Benedict XVI on environmental degradation

New York Times

July 18, 2008

Pope Warns on Environment

By TIM JOHNSTON  

SYDNEY, Australia —  Pope Benedict XVI used his first major address at the Roman Catholic Church’s youth festival on Thursday to warn that the world was being scarred and its natural resources used up by humanity’s “insatiable consumption.”

In a broad criticism of consumer culture, before a crowd of more than 140,000 on a dock in Sydney harbor, Benedict reinforced the Vatican’s growing concern with protecting the environment, a theme he has addressed before.

“Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption," he said.

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