Spike is Best

One cleric on twitter was asking what sorts of things could possibly constitute an ecological sin, so he would know for penitents coming to him for confession. He was asking snidely of course, like that proved something. Which reminds me a bit of people who get annoyed by priests who instead of giving them Hail Marys or Our Fathers for their penance, give them the penance of "making an act of kindness", or a number of such acts, and they say, "But how am I to know if I've fulfilled the penance?" Like really? You don't know what could possibly constitute an act of kindness? How are you going to make it into the kingdom of heaven?

Anyways, you don't know what could possibly constitute an ecological sin? You could read Laudato Si' to find out. One good basic place to start is to ask yourself, "Do I waste food?"

Just think of all the generations previous for whom the wasting of food would have been abominable. All the generations going way back, and the experience of food shortages during wars, famine, economic depression, no mass transport and no giant corporations: if anyone from those generations were to have wasted food, you can be sure it would have burned their conscience and it would be a matter they would take to confession.

Yet what to them was abominable, for us today is par for the course and an intrinsic product of our systems. Do you ever decide to leave something in your cupboard or fridge that is about to stale-date or expire, simply because you don't feel like having it for dinner, because it would be dull, and you prepare some other foods instead?

Your cupboard or fridge, in effect, is then a kind of pagan shrine in which you offer foods to the idol of your bodily impulses. You offer your food to the god of waste. At least the pagans of old would actually eat the food they offered to their idols.

It is inexcusable, and relativistic, to say that a huge percentage of food is already wasted in the production and transport system, and that your personal wasting of food doesn't amount to anything and is just an inevitable part of the system. The teaching of the Church is aimed at both the instigators in the larger corporate systems and individuals in those systems.

This is where the ecological understanding comes into play. The food wastage today is simply not comparable to what food wastage would or could have ever been back in those previous generations. Because, as with money-as-debt, or debtflation, what we have today is huge production that equates to huge waste, but not because it is huge production. In other words, we don't have super waste because we have superabundant production; we have superabundant production purposely done for the sake of becoming huge waste. You have to understand how perverse it is; how offensive an abuse it is of God's creation, earth.

So while this sin is, like all old sin, traceable to one of the seven deadlys, like say gluttony, it comes in a newly perverse application as it were. It is a massive abuse of the production of the earth, as usury today, in an almost incomprehensible form, is the abuse - no, not only of money - but the abuse of peoples' labour and productions and talents and goods.