The dangers of rigid ideologies

I came across “Has Progressivism Ruined Environmental Science?” in the online publication American Thinker, which—from the advertising that populates it and the comments posted—seems to veer “right.” But as I am not a regular reader, I do not know this to be the case.

Still, the commentary by Anthony J. Sadar is a critique of the industry known as environmental protection. His concern is that the field has become too “progressive” and, as such, is not challenged from within by alternate views. This, he says, is dangerous for seeking truth.

He’s correct. But he’s not entirely on the money.

First, as an environmental regulator myself, I do appreciate one point he is making:

In my thirty years of work in the science arena, as a government scientist, an industry consultant, and an academician, I have witnessed an increasingly adverse influence of progressivism on the practice of science. This influence has been especially visible in my specialty, environmental science (with a focus on air-pollution meteorology).

Amen, brother. From my own experiences, I know that the ecological vocation tends to attract left-leaning ideologues and that they champion other causes common to the left. So be it. Perhaps this is akin to how, say, the armed forces tend to attract right-leaning ideologues.

In my own eco-industry world, some of my dear friends seem frustrated that because of my ecological credentials I am not also pro-abortion, or pro-same-sex marriage, or that I do not favor big government (even if I work for one). So, yes, I believe that Mr. Sadar is correct in his point about the general worldview of ecology.

But then he expresses concerns with the matter of climate change and I wish he hadn’t tethered his argument so much to the past sins of a few researchers. After all, as I’ve written about earlier, sin is one thing we all have in common, and climate researchers are sinners, too.

Then again, I do not understand the political right’s obsession with disproving the general acceptance of climate research—that is, how well-defined trends in various data sets are aligned with climate-change modeling and hypotheses. It's as if some on the right reject climate change science only because so many on the left laud it.

But also, in agreement with Sadar, I do not understand why so many on the political left can be so uncritically accepting of what they’re told about how anthropomorphic climate change is occurring, and what effects it will have. In fact, sometimes it seems that they wish harm on the human race. And allow me to confess this: occasionally I sit in meetings to discuss climate change and sea level rise and wonder, what if we’re wrong—even just a little? I suppose I should speak up, but then I can’t help but think, what would people think? Would they dismiss me? Would they discredit me? Would I be invited back? It's not that I reject that we are witnessing anthropomorphic climate change—far from it. But sometimes it would be nice to talk about it openly. And I don't think that we are allowed to—which is exactly Sadar’s point.

But either way, right or left, I am impatient when any scientist (or anyone of any vocation) must fit their worlds into neat packages of human political ideology. That limits one’s horizons, which makes no sense.

Then again, I am Catholic, and I do not describe myself as left or right, liberal or conservative, or what have you. I suppose if anything, I am Augustinian. That is, I'm a-political because no political party or ideology has the fullness of truth to offer.

What sailing teaches us about our environment, and our faith

August 2011

"What I love about sailing is it makes you pay attention to everything in the environment around you.” So noted my friend David Kane as he worked the sails of the Able, his sturdy Stone Horse sloop.

David is an instructor at Newport’s Navy base and he’s responsible for my maiden voyage on Narragansett Bay—indeed, my first sail ever. Having finally accepted his long-standing offer to see the world from the water, I and another friend joined David on a post-card-perfect Ocean State summer afternoon. You couldn’t ask for a better first sail, even if I did ram the ship’s newly painted hull with the dingy while boarding, but that’s another story.

By the time we came ashore six hours later, the sun had set over Jamestown, the moon had risen over Fort Adams and, with much guidance, I—the clumsy land lover—had steered the Able and my friends around Gould Island and tacked a few times back and forth across the East Passage. It was the first time I saw the underside of the Newport Bridge—and we did it twice. I learned a little of how those red and green lights try to protect you as they pulse on the water; I learned how to make a sailboat go where I wanted, and how to keep it safely from where it shouldn’t go.

David was right. Sailing makes you respect your environment. It’s an experience I recommend for all.

