Putting Earth at the Heart

Whatever else occupies these pages in the decades to come, environmental issues will be at the forefront. Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute contends that humanity has about 40 years to make the shifts in thinking and living that will save the Earth.

Let it be said first that concern about Earth's environment signifies no departure whatsoever from the issues of justice and peace that have filled this magazine for the past two decades. On the contrary, it will only be through even more serious efforts toward equity and dignity for the poor and through peaceful solutions to human conflict that the planet will be saved.

A faith-inspired environmentalism does not come out of some selfish, affluent desire to purify OUR air, OUR soil, OUR water. What Christians envision for this world goes to the very heart of what it means to be human -- living in harmony with all of nature and with human beings. We offer two theses in this regard.

First, social injustice increases environmental decline. Take the air. Through our exorbitant lifestyles, the wealthiest fifth of humanity is pumping out more than half of the greenhouse gases that threaten the Earth's climate. Or think of the soil. Poverty on the current macro level is clearly the chief underlying reason for soil degradation and desertification. Millions of desperate people around the world overexploit their tiny plots, overgraze rangeland, destroy forests to farm -- knowing to their own horror that these practices will quickly erode the poor soil beneath them. And consider water. While water from a single spring in France is bottled and shipped to the prosperous few around the world, 1.9 billion people drink and bathe in water contaminated with deadly parasites and pathogens; more than half of humanity lacks sanitary toilets.

It is clear, then, that our struggle for a more equitable, peaceable world now takes on dramatic proportions. We no longer act only on behalf of those who are poor, or to help the victims of injustice. Now it is all of us humans who are endangered, together with our only habitat, the Earth. For if the increasing spiral of poverty threatens air, soil, and water, can any of us say that we shall long remain immune?

The second thesis is the converse of the first. Environmental degradation disproportionately harms the poor. We know the magnitude of destitution within which hordes of the Earth's people exist: 400 million persons so undernourished that they face stunted growth, mental retardation, and death; 880 million adults who cannot read or write their own names; 14 million children dead of eradicable diseases in 1988. The grim statistics go on and on, numbing the mind.

Now we are increasingly aware that this poverty is exacerbated by environmental decline. For example, the most concentrated hazardous waste dumps in the United States are found in the predominantly black and Latino South Side of Chicago. And the largest hazardous waste landfill -- receiving more than one-fourth of such waste in this country -- is located in Sumter County, in Alabama's poor "black belt."

Global warming impacts the poor in egregious disproportion as well. People already struggling just to survive will suffer still more as Earth's temperature rises, as heat waves and droughts occur, and as rising seas flood low-lying coastal lands such as Bangladesh and the Nile Delta with their destitute populations. Ships filled with toxic wastes from industrial countries carry their cargoes to poor countries where this poison is stored for small fees in sites that are often unsafe. And as governments pour hundreds of billions of dollars into sea walls, new irrigation systems, flood prevention, and countless other projects that would minimize the effects of global warming, it is the health, education, and anti-poverty budgets that will first be sacrificed.

WE CAN OFFER NO quick fixes or easy solutions, for there are none. In the words of playwright Christopher Fry, "Affairs are now soul size. The enterprise is exploration into God."

Rather than solutions, we first deal with soul-sized questions such as: Will we survive as a planet and as a human race? Will we live out the dream of co-creating with God "the new heavens and the new Earth"? Or are we destined for nothingness?

At Sojourners, we cannot believe the latter, despite all the evidence around us. We are women and men of hope, Easter people, trusting that God will inspire humanity to overcome our latest and worst crisis. But we believe also that human beings, all of us, must make best use of the next several decades and turn our course away from death toward life.

We call for continuing Bible study on the vision held out to us in our faith tradition. We pledge ourselves, as our next decades unfold, to take up the cause of the Earth as vigorously as we have advocated for its most needy people in the past.

Then will the desert become an orchard and the orchard be regarded as a forest. Right will dwell in the desert and justice abide in the orchard. Justice will bring about peace; right will produce calm and security. My people will live in a peaceful country, in secure dwellings and quiet resting places (Isaiah 32:15-18).

In Christ were created all things in heaven and on Earth, all things were created through him and for him ... In him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16-17).

Joe Nangle, OFM, was executive assistant of Sojourners when this article appeared.