Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  Yet Italian public schools aren’t full of empty seats and desks, because immigrant children from overflowing Africa and Asia, as well as eastern Europe, are filling the breach. Italy has its own counterpart to the British National Party, the anti-immigrant—and especially anti-Muslim—Lega Nord. Unlike the fringe BNP, Lega Nord is among the most powerful parties in northern Italy, for which it has advocated autonomy—and at times outright secession—from the rest of the country.

  Anti-immigration politics is problematic for the Church, which ministers to refugees in Italy. The refugees’ very existence, however, underscores an uncomfortable reality: Other continents have more people than can be fed. Such hungry hordes produce many more children than Europeans, whose infant mortality rates are nearly zero, whose family livelihoods don’t depend on child labor, and who have ready access to contraceptives, even in the long shadow of St. Peter’s.

  In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI addressed this convergence of poverty and population in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth). In it he denounced the global market economy for squeezing salaries, social security, and workers’ rights to maximize profits, locking poor countries into competing in a race to the bottom of wages and benefits for factory jobs that bring more misery than actual development. He condemned consumer temptations that undermine people’s values and their planet.

  During his papacy, the first of the new millennium, Benedict XVI became known as the “green Pope” for installing thousands of photovoltaic cells atop the Vatican auditorium, and for his open disgust at the failure of the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen. In Caritas in Veritate, he declared: “The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone.”

  But he rejected any conflict between that moral environmental imperative and maintaining a growing population:

  Human beings legitimately exercise a responsible stewardship over nature, to protect it, to enjoy its fruits and to cultivate it in new ways with advanced technologies, so that it can accommodate and feed the world’s population. On this earth there is room for everyone: here the entire human family must find the resources to live with dignity, through the help of nature itself—God’s gift to his children—and through hard work and creativity. At the same time we must recognize our grave duty to hand the earth on to future generations in such a condition that they too can worthily inhabit it and continue to cultivate it.

  Nature will help humans if humans help nature: It sounds simple, except the number of humans keeps increasing, even as nature’s bounty does the opposite. How to feed “everyone” without sacrificing our remaining carbon-absorbing forests, says Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo, is what the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has been charged to solve. And he believes they have.

  He turns to the shelves behind him, lined with leather-bound volumes. Their gold-embossed titles glint beneath crystal wall sconces retrofitted with multiple compact fluorescent bulbs. Not finding what he wants, he calls toward the doorway in a sonorous baritone amplified by the vaulted ceiling. A priest appears with the proceedings from a recent Academy study week, titled Transgenic Plants for Food Security.

  “Food isn’t running out,” he says, opening to the report’s table of contents. “New crop species are coming in. Developing countries are living off them—Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, most of all. They’re producing nothing else, and selling them in Asia. People who were poor are getting rich—they’re making more by growing transgenic soy than by raising cattle.”

  Some articles in the proceedings describe the case of golden rice, a genetic modification that inserts genes from daffodils, corn, and soil bacteria into rice to make it produce beta-carotene, which in turn produces vitamin A. The idea was to combat the world’s millions of cases of blindness and death from vitamin A deficiency. Golden rice was first developed in Switzerland, with subsequent improvements by affiliates of IRRI, the International Rice Research Institute, in the Philippines, the tropical counterpart to CIMMYT, Mexico’s wheat and maize center. Its grains are golden-orange like a sweet potato, for the same reason: beta-carotene.

  Although its flavor is indistinguishable from white rice, and it was developed more than a decade ago, golden rice has yet to become available due to wide opposition to genetically modified crops. One fear is that transgenic plants might crossbreed and permanently alter strains in nature, meaning a loss of crop biodiversity.1 The Vatican study was devoted to disabusing that notion, on the grounds that today’s crops have been selected by humans over millennia to improve them, so none remotely resembles its ancestors.

  Msgr. Sánchez Sorondo turns to an entry by renowned ecologist and Academy member Peter Raven, longtime director of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

  “Dr. Raven says transgenics actually help conserve biodiversity.” During the study, Raven presented a paper stating that at the rate species are being killed off worldwide, by 2100 two-thirds may be gone: an extinction equivalent to the event that obliterated the same proportion of the world’s life-forms 65 million years ago, including the dinosaurs. In that case, an asteroid the size of a small town smashed into the Yucatán Peninsula; in this case, the asteroid is the human race. One thing that might help, Raven proposed, is planting transgenic crops, which can be grown intensively and therefore take less land away from other plant species than conventional agriculture. He dismissed as a myth the concern that these genetically altered strains might hybridize so readily with their wild relatives that the latter would vanish.

  If Sánchez Sorondo is aware that Peter Raven’s scientific prestige dates to a classic 1964 paper on the coevolution of butterflies and plants he coauthored with an entomologist named Paul Ehrlich, it is a detail he ignores.

  “If transgenic food wasn’t healthy,” he says, “nature would rebel against it. Like when you feed meat to a cow, you get mad cow disease. The Church believes that if things were only better regulated economically, there would be plenty of food for everybody.”