When sailing, you sense that creation is hardwired for humanity to be at home in the space where wind meets water—those primal elements spoken of in the first words of Holy Scripture. Intuitively, the human mind—even an inexperienced one like mine—comprehends the relationship between rudder, sail, wind and current. The Able’s creator, the well respected Massachusetts yacht designer Sam Crocker, clearly knew something of the mind of God.

When sailing, you learn the nature of a community—whether it’s the shared responsibilities of three people on a boat or the good-natured communication with those on crafts passing by. Everyone is everyone else’s friend on the water because everyone’s life depends on it.

Of course, I was reminded of the quality of our waters, something near to my heart, as it is the mission of my office at the Department of Environmental Management. Clean water becomes all the more appreciated when coasting along its depths—when its spray swirls around you and you breathe it in.

And certainly, I couldn’t help but think of those first disciples who caught fish before they were fishers of men. Their experiences on the water helped formed their nature. God’s grace elevated their sea-faring nature, allowing them a role in founding the universal church, which is our great ship of salvation, steered always by the Holy Spirit.

As you can tell, in small but analogous ways that six-hour sail elevated me. For forty-seven years I’ve explored the shores of Jamestown and Newport, crossed Narragansett Bay on bridges and admired it all from the safe distance of land. When sailing, however, those familiar landmarks and seemingly disconnected places—Beavertail, downtown Newport, the nighttime brilliance of Quonset Point and the far distant glow of Providence—were now seen as they really are: a landscape of distinct places that exist in intimate union. They, like we, are in relation to each other.

Sailing, I’ve concluded, is very Catholic. It makes you well aware of your environment; it joins worlds and peoples and it teaches you that there are rules to follow that are not yours to change—even if it seems that you can or should. Sailing shows us that our individual lives and journeys are in relation with each other and with God. Indeed, like the open ocean I glimpsed well beyond the East Passage, there is much that is outside of us—much that calls to us. Only in choosing to trust and journey outward are we ever able to know what it means to be human.

What's missing in Pew Research vs. the poultry industry

The Pew Environment Group and the poultry industry are in a bit of a tiff.

The debate began with Pew’s recent study of pollution from large-scale poultry producers. The summary on the Pew website notes that

“in just over 50 years, the broiler industry has been transformed from more than one million small farms spread across the country to a limited number of massive factory-style operations concentrated in 15 states,” said Karen Steuer, who directs Pew’s efforts to reform industrial animal agriculture. “This growth has harmed the environment, particularly water, because management programs for chicken waste have not kept pace with output.”

The summary then gives these statistics:

• In less than 60 years, the number of broiler chickens raised yearly has skyrocketed 1,400 percent, from 580 million in the 1950s to nearly nine billion today
• Over the same period, the number of producers has plummeted by 98 percent, from 1.6 million to just over 27,000 and concentrated in just 15 states.
• The size of individual operations has grown dramatically. Today, the typical broiler chicken comes from a facility that raises more than 600,000 birds a year.

The Pew report—which in particular studied nutrient loading into Chesapeake Bay—has a few feathers flying at the National Chicken Council and the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association, which released a scathing statement in response. Here’s a sample:

The report's critique is terribly misplaced, and once again demonstrates Pew's bias against modern farming practices. The poultry community has already taken meaningful steps to further reduce nutrient impacts on the environment. The sources of nutrients into the Chesapeake Bay and other watersheds are ubiquitous. EPA acknowledges the positive steps agriculture has implemented in reducing its environmental footprint in the Bay region, even as the nutrient contribution from non-agricultural sources continues to grow.

You can read the report and the response for yourselves, as well as some of the media coverage (here, here, or here). What gets lost in all this back and forth is, usually, the truth.

As a regulator myself—and a Catholic one—I find it nearly impossible to hold any group, industry or individual in either the “all good” or “all bad” category. Our fallen human nature keeps most of us from ever being completely selfless, although we do often try—and by “we,” I mean even the people at big corporations.

