Photo
by
Don Nesbitt
|
In
the Northwest region of the United States, the Columbia
River is a valued treasure abundant with wildlife and resources.
As with any natural treasure or resource, however, there
are always potential threats to its continued existence.
To
raise awareness of the value of the Columbia River, the
bishops of the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana
plus the town of Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, joined
together to release a pastoral to raise awareness of this
natural resource among members of the community and urge
them to help protect it. The pastoral, entitled The Columbia
River Watershed: Realities and Possibilities, was released
this February.
In
the South of the United States, the Dioceses of Amarillo
and Lubbock, Texas, and Dodge City, Kansas, are focusing
their environmental concerns on dialogue. Lack of understanding
among farmers, ranchers and environmentalists in these regions
is an ongoing problem. These dioceses have instituted The
Southern Plains Conference: The Promised Land Network. Under
this program, farmers, ranchers and environmentalists will
meet and explore common values and goals.
On
a smaller scale, Our Lady Gate of Heaven Parish Council
in Chicago has formed the Pollution Prevention Public Education
Project to motivate plant owners and managers to reduce
toxic emissions.
And
the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin, is training elementary
and middle school students to understand better their roles
as “stewards” of God’s creation and what that entails.
Stories
such as these are springing up across the United States.
And although they are as varied in focus and scope as those
above, each one is addressing the very real issue of the
connection between the environment and social issues, also
known as environmental justice.
Environmental
justice is defined as the search for a just solution to
the disproportionate burdens of environmental degradation.
In many cases, these burdens are borne by the poor and people
of color.
For
instance, in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, Focolare,
a Catholic ecclesial organization, developed a project in
response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “brownfield”
program. (Brownfields are contaminated commercial or industrial
sites.) Brownfields are often located in low-income urban
communities. This program will consist of four community
meetings to educate, encourage and enable low-income residents
to be informed about any efforts to clean up brownfields
in their communities.
National
Program Supporting Local Efforts
The
force behind these initiatives is the U.S. Catholic Conference’s
(USCC) Environmental Justice Program (EJP). Begun in the
fall of 1993, the program is part of the larger interfaith
National Religious Partnership for the Environment. The
U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches,
the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, and the
Evangelical Environmental Network set up that partnership
in 1992.
Walt
Grazer, policy adviser for the USCC Office for International
Justice and Peace, spoke about the vision of the Environmental
Justice Program with St. Anthony Messenger last year.
In
the fall of 1993, the Environmental Justice Program got
under way as a means of “addressing questions of ecology
and environment through Catholic social teaching a little
more forthrightly or in a more intensive fashion,” says
Grazer. The goal of the program is to help educate and motivate
Catholics to a deeper respect for God’s creation and to
engage parishes in activities aimed at dealing with environmental
problems, particularly as they affect poor people.
The
program “was kind of a natural outgrowth of work that has
in some ways gone on for 70 years through the National Catholic
Rural Life Conference, which addressed the relationship
between the environment and agriculture,” says Grazer.
The
farm crisis in the 1980s also raised an awareness of the
link between the environment and social issues. Then, in
the late ’80s, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles suggested
that the bishops begin attending more to questions concerning
the environment. So in 1989, Grazer organized a symposium
of ethicists, policy analysts and scientists to discuss
the issue.
The
next year, the issue of ecology received a boost when Pope
John Paul II issued his 1990 World Day of Peace message,
The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsibility. In
the message, the pope called the environmental crisis a
“moral issue” and pointed out the “growing awareness that
world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional
conflicts and continued injustices among peoples and nations,
but also by a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering
of natural resources and by a progressive decline in the
quality of life.” He further noted, “Christians, in particular,
realize that their responsibility within creation and their
duty toward nature and the Creator are an essential part
of their faith.”
The
U.S. bishops then followed up a year later with their own
statement on the environment. In Renewing the Earth:
An Invitation to Reflection and Action on the Environment
in Light of Catholic Social Teaching, the bishops wrote,
“At its core, the environmental crisis is a moral challenge.
It calls us to examine how we use and share the goods of
the earth that we pass on to future generations and how
we live in harmony with God’s creation.” They went on to
ask, “How are we called to care for God’s creation? How
may we apply our social teaching, with its emphasis on the
life and dignity of the human person, to the challenge of
protecting the earth, our common home?”
All
of those events, Grazer points out, as well as the bishops’
involvement with the National Religious Partnership for
the Environment, were “a laying of the ground for how we
ought to begin thinking about this question.”
Going
Local
The
strategy for developing the program was twofold, says Grazer.
“One was integration. We wanted people to keep their same
camera, but we wanted them to put a wide-angle lens on it.
The second strategy was to go local because the beauty of
the environment is we’re a part of it and it’s right where
you live, in addition to certain kinds of large global questions.
“We
thought it would be best to try to develop leadership and
let people’s imaginations work primarily locally rather
than create a big national program and invite everyone to
this party. It was kind of, ‘How do we come to your party?’”
When
establishing the program, the bishops mandated a broad policy
framework which encompassed four areas of priority: 1) environmental
justice, defined as a strong link between social justice
and environmental protection, emphasizing the needs of the
poor; 2) sustainable development, with an emphasis on social
and economic development that not only protects the sustainability
of natural resources but also promotes a just distribution
of resources for today’s and future generations; 3) worker
protection, with an emphasis on not sacrificing workers’
needs at the expense of environmental protection, or vice
versa; and 4) the “commons,” defined as protecting vital
global shared resources such as the oceans, land, water
and fisheries.
