 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
January 8, 2007 • VOL. 45, NO. 1 • Oakland, CA
Christian Brother promotes environmental justice worldwide
 |
| Children test the water from a new tap at an elementary
school in Hichuraya, Bolivia, in October. The village’s water
system was installed with the aid of a Maryknoll lay missioner and
a nonprofit organization working together to bring safe water for
drinking, cooking and washing to households in Bolivia’s rural
villages. CNS PHOTO/BARBARA FRASER |
COCHABAMBA,
Bolivia (CNS) -- Everywhere he goes, Australian Christian Brother Moy
Hitchen urges people to get out into nature and listen to the earth.
“I’m trying to say ‘Love your local ecosystem,’”
he said. “Get out there and find the rocks, the soil, the trees,
the bushes, the birds that belong to (your) part of the world, and then
think, what does the earth want us to do?”
As the Christian Brothers’ international promoter of environmental
justice, Brother Moy’s travels have taken him from rural villages
in Melanesia, where he learned about ancestral farming and hunting practices,
to a school in India where 3,000 elementary and high school students share
the grounds with hawks, mongooses, squirrels and parrots.
In a sprawling slum in Nairobi, Kenya, he was struck by the contrast between
environmental disaster -- a “filthy black river (of) industrial
waste, human sewage and plastic bags full of household garbage”
-- and vestiges of the natural world that were struggling to survive.
“I saw five species of birds from the local area and 12 species
of plants in that slum, hanging on by their claws and by the tips of their
roots,” he said. “If the people in the slum don’t deserve
a decent environment, who does? The slum will only be rehabilitated when
the earth is back, when the river is clean and the trees are growing.”
Part of Brother Moy’s job is to visit Christian Brothers around
the world and encourage them to understand that ecology is an issue rooted
in both spirituality and justice.
“The great spiritual traditions are in partnership with the earth,”
he told Catholic News Service during a visit to Christian Brothers working
in this central Bolivian city.
“And the Congress of Consecrated Life in Rome in 2004 had 16 recommendations,
one of which was to maintain a triple dialogue -- dialogue with the poor,
dialogue with the world religions and dialogue with the earth.”
Brother Moy sees a close connection between social justice and ecological
justice. The cry of the earth, he said, can be heard in the cry of the
poor. In much of the world, when farmers can no longer make a living on
their exhausted land, they migrate to the shantytowns in and around cities.
“Every piece of damaged countryside sends another family to the
city,” he said, “so environmental degradation and poverty
are interconnected.”
While indigenous people and farm families in developing countries are
keenly aware of the need to live in balance with nature, that bond has
been lost in industrialized countries, he said.
“In the First World, city students in our schools don’t know
their local ecosystem,” while students in Christian Brother-run
schools in New Guinea and India were able to tell him that their local
ecosystems were “swamp forest, savannah woodland, rain forest or
delta,” he said.
One result of that disconnection from nature, Brother Moy said, is that
people in industrialized countries consume more than their share of the
earth’s resources.
“That’s my biggest challenge,” he said. “I’m
talking to people about their ecological footprint. The ecological footprint
of my own country, Australia, is four times what the earth can sustain.
If everybody lived like we live, you would need four planet earths.”
In his visits to Christian Brothers around the world, he urges them to
find ways to simplify their lifestyles.
“It might be things like no cars,” he said. “There might
be quite hard decisions to be made about diet, about lifestyle, about
where you live.”
For examples of what can happen when a society strains its natural resources
beyond the breaking point, Brother Moy turns to the Bible. In the stories
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he said, “the holy oak, the sacred
mountain, the rock he had the dream on -- the earth is charged with divine
presence, that Holy Land we’re talking about all the time. The promised
land.”
The prophet Amos, who was a shepherd, compared God’s voice to the
roar of a lion. But by Jesus’ time, he said, “there were no
lions, no more leopards, no more deer. The Promised Land was destroyed
by the agricultural and pastoral practices of hundreds of years. There’s
been massive ecological devastation going on, and it’s in the Bible
if you read it carefully enough.”
Brother Moy said he encourages the Christian Brothers to adopt and teach
the principles of the U.N. Earth Charter, which offers guidelines for
stewardship of the earth. Despite the ecological disasters he has seen,
he said, he finds hope in the earth itself.
“I need weekly to get out into that local ecosystem -- rocks, soil,
air, water, trees, plants, birds,” Brother Moy said. “I really
believe that the earth, whatever we’ve done to her, is saying: ‘I
want to heal. I want to be healed. I want you to be part of the healing.’
And she will assist us in that growth toward God.”