I’ve seen local communities, local public employees and volunteers excel and sacrifice for the common good. And I’ve seen others only care about themselves. I’ve seen corporations (large and small) care more about the bottom line and their corporate image than anything else, and I’ve seen others go well out of their way at significant cost to simply and quietly be good neighbors and good stewards of the environment.

My point is that we should not always assume that big business is inherently evil—even when they’re not always good—nor should we given them license to do what they will just because they employ many, many workers. And we should not forget that there is such a thing as the environmental protection industry, and it, too, can be big business.

In other words, there is a pastoral element to conflicts like the one between Pew and the poultry industry. Both groups have something to offer mankind. But if one or the other can only see the world in black and white—with the bad guys always being the other guys—then the only people to benefit will be the news outlets.

I think of a statement in Leo XIII’s groundbreaking 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum. Here he’s speaking of labor and management, but the sentiment applies just as well to professional environmentalists and the industries they monitor:

The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice.

May God bring cooperation and solutions to the many good (but not perfect) people at Pew and the poultry industry. May God grant that they, we and all creation benefit from their mutual respect and fraternal efforts.

The hypocrisy continues . . .

Once again, media reports on the dangers to unborn children—and the moms that carry them—dodge an important issue: Why are we so concerned about “fetal development” when so many in our culture support abortion?

Today's news from the University of California, published in the online version of Environmental Science & Technology, examines banned chemicals used in flame retardants that are turning up in pregnant women. Here’s a clip from a story in the San Francisco Chronicle:

The data, while preliminary, also found a relationship between thyroid hormone disruption in women in their second trimester of pregnancy and exposure to once-common flame retardant polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. Most PBDEs are no longer in use today but persist in the environment.

"Maternal thyroid hormone during pregnancy plays a critical role in fetal brain development, especially during early pregnancy," said Ami Zota, postdoctoral fellow at UCSF's Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and lead author of the study. "Even moderate disruption of thyroid hormone can have a long-lasting developmental impact on her child, including (attention deficit disorders) and reduced IQ."

The good news is that the researcher uses the term "child," and the paper printed it.

But as covered in these pages repeatedly (here and here and here), a good many people that rightly find such news terrifying hypocritically support abortion. But such contradictory thinking can’t last long. Over time, such studies will remind people of what exactly grows inside the nurturing womb of a pregnant woman.

Perhaps, we pray, that such a recognition will be embraced soon—and that all life will be allowed a chance to live and grow, free from toxins and the lethal tools of abortion providers.

Biodiversity needs truth and love

There’s a new and chilling study about the failure of management techniques to protect the planet's needed biodiversity. Some of the reporting on the study is also chilling.

(If interested, the article from the Marine Ecology Progress Series is here. After the download, scroll to page 251.)

The findings suggest that in the marine world, the use of “protected areas” do not adequately protect the variety and health of species—certainly not to the extent necessary. I’ve covered the decline in biodiversity elsewhere and this new news shows that the problem is not going away.

But there’s a double threat to the story. Besides understanding and mitigating the loss of global biodiversity, we must also understand its root causes. Scientists and commentators often claim two related ones: overconsumption and overpopulation. The adjective they often use is anthropogenic, which means you and me. People are the problem, some say, because we consume too much and there’s just too many of us.

In fishnewseu.com, Dr. Peter F. Sale, one of the study's authors, says this:

"Our study shows that the international community is faced with a choice between two paths . . . One option is to continue a narrow focus on creating more protected areas with little evidence that they curtail biodiversity loss. That path will fail. The other path requires that we get serious about addressing the growth in size and consumption rate of our global population."

Now, I don’t know what Dr. Sale means by getting serious, but if he means—like so many do—that we are to encourage artificial birth control and abortion, then I take issue. One does not protect life by waging war against it.

This is exactly where ecology benefits critically from a Catholic perspective, most especially the Holy Father’s third letter to the Church and the world, Caritas in Veritate. In it, he connects the many hurdles facing the human race, and he does so by offering as a solution the Christian anthropology of relation and love and the recognition of human dignity.

