In my reading today of Gaia and God, Rosemary Ruether talks about the environment. Among her topics are the dangers of acid rain, how "complex biotic communities" that are being destroyed will be replaced by "weeds" and "pests" (i.e., cockroaches) that "thrive under adverse conditions" (page 102), the "destruction of plants useful for food and medicine" (page 102), and how climate change will lead to the flooding of coasts, where a lot of cities are, resulting in a loss of life. She states that "Plague, famine, violence, and mass death of humans and animals, caused by such flooding of huge urban areas, would be a scene that would far surpass the ancient flood story that wiped out the cities of the ancient Near East in the fourth millennium B.C.E." (page 98).
While Ruether talks a lot about the dangers of environmental degradation to human life and health, she also believes that it undermines "the aesthetic imagination that can sustain human biophilia, and with it the moral urge to value life itself" (page 102). She elaborates: "Without the rich beauty of the natural environment, humans may also have been losing that which has nurtured their moral-aesthetic 'soul,' their sensitivity to complex and subtle realities, their capacity to imagine ecstatically and to care deeply about life."
On page 89, Ruether says the following about poverty:
"The destruction of wild habitats and the confiscation of land by the wealthy means that few human populations today can live as self-subsistent gathering and gardening societies. Poor populations are poor because they lack access to sufficient land for their traditional life-styles, but their work is not needed in the new productive systems of affluence. And so they must scavenge the scraps of work and waste from the tables of the wealthy.
"Crowded on marginal lands by those who have monopolized the best land, the farming and animal grazing of such people will erode the thin soils, and their wood gathering for fuel will strip the remaining forests, causing floods and desertification of the land. Their crowded conditions probably also mean that their water supply is polluted by being mixed with human and animal feces, and their children are dying in great numbers from malnutrition and intestinal parasites."
These are all sobering insights. Ruether's book was published in 1992, and I don't know whether we're in better or worse shape now. We haven't seen the floods from climate change...at least not yet.