The Storm Cloud of the Twenty-First Century: John Ruskin, Pope Francis, and global warming

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. —Pope Francis, Laudato si’

When Pope Francis observed that the natural world had been infected with human wickedness, he echoed one of the more macabre and prescient prophecies of ecological ruin: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), John Ruskin’s account of the impact of industrial capitalism on the weather of England. In Ruskin’s eyes, the ailing earth had been contaminated by the putrescence of our wounded hearts. Polluting the skies with the effluvium of avarice, “iniquity” leavened the clouds; “bitterness and malice” befouled the winds; “poisonous smoke” composed of “dead men’s souls” rose up from the ominous mills. “Blanched Sun,—blighted grass,—blinded man.” This was “blasphemy,” in Ruskin’s view: a desecration of “the visible Heaven” and a sacrilege upon “all the good works and purposes of Nature.” “Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom,” he warned. If the moral and material pestilence of industrialized avarice metastasized, our terrestrial paradise would become a ghastly inferno. The only antidotes to this metaphysical contagion were “Hope…Reverence…[and] Love”—a constellation of virtues that, by healing our desolate souls, would also mend or mitigate the desolation already inflicted on the planet.

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