climate justice
But during that conversation with Rev. Dr. Durley, I realized that there is one compelling reason that Christians should all care about the earth — generational legacy. We have to create a legacy of and a world that is safe for future generations to breathe in, live in, and thrive in
Organized by a number of local and national partners, the Freedom to Breathe tour bus is a “vehicle for social change” and moving art installation. The bus has been on the road since Aug. 25, capturing the stories of climate leaders and organizers in impacted communities across the United States and sharing them out under the hashtag #FreedomToBreathe.
I confess it is so easy, and tempting, for me to become exorcised over Donald Trump’s daily deceits, narcissism, and shredding of public virtue. But a deeper threat looms, begun many decades before. Humanity is destroying the integrity of God’s creation. The most flagrant and catastrophic assaults are now altering the globe’s climate in ways that already are impacting the world’s most vulnerable people and threatening us all. President Trump’s policies are aimed at liberating constraints on the burning of more coal and carbon, come hell or high water.
Catovic, 53, is an American Muslim of Bosnian-Anglo descent who lives in New Jersey and serves as the senior Islamic advisor to GreenFaith, an interfaith coalition for environmental issues. He believes the responsibility of fighting climate change begins with the individual, but stresses that the Green Hajj is “not just about the more privileged parts of the Western World. I am just one person who is making this commitment. There are many other millions of people who are doing this too.”
The Trump administration’s proposed replacement, known as the Affordable Clean Energy proposal or “ACE,” would grant individual states more flexibility in how to regulate and reduce emissions. According to the EPA Fact Sheet, it would also “promote investments to make coal plants cleaner, modern, and more efficient.”
FILE PHOTO: EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt attends a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington. June 21, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt has resigned, Trump said on Thursday.
SOMETIMES TRAVEL exposes you to new things, and sometimes it reminds you how much is the same the world over.
I’ve just returned from a long organizing expedition from one end of the Pacific to the other: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, the San Francisco Bay. Many of the issues were the same, of course: plans for new coal mines and oil pipelines.
But what really struck me was that almost everywhere I went, Indigenous people are driving the fight. Whether it is battling new coal mines in Australia, protecting the Great Australian Bight from offshore drilling, stopping fracking in New Zealand, battling the Kinder Morgan pipeline headed for Vancouver, or standing up to California Gov. Jerry Brown over the Golden State’s endless oil drilling, native activists are leading the way.
This should come as no surprise. Groups such as Tom Goldtooth’s Indigenous Environmental Network have been at the forefront for decades; younger leaders such as Clayton Thomas-Müller and Melina Laboucan-Massimo have long been raising the alarm about Canada’s tar sands; and in the low-lying islands of the Pacific, great organizers are fighting against rapid climate change in every forum they can find. Winona LaDuke, Pennie Opal Plant, Rueben George—it’s an endless list. But perhaps Standing Rock—the great battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline—helped everyone see the depth and breadth of this leadership. New leaders appeared, and new groups, and arguments that had been too little heard got a much broader airing.
Photo by Steven Su on Unsplash
Starting today, Presbyterian activists are walking from denominational headquarters in Louisville, Ky., to the PC(USA_ General Assembly in St. Louis, Mo., to pressure delegates at the assembly to divest all of the denomination’s fossil fuel holdings. It’s a bold, dramatic action within a denomination that’s often better known for being decent and in order, than for causing a stir.
A coalition of faith leaders took to the steps of the Interior Department April 19 to ask Secretary Ryan Zinke to curb methane leaks at natural gas drilling sites. Notably, the group included a representative from the evangelical community.
In the past 50 years, the country has made great strides toward equity. But racism is still embedded in every aspect of American culture, from the churches we occupy to the environmental issues shaping our planet. People of faith can tackle these problems by working outside the lines that keep churches racially segregated. One way forward is through collaborating with other church communities on joint environmental projects.
While we look out over creation, we must earnestly ask ourselves how we can participate in communion with the lands surrounding us if there is no clean water to drink, food to eat, or creation in which to delight.
ONE OF THE conceits of modern life is that it’s always going to work out, always going to be okay. Indeed, it’s going to be better than it ever was. But the world is testing that idea.
