"Is Ecology Haunted"?

This reflection, by Doug Sikkema, on the new encyclical was, for me, helpful and illuminating.   It draws on C.S. Lewis, Dante, Charles Taylor, Wendell Berry . . .  .  Check it out.  A bit:

So today we live within what Taylor calls the “immanent frame,” a world reduced to naturalist explanations, increasingly closed off to the transcendent. And whether we're aware of it or not (and whether we're religious or not), this frame has shaped much ecological thought in our secular age. This means environmentalists,especially Christian environmentalists, don't get to hop on to the subtraction-narrative bandwagon, lamenting everything we've lost since the fifteenth century—as if dysentery were something to get nostalgic over. We have to admit that disenchanting the world allowed for the possibility of major breakthroughs in applied science (particularly modern medicine) that have improved life. We also have to recognize that the flattening of the world allowed for a really robust look at life on the x-axis.

Yet while we might be grateful for the growing body of scientific knowledge accumulated within the scope of the immanent frame, there are still troubling consequences when we lose sight of the y-axis. As we become increasingly buffered from even the possibility that “something” might transcend our sensible world, we have a much more difficult time really believing that humans are not justanother type of animal and the world is not just a place of inert, material resources for us to use up in any way we can.

Laudato Si': Recovering Ecology's Y-Axis

In Laudato Si', Pope Francis attempts something Wendell Berry in his fiction, Annie Dillard in her essays, and even Christian Wiman in his poetry have all attempted in the past decades: to recover the y-axis within ecological thought.