Out
of that underlying view, four aspects of the program were
developed: parish resources, leadership development, scholarly
activity and public policy/advocacy.
In
an attempt to get parishes and dioceses thinking locally,
each parish in the United States received a resource kit
from EJP. The kits contain a video entitled The Earth
Is the Lord’s and other basic materials. These motivational
(rather than issue-oriented) kits focus on the religious
and moral dimensions of environmental justice, encouraging
people to think about ways they can address the issue.
The
second aspect was leadership development. Seeking to help
Catholic leaders develop an awareness of environmental justice
issues on a diocesan and parish level, the EJP began sponsoring
regional retreats. The retreats, which include a field trip
of some sort, are spiritual in nature and encourage participants
to think about the issue of environmental justice within
the context of Catholic teaching.
In
an attempt to develop more leadership on a local level,
the program began sponsoring small grants of $500 to $1,500
for parishes or dioceses to “spark imagination” and encourage
creative environmental initiatives. Grazer says the grants
reflect a unique aspect of the program. With the number
of parishes in the United States, however, it became clear
that EJP would not be able to continue with the small grants
for an extended period of time. “We wanted mostly models
that we could then shop around so people would call and
we could say, ‘Well, here’s what St. Mary’s Parish did in
Kansas City,’ or something like that,” he says.
As
dioceses began to go through the leadership training, the
small grants were stopped and the money was combined to
offer larger grants in an attempt to get dioceses to cooperate
on projects. The grants ranged from $4,000 to $6,000. “Again,
the emphasis was on building Church leadership and questions
related to social justice,” Grazer points out. “Beyond that,
we didn’t try to detail what they did. They could do whatever.
And it’s been interesting.” In February, the program began
soliciting proposals from dioceses for possible funding.
The
Columbia River Watershed Initiative (www.columbiariver.org)
is a prime example of this type of diocesan cooperation
on a project, Grazer says. “This is a unique project—kind
of our poster child. And the process has been fascinating.
[The bishops] didn’t just try to go off and write a pastoral.
They have been conducting these listening sessions up and
down the river with all sorts of groups from all sides of
this issue. I went to one of them and it was quite remarkable.”
The bishops, he says, provided people with a dignified way
to address the issue, and there was “great appreciation
by community people that this was being looked at seriously
by a major religious group.”
Third,
the program addressed the issue from a scholarly point of
view “in order to root this thing in Catholic theology and
social teaching,” says Grazer. Scholars’ consultations,
which unite ethicists and policy analysts and scientists,
have been held in Oregon, Maine and Washington, D.C. Papers
that were presented at one of the first consultations have
been compiled in the book And God Saw That It Was Good:
Catholic Theology and the Environment. Finally, the
EJP addressed ways to impact public policy surrounding environmental
justice issues from a distinctly Catholic perspective. Some
of the issues the program has addressed are: 1) urban sprawl,
2) brownfields, 3) children’s environmental health, 4) renewable
energy and 5) selected international concerns.
Children
Suffer the Most
The
connection between the environmental crisis and the impact
that it has on society is a very important aspect of the
EJP. Grazer says that it is often the poor who have the
fewest resources and live in the places no one else wants
to—next to waste dumps or polluted water. They in turn suffer
the ill effects of environmental problems.
“The
pope calls for the right to a safe environment,” Grazer
says. “Well, for many of these people, they don’t have a
safe environment. And so from the justice point of view,
the question becomes: What does it mean to have a right
to a safe environment when you have these people who obviously
don’t have access to clean water, clean air and, perhaps
even worse, are working in industries where they’re exposed—like
farmworkers—to high amounts of chemicals?”
In
August 1999, a special effort was launched on behalf of
children’s environmental health. Children, says Grazer,
are especially susceptible to environmental health hazards.
The
effort brings together Catholic Charities USA, the National
Catholic Education Association, the National Council of
Catholic Women, the National Association of Catholic Facilities
Managers, the Catholic Hospital Association, the USCC Pro-life
Secretariat and the Domestic Social Development Office to
promote a concern for protecting the unborn and children
from the harmful effects of environmental pollution.
Dominion
Is Not Dominating
When
asked what message Grazer hopes the Environmental Justice
Program sends to people, he quickly responds, “Simply that
the Church cares. That this is an important modern question
and that the Church does not want to neglect a question
which is important basically for the health of God’s creation
and obviously for the human community. This is not a question
that can be or should be neglected and, therefore, if we’re
all members of the Church, in some kind of way all of us
have some responsibility right where we are, even if it’s
very little and even if it’s very simple. We need to exercise
some kind of stewardship over that little bit of earth that
we live on.”
The
notion of humans “having dominion”—in the sense of crassly
dominating or exploiting—over the earth is one which Grazer
says is borne out of a misinterpretation of Scripture, especially
Genesis 1:28 (“God blessed them, saying: ‘Be fertile and
multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over
the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living
things that move on the earth’”).
Grazer
points out that “the original text in Hebrew doesn’t have
those notions. The whole purpose of the kingship notion
was to stand in the place of God, so it wasn’t like ‘I get
to do what I want.’ It’s to act in God’s stead. We’re part
of nature. We’re part of the environment and so we have
to learn to live in some type of symbiotic relationship
with nature. We don’t have some kind of wanton right.”
Answering
the Call
So
how can you begin exercising stewardship in your own community?
Grazer offers the following suggestions for getting involved:
