Laudate Deum - https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20231004-laudate-deum.html(https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/20231004-laudate-deum.html) Eight years after Laudato Si, Francis’ encyclical on care for our common home, he has produced a comprehensive and powerful review of what has, or more often what hasn't, been done. It is both easy and gripping reading! Here are some quotes: "We stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it.“ "Contrary to (a) technocratic paradigm, we say that the world that surrounds us is not an object of exploitation, unbridled use and unlimited ambition. Nor can we claim that nature is a mere “setting” in which we develop our lives and our projects. For “we are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it”, [18] and thus “we [do] not look at the world from without but from within”[19] “… For this reason, a healthy ecology is also the result of interaction between human beings and the environment, as occurs in the indigenous cultures and has occurred for centuries in different regions of the earth. ... The great present-day problem is that the technocratic paradigm has destroyed that healthy and harmonious relationship. In any event, the indispensable need to move beyond that paradigm, so damaging and destructive, will not be found in a denial of the human being, but include the interaction of natural systems “with social systems”. [21] We need to rethink among other things the question of human power, its meaning and its limits. For our power has frenetically increased in a few decades. We have made impressive and awesome technological advances, and we have not realized that at the same time we have turned into highly dangerous beings, capable of threatening the lives of many beings and our own survival…… We need lucidity and honesty in order to recognize in time that our power and the progress we are producing are turning against us.” “… the necessary transition towards clean energy sources such as wind and solar energy, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, is not progressing at the necessary speed. Consequently, whatever is being done risks being seen only as a ploy to distract attention.” “We must move beyond the mentality of appearing to be concerned but not having the courage needed to produce substantial changes. We know that at this pace in just a few years we will surpass the maximum recommended limit of 1.5° C and shortly thereafter even reach 3° C, with a high risk of arriving at a critical point. Even if we do not reach this point of no return, it is certain that the consequences would be disastrous and precipitous measures would have to be taken, at enormous cost and with grave and intolerable economic and social effects. Although the measures that we can take now are costly, the cost will be all the more burdensome the longer we wait.”