Dr. David Cloutier, an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, writes about all this in the winter 2010 edition of Communio, a theological journal founded with others by Joseph Ratzinger. Cloutier’s excellent essay “Working with the Grammar of Creation” uses Wendell Berry's writings to get at the Holy Father's concerns. In Berry, we hear an American voice exploring issues of industry, sexuality, marriage and, especially, community, all in context of what it means to be human. When we're not what-it-means-to-be-human—when we're not in a healthy relation with our world, our community, our environment, our family, our neighbor—we create problems, the kind we read about in the papers. There's so much in Cloutier's article, you really should read it all yourself. For the present, I'll just note that Cloutier brilliantly places Berry in dialogue with the pontiff’s important words. And the pontiff does have much to tell us. For instance, from Caritas in Veritate, we read that

in order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the overall moral tenor of society. If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology. It is contradictory to insist that future generations respect the natural environment when our educational systems and laws do not help them to respect themselves. The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.

Benedict XVI's next words are those used in the masthead of this blog.

We must take from these warnings that in discussing issues like planetary biodiversity losses—or the world economy, or the health care system, or any discussion about people’s relation to the world—there are moral and ethical issues at play that can not be ignored because they drive everything.

World strife and ecological crises will not be solved with a view that other humans are the cause. One can not love thy neighbor and then wish to control them. Humans can only begin to address worldwide ills when we live in solidarity—in communion. We must see ourselves as creatures of relation, because only then will we realize ourselves that we really do affect everyone else. Only by living in accord with our true nature—that of being in relation to each other, to creation, and especially the Creator—can we as a race live within our planetary means and still live very, very well.

And so to the authors of this most important study, I would add what the pontiff wrote elsewhere, “it is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love.”

May God bless these researchers in their work, and may they always be guided to the fullness of truth.

House gardens: reminders of who created beauty in the first place

If we’re to think globally and act locally, then I suppose we must be especially ecologically minded at home.

But this must mean more than using organic lawn products or reducing household toxins. We also do well in making our homes and yards reminders for all of the beauty of creation.

I was thinking of this driving home from lunch with long-time, long-unseen friends. To avoid the summer beach traffic, I took the back roads from Rhode Island’s coastal south. This brought me through rural areas that had wonderful house gardens—whether modest or elaborate, or just a few planters on the front steps. These were the gardens of mostly small, simple homes—and yet with their gardens, they looked to be nestled in Eden.

As a gardener myself, I appreciate when people say how much they enjoy passing by my yard. I’m glad that my efforts delight others. Home gardens transform communities and lift souls. They remind us of the great glory of God’s work in the world.

This takes me to an observation made after lunch by one of my friends. She is a woman who does not adhere to an organized family of faith—but she was interested in what I had to tell her about Benedict XVI’s teachings about love, relationship and much more. Turns out, what she had to say was a wonderful, theologically powerful statement in itself, one which the likes of Benedict XVI and Karl Barth would have approved. As we were talking about our gardens, I noted that much of my yard’s beauty comes from various types of hosta—those easy-to-maintain, fast-growing, lush-leaved shade-loving plants. Within a few days in early spring, I said, my borders are transformed from barren stretches to leafy beauty, thanks primarily to hosta being hosta and sprouting their leaves with majesty. This prompted my friend to say something like “I know, we take all the credit for our gardens when it’s really God doing all the work.”

How true she was! It’s always good to be reminded of the primacy of God’s grace.

So, a quick prayer: Thank you, God. People may compliment me on my yard, but its beauty is part of your creation, for which you rightly deserve our praise.

Nature and relationship

“Society is absolutely dependant for its vitality and existence on its ability to bring about adequate friendships among its people,” writes the Jesuit James V. Schall in his essay “The Totality of Society.” He’s writing about the commonalities between Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas in understanding how relationships—“friendships,” as a catchall term for all loving bonds—underpins what it means to be human.

Schall takes some of the best of pagan antiquity and Western medieval thought and finds them completing each other’s sentences. We learn that the human soul is made to reach outward, to be in relationship with someone else—ultimately and perfectly, we are only fully human when in relationship with everyone else.

