The World Wildlife Fund’s 2010 “Living Planet” report lists Australia as the eighth “most unsustainable” of 152 nations surveyed.

CEO of WWF in Australia, Dermot O’Gorman, says this means that the federal government “must put a price on carbon pollution”.

Which is debatable . . . .

Australia ranks better this time than in some previous Living Planet surveys.

In 2004, Australia was fourth worst. In 2008, fifth worst.

By coming in eighth, Australia now rates better than Canada, Belgium, Qatar and Estonia — all previously ranked better than us.

Considering Australia’s climatic extremes — and the tyranny of distance making transport costs inevitably greater than other countries — we possibly deserved slight praise.

But the WWF doesn’t do praise.

* * *

What would the late Mary MacKillop make of all this?

She and Father Woods, in setting up the Josephite Order, emphasised simplicity of lifestyle.

Mother Mary wrote that, “I longed for a religious life, one in which I could serve God and his poor neglected little ones in poverty and disregard of the world . . . I looked for poverty more like unto that practised in the early religious Orders of the Church, a poverty which in its practice would make a kind of reparation to God for the little confidence now placed in his divine Providence by so many of his creatures.”

The original Rule of the Order stipulated that the Sisters’ houses must be “very poor and fitted with furniture such as poor people use. The chairs and tables to be of common wood, no carpets on the floors.”

Not much of a “carbon-footprint” there.

* * *

The Founder of the Catholic Church, Jesus Christ himself, was recorded in the Gospel telling his disciples, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” 

Our Lord’s motives (and those of Mary MacKillop) were — unlike those of the WWF –primarily God-related, not materialistic.

Any true Catholic will live as simply as possible, so as to emulate the ways of Jesus and the saints — and to live in harmony with the beautiful natural world which Our Creator has entrusted to us.