The Pope's Dystopia

"The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth." That's not a line of dialogue from Interstellar or The Walking Dead. It's a direct quote from Pope Francis, found in his biggest and most influential teaching document to date, "Laudato Si," which was officially revealed by the Vatican this week. And when its language skews more traditionally biblical, it's just as grim: "the earth herself," Francis writes, "burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she 'groans in travail.'"

That's some powerful verbiage, and some loaded imagery of a dying planet. Few environmental writers—or dystopian screenplay scribes, for that matter—do better.

Good thing, too. This is the first encyclical ever issued by a pope that's focused on the environment, and it was clearly designed to leave a mark. (It's also the first major encyclical that the popular Pope Francis has issued thus far; he published one previous encyclical, but it contained much of the work of his predecessor). In no uncertain terms, it urges the people of the world, especially the powerful, to fight climate change with an eye to aiding the poor, to reduce pollution, to conserve natural resources, and to be wary of the allure of grand technological fixes. Or else.

A leaked Italian-language draft that made the rounds earlier this week already had commentators noting the "apocalyptic" nature of the document, and the official release confirms it: This isn't just a teaching paper. (Though it is that, and a good one; the Washington Post marvels that the pope has outed himself as "a total policy wonk.") It's also a piece of literature crafted to move the world to action. It's intended to be rousing as well as educational—it's loaded with quotable, shareable apocalyptic snippets—and, as such, the encyclical's language seems to take its cues from both old-school biblical apocalypticism and modern-day dystopianism.

Compare the headline-grabbing "immense pile of trash" line with this, a more poetic cautioning: "The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life."

Francis can invoke the tone of a science journal presenting disturbing findings in one instance, and that of Revelations the next: "If present trends continue, this century may well witness extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented destruction of ecosystems," Francis writes at one point; "This sister, [Mother Earth] now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her," he intones at another.

Throughout, the pope crafts a vision of a world on the brink, threatened by the fossil fueled growth that's led the rich to prosper and to the resultant pollution that punishes the poor. It's about both ecology and economics; in the pope's eye, climate change and global inequality are the leading drivers rushing the world to ruin.

Even the encyclical's closing prayer, A Christian prayer in union with creation, contains a narrative, of a world under fire, to be won back by the poor and the just. Here's a snippet:

Enlighten those who possess power and money
that they may avoid the sin of indifference,
that they may love the common good, advance the weak,
and care for this world in which we live.
The poor and the earth are crying out.
O Lord, seize us with your power and light,
help us to protect all life,
to prepare for a better future,
for the coming of your Kingdom
of justice, peace, love and beauty.

Also explicit in the encyclical is the notion that technology will not be our savior, but may just as easily be our ruin. ("Technology," Francis writes, "which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others.")

Interesting, then, how this vision aligns with the marquee dystopian fictions of our day: Elysium is a world scorched by industry, wherein the rich have evacuated to the high-tech safety of an orbital pleasure barge. Snowpiercer is a world squeezed by climate change, then destroyed by geoengineering, forcing the survivors into a speeding marvel of a prison, where they are victimized by exacerbated classism. The subtext of The Hunger Games, in the books at least, is that ecological destruction, maybe climate change, has begotten Panem, and shaped the world into its divisions of haves and have-nots—and high-tech, networked entertainment works to pacify the masses. Mad Max's world has been left a divided wasteland, presumably at the hands of ignorant, hubristic, and violent men.

The pope himself is a noted fan of dystopian literature; he has gone so far as to cite a turn-of-the-century novel, The Lord of the World, which, yes, is about the end of the world, in an official homily. One of the most prominently cited works in his encyclical, The End of the Modern World, by Romano Guardini, is not a novel, but nonetheless espouses many of the aforementioned ideas about nature, man's selfishness, and a misplaced faith in technology.

So while the content of the encyclical is drawn largely from modern science and economics—it displays a remarkable grasp of the impact of the accumulation of greenhouse gasses, pollution, and water stress on our biosphere—its execution is florid enough to feed hundreds of headlines, each echoing his fears.

Critics, especially the world's cadre of climate change deniers, have predictably charged the pope with hyperbole. One Catholic GOP presidential candidate claimed the pope "should stay out of science," another that he "should stay out of politics." But the most frightening thing about the pope's encyclical is how well-informed it is, and how well Francis knows that the gap between our fictional dystopias and our increasingly real-world one is slimming.

The same day that the pope launched the encyclical, the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration announced that the world had just experienced its hottest May in recorded history, and the three month period between March-May was also the warmest on the books.

The whole world was wrapped in red, just about. The day before, the International Monetary Fund released a report that described the other prong of our real-world dystopia: "Widening income inequality is the defining challenge of our time," it notes. The report (yet again) debunks the concept of trickle-down economics, and calls on world leaders to focus on addressing inequality to stimulate growth.

Last week, as the rest of California worked together to conserve water in the face of its unprecedented drought, which many scientists say was exacerbated by global warming, reports surfaced that a handful of rich elites were squandering water just for the hell of it. If that's not dystopian behavior—the wealthy literally sneering at the poor from the comfort of their compounds—I don't know what is.

There's a reason that dystopian fiction is so en vogue right now, and yes, it's partly because we delight in seeing a swift end to our world. But it's also because the genre helps us articulate our darkest fears about the way the planet's heading—and gives us hope that we can fight through it. The urgent apocalyptic scenarios grab us by the throat, and, typically, in unsubtle terms, propose a way forward, whether it's revolution or wealth redistribution or feminism or ecological stewardship.

The pope's own solutions tend to call for a pastorally-tinged paradigm shift; away from consumerism, fossil fuels, and techno-utopianism and towards communal harmony, equality, and a spiritual rebirth. It's also worth noting, perhaps, that in his favorite dystopia, the antichrist prevails and the world ends.

So yes, the world the pope describes is alarming, the critics aren't wrong about that. But the state of the world is alarming. And there's no sense in shying away from it.

Shortly after the official announcement of the encyclical, the pope launched a tweetstorm to spread the word to his followers online. The tweets formed a little story of their own; "We need a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet," the first read, and it won 5,000 retweets. "One particularly serious problem is the quality of water available to the poor," went another, with 2,500.

Then came the cautionary conclusion, that line from the beginning of the encyclical:

"The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth." It was quickly retweeted some 20,000 times.