by Melanie Pino-Elliott | Jul 6, 2015 | Climate Justice, Global Justice
I’ll never forget the time in eighth-grade religion class when one of my classmates asked why our school didn’t participate in neighborhood cleanup days. My teacher replied, “It’s not fair to worry about things like that when souls are going to Hell every day.”
She elaborated, “The earth can save itself.”
Seriously. A human being actually uttered that sentence without irony.
This teacher would also frequently stress the importance of following everything the Catholic Church teaches without question. (You can’t just pick and choose!)
Which, of course, begs the question of how she and others from this line of thinking are responding to Pope Francis’s new encyclical on ecology and climate change.
Entitled Laudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home, the official statement of church teaching calls on all of humanity to do their part to stop environmental deterioration; to “recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption in order to combat this warming” and protect our shared home.
However, protecting the environment and acting as stewards of the earth are not new concepts for the Church. In 1981, the U.S. Catholic Conference even issued a statement that recognized the threat of climate change and the need for clean energy.
So while the encyclical may be increasing global consciousness and moving the sympathetic to act, it’s probably not troubling the deniers as much as you’d think.
I also remember back when Pope John Paul II changed the order of the Mass so that the congregation would stand up before the offertory prayer instead of after. My school promptly implemented this change in their daily Mass. It was around the time JPII also spoke out against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This went unacknowledged; however, teachers and students alike rallied around George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection, enthusiastically endorsing his foreign policy.
On the encyclical, we’re already seeing a huge backlash from U.S. politicians, including Catholics.
“I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope,” said Jeb Bush. “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.”
Republican energy lobbyist and political consultant Michael McKenna declared,
This pope is selling a line of Latin American-style socialism. This guy is not in sync with the American Catholic Church. Guys like Jeb and Rubio are more in line with the American Catholic Church than the pope.
Couple of important points here:
- Climate change cannot be written off as a political issue; in fact, it constitutes a moral crisis. The world’s poorest countries—the ones who have contributed the least to climate change—are the ones being hit hardest by emissions from big polluters. Serving the poor and caring for the most vulnerable among us is a pretty key part of the Catholic faith. One I think would fall under the category of “things that make us better as people.”
- Even if a slight majority of American Catholics disagree that climate change is dangerous and human caused, guess what? Catholic doctrine doesn’t depend on public opinion. If a poll found that a majority of Catholics didn’t believe in helping the poor, that wouldn’t change Church teaching either. The “American Catholic Church” is not somehow exempt from papal authority.
Denouncing the Pope for promoting environmental responsibility is not bolstering anyone’s credibility—religiously, politically, or morally.
Tell your members of Congress to stand with Pope Francis and support U.S. climate leadership.
Originally published July 6, 2015.
by Jack Pearce | Jun 5, 2015 | Climate Justice, Global Cooperation
As I discussed in Part 1 of this blog series, Over the next 70 years, our children and grandchildren will need to negotiate three major transitions in human civilization: the transition to large-scale sustainable energy flows, managing the environmental impact of human civilization, and maintaining global governance systems that enable humans to meet these challenges. CGS and its members can play a role in all three transitions.
Thinking about environmental issues often evokes a feeling of impending doom, due to dwindling fossil energy supplies, population above environmental and economic sustainability, and heedless, ungovernable “human nature.”
However, analysts around the world now suggest that if we are disciplined, patient, and prudent, we may be able to expand sustainable energy supplies to civilization-maintaining levels. We now see early versions of ideas for managing economic and environmental assets to produce futures both ecologically sustainable and reasonably comfortable for humankind.
I suggest a few major themes to keep before us:
First an evolutionary product of nature, we as humans are now evolving along with nature (though the processes are not equal—nature is bigger.) Microscopic nature has adjusted to us and will continue to do so, at least on land. Microbes rule. Plants and other animals are experiencing major difficulties with our teeming numbers. But we are going to have to adjust to what works for them also, or they will not support us.
Ecologists have calculated that humans have assumed some control of about 40% of the earth’s vegetation, and either use or otherwise cause to be lost to other creatures about 25% of the world’s potential vegetation biomass. We humans might think that impressive, but we may be wrenching the life circumstances of honeybees so drastically as to imperil their ability to pollinate crops making up major parts of our diet. The U.S. White House is orchestrating a response to this threat. In the oceans, fish populations are under great stress. So we have to let the rest of nature live if it is to let us do so.
Second, we need to move from parasite to producer. Most of the life system works off organic photosynthesis. If we replace energy from life-stored fossil fuels with sun, wind, and nuclear alternatives, we will be in a position to add to the world’s energy. With this sustained energy flow, we would have the capability to add measurably to the overall scope of life on this earth instead of merely plundering it. We need to reduce where we impose too much and add where we can.
Third, closely related, we need to recognize that to sustain a high energy, high complexity lifestyle there must be a huge life system (including the oxygen in the air, microbes, and much else), much of it lower in complexity, into which humanity fits. This has to do with “power law” understandings pioneered by Mark Buchanan and Stephen Jay Gould. (Here is an extended treatment of these concepts as applied to humans. See also cosmologist Eric Chaisson’s treatment of complexity in his marvelous website on cosmic evolution).
