Asymmetric Religion and Philosophy

As Anne Applebaum notices and Diane Francis' anti-person screed proves, nature worship leads to a diminution of man's place in the world. It's logical, actually:

1. If desiring nature to be preserved as it is now or restore it to a pre-human state is the greatest good.

2. and, if people are just one creature amongst many, without any more natural worth than nature itself.

3. and, if man is using more than his share of resources or damaging the earth so that 1 is impossible.

4. then, man's power to destroy needs to diminish.

We can do this two ways, by reducing the number of people or limiting each person's engagement with nature.

Christianity teaches us that man is the ultimate physical creation (angels are spirit) and infinitely more valuable than animals by virtue of our being created in God's image, as moral agents. The universe's resources are here for us. One judges anything men do in relation to the earth by how it impacts humanity, physically and aesthetically (preserving nature because men enjoy its beauty is perfectly justifiable, although using marble to make Michelangelo's David is probably more beneficial to mankind than having another slab of marble in the ground).

You can be thoroughly secular and still value men more than nature, but you can't do so logically while holding the the first and/or second assumption; it would just be a personal preference.

As for the Pope's seemingly anti-capital pronouncements, it's probably not correct to frame them in secular right-left terms.

Society should orient itself towards what's good for its citizens (I think it's capitalism) and if taking care of the environment, as per the explanation above, is part of that, so be it.