Meaningful action begins with a deepening of commitment within ourselves, our programs and processes to relate to our environment as part of ourselves, and to ourselves as part of the environment, writes ANDY HAMILTON SJ. We must become more sensitive in our living, more insistent in our advocacy and more effective in our action.
Dedicated days and weeks like World Peace Day, World Children’s Day and World Environment Day are rituals designed to stir us out of the apathy that is the breeding ground of despair. They encourage us to survey aspects of the world we live in, to note its pathologies, and to find new energy to build its health.
If that is so, World Environment Day has a lot of work to do. A few recent news items suggest its scale. A survey of the world’s leading climate scientists revealed general pessimism that the limitation to 1.5% increase in global warming will be met. The business pages reported that large investors are turning from renewables to coal and oil. The deforestation of Australian land for the production of beef, one of the large sources of emissions, accelerates. And World Environment Day 2024 is sponsored by Saudi Arabia, one of the largest producers of fossil fuels.
When you add to these details the generalities of declining living standards, wars, and paralysed and polarised political systems, you have the makings of despair. And yet there are grounds for hope, if not for optimism. What has already been done to address global warming, the commitment of young people to demanding more radical change, and the increasingly destructive effects of climate change, may all increase pressure for more radical action.
World Environment Day reminds us that this change must be grounded in a change of heart. This begins by paying attention to the world around us, goes on to discern what needs to be done, and then proceeds to act accordingly.
At the heart of this change is the recognition that the environment is not something which we have but is something of which we are part. The world around us is an ‘us’ and not an ‘it’. If the world around us is harmed, we suffer. We are bound into vast sets of interlocking relationships to other people, to institutions, and to the natural and the made world. The world is not our possession but a gift. Our proper relationship to it and to all within it is one of respect, not of exploitation. It invites us to look at the network of relationships that bind all together, and not at things and individuals in isolation.
It also demands respect in the relationships between people within the family, within all the small and large institutions of social life that define humanity, and beyond that within the relationships to the natural and made world on which the quality of human life depends. That respect is owed particularly to people on the margins of society.
For Jesuit Social Services discernment involves both recognising the places where people already disadvantaged are further disadvantaged by the effects of climate change, and working to help them overcome them. This leads us to seek out the people and groups in these places who have attended to the effects of climate change and to promote concerted local action within these communities to address it.
This demands a constant deepening of commitment within ourselves, our programs and processes to relate to our environment as part of ourselves and to ourselves as part of the environment, and to become more sensitive in our living, more insistent in our advocacy and more effective in our action.
If that seems a very small thing to meet such a huge and urgent need, it is indeed so. But it is surely better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
