Gov. Jerry Brown’s personal commitment to climate change is well known. Still more widely known, now, is the pope’s recent encyclical on climate change, “Laudato Si.” The governor last week participated in an international “sub-national” governments conference in Canada, as he prepares for the UN conference in Paris in December. The LA Times published two stories on his Canadian comments, which clearly indicated the breadth and depth of how California does and will lead the world.

The governor also commented on the pope’s precedential document in the national Jesuit journal America last week. At first, he sounds like the Brown of old, noting, “…there are certain limits and certain ways of living and industrializing and carrying on that are more compatible with a sustainable and healthy environment.” A riff on his “era of limits” from his earlier years as governor you’re thinking.

But the governor quickly jumps to 2015 and his pioneering approach to adaptive climate change: “The pope made a very clear articulation of the responsibility and the respect that human beings owe the rest of creation. And he’s taking on a real existential threat to the underlying conditions on which our civilization is dependent, the stability of the climate, which has been very favorable for the last 10 to 12 thousand years.”

If you’re advocating resources management issues, laws and regulations to the governor’s office, here’s guidance from the Corner Office: “The encyclical raises a real challenge to a modern world that is so dependent on the market for authority and for the allocation of life’s goods and services. The pope is raising the ante, saying no, you have to look at the impact. When you’re disturbing the environment you’re going to create negative feedbacks that are going to be felt disproportionately by poorer people, more vulnerable people who don’t have the assets and the capital to protect themselves against the extreme weather and the disruptions that follow in the wake of an impaired climate regime, which is where we’re going.”

One place we’re going very soon is the Brown administration in late summer will roll out a revived “Safeguarding California” plan that will identify 10 major policy arenas focused on climate change and the encompassed extreme weather events like drought.

Full America interview:
http://americamagazine.org/content/dispatches/front-lines-interview-california-governor-jerry-brown-laudato-si