Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate engenders a guilty conscience

Even if you aren’t a Roman Catholic, you have to give Pope Francis credit. He has been making strides in Catholicism since the beginning of his papal duties, making the news quite often with his progressive actions. Typically, the Pope reaches a wide audience of Catholics and Christians around the world, totaling roughly one billion people.

However, in Pope Francis’ encyclical on the

environment (released June 18), he addressed an even wider audience: everyone on this planet, not simply those aligned with his religious beliefs.

Using his broad platform, the Pope called on everyone to care more for the environment, referring to it as the common good. In his message, he focused on the moral concerns we should have for the environment. We have seen the effectiveness of policies and scientific knowledge on helping the environment but can the moral aspect be effective as well? Can it be more effective?

“Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity, but rather to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening to the world into our own personal suffering and thus to discover what each of us can do about it.”

The Pope’s approach on the environment is intriguing. He acknowledges the reality of climate change and pins its cause on humans. He acknowledges how humanity has impacted our environment, affecting our common home. He is prompting us to think and question and, perhaps, instilling a guilty conscience in us all.

Feeling guilty may well make us want to change our behavior. To be sure, guilt is a tricky motivator at best—too much of it causes us to give up or shut down. However, a measure of awareness in the form of guilt paired with real alternatives can lead us to take action.

We understand this motivator in our day-to-day interactions with others. For example, when we wrong another person, we tend to feel guilty and want to make it right. Surely, the earth is a living organism, and an enormous one at that. However, we tend to feel less connected to it in comparison to people. We interact with it every day yet we place more concern on human relationships than environmental ones. Now, however, this guilty conscience is being applied to the environment. We are being asked to think of the environment in a moral way, in the same way we think about each other.

“This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”

In his encyclical, he is applying a concept of eco-guilt, or guilt from not meeting standards for behavior that aids the environment. In turn, this instilled guilty conscience calls us to act.

According to research, by framing environmental deterioration as human-caused, it makes us want to act in more environmentally friendly ways. These issues become more tangible for us. It puts these problems into perspective. The Pope has placed humans at the center of this issue: Our behavior has harmed our Earth; we are the problem and, yet, we are the solution.

Pope Francis’ morally framed message is one from which we can learn. Religious opinions aside, his encyclical has spoken on a global issue to his global audience. He has brought attention to this vital issue. This attention can only help progress our environment. Now it’s up to us, the common person, to protect our common home.

Nikole Baker is a PennFuture intern based in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, a resilient city

Point State Park at Sunset

From steel, to collapse, to a diverse knowledge and health-based economy, Pittsburgh has come to embody the definition of a resilient city. Our growing economy alone doesn't make this the vibrant city that it is, however. Pittsburgh’s rivers, trees and the air we breathe impact our health and well being. As climate change exacerbates bad air on hot days and brings more intense storms and extreme cold, protecting our environment will mean protecting our neighborhoods. Smart policies and planning now can turn environmental threats into impetus for bolstering healthy and cohesive communities.

That is what the Rockefeller Foundation saw in our city when they selected Pittsburgh to be one of only 100 Resilient Cities, worldwide. 

100 Resilient Cities provides resources and guidance for an active network of urban hubs throughout the world. The first group of 32 cities began work in December 2013 and the second group was announced in December 2014. Of the 331 applications for the second round, Pittsburgh was one of 35 to be selected and PennFuture is thrilled to be part of the local collaboration to make our city stronger.

On June 6, we met with other stakeholders from the private, public, and nonprofit sectors for an agenda-setting workshop. The conversations were eclectic and electric, and centered around key urban concerns (both chronic and acute), many of which overlap with our environmental efforts, including:

• Infrastructure failure and flooding concerns (in addition to safety concerns, flooding equals raw sewage in our streams and rivers -- where we boat, swim and get our drinking water).
• Hazardous materials accidents (oil bomb trains, anyone?) 
• Heat waves (unhealthy ozone pollution is expected to get worse as summers get hotter)
• Significant environmental degradation (clean air, clean water and healthy land: the building blocks of life) 

With our own holistic mission to create a just future where nature, communities and the economy thrive, we at PennFuture are very excited about Pittsburgh’s participation in the 100 Resilient Cities effort. It makes sense and the time is ripe.

Nicole Catino is PennFuture's 2015 Student Conservation Association Green Cities Sustainability Fellow and is based in Pittsburgh.

VICTORY: In addition to saving a stream, UMCO set important legal precedent

This post is one in a month-long series speaking to 15 of PennFuture's significant victories. It was 15 years ago this September that we began our work to protect the environment and champion a clean energy economy.

Once upon a time (actually around 2004), there was a mine owner named Bob Murray who operated a longwall mine in Washington County, Pennsylvania known as the High Quality Mine. It was a shallow mine as far as longwall mining was concerned - as shallow as 210 feet below the ground surface - and, like many underground mines in Washington County, it crossed under a number of springs, seeps and streams.

Bob Murray - also part owner of

the Crandall Canyon Mine, where

six miners died in August 2007.

By the time PennFuture was asked by local citizens to get involved in the matter, we found that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) had been permitting the mine in a very unusual way. Instead of issuing a single permit that comprehensively looked at the impacts of the entire mine, DEP was segmenting the project into individual authorizations that only looked at the environmental impacts from the next longwall panel. The streams that flowed over the mine were fed by shallow, perched groundwater zones. This was significant because this shallow source water could be permanently redirected away from the stream by mine subsidence fractures.

When PennFuture entered the scene, Murray's company, UMCO Energy, Inc., had completely eliminated every spring and seep above the portion of the mine that had been completed, including eradication of the flow in an unnamed tributary to Maple Creek known as the 5E stream, and DEP was proposing to allow UMCO to continue mining under, and no doubt eliminating, the next tributary that would be encountered, the 6E stream. 

For more than two years, PennFuture pursued litigation on behalf of local citizens that were concerned about the permanent impacts of the mine on local streams. Through a series of actions filed with the Environmental Hearing Board and an appeal to Commonwealth Court, PennFuture not only prevented DEP from continuing to permit the mine and the subsequent destruction of the springs, seeps and streams in the Maple Creek watershed, it also established important legal precedent on how DEP permits longwall mines.

In particular, the UMCO proceedings established that DEP had to comprehensively consider the effects of all anticipated mining on area hydrology, and could not make decisions based on an artificially narrow and segmented approach. In its supersedeas decision, Judge Labuskes of the Board chided the agency for its slanted approach, saying that it would not surprise anyone that the hydrologic impacts of a mine would appear insignificant if you focused only on small, isolated portions of the mine rather than looking holistically at the full impact of the entire operation.

The case represented a significant decision for Maple Creek and its tributaries, and had a lasting impact on how DEP permits mines in Pennsylvania.

PennFuture will celebrate 15 years of environmental victories on September 25. Please consider joining us!