How do we contend with a fundamental problem in Catholic social teaching: the conflict between its defense of private property and how private property is constitutive of a set of “wasting relations” that make Black and Indigenous peoples disposable and wreak havoc on the ecological commons? As Ignacio Ellacuria inquired in 1976, “if private property is necessary for freedom, then why do the vast majority of Salvadoran peasants lack the indispensable condition for freedom?” If property is the fruit of labor, Ellacuria continued, then the Salvadoran people would have “long ago produced a property tenure” (125). The Church’s defense of private property directly conflicts with its values of the universal destination of the goods of God’s creation and integral human and ecological development. Pope Francis laments how a dualism between nature and society is itself a “technique of possession” that made it easy to accept the idea of infinite economic growth that is “based on the lie that there is infinite supply of the earth’s goods that leads to the planet being squeezed beyond every limit” (§106).
Yet society, and Catholic social teaching, I suggest, tends not to perceive how the ideology of private property—the dominant technique of possession—fuels the destruction of both human social metabolism and the earth’s metabolisms. By social metabolism I mean the fundamental, self-reproducing, and material way society organizes its exchange of energy and materials with nature. We tend to be blind to the fact that for at least 150 years the global capitalist economy burns fossil fuels at a rate 10 million times faster than originally charged by the sun. Earth’s metabolisms include cyclical flows of photosynthesis and respiration that sustains the biosphere, cyclical flows of nutrients like carbon and nitrogen, and climate regulation. The current burn rate of fossil fuels is not only unsustainable, it is breaking metabolic processes that sustain life.
Catholic social teaching defends the right to private property as a means for personal freedom and creativity but that right is qualified by its tradition of the “universal destination of the goods of God’s creation,” that insists on the use of personal wealth for the promotion of human dignity and the common good. The problem, however, as Ellacuria recognized in El Salvador, and as Pope Francis articulated in Laudato Si, is that the system of private property not only does not reward everyone’s labor equally, but it creates wide gaps between the wealthy and unwealthy, which also foments conflict, and destroys the earth in the process.
I suggest that a condition of the possibility of revisioning private property (§118-120) and healing the rift between nature and society demands a new historical-ecological paradigm that draws upon Pope Francis’s integral ecology and a decolonial praxis to demonstrate that economic growthism and what political economists call racial capitalism are inherently violent against the earth and all human life. The problem of how to resolve the tension between private property and the universal destination of goods, perhaps, obscures a deeper problem in CST. I contend that Catholic social teaching tends not to perceive its own entanglements in modernity and its hidden side of slavery, genocide, and unprecedented ecological waste. I discuss the problem of claims to universality in Catholic social teaching in my article “Catholic Social Teaching: Toward a Decolonial Praxis.”
The slain Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuria illuminated a key historical problem of private property. Ellacuria applied the principle of historicization to demonstrate how private property is actually practiced in a particular context and de-ideologize the dominant idea of private property. The dominant ideology of private property contends that it is necessary for personal freedom and creativity and that it is a consequence of human labor. However, historically, private property does not function to everyone’s benefit or the common good. Ellacuria demonstrates how the system only benefits economic “haves” to the detriment of “have nots.” He demonstrated how the defense of private property by ruling elites as a basic human right in El Salvador actually creates “intolerable differences between those who have property and those who do not, and plac[es] the most of the human race in a situation of extreme deprivation and need” (132). I reinterpret Ellacuria’s critical historical contextualization of private property through a historical-ecological framework to address how racial and colonial capitalism creates the rift not only between nature and society but between capitalism’s social metabolism and the earth’s metabolisms. While Ellacuria exposed how privatized wealth is a counter-scandal to the Basileia tou Theou (Kingdom of God), he did not articulate how private property as a way of life is also destructive of the earth’s metabolisms.
I suggest a new historical-ecological Catholic social praxis that creates conditions of the possibility of a social metabolism that is oriented to the earth’s metabolisms so that humanity is not breaking planetary boundaries. In my previous work, Unlearning White Supremacy: A Spirituality for Racial Liberation, I contended that undoing and unlearning anti-Blackness is constitutive of practicing ecological intimacy.
I draw upon the work of Marisa Solomon who describes “racism as productive of wasting relations and wasting relations as productive of anti-Black racism” (128). Racial capitalism lays waste both to the earth’s metabolisms and Black and Indigenous peoples. Although white settlers assume that our waste goes “elsewhere” to keep us “safe,” that assumption is deadly wrong. The United Church of Christ published a landmark study in 1987 demonstrating that race, rather than socioeconomic status, is the primary predictor of the location of hazardous waste in the United States. Public health literature repeatedly confirms that environmental risk is concentrated in “poor neighborhoods of color” (32).
