In "integral ecology," science and religion find middle ground on climate and politics

Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is an openly partnered lesbian with a track record of advancing LGBTQ+ protections in health and labor policies. She’s an unflinching defender of abortion and reproductive rights in her state. And she’s a science-driven leader using every executive-office tool at her disposal to advance an all-of-government approach to tackling climate change.

By most accounts, she's the last person you’d expect to see deliver a keynote address at the Vatican on the invitation of the Pope. But, to the chagrin of conservatives in her state this week, Healey — herself, a Catholic — did just that.

And her attendance of Pope Francis’ three-day climate change summit, along with governors of New York and California, should give pause to the science-minded among us. We, who too often mistake the data for the story when charting the slow-rolling havoc of climate change, are now forced to reckon with new evidence of possible hope. Even if only for a moment. And we shouldn’t turn away from that possibility. 

At the summit, Healey advanced an ambitious agenda to build a resilient state economy with skilled labor in climate-tech which, as NBC Boston reports, would demand “30,000 new workers who can install heat pumps, prepare residential homes to charge electric vehicles, build offshore wind farms, and more.” 

Catholic or not, Healey told the Holy See that she doesn't "need to cite the Book of Genesis to say that a flood can send a message."

"We have to be nimbler and more innovative than ever before, to adapt to urgent new realities. We need to be more evidence-based than ever before, to inform all our policies with climate science,” she said. “We have to be more collaborative than ever before, to work across every function of government and every sector of the economy. We need to align all our efforts around our climate goals.”

She drove home her sentiment with a bit of diplomatic charm, offering His Holiness a Red Sox ballcap, and an inscribed copy of “Walden” by Massachusetts native Henry David Thoreau. The gesture returned, Healey was sent back to Boston with a rare gift which she says she'll give to her mother — a rosary blessed by Pope Francis himself. 

https://x.com/MassGovernor/status/1790500632584994926

As shocking as some conservatives may find her papal invite, progressives may be more shocked that her call for urgent collaboration is nearly identical to Francis’ own pleas the past decade. 

May 24 marks the ninth anniversary of his Laudito Sí (Praise Be to You), an encyclical letter on what he calls “integral ecology” — a holistic and collaborative call to action on climate change from every corner of science and faith. The letter is a bold about-face, rounding sharply on the Church’s past timidity toward environmentalism, dealing out rebukes of corporate and political greed, and of techno-capitalism built on the backs of the poorest.

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"Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years,” he writes, just before offering his olive branch to science. 

"I am well aware that in the areas of politics and philosophy there are those who firmly reject the idea of a Creator, or consider it irrelevant, and consequently dismiss as irrational the rich contribution which religions can make towards an integral ecology and the full development of humanity,” he offers. 

“Nonetheless, science and religion, with their distinctive approaches to understanding reality, can enter into an intense dialogue fruitful for both … If we are truly concerned to develop an ecology capable of remedying the damage we have done, no branch of the sciences and no form of wisdom can be left out, and that includes religion and the language particular to it."

It’s consistent with his 2013 encyclical:

"The gaze of science thus benefits from faith: faith encourages the scientist to remain constantly open to reality in all its inexhaustible richness. Faith awakens the critical sense by preventing research from being satisfied with its own formulae and helps it to realize that nature is always greater,” he wrote in 2013. 

In that much, he wasn’t wrong. And the 2015 encyclical offers rejoinder:

“The respect owed by faith to reason calls for close attention to what the biological sciences, through research uninfluenced by economic interests, can teach us about biological structures, their possibilities and their mutations," he writes. "The majority of people living on our planet profess to be believers. This should spur religions to dialogue among themselves for the sake of protecting nature.” 

One summit is hardly enough to persuade most of us to hopefulness, of course. Environmental despair grows proportional in this country to the number of oil lobbyists checks pocketed by elected officials and the defanging of regulatory watchdog agencies — all of which has been outpaced only by the length of extinction lists and the speed of melting of glaciers. 

The 21st-century American Dream of an automated, laborless society — where medicine and food manifest via quantum-mysticism with endless scientific advancement — has begun to peel at the edges. And all of us seem to sleep a bit worse these days with that nightmare world peeking out from beneath the chrome-polished veneer of our laptops. Our artificially intelligent angels are not housed in heavenly clouds but in data centers siphoning the same old fossil fuels. 

Overwhelmed, it can feel like the only thing left to do is surrender, disassociate into a mindless scroll until we sleep. In all this, how can a little conference be enough evidence to rationally justify hope for the logical among us?  

Here’s how: Faced with even the most microscopic parcel of evidence that human good yet may be possible within this world’s immeasurable scope of shifting variables, a scientist’s right to despair becomes more costly a purchase on their ethical duty than can be afforded by logic alone. And one needn’t cite Matthew to know just how quickly the tables can turn.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon's Lab Notes, a weekly newsletter from our Science & Health team.