This summer’s hurricanes in Florida, coupled with even more destructive monsoons in Bangladesh; last year’s European heat wave that killed thirty thousand and massive wildfires that scalded Australia: suddenly, people everywhere are beginning to wonder what’s afoot. Might we be in the grip of a warming process that is tipping the Earth’s ecological balance, knocking the whole thing off kilter? Is there some way to stop it?

With each new scientific report, the data seem to grow starker. Average global temperatures rose one degree Fahrenheit last century, and that increase is more than likely to double in the century ahead. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s once majestic snowcap has melted to the point where it will now disappear by 2020.

But while temperatures are rising, the actual amount of sunlight reaching the Earth has fallen 10 percent since the late 1950s. The cause is pollution and the resulting heavier cloud coverage. A group of nineteen eminent California scientists recently warned that the state’s water resources and its agriculture sector are imperiled by such trends. As James Gustave Speth notes ruefully in his recent ecological call-to-arms, Red Sky at Morning (Yale University Press), “in a book containing as much bad news as this, one must hope that some of it turns out to be wrong.”

There is hope. After all, on the eve of the Republican National Convention, the Bush administration finally acknowledged that global warming is a fact. Yet this hope is thin. Environmentally, the last four years have otherwise proved a lost opportunity, with potentially disastrous consequences. True, the Bush administration did strengthen emission standards for diesel vehicles, but at the same time, federal automobile fuel efficiency standards fell across the board. Employing executive orders, the administration turned back other regulations on species protection, workplace safety, and brazenly removed hundreds of millions of acres from wilderness protection, opening them to paving and drilling. It attempted to weaken the Clean Air Act of 1970 through its euphemistically titled Clear Skies Initiative. Written largely by energy executives, this redefinition of Nixon’s historic act sought to delay implementation and allow for the release of millions of tons of additional atmospheric pollutants. At the same time, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was reporting that more than half of U.S. citizens now live in, or adjacent to, areas that violate clean-air standards.

Dirty skies make for dirty water. Nineteen states now advise residents against the consumption of fish from any of their rivers and lakes; forty-eight states warn against eating fish from at least some of their waters. The federal government reports that half the nation’s freshwater fish are contaminated with highly toxic mercury, and that the more fish it tests, the more mercury it finds. The Clean Air Act had legislated a 90-percent reduction of emissions from power plants (which account for 41 percent of total mercury emissions) by 2008. The Bush standards would relax that goal, and prescribe only a 29-percent reduction by 2010.

The administration’s environmental rollbacks have been achieved largely by executive-branch fiat, shielded from congressional oversight. As the Economist (August 28) noted, “By changing the word ‘waste’ to ‘fill’ in a rule governing coal mines, the administration allowed an increase in strip mining in West Virginia. By adding two sentences about scientific evidence in an unrelated budget bill, it gave itself increased authority to rule in regulatory disputes.” One example: The EPA can now approve pesticides without having to wait for results on how they might affect endangered species. For some life forms, “four more years” may prove their last.

To date, the Kerry campaign has done little to address these issues consistently, broadly, or bluntly. True, Senator Kerry has pledged to promote alternative energy resources, to reduce dependency on Middle East oil (as has President Bush), and in so doing, to create half a million jobs in new energy-technology industries. (Kerry is on sound ground here. Wind power is one area in which to invest. Wind turbines provide 18 percent of Denmark’s total energy needs. They produce but 1 percent of ours. But the sky seems limitless here, and similar or better results are clearly achievable.) By emphasizing renewable sources of energy, and coupling them with enhanced efficiencies (pumping up fuel economies and strongly supporting hybrid vehicles; improving energy conservation in buildings and along transmission lines), Kerry could achieve marked improvements and perhaps begin to change the tone of the whole conversation.

In the long run, whoever our leaders turn out to be for the next four years, changing the tone and the substance of the conversation about conservation is imperative. The Earth is a lustrous place, but we now know its gifts are finite, and that its carrying capacity and powers of renewal have measurable limits. As China and much of South Asia prepare to vault into the middle class, the strains on our shared environment will deepen. Whereas the Clean Air Act led to a 37-percent decrease in sulfur dioxides in the United States between 1980 and 2000, during the same period those pollutants increased 25 percent in Asia. It is now predicted that by 2010, one-third of the smog-forming ozone in California will originate in Asia. When it comes to clear skies, clean oceans, and to global warming, we are now a world without borders. We are truly all neighbors, and the garbage of one spills on the others.

In the last half-century, Catholic social teaching has emphasized the sacredness of human life, while paying insufficient attention to the environmental conditions that underlie and sustain it. Similarly, the world’s major political institutions have failed to grasp the enormity of the ecological crisis. Advocates like James Speth argue rightly that to meet the Herculean challenges that confront us, we will first have to reconstruct our way of thinking-as individuals, collectively, institutionally, and even religiously. We will need to create, and sign on to, what he calls a Declaration of Dependence. It will have to spell out our reliance on this planet and on its maintenance. Only then will it be possible to understand our place here and to claim our responsibilities. Such an understanding would include a serious commitment to environmentally sustainable economies and to an ethic of planetary stewardship.

This is a long-term project. It will demand more than four years, a great sense of urgency, and bold leadership.

September 14, 2004