The Climate Crisis – Why is this Still a Thing?

In the 1970s and 1980s, fixing our environmental problems seemed to many like a foregone conclusion. It was a “New Age” of awareness, and we were waking to the planet as a force of life all its own, confident that novel, post-industrial ways of thinking and acting would soon put us in harmony with the nature we had forsaken with industrial development.

That didn’t happen, and today we still struggle with denial, half-measures, tortuous policy proposals, and virtuous personal sacrifices that have no impact on the overall bleak picture. Pope Francis in 2015, in his encyclical Laudato si’, famously urged that the problem must be attacked at multiple levels simultaneously – the systemic, the institutional, and perhaps most importantly, the personal.

Is this the key that is missing from our efforts?

Can we avert the worst-case scenarios of climate change without the “personal transformation” the pope’s vision invites?