Fourth, in this co-evolutionary process, local realities sum up to global reality, and global imperatives must be localized. As the United Nations Environmental Program recognizes, diverse circumstances require diverse solutions. But lessons learned locally can often be shared. The sum total of humanity’s successful reconciliation with nature is its successful local initiatives: setting aside wildlands for bees, perhaps, economizing on water use in watersheds, protecting wetlands, maintaining vegetation in arid regions, and the like. We may not often need projects of the scope of China’s 1400-year-old, thousand-mile-long grand canal. Many less grand but useful programs may do.
CGS is actively involved in a current, pressing global issue: keeping the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere from rising dangerously. CGS climate change resources and actions offer opportunities to make contributions in a number of ways. Keep informed and stay active.
by Jack Pearce | May 25, 2015 | Climate Justice, Global Cooperation
This is the first of three planned blogs to focus on three crucial levers to a sustainable and ample life for our children and grandchildren.
Over their lifespans—the next 70 years—they are going to need to negotiate three major transitions in human civilization:
- The transition to large-scale sustainable energy flows
- Managing the massive impact of human civilization on the environment which created and sustains us
- Maintaining global governance systems that enable humans to meet these challenges
Regarding energy, there can be little doubt that only solar energy is large enough to sustain a growing and more widely prosperous human civilization, though solar can be supplemented by wind, nuclear, some biomass, and possibly geothermal energy sources. But the transition to this sustainable regime will leverage off the fossil fuel foundation and will take a few decades.
For further information check out:
We must maintain a significant amount of fossil fuel use for some time without producing massive harm to global and local ecosystems. This means controlling the levels of greenhouse gas emissions even as we use fossil fuels. There are proposed geoengineering’ solutions, but they have major issues with scope and effective implementation over decades.
With public support such as research facilities and state or local clean energy promotion agencies, major renewable energy technologies seem to be rapidly approaching cost levels competitive with fossil fuel energy. We need to continue to smooth the way for solar and other renewable developments while removing or diminishing subsidies for fossil fuels.
What can a CGS member do? The opportunities for useful activities will change and evolve over time. But today has some opportunities.
Much solar energy development is linked to the electricity supply system. Participants in this system see the big changes coming, with traditional electric utilities at something of a crossroads. You can encourage development in useful directions by:
- Letting your local and state utility commissions know that you want to see ample scope for energy conservation (including measures like distributed generation, microgrids, ‘‘smart” grid management, solar energy, and battery backup deployment).
- Supporting federally funded research into the technologies of the future, including solar, wind, and battery systems, and federal efforts to encourage states and localities to lower the costs of solar and wind energy.
In the climate change area, you can continue to support:
- Innovative ways in the United States to lower emissions, such as Representative Van Hollen’s “cap and dividend” proposal.
- Maintenance of Environmental Protection Agency emissions control authorities, regardless of which political party may have the Presidency or Congressional majorities at any given time.
- Worldwide efforts to target lower greenhouse gas emissions, and create programs in our government and others to meet those targets (for example, Kyoto Protocol, in which the US, China and India are major laggards). The United Nations Environmental program has recently released an informative report on pathways to limit and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
CGS will continue to alert you to developments in these areas, and seek your support for timely action opportunities as they arise.
by Don Kraus | May 20, 2015 | Climate Justice
We live in narrow times—a time of Mitzrayim.*
On one side, violence spreads like cancer. ISIL, Ukraine, Sudan, DRC, and too much more. Some of the violence is old. Some is new. But it eats at the slow-growing embryo of our oneness.
On the other side, the climate that sustains humanity is in slow-motion collapse. Melting Arctic ice packs slow the Gulf Stream; destabilization of Antarctic glaciers adds to rising sea levels, record high temperatures, ocean acidification, mass extinctions, and too much more.
We live between these threats.
Some of us wear blinders, look towards neither side and focus on what we can control—our families, our work, our daily lives. Some of look to one side or the other and shout warnings like prophets of old.
Others work to find a way—step by step—to carefully thread this narrow maze in which we find ourselves.
Our technology is both cause and solution. We live in cultures ranging from the Stone Age to the Information Age.
We create the means to travel fast and far, which binds us together into a growing global organism, yet fouls the air and transmits global pandemics.
We design powerful weapons to protect us from the “other:” Smart bombs used in dumb wars and mass killers that leave us less secure and questioning our morality.
We build a digital nervous system that allows us truly to live in a world as each other’s eyes and ears with cloud memories and massive knowledge at our finger tips—but leaves our inner selves, our identities, open to theft.
We learn how to feed and heal our billions of bodies. So our population continues to grow. We have become a fetus consuming and fouling the egg which still shelters us.
So much has happened in so short a time.