When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico—its buzz-saw eye ripping from one end of the island to the other—it changed almost everything in the course of a few hours. Gone were airports and roads. Eighty percent of the island’s crops were destroyed—think of that. Almost all the cell towers: There were profound images of groups of people standing in fields where the few remaining transponders would catch a signal, desperately trying to phone friends and family. Electricity was suddenly a thing of the past, and in places likely to stay that way for six months or a year. And when you lose electricity—well, there goes AC, not to mention ice. The concept of cold disappears for a while. Modernity retreats.
When progress we have worked so hard to achieve is being reversed, we must work to strengthen the partnerships between and among the faith community, communities of color, the environmental policy community, and the grassroots climate justice movement. We need to rebuild, inspire, and resource an American majority that recognizes the reality of climate change and seeks to stop it. The environmental movement must be more open to climate justice concerns and faith perspectives. Faith communities of color must be mobilized to view combatting climate change and building resiliency to climate change effects as central to their missions. And the resolve of sympathetic white evangelicals and Catholics — especially young people — who support action on climate change must be strengthened.
Image via DarwelShots / Shutterstock.com
In my experience, Democrats in Congress see the iceberg and want to steer away while Republicans, with mercifully increasing exceptions, don't. Congressional offices tend to fall into three categories: climate affirmative, climate dismissive, and climate indifferent.
4. Houston Flooding Always Hits Poor, Non-White Neighborhoods Hardest
“You’re talking about a perfect storm of pollution, environmental racism, and health risks that are probably not going to be measured and assessed until decades later.”
The logo of Exxon Mobil Corporation is shown on a monitor above the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, December 30, 2015. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson/File Photo
Supran and Oreskes said that while, as early as 1979, Exxon scientists acknowledged burning fossil fuels was adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and causing global temperatures to rise, the company's position in newspaper ads remained significantly different by consistently asserting doubt about climate science.
Americans think of the U.S. as being a classless society. Piketty points out that our country invented progressive taxation of income and of large estates, to avoid the inequalities rife in a patrimonial society like “Old Europe.”
Image via Dhanya Addanki/ Sojourners
Help them understand they have a voice.
Elizabeth Brandt, a mom and a participant of the play-in, takes her young daughters to her senators’ office. She believes she believes this will lay a foundation for her daughter to speak up throughout her life.
“She may not have the most articulate things to say — last year when she was three she asked them not to throw trash in the ocean which our senators don’t do — but she’s learning that she has a voice in this process and that’s about the most important thing,” said Brandt.
Image via Nicole S Glass / Shutterstock.com
The pope talks about environmental protections from a spiritual perspective — an understanding of creation as a holy and precious gift from God, to be revered by all. We should make it a priority to keep our air clean, our water pristine, and our land whole. Whether we understand environmental stewardship as a God-given moral responsibility or from an economic and military strategic viewpoint, the fact remains: Environmental instability is inextricably linked to economic instability and increased discord throughout the world.
More than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that human-caused climate change is happening here and now. Yet many Americans are unaware of this scientific consensus.
Meanwhile, evidence of climate change is mounting—rising seas, retreating glaciers, and extreme weather—as are their effects on human health and well-being, everything from more lung disease and vector-borne illnesses to injuries and deaths from extreme weather events.
In the face of these sobering realities, the Trump administration is taking steps to reverse progress the U.S. has made on carbon pollution by eliminating the Clean Power Plan, radically shrinking the Environmental Protection Agency, reversing environmental safety regulations, and potentially withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.
However, we are not helpless, and the situation is not hopeless. In many ways, the prospects for progress in combating climate change are good. The costs of clean, renewable energy, such as solar and wind, are dropping precipitously, and a large majority of Americans want us to transition quickly away from fossil fuels, regulate carbon emissions, and abide by the climate agreement reached in Paris last year. National environmental organizations are seeing rapid increases in donations and volunteerism from those who oppose federal efforts to dismantle environmental protections. But it’s not enough.
Building a strong national movement to protect the climate requires many voices. The voices of Christians are especially needed. And many are speaking up. “The poor, the disenfranchised, those already living on the edge, and those who contributed least to this problem are also those at greatest risk to be harmed by it. That’s not a scientific issue; that’s a moral issue,” wrote Katharine Hayhoe, a renowned climate scientist and evangelical Christian, on The Conversation website. She has noted that, “As scientists we don’t know a lot about suffering, but as Christians we do. And we know that part of the reason we’re here in this world is to help people who are suffering.” Pope Francis has made the case that climate change is one of the principal challenges facing humanity and that it is a moral imperative for Christians to rise to the challenge.