  In part, this argument refers to Pope Benedict XVI’s invectives against food becoming less human sustenance than marketable commodity. But it may also respond to American diplomatic persuasion. Having ingratiated itself in Rome by defunding foreign aid for any family-planning program that mentioned abortion, the George W. Bush administration lobbied the Vatican on behalf of biotech agro-industries, asserting that the way to feed the world’s hungry is with GM crops. This lobbying effort was intended to counter Catholic clergy in poor countries who oppose genetically altered grains. Because new genetic strains are hybrids that often can’t reproduce or lose their vigor if they do, farmers must buy new seed every year, as well as the fertilizers and chemical protection needed to cultivate them. Even the conservative African Synod of Catholic Bishops has accused agro-technology of “risking the ruin of small landowners by abolishing traditional methods of seeding, and making farmers dependent on companies” that produce GMOs.

  Apparently, they have been overruled. “As the Holy Father said, there will be enough food in the future for all,” repeats Sánchez Sorondo. “The Church is showing that the new transgenic methods can help bring this about.”

  Yet scientists at both IRRI and CIMMYT warn that transgenic leaps to feed the world are decades away from being viable—let alone discovered. And Green Revolution founder Norman Borlaug insisted that it will be impossible to keep feeding the whole world unless population growth is also checked.

  “That’s not what the Church believes. The Church believes in Providence. That fellow apparently didn’t.”

  But how far does Providence extend? When Pope Benedict XVI wrote of enough room and resources for everybody, did he mean every living species, not just human beings?

  “Both humans and animals are subject to natural laws that have taken scientists time to decipher and understand,” Sánchez Sorondo replies after a pause. “We have to respect the natural laws.” />
  Another pause. The Academy, he admits, has never actually studied how human population growth might trespass on biodiversity. “But to respect nature doesn’t mean that you just stand there admiring it. Pope Paul VI once said that the goal of a scientist should be to develop the potential of nature for the benefit of man and of nature itself. We must understand how nature functions, what its laws are. And then, perfect it.”

  ii. Heaven and Earth

  Is natural law immutable? Or is it law that changes with time, circumstance, or interpretation? It might be said that biological laws evolve, but the laws of physics don’t: a chance mutation might skew a living lineage off on some wild new angle, while the law of gravity seems unlikely ever to be repealed. But in the Catholic Church, law became immutable from the moment in 1870 when Pope Pius IX and his advisors realized that, bereft of their Papal States, their territory reduced to less than half a square mile, with only a thousand or so citizens (nearly all male, as today) their power was essentially gone. Unless…

  Thus Vatican I, which sealed the notion of papal infallibility. It was an idea that had been broached over centuries, with arguments pro and con even among Popes. It was also suspected of being a Protestant rumor meant to vilify the Catholic Pope for such a presumptuous claim. But now, for the first time since biblical prophets and apostles, the word spoken by a man—the Bishop of Rome—on matters of faith and dogma would be not mere opinion or command, but divine revelation. The authority of God Himself was infused in the Pope.

  Power restored. But papal infallibility was a sword that cut two ways. As the late Vatican historian Father August Bernhard Hasler noted, if the Pope’s teachings were infallible by virtue of being Pope, then the teachings of all Popes were infallible. A new Pope was locked into—and limited by—what was now the inviolable word of his predecessors. Overturning precedent was not an option.

  Therefore, on controversial positions that perplex modern progressive Catholics over their Church’s seemingly ossified stance against contraception, ordination of women or married men, or acceptance of homosexuals, the reality is that the Church has little choice, because it has painted itself into an ever tighter corner. As Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, would write for the dissenting opinion to the overwhelming (69–10) majority of the Papal Commission on Population and Birth Control that advised Paul XI to relax the sanction against artificial birth control:

  If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches…. It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half century the Holy Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned.

  Those words provided a key passage in the minority opinion that persuaded the Pope to write Humanae Vitae, rejecting the majority that favored contraception. To do otherwise would have undercut the stoutest remaining pillar of the Church’s foundation: the absolute authority of the Pope.

  “The Church has never been against birth control,” says Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson. “It’s just a problem of method.”

  Cardinal Turkson heads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Although its official mandate mentions neither nature nor ecology, in one of the mysteries of the Roman Catholic curia, it is the branch of the Vatican’s bureaucracy that takes the lead on environmental issues. Before becoming its president in 2009, Turkson was archbishop of the ecclesiastical province of Cape Coast in his native Ghana. With the world’s highest birth rates, Africa also is where Catholicism enjoys its fastest growth; Turkson’s former archdiocese is famous for training and exporting priests to other countries where Catholic clergy have become an endangered breed, such as the United States.2

  The Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace is housed in Rome’s seventeenth-century Palazzo San Callisto, a four-story complex three miles from the Vatican, owned by the Holy See as an extraterritorial property under treaty with Italy. Its office is spare, with pale walls and plain, dark wood-trimmed doorways and windows. Portraits of popes past and current hang above cases of multilingual pamphlets and books published by the Council on topics such as ethical development, disarmament, and fairness in global financing. Compared to the opulent Pontifical Academy of Sciences, its modest countenance resembles that of a human rights NGO.

