No one likes to admit it, but spiritual leadership on the climate crisis among Catholics is currently being exercised from a women’s prison in Waseca County, Minnesota. That’s where the American government is holding Jessica Reznicek, a Catholic Worker activist sentenced in April to eight years’ imprisonment for sabotaging an oil pipeline construction.
Good news: Joe Biden could pardon her tomorrow. The bad news: he almost certainly won’t. In a neat legal contrapuntal to its near-orgiastic rhetoric at COP26 last month, his administration insists that Reznicek is a terrorist. If this is how a “good Catholic” behaves, it’s hard to imagine how bad the bad ones must be. The US wants to end fossil fuel use; but will condemn as terrorism non-violent action to end fossil fuel use. You won’t be alone in considering this an instance of linguistic legerdemain.
Consider “renewable” energy. The sun and wind are renewable: but solar panels and wind turbines require mining very finite (and often very toxic) rare earth metals. “Biofuel” is frequently a euphemism for torching forests, not traditionally considered an environmentally friendly practice; hydroelectric power produces staggering amounts of greenhouse gases. Better and less malformed minds than mine have commented on COP’s anaemic final documents, vitiated to within an inch of their life by power politics. That the final inch wasn’t taken seems a hollow victory.
16 December 2021, The Tablet
We’d marched believing collapse is likely; we live as though it’s impossible
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