution of goods, and protect a market economy that continues to ravage the poor—an approach that “leads to the planet being squeezed dry beyond every limit.” [...]
What Trump offers to the nation and the world is only fear. Even those who grasp the urgency of the climate crisis may be tempted to see it as an already lost cause, a deadly eradicator of hope. They might, even in spite of themselves, join Trump in his blatant quitting. But, for Francis, resignation before the obliteration of hope is itself deadly. While the Pope, in “Laudato Si’,” argues that we must accept human responsibility for what threatens human survival, he still insists that we “are also capable of rising above ourselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start.” Faced with a threatened environment, we can do that. Faced with a foolish nihilist for President, we can do that.
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