  Cardinal Turkson has a broad, gently smiling face, with a cloud of gray frizz above a high, prominent brow. He explains that the Church, in fact, supports several kinds of contraception—each based, he says, on the fact that “a woman can always tell if she’s ovulating.”

  He actually took a class in Australia, he adds, in a technique known as the Billings ovulation method. “They called me their first bishop student.” The Billings method teaches a woman how to recognize the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle. “Without even inserting any finger into anything—just by, you know, touching—she can feel the mucus that begins to appear and notify the husband. Something like that, we encourage.”

  There are several ways, he says, for women to alert their spouses. “Some put a green leaf on the bed. That indicates to your husband that you’re ovulating. When you see it’s over, you put a red leaf.”

  It is disconcerting, if not surreal, to hear a Catholic cardinal—and one frequently mentioned as a prospect for the papacy—discuss vaginal mucus, especially when the topic was supposed to be the environment. But all environmental issues quickly lead to the fact that there are more humans than the system can comfortably hold, including the issues Cardinal Turkson himself lists: the need to clean the air, cut CO2, and slash Rome’s satanic traffic. Lamenting the hours that Italians lose hunting for a parking place, he calls for more mass transit, and bicycles to save fuel. He considers it a crime that a crucial measure of economic success in Europe is how many cars people can be convinced to buy.

  “When the Volkswagen was invented, their slogan was ein Auto für jedermann: ‘a car for everybody.’ Then when everybody has one, there’s hardly any space to park, so cars get smaller and smaller. Then, you know what happens next: Families want two cars, and you double the problem.”

  Overconsumption is unquestionably deplorable, but taken alone, it also deflects from the obvious: that too many cars result from too many people. That, in turn, results in the awkward spectacle of a kindly, intelligent man who someday might be leader of the world’s Christians—at least according to the Roman Catholic Church—pretending he doesn’t know that sperm can live inside a woman for up to six days preceding ovulation, regularly foiling contraceptive methods based on mucus, temperature, or calendars.

  Lurking behind such contortions of learned men who are genuinely worried about melting poles and deepening droughts, yet who still insist that a million more of us every four days or so is a blessing, is a simple accounting cipher. Even an infallible pope has little power if his flock shrinks too far. Like Yasser Arafat’s womb-weapon and the overbreeding of Israel’s haredim, the Church has a fundamental, vested interest in bodies. The more Catholics there are in the world, the more the judgment of the 1,000 male citizens of Vatican City matters.

  Cardinal Turkson has seen enough African suffering and starvation in a world with 7 billion to know what it will be like with 10 billion. Moreover, he heads a Vatican council charged with moral guidance regarding questions now shaking seven continents and roiling the seas: questions such as ethical dilemmas over which species to save and which get sacrificed, dilemmas that might never arise with fewer people cornering all the room and resources. Yet his Church insists there’s room for everyone, and that it’s a punishable sin to use effective means to prevent adding more.

  Cardinal Turkson knows, yet he can’t disobey dogma. He cites Pope Benedict’s 2009 annual World Day
of Peace message, when the pontiff said that we need to live in solidarity with the future and with other dependents on the Earth. “You know. Like animals.”

  Yet ecologists contend that this not just about expressing solidarity, but about mutual survival. Can there be a home for humans here without a supporting cast of characters, whose numbers perhaps only God can know?

  In his plain wooden chair, he sinks into contemplation of this question. “When God began to create the world,” he finally says, “it was chaos. Then God said let there be this and let there be that. The chaos transformed into a cosmos, into a beautiful, orderly system. That transformation was through the Word of God. For me as a Christian, that means that without the Word of God, we’re likely to go back to chaos again. I would be worried if I was not a man of faith. I would be worried if I didn’t believe in a God who our Scripture says has not created this world to be in chaos.”

  But if we have entered a time where our planet seems to be bursting its seams and popping its rivets, might there be Scriptural justification for thinking about restraint?

  The cardinal takes a deep, thoughtful breath.

  “It makes a lot of sense to practice restraint. There are biblical instances of a time to do this, and a time not to do that. Unfortunately, our culture has gone through an evolution that makes it difficult to hear Ecclesiastes saying that there is a time to embrace and a time to refrain. Now, there’s always time to do, and never a time to refrain from anything. Everybody knows how to celebrate Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, but nobody thinks about the abstinence that Ash Wednesday calls for. Does Mardi Gras make sense if it’s just Mardi Gras?

  “As for restraining from sex: in the animal world, a dog or a cat will not accept a mate unless it’s in heat. It’s only human beings who make love both in and out of season. But there is a viable alternative to which we could invite people…”