If humanity’s 200,000 years was a day, then in less than the last two minutes we have:
- expanded our numbers—from less than a billion to over seven billion and counting
- shortened the time to circumnavigate our world from years to hours
- decreased the time to spread a message across the earth from decades to seconds
Never before have there been so many mouths to feed and smiles to receive.
Never before has the gap between rich and poor—the haves and have nots—been so wide.
Never before have we said “Never Again” and sought the means to make it a reality.
We traverse a narrow place—and this generation’s task is to point the way to the other side.
To draw the map.
To begin a journey.
To life.
To birth.
To the step beyond.
* The name for “Egypt” in Hebrew is “Mitzrayim” which is from the Hebrew word “metzar” meaning “narrow,” or “constriction.” Egypt was the ultimate place of constriction. No slave had ever escaped from there, let alone an entire nation.
by CGS Blog Archive | Mar 20, 2015 | Climate Justice, Global Cooperation
This blog was authored by Edward Rawson, Executive Director of Haiti Friends (not to be confused with Ed Rawson, founding member of CGS).
By the turn of the 21st century, 98% of Haiti had been deforested due to logging for timber, slash-and-burn agriculture, and the great demand for cooking fuel. Most of the land’s rich topsoil has washed into the sea, where it chokes the reefs and marine life.
Haiti’s mountains have eroded to bedrock and its aquifers are drying up. The habitat loss for wildlife is staggering, with many native plants and animals on international registries of endangered species. The deforestation and the resulting desertification is Haiti’s single largest ecological problem, which has had a negative ripple effect on the overall ecology of Haiti and its surrounding waters.
In response, the Haiti Timber Re-Introduction Program (HTRIP) began in 2008 as a grassroots movement that applies a scientific and education-based approach to support communities in the mountain regions. HTRIP seeks to transform the mountains with three approaches:
- Building rock walls to lessen topsoil erosion while collecting soil and limiting flow down into the coastal alluvial plains.
- Building water basins to collect rain water to extend the rain season, establishing greater access to water for people, and providing irrigation during dry spells.
- Reintroducing trees to the mountainsides; some for timber, some for fruit, and some for ecologic reasons such as nitrogen fixation and addressing the relatively low ratio of organic material to lithic material In the soil due to desertification.
Because deforestation is a human-caused issue, HTRIP puts the power of change in the hands of the people.
HTRIP educators and technicians have worked with committees of farmers in more than 63 communities, providing education, technical assistance, and basic tools to convert currently unproductive farmer-owned land into productive fields through erosion control, contour trenches, composting, and planting indigenous trees. Farmers in the communities we serve have planted 1.6 million trees to date, and in July of this year, the communities will be planting the 2-millionth tree using our tried and tested approach.
In each new HTRIP community, committee members participate in monthly education sessions on agricultural techniques and soil management. Community member’s neighbors help out by participating in communal work sessions to control erosion and prepare plots for planting. The farmers work to plant a variety of trees in each site, providing diversity through the mixture of trees, which provide timber, produce fruit, or support nitrogen-fixation. Food crops, such as millet, corn and several varieties of beans, are planted among the young trees. The introduction of animal husbandry and apiculture techniques completes the cycle in creating highly productive farms on once desolate land.
Each HTRIP community acquires technical skills, and the techniques of collaborative work and decision-making is encouraged. The leadership garnered means people are tied to making change and reducing environmental distress.
by Jennifer Welden | Jan 2, 2015 | Climate Justice
2014 has been quite a year: from climate change to the World Cup to the recent revelations about the US’s torture strategies, it is clear that we still have a ways to go. And while it is easy to remain cynical as we enter a new year, there is still room for hope. The same problems may not, in fact, have the same solutions (or lack thereof) in 2015.
Take climate change. We have already seen advances in technology that are leading to possible solutions all over the world. These local programs – such as recycling programs, solar-powered boats, and a revolutionary biofuel clean up project using algae – all have the potential one day to be global solutions.
In fact, many of my posts have implicitly highlighted this: local solutions are often the stepping-stone to global policies and practices. Whether it is at the country level, the company level, or at the much more local level, small changes can culminate in widespread results.
Admittedly, however, there is still much cause for skepticism. For example, the year has shown us the continued failure to regulate fishing, which has significant implications not only for our ecosystem, but also for millions of people in developing countries. While once again there are local solutions, like the sustainable fishing co-op CatchBox, there is still a role for government to play if we want to see improvements on a global scale.
I wish I could end this post with the same cliché “new year, new me” optimism that we see plastered over the internet, but unfortunately I have to take a more qualified stance: new year, maybe new world. The outcomes of 2015 depend very much on local, national, and international actors; the local level may drive changes, but it is up to governments to implement those changes. At the international level, the credibility and future of the UN hinges very much on its ability to act timely and effectively on such matters as climate change, which is quite far from a sure thing.
Addressing the issues of 2015 can very easily be analogized to setting a New Year’s resolution: the success of that resolution ultimately rests on you. As we enter a new year, citizens, politicians, and governments alike must recognize that it is up to us to solve our own problems. Unlike a New Year’s resolution, we cannot just sit idly by and try again next year.