Schall notes elsewhere that this grand, universal vision of relationship troubled Aristotle. But for St. Thomas, with his Triune God of relation and love—in whose image all humanity was created—such a vision made absolute sense. St. Thomas wrote that “all precepts of law, especially those ordered to the neighbor, seem to be ordained to this end, that men love one another.”

But people and cultures can choose not to love one another. Or they can order society to encourage the love of only certain types of humans, or, worse, the love of only one person. Societies can also order relationships towards pleasure alone, at the expense of sacrifice. All this reverses the natural course of humanity, which must be open to the universal.

I say the “natural course of humanity” because we are meant to be in relationship—indeed, all creation is. You'll find elements of this truth throughout nature, such as in this news story from sciencemag.org about the fraternal socialization of Asian elephants. Here’s a clip of the story:

A new study shows that many female Asian elephants are more like social butterflies, with numerous pals. And they're able to maintain strong friendships even with those they have not seen in a year or more. 

The study adds Asian elephants to a short list of other species, including dolphins, that are able to maintain complex social relationships despite not having daily contact, an ability regarded as being cognitively demanding.

"People thought they knew what Asian elephants were doing [socially] based on what they saw them doing in captivity," says Shermin de Silva, a behavioral ecologist with the Elephant, Forest and Environment Conservation Trust in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the lead author of the new study.

One wonders what observers of the human race would discover about our relationships. Certainly, they would see much that is beautiful—affection, forgiveness, joy, camaraderie and sacrifice. But they may also observe class warfare (and warfare in general), loneliness, abuse, aggression, murder and many other crimes against relationship.

Indeed, over time they might even note that in some cultures (like in America and much of the Western world) we humans are re-embracing a kind of primitive mentality that, while needed during our species’ evolution, encourages isolation. We hear such isolation, for instance, in the common defense for redefining marriage, which is something to the effect that “no one else’s marriage affects mine.”

Sadly, we humans often fail to embrace our true, God-given nature—that is, to be creatures in relationship with everyone, not for sentimental and passing notions of earthly bliss, but because that's what it means to be human. Let us pray to the Triune God, then, that we ever more grow in friendship with Father, Son and Holy Ghost, as well as with each other, and with the entirety of creation that God has made and called very good.

Bring back Friday’s fast

Recent news about the global impacts of blighted local ecosystems spotlight how human consumption—especially in the developed world—can have significant impacts elsewhere, and everywhere.

This goes particularly for food consumption.

For instance, widespread cattle ranching in and around the Amazon Rainforest is causing dire effects to one of the planet's most critical ecosystems. NASA has a terrifying array of information on the issue here, as does the National Science Foundation.

And this recent story from the Kansas City InfoZine reports on work by Marcelus Caldas, an assistant professor of geography at Kansas State, who worked in conjunction with researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Michigan State University. The group published “Statistical confirmation of indirect land use change in the Brazilian Amazon" in the journal Environmental Research Letters. In part below, we read just a little of the complexities and the seriousness of the issue—such as the relation of changing food and biodiesel markets and how the global demand for soybeans and for beef play off one another, and the effects of it all.

"Between 2003-2008 soy production expanded in Brazil by 39,000 square kilometers," Caldas said. "Of this 39,000 square kilometers, our study shows that reducing soybean production by 10 percent in these pasture areas could decrease deforestation in heavily forested counties of the Brazilian Amazon by almost 26,000 square kilometers -- or 40 percent."

Caldas said he hopes this link between crops and deforestation will motivate Brazil's environmental policymakers to develop more dynamic agricultural regulations to slow deforestation.

Although the numbers and data back this connection, the notion that deforestation will cease completely is unlikely because of other complexities like money and livestock. Demand for Brazil's crops is high and there's a desire to produce more for buyers. 

"In the international market, China is buying a lot of soybeans from Brazil," Caldas said.