Two competing social imaginaries demand our attention for a future social metabolism that downscales waste and the demand for raw materials. The first, an argument for a “circular economy,” (CE) prevalent across U.S. cities as well as the European Union, recycles waste to maintain capitalist social metabolism. Proponents of a pro-growth future, advance a vision of a circular economy that is led by business interests, local and state institutions, and multinational corporations projecting long-term profits from a new commodity frontier of all forms of waste (2).
The second, degrowth circularity (DC), not only downscales waste and lowers the demand for raw materials, but also builds an alternative social metabolism that decelerates economic growth as it decolonizes, de-commodifies, and de-encloses the ecological commons. Whereas the dominant capitalist circular economy (CE) relies upon increasing ecological responsibilities of individual consumers, it decreases the responsibilities of waste producers as it increases producers’ monetary gain and ecological destruction. The problem is that capitalism benefits from waste management as it damages ecosystems. By contrast, DC critiques how the dominant CE produces more waste as “growth’s inevitable surplus which must be reduced” and it creates structures of collective responsibility for lowering the demand for raw materials in bioregional localities focused on reducing socio-ecological burdens. Degrowth creates collaborative collectives to develop waste reduction and prevention practices that sustain ecological metabolisms.
Yet society, and perhaps, Catholic social teaching, tends not to perceive how private property and its way of life links historical social metabolism with ecological metabolism.
Racial capitalism produces “wasting relations” through its social metabolism. Social metabolism concerns the material and energy flows between distinct socio-historical economic systems and nature. Capitalist social metabolism and its ideology of private property is a blind, totalizing system that reproduces economic, social, and ecological devastation (41).
Yet white settlers tend to assume that our institutions are in control of capitalism and that we can throw our waste “out of sight and out of mind.” After all, white settlers assume first possession of land and people; indeed, white privilege and property rights are obtained in conquest and genocide of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous rights and sovereignty are forgotten already. Actually, indigenous rights and sovereignty never existed and are “out of sight and out of mind,” because white settlers are a “specific genre of being” defined by possession. Likewise, managing waste as “out of sight and out of mind sustains a white settler fantasy: that whiteness and property are sound” (14).
Whiteness achieves its ontological status as the pinnacle of humanity, legal scholar Cheryl Harris finds, through the right of first possession. First possession, materially and ontologically, begins in the Atlantic slave trade and in the clearing of Indigenous peoples and lands for white settlement and ownership. Contemporary landfills are not only a place to put waste but also teach us about the enduring social metabolism and relationships of racial capitalism. Landfills socialize us into normalizing racial dispossession:
Public housing complexes, prisons, jails, and detention centers are often atop superfund sites and in proximity to particulate matter from waste to energy facilities; highways map directly onto historical patterns of segregation. The likelihood that marginalized communities live close to a landfill increases with poverty, indexing the racial and economic geographies of exposure to contaminated groundwater, lead and legionella, and hazardous material at work (128).
Where we place waste, Solomon demonstrates, not only produces racial dispossession but makes dispossessed people appear that they are waste themselves. Solomon explains that chattel slavery, which built racial capitalism, is based on the logic that Black life is disposable.
The wasting relations of US racial capitalism also keeps waste out of sight and out of mind by exporting over 50 million tons of electronic waste to Africa every year. In the same way that the U.S. places landfills and dump sites in poor communities of color, the U.S. also treats Africa as its waste “away land”, where our shit does not really go away because it refuses to be treated or to go away. Marisa Solomon emphasizes the “away land” or “elsewhere” of anti-Blackness as an environmental strategy in which settler colonialism uses “the Black body [as] Blackening place to make way for waste disposal and toxic accumulation” where “toxic capture” is the “way that [white] property is a genre of living (by killing)” (5).
Settler colonialism, ever since the U.S. was founded upon enslavement of Africans and elimination of Indigenous peoples, produces a set of wasting relations that foment death. While white settlers are comforted by our shit going down the toilet or to the “elsewhere” of the “Black belt” or any environmental dump, our denials and assumed innocence only blind us to our death-dealing and suicidal waste strategy.
White “waste management,” integral to racial capitalism’s environmental strategy, really constitutes “a set of wasting relations” (8-9). While racial capitalism’s set of wasting relations attempt to secure pristine whiteness ecologically and geographically, the logic of waste “elimination” does not only make Black life disposable and expendable, our white settler way of being eliminates all life, including our own.
A new historical-ecological paradigm must contend with the historical geographical specificity of metabolic rifts and how those geographically distinct rifts were and are wrapped up in the oppression of Black, Indigenous, South Asian, Palestinian, and peoples who were removed from their lands for capitalist ends. A new historical-ecological praxis entails decolonization as return of lands to Black and Indigenous peoples, degrowth or economic deceleration as a way of white economic dispossession, decommodification of public goods, and de-enclosure of the earth’s commons. Decolonization, degrowth, decommodification, and de-enclosure are all constitutive of ending racial capitalism, and transforming white ontology, language, and epistemology. Degrowth metabolism is constitutive of restoring, repairing, and regenerating healthy social and ecological metabolisms.
