Franciscan Zoom Lecture

The Promise and Limits of Personal Climate Action: Can “Thinking Globally, Acting Locally” Be Enough?

By: Edward Tverdek, OFM is a Priest at St. Peter’s Church in Chicago’s Loop

Members of the Franciscan family and everyone else who professes a “care for creation” may find themselves profoundly disappointed at the lack of global progress in arresting climate change. Climate scientists warn us that the targeted maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius increase in the planet’s atmospheric temperature – the consensus ideal since the COP21 Agreements in Paris in 2015 – is all but unachievable, and that we’ll almost certainly exceed it and experience even more grave symptoms than we’ve already felt. In this discussion, Br. Ed Tverdek suggests that our shortcomings can be attributed to a failure to take seriously Pope Francis’ message in his encyclical Laudato Si’ and his subsequent apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum. We have, in short, misunderstood our personal culpability in climate change and thus our personal role in the struggle to avert it. Br. Ed suggests that the transformative vision of a culture less wed to consumerism and growth – long expounded by “radical ecologists” and now by Pope Francis – remains our best vehicle for evangelization as Franciscans.