The Brazilian government says soybean and sugarcane are grown largely in degraded pasture, but data from the team's work with geographic information systems, or GIS, shows that many of these crops have crept into the Brazilian savanna, a large area bordering the Amazon that's used for cattle. Consequently, this has created deforestation in the savanna, driving cattle inside the Amazon.

"Our data shows that the Amazon now has 79 million heads of cattle," Caldas said. "Fifteen years ago, it had less than 10 million. That means that there's a problem with cattle moving inside the forest."

Of course, the messy business of cattle ranching and beef processing creates problems here in America, too. This news from the Department of Justice tells how last month Swift Beef Company, a subsidiary of JBS S.A, the world’s largest beef producer, agreed to pay $1.3 million to the United States and state of Nebraska to settle alleged violations of the federal Clean Water Act and Nebraska state law at its Grand Island, Neb., beef processing plant.

All this has people urging us to cut back on our cheeseburgers. The Meat Eater's Guide, for instance, is a wonderful source of information and suggestions about being a carnivore in the modern world. Naturally, this is the type of thing that gets a lot of press coverage. (See here, and here, and here, and there’s much more, too.)

But when Catholic ecologists do the math, we have to come to one simple conclusion: Bring back the Friday fast.

Remember, it wasn’t long ago that Catholics abstained from meat on Fridays all year long, not just during Lent. If we were to return to that practice, the world's 1.2 billion Catholics could, theoretically, cut their beef intake by some 14%. Not too shabby!

But we shouldn’t simply transfer our Friday appetites to other areas. That would just transfer the problem of over consumption. The fish industry is one that can suffer, too.

(Of course, some of our non-Catholic ecologist friends are going to say that the world’s population is the biggest problem, and that the Church should change its ways on artificial birth control and abortion. But I for one would like to think there are better ways to get at the pollution-from-over-consumption-of-food issue than rejecting the dignity of the human person, or by outright murder.)

And so for those Catholics who medically can do so, year-round Friday food (especially beef) consumption could be reduced—for spiritual, penitential and ecological reasons.

I’ve covered the ecological reasons above. As for the spiritual, fasting has been part of Christian (and many other faiths) history since the beginning. Remember Christ in the dessert? His immediate followers, and their followers, and so on (and on), have routinely fasted as spiritual exercise—that’s how we got our year-long Friday fast in the first place. So how come so many of us don’t fast any longer?

And as for the penitential aspect of fasting, a good many in the Church have much to make reparation for—and so we as members of the Body of Christ must all do our part, too. A Friday fast would be a good start. Indeed, the bishops in Ireland are saying exactly this.

So, how ‘bout it? I’ll be starting a Friday fast this week. Who’s joining me?

Reflecting on Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha

July 14 is the Memorial for Blessed [now Saint] Kateri Tekakwitha (1656-1680), the Native American daughter of a Christian Algonquin woman (who herself had been captured by the Iroquois) and a non-Christian Mohawk warrior-chief. Blessed Kateri is a patron of ecology and ecologists, of the environment, environmentalism, environmentalists, exiles, orphans, the exiled, those ridiculed for their faith and for World Youth Day.

Our friends at the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center (formerly the Catholic Conservation Center) provide a comprehensive biography of this amazing young woman—the first Native American on the path to sainthood. In this biography we hear from Bishop Stanislaus Brzana of Ogdensburg, N.Y.:

Kateri was a child of nature. Her sainthood will raise the minds and hearts of those who love nature and work in ecology.

As you read more about this woman, you’ll see the intimacy with which Kateri found God in the natural world. She was this “child of nature” in her birthplace—what is now upstate New York—and in her later home of refuge, near what is now Montreal. For this intimacy, the Church declared her the patroness of ecological and environmental causes.

Of course, as a Native American, Kateri would have lived a lifestyle considered primitive to the European settlers that baptized her. But is this not what (then and now) intrigues so many? For instance, her propensity of making crosses from sticks—and then hanging them from trees as “stations” at which one should be reminded to pray—is a charming example of the Christian’s task to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ throughout all creation. As her biography tells us, “she often went to the woods alone to speak to God and listen to Him in her heart and in the voice of nature.”

