Can Market Forces Be Aligned with the Vision of Laudato Si’?

by Stu Dalheim

Perhaps no environmental challenge calls for more urgent action than climate change. If we are to avoid dangerous climate change, science tells us we must dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions during the next decades.

Of course, Pope Francis addresses this topic directly in his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’:

“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day” (Laudato Si’, 25).

I work in the investment industry and know many people who have welcomed Pope Francis’s clear and forceful call for changes in the way we live as a global community and produce and consume goods in order to slow and very quickly reverse the widespread harm to the environment.

We have seen that the goal of maximizing short-term profits far too often has driven business and investment decisions, with little attention to long-term sustainability or impacts to communities, employees, and the environment.

During my time in the field, however, I have seen a change in how business and investors think about their relationships with the people whose lives they touch and the natural environment.

Take climate change: increasingly business and investors recognize that climate change represents a risk to their own firms and to the global economy. However, they also understand it as a huge opportunity. Growth in renewable energy and energy efficiency is stimulating investment, driving innovation and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, while also curbing the threat of global warming and reducing harmful air pollution.

As the risks and opportunities that climate change represents come into sharper focus, market participants have begun to develop products, change processes, and make commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy. An inspiring example is the business coalition RE100, made up of large companies that have “committed to 100% renewable electricity, working to massively increase demand for—and delivery of—renewable energy.”

It is critical that members of the private sector also have become more willing to make their views public. Since November 2016, more than 1,000 businesses (including major global brands) and investors have signed the Business Backs Low-Carbon USA statement calling on the Trump administration and the new Congress to maintain and strengthen policies that drive clean energy development and arrest climate change.

The Natural Capital Coalition, made up of representatives from a diverse set of fields—including conservation, research, science, accounting, finance, corporate responsibility, and civil society—has come together to facilitate a “vision of a world where business conserves and enhances natural capital.”

The group seeks to help business understand the value of natural capital, including plants, animals, air, water, soils, and minerals, in part by underscoring the benefits that natural capital provides: clean air and water, nutritious food, renewable energy, shelter, medicine, and the raw materials for sustainably designing, producing, and distributing products on which the economy and business depend.

However, one can address a central theme of Laudato Si’ by asking whether these corporate and investor environmental initiatives simply make us feel better without driving the true change we need. Are we simply reducing the harm, while not addressing the underlying problem of an economic system that treats people and the environment simply as exploitable commodities?

While these are important questions to ask, here in the United States, where there cannot be confidence that government will act to protect the environment and uphold human rights, private sector progress in addressing these challenges deserves our attention, support, and encouragement.

Respect for the strengths and limitations of public and private institutions, and their respective spheres of responsibility, is an important part of the vision of Laudato Si, too. We can welcome Pope Francis’s message as an invitation to dedicate talent and tools from the social sciences, including business, alongside the natural sciences, to support his urgent appeal on behalf of integral ecology.

Private sector practices can and must complement governmental, civil society, religious, and other approaches to caring for our common home and one another.

Centering our Concerns: Building from the Brilliance in Pope Francis and His Laudato Si’

By Bruce Piasecki, Ph.D.

When I was a child, some 60 years ago, I felt the world heavily unjust. Born poor, and competitive, I misunderstood my roles, and was mostly angry. I had not yet discovered the brilliance in praise, the strength in teams, and how mercy and generosity work in our world.

When I was 16, I met a surrogate father, Mr. Charles Plummer, who asked me to read Marcus Aurelius and his 12-book Meditations. I spent three years studying that text in relationship to the New and Old Testaments, then in relation to the Judaic traditions of our fathers, and then with the books that my mother had kept at home, and knew I needed to know —namely, the St. James version of the Bible.

When Aurelius helped me see how small I was, and that my family was the first circle of protection for me, then my neighborhood, then further protection and value in my competitive realms in sports and work; and then when he taught me to laugh at myself in praising the Logos, things became more controllable. Some of my rage and anger lessened, and I could focus on working to improve the life around me.

Of course, this is where St. Francis began, too, improving the life around him, and this is where his namesake, Pope Francis, builds from. That is part of the miracle in the Pope’s 200-plus passages in Laudato Si’.

In addressing poverty and the wealth of nature, in addressing science and its usefulness, and in questioning our current responses to the threats of pollution and climate change, our Pope Francis is tackling something larger than the former Francis’s wolf of Gubbio. I say this because our Francis is facing the whole world now, not just a few Italian hills, manageable by foot, and shared over time with the help of special folks we have come to call Sister Clare and Friar Bonaventure. I love not St. Francis less, in saying this, but these natural problems more.

Today, in the science of climate change, and in the issue of world markets, and the rampant consumerism, we face an increasingly urgent crossroads. It is the industrial cultural equivalent to walking up the hills of Assisi, but every day. The only messages that can last in this predicament, I predict, are phrased as learning to “do more with less” and learning to “do more with teams.”

This is the most procedurally and practically consistent way to answer the call of our Pope, and of the many scientists behind the Paris Accord.

Here is the good news: The Paris Accord is a major turning point in history, equivalent, in my mind, to the brilliance of our Pope. If there is such a thing as natural supernaturalism (as my Ph.D. mentor, M. H. Abrams, shows as real in social history), then I think the Paris Accord answers both our needs for teams and innovation, and our needs for competitive frugality. Every five years, the Paris Accord will readjust our expectations in relationship to environmental, social, and governance matters. There is a magic in that kind of humility and its collective view of what I call “social response capitalism.” These are concepts not unheard of in Catholic social tradition.

But today, these concepts can outlast and be heard anew in a fashion deeper than politics, media, and keeping up with the Joneses. There is something sacred that happens when a team extends our individual needs, and there is something sacred and something satisfying when we learn: “Doing more with less is success in the 21st century.” This is a mantra, not a prayer, a practical way to frame the objectives of his reflections on poverty and climate change.

Now that I am much older, I see a web of relationships in nature, science, and corporate behavior. This is the reality of living in our century. I have lessened my rage, and increased my faith. You might say I have “arrived,” however slowly, to something St. Francis knew from the start. Answers are available, every day.

I hope these reflections help, and sing some praise and ground a framework as we march forward in a carbon- and capital-constrained world.