The Apostolic Exhortation: “Laudate Deum: to all people of good will on the climate crisis,” the newly issued plea from Pope Francis, states more urgently some facts this spiritual leader has underscored before — mainly the vital one that human uses of power, both physical and sociopolitical, have generated awful global consequences, potential dead-end ones.

Although hugely appreciating this lifelong spiritual leader’s science-based warnings, I look forward to the time when the discussion, and the science profession itself, digs into systems science and the physics of energy within our own Earth and Sun system, including the physics around “renewables” such as wind and solar. To cut to the chase, that examination, I firmly believe, will make local, more subsistent economies look attractive even in the Western mind.

We may forget that our efforts to harness and commodify energy have floundered for centuries now, considering not just fossil fuels, but nuclear, charcoal, whale oil, gunpowder, slavery, etc. How well is it likely to work, long term, to snag and redirect a portion of the planet’s geophysical energies, its sun and wind? Current policies imply we can successfully own and control trillions of watts of it. Are they based in realism, or expediency and hope?

Few seem to want to ask: What is energy, how does it function to serve life itself? What is the effect when it’s refined and redirected massively, long term, on behalf of just one species?

My own answer is that energy enables life itself in a random, no-favorites but brilliant way, and needs to be treated as sacred. Honored in its wild state. Scientifically speaking, it’s the stuff of life, via both Geos — functioning, physical Earth— and its offspring, Bios —  biological life, the two having become partners in Ecos, the living whole.

Energy powers this union and the countless parts thereof. It’s the delicate flesh and spirit of Earth life, and, let’s just say … not well-suited for sale. The practical and the ethical meet here: The planet’s energy regime serves every living thing and is only so resilient. Commodity energy, massively manufactured and deployed, begins as selfish and eventually must become destabilizing and unsustainable.

I’d describe us as a curious, dangerous, holy species … made of energy. If we can’t collectively resonate with the idea of the sacredness, the (w)holiness, of energy and implement it — if we can’t get ourselves out of this crazy super-secular anthropocentrism that has us lunging with mechanized arms after almost every niche of Ecos — we’ll be just dangerous.

Not properly curious, not holy, and certainly not adaptive. There will be little hope that the planet can remain a home to the slower-reproducing and more recent life forms like us. They, we, and a peaceful society require the stable climate and resilience of ecological complexity that we’re so busy knocking the props out from under.

Is ignorance bliss? The science of systems, energy systems all, says imposed shifts in energy patterns can only destabilize, threatening further loss of equilibrium. It’s high time to apply that knowledge and serve the essentially sacred ecology … and our related, sacred selves.

Although this turns some key civilized assumptions upside down (those of human functional hierarchy, power, control), it honors our best instincts about connection and the oneness of all life. The practice of power never really fit us spiritually or nourished us emotionally, or always even physically. Most of us resonate more with wholism and inclusion than separatism and hierarchy. Yet these last are the assumptions that commercial forces and governments are bringing the electrode-paddles of solar, wind and nuclear to resuscitate.

If we wait to radically back off in our economic reach, once we are finally humbled, I can almost hear our pleas to rejoin the family of life, or what’s left of that basic unit that’s wild-energy-born, wild-energy-dependent, and so shiningly sacred.

My question is only, why wait to rejoin? Subsistence, for all its challenges, is less to be feared than the present darkness, this spiritual cliff where we grasp at the crumbling status quo in dread of the pain and chaos to come.

Jonathan von Ranson is a longtime resident of Wendell. In the early 2010s, with the help of persistent town residents and officials and the late state Rep, Steve Kulik, he and his wife, Susan, created a legal path toward simple living. He reports that the new Alternative Housing provisions of the state building code “have allowed us to live happily and well with our total yearly costs for home energy use under $1,000.”