PUBLISHED posthumously, two years after his death in 2022, this important book would be easy to overlook. The distinguished French earth scientist Bruno Latour writes more freely about his strong, albeit critical, Christian commitments than in his early scientific publications, in which they were seldom included. He was a lifelong committed Roman Catholic.
He made some of these commitments explicit in his 2015 Gifford Lectures and, as he neared death, in his final book (he saw and approved the French proofs just before going into hospital, but did not live long enough to see it published), with its passionate call to his own Church to take the environmental crisis much more seriously. His work as an earth scientist convinced him that all forms of life are deeply interconnected but vulnerable to human over-consumption and technology.
More positively, in this final work he also applauded enthusiastically Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. For Latour, this crucial encyclical “offers the opportunity to preach, finally, ad extra and no longer ad intra, by making the old schema of the end of times once again comprehensible to the multitudes”.
At a time when climate-change-deniers (and vaccine-deniers) are becoming ever more vocal and powerful, Latour’s voice and especially that of Pope Francis do need to be heard. Of course, they said little beyond what is said by many Christian ethicists today, but what they said has immeasurably more authority. These opening statements in Laudate Si’, for example, could have been written by many Christian ethicists by 2015:
“The continued acceleration of changes affecting humanity and the planet is coupled today with a more intensified pace of life and work which might be called ‘rapidification’. Although change is part of the working of complex systems, the speed with which human activity has developed contrasts with the naturally slow pace of biological evolution” (18).
“Other indicators of the present situation have to do with the depletion of natural resources. We all know that it is not possible to sustain the present level of consumption in developed countries and wealthier sectors of society, where the habit of wasting and discarding has reached unprecedented levels. The exploitation of the planet has already exceeded acceptable limits and we still have not solved the problem of poverty. Fresh drinking water is an issue of primary importance, since it is indispensable for human life and for supporting terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems” (27-8).
“The earth’s resources are also being plundered because of short-sighted approaches to the economy, commerce and production. The loss of forests and woodlands entails the loss of species which may constitute extremely important resources in the future, not only for food but also for curing disease and other uses” (32).
Although we said something very similar, we were not the Pope. Nor was Latour; and yet his two decades of research as an earth scientist in Paris, and then his Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, did give him more authority than most of us.
Canon Robin Gill, now retired, edited Theology for the past 12 years and was Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology at the University of Kent 1992-2011.
If We Lose the Earth, We Lose Our Souls
Bruno Latour
Polity £12.99
(978-1-5095-6046-2)
Church Times Bookshop £11.69