Damaged oil wells burning in fields of spilled crude oil during the Gulf War.
Karen Foley / Alamy
‘Our geopolitical moment is one of dangerous flux – a geological flux and a political flux. Our moment is, therefore, truly geocritical. It is an Earth emergency.’
The Church, and all in the Church, have a “prophetic duty” to convince political leaders that war is not only a disaster in itself, but also a “disastrous distraction from the much bigger, all-Earth threat of climate change”, Dr Hugo Slim, Director of the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall in Oxford has said.
Giving the annual Trócaire Lent Lecture at St Patrick’s College Maynooth, the specialist in the ethics of war and humanitarian aid warned that at a time when all political leaders and the world’s citizens should be thinking and working on the survival of humanity, nature, and the Earth, “we are instead increasingly focused on defence and preparations for war”.
He appealed to Catholics to promote the Church’s double love for humanity and nature. The lecture, which was titled, “Care for Creation Amidst the Cries of War – Working for Peace in the Earth Community” was attended in person and online by up to 200 people, including a number of Irish bishops.
It heard Dr Slim stress that while every generation lives in a particular geopolitical moment, ours is especially geocentric because the whole earth system – its systems of ice, water, oceans, air, land and life are changing fast.
“Our geopolitical moment is one of dangerous flux – a geological flux and a political flux. Our moment is, therefore, truly geocritical. It is an Earth emergency in which the Church is absolutely right to hear the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor simultaneously all around the world.
“On one hand, we face the rapid rearrangement of all life on Earth because of the changing climate, weather patterns, biodiversity loss, and transformations in natural landscapes.
“On the other hand, we face the rapid rearrangement of political power across the earth in a return to a world of great powers, increasingly conservative authoritarianism, the realignment of alliances, economic nationalism, and the uncoupling of the global economy.”
The academic lamented that when geopolitical attention should be focused on saving mother Earth from “a catastrophic change in the geological, ecological, and biological order, we are simultaneously faced with a disorientating change in the geopolitical order, which means we no longer have sufficient unanimity and political attention to work together”.
Following Christ in this geopolitical moment demands that we call all people of goodwill to a double love – the love of humanity and nature together, the theologian said.
It demands that we recover political affection for our human neighbours and rediscover an emotional bond with nature as our neighbour too.
“The Kingdom of God is to be enjoyed by all life on Earth, not just human life. And our growth in Godliness always follows the divine pattern of nature: a lost sheep is to be treasured; a mustard seed becomes a bush; a grain of wheat becomes a harvest; the Holy Spirit comes to us as living water, and a solid faith is built on rock,” he told the packed hall in Maynooth.
Our geopolitical mission today as Catholics, Dr Slim said, is to call people to this double love: the simultaneous love of humanity and nature. “We must refresh our relationships with our political and ecological neighbours.”
Paying tribute to Trócaire, he said this double love blossoms in the Catholic agency’s projects which combine a care for creation and a care for humanity: human health and sustainable agriculture, education and climate action.
“Our challenge is to bring all nations back into one peaceful human community and to bring nature – its trees, mountains, oceans, animals, ice and insects – into the social and political life of the Church and the world.”
He added that nature is an essential part of social justice because it too is our neighbour made and loved by God.
“Nature’s cry from war must also be heard. Rightly given civilian status in the Geneva Conventions and the laws of war, nature should be protected from deliberate attack. Instead, it is often deliberately laid waste by burning, flooding, polluting, and land mines, or simply occupied, harvested and stolen by its owner’s enemies.”
Environmental damage in war is often “catastrophic for thousands of species”, Dr Slim highlighted and revealed that this probably makes non-human life the single biggest casualty of war as individual plant, animal, fish, and insect deaths far exceed human deaths.
Noting that legal scholars are now developing the crime of ecocide to complement the crime of genocide, he said and this “deserves our support in the spirit of Laudato si’ and our care for creation”.
“In today’s geopolitics, one very important task for every parish and diocese, and for Catholic diplomacy worldwide, is to bring the cry of the Earth into political discussions, so that the voices of nature are heard alongside human voices in an all-life politics that is louder than the cries of war. Innovative nature diplomacy is essential for success in the Earth emergency.
“In our own parliaments and at the UN in Nairobi, Geneva, New York, and Rome we must find creative ways to bring nature to the table. Nature’s needs must be imaginatively represented and understood and properly entangled with human needs in our political forums just as they are in real life.”
He saw parallels between the evolution of war diplomacy and the possible future of nature diplomacy. “The ecological humanitarianism of the 21st century that sees humans and nature as neighbours must similarly evolve new forms of diplomatic representation for other life.”
Dr Slims also revealed that at Blackfriars in Oxford, as part of the work on “Nature as Neighbour”, a project called “Nature as Diplomat” has been launched to explore how to represent nature more effectively in international diplomacy.
“Being diplomats for God’s double love of humanity and nature must be our task in a warm embrace of our political and ecological neighbours,” he suggested.
He said one of the biggest challenges for the world in the 21st century is to move beyond a 20th century idea of being an international community of human states to become an Earth community of all life.
“This is a new diplomacy, a new multilateralism, and a new geopolitics. But it has always been our faith,” he said.