Economic Magical Thinking and the Divine Ecology of Love

I n the encyclical Laudato si’, 1 Pope Francis identifies a number of causes for the ecological crisis and for the failure of the nations to reduce their impacts on the beauty, fertility, and climate stability of “our Sister Mother Earth” (§1). First, Francis notes those causes previously identified by Pope Benedict XVI. For Benedict, atheism is key to the modern world’s maltreatment of the earth: it underwrites the related failures to recognize that humanity did not create herself and that there is a transcendent order of value in the divine gift of creation that humans ought to respect and honor (§5, 6). Francis also concurs with Benedict when he notes the increased powers modern humans have acquired through science and technology “to transform reality” and the moral and spiritual failure to use these without harm to the planet (§5). Francis then considers a number of causes specific to this encyclical. These include the creation, through industrial technologies and consumerism, of “a throwaway culture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish” (§22). Industrialism has turned the God-given vocation of humans as makers against the intrinsic laws of nature, including that nature does not waste and that all creatures in nature are connected (§42). Francis observes critically the tendency of the modern economy to turn nature’s goods into commodities, as in the privatization of water, which turns water “into a commodity subject to the laws of the market.” He criticizes the economic plunder of forests, which reduces biodiversity and destroys the dwelling places of their indigenous human inhabitants (§32). And he observes that “the land of the Southern poor” is exploited by developed countries in the North through “a system of commercial relations and ownership which is structurally perverse” (§52). For Francis, the root cause