Does this not remind us of the following words of Blessed Mother Teresa?

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature—trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence . . . We need silence to be able to touch souls.

Because Kateri so easily found God in creation, she is so easily associated with ecological protection and environmentalism—modern concepts that would have been incomprehensible to the people of her day, living long before worldwide ecological damage wrought by modern technologies and lifestyles. Which is why today, where far too many Catholics shun an overt appreciation of nature—partially in response to far too many other Catholics elevating nature seemingly to divine status—Kateri and the Magisterium’s response to her life should remind us all of the place of nature in our faith.

To this point, it is stunning that her feast day precedes by one day that of St. Bonaventure (1221-1274)—indeed, in Blessed John XXIII’s Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, July 14 is his feast day. What brilliant coincidence!

Bonaventure, too, knew and taught that creation held signs that could lead one to the Triune God.  Read the passage below from his Journey of the Mind to God.

He Who is the image and likeness of the invisible God [Col.,1, 15] and "the brightness of His glory and the figure of His substance" [Hebr., 1, 3], He Who is everywhere through His primal generation, as an object generates its likeness in the whole medium, is united by the grace of union to an individual of rational nature--as a species to a corporeal organ--so that by that union He may lead us back to the Father as to the primordial source and object. If then all knowable things can generate their likeness (species), obviously they proclaim that in them as in a mirror can be seen the eternal generation of the Word, the Image, and the Son, eternally emanating from God the Father.

In this way the species, delighting us as beautiful, pleasant, and wholesome, implies that in that first species is the primal beauty, pleasure, and wholesomeness in which is the highest proportionality and equality to the generator. In this is power, not through imagination, but entering our minds through the truth of apprehension. Here is impression, salubrious and satisfying, and expelling all lack in the apprehending mind. If, then, delight is the conjunction of the harmonious, and the likeness of God alone is the most highly beautiful, pleasant, and wholesome, and if it is united in truth and in inwardness and in plenitude which employs our entire capacity, obviously it can be seen that in God alone is the original and true delight, and that we are led back to seeking it from all other delights.

Does one not hear echoes of Kateri, who “often went to the woods alone to speak to God and listen to Him in her heart and in the voice of nature?”

It is fortuitous for us in the Northern Hemisphere, when summer surges with the life and light of nature, that Blessed Kateri and St. Bonaventure are to be remembered.

For the saint and doctor of the Church, more will be coming later on these pages. But for now, let us familiarize ourselves with Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, and let us pray to her for wisdom and for peace in sharing in the sometimes simple and sometimes awesome beauty of the created world, which in the beginning God made team with life and found it all to be very good.

For more on Blessed Kateri, read the commentary about her at CatholicCulture.org.

What he said

It's always nice to know that you're in line with the Pope. And so I was glad to read the last paragraph of this VIS story, especially in light of yesterday's blog post.

POPE SPEAKS OF MARITIME WORLD AND OF RESPECT FOR NATURE

VATICAN CITY, 10 JUL 2011 (VIS) - After praying the Angelus at midday today from the central courtyard of the Apostolic Palace at Castelgandolfo, the Pope mentioned the fact that today marks the "Day of the Sea", in other words "the day dedicated to the apostolate in the maritime world".

The Holy Father addressed a special greeting to "chaplains and volunteers who work to being pastoral care to seafarers, fishermen and their families. I also give assurances of my prayers for those seafarers who, alas, find themselves as hostages of pirates", he said. "My hope is that they be treated with respect and humanity, and I pray for their families that they may remain strong in the faith and not lose hope of soon being reunited with their loved ones".

Turning then to address French-speaking pilgrims including members of the choir from the basilica of Notre-Dame de Lausanne, Switzerland, Benedict XVI invited them "to draw strength from contemplating the splendour of the Creation. Parents, teach your children to observe nature, to respect and protect it as a magnificent gift that makes us aware of the greatness of the Creator. Speaking in parables, Jesus used the language of nature to explain the mysteries of the Kingdom to His disciples. May the images He used become familiar to us all!"