I read in the press that Spanish researchers have discovered in the Antarctic a species of "wingless mosquito". Its small size might lead one to think that it has little to do in this vast and seemingly inhospitable territory. And yet, because of climate change, more than hundreds of thousands of "wingless mosquitoes". per square meter, making its eradication very difficult: a dangerous pest that can damage other native animal and plant species... One more piece of news that increases the concern that was heightened on the occasion of the Climate Summit in Madrid last December.
Climate change is a very important phenomenon and deserves our attention. Parallel to this change, another more profound and less attended phenomenon is also taking place in the West: climate change. "cultural climate change". The expression was coined by the English rabbi Jonathan Sacks, for whom religions in the West live in a hostile habitat for their development and for the improvement of our world. Faced with this hostile habitat, the temptations for religions and their followers - I follow the rabbi's thought - are threefold: to use violence to impose the truth (fundamentalism), to isolate themselves in religious greenhouses to a hostile environment (isolationism) or to adapt to moral conditions at the cost of losing one's own identity (assimilationism). Any of these three temptations ends up denaturing religion, conditioned by anger, selfishness and weakness.
Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis have all urged the care of the "human ecology". We need a planetary effort to safeguard (or regenerate) the moral conditions that allow the flourishing of this healthy habitat for the harmonious development of the human being. Natural law (which is not a "Christian invention") guides this effort. But it is a task that cannot be improvised. It requires a careful analysis of our environment in order to detect which elements are causing the "harmful emissions" that generate this inhuman "greenhouse effect" in western societies... It demands thinking, it demands innovation, overcoming the complaints that yearn for "ecosystems of the past"....
At the Madrid Climate Summit, a slogan of hope was coined in the face of the prophesied disaster: "we still have time". In the face of an adverse social climate, Christians - the salt of the earth and light of the world (Mt. 5:13-16) - will always "we are on time" to contribute (small and large gestures!) to a flourishing human ecology. n
