United Nations Environmental Program Archive of E-Articles 2007 January 4, 2007 “'Love your local ecosystem,' says Catholic religious, connecting spirituality to ecology” By Barbara J. Fraser 1/3/2007 Catholic News Service 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 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 said 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 2 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 urge 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." 3 January 5, 2007 “India's sullied river 'goddess'” During a festival this month, some 75 million Hindus will wash in the stubbornly filthy Ganges River. By Sunita Nahar and Lilly Peel Contributors to The Christian Science Monitor VARANASI, INDIA An old man in a loincloth squats on the banks of the sacred Ganges River scrubbing his clothes. Nearby, sewage gushes from a pipe as water buffaloes contentedly wallow in the river's murky waters. Upstream, a bright-eyed woman clad in a fuchsia sari stands waist-deep, pouring a stream of the river's holy water from a brass pot and reciting prayers while a plastic bag of garbage washes up on the shore. This river is known to Hindus as goddess Ganga, one of the main arteries at the heart of India's spiritual and physical life, who provides a lifeline of fresh water to the 400 million people who live on her banks. Starting Wednesday and for the next six weeks, legions of devout Hindus will celebrate the "Ardh Kumbh Mela" or Half Grand Pitcher festival in the city of Allahabad, at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. Allahabad is one of four spots where Garuda, the winged steed of the Hindu god Vishnu, is said to have rested during her battle with demons over a pitcher of divine nectar. But chronically high levels of pollution have turned this river goddess into a potential killer. For the nearly 75 million pilgrims - setting the record for the world's largest gathering of people - who will travel here to bathe their sins away, sip the river water, or cremate their dead, the "holy dip" is believed to usher them more quickly into a state of nirvana. Leading Indian environmentalists claim the $100 million Ganga Action Plan (GAP), launched 20 years ago to treat sewage dumped in the river, has failed. They blame poor planning, corruption, lack of technical knowledge, and a gross miscalculation of the volume of waste from Varanasi, a teeming city of around 1.2 million people, which they say has left pollution levels worse than ever. Kicked off in 1986 by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the GAP aimed to divert and treat the waste and bring the quality of water up to bathing standards. However, in Varanasi, where raw sewage spews into the river from 30 sources, levels of fecal coliform bacteria are up to 3,000 times the accepted Indian standard and 1.5 million times the safe level for drinking. 4 The river's destitute state is no mystery to the hordes of fervent devotees. This year, hundreds of Hindu holy men have threatened to commit mass suicide during the festival to protest what they say is a lack of government action, the Daily Telegraph reported last week. Among the devotees completing the daily dawn ablutions before the festival was Veer Bhadra Mishra. Clad in a white cotton dhoti, the tall, silver-haired priest cups his hands and lifts the water to his mouth. But he leaves out one part of the ritual - he does not drink it. As the mahant, or spiritual and administrative head of Varanasi's second largest temple, he believes the water is holy. But as a professor of hydraulics and a leading campaigner to clean up the Ganges, he knows it is not pure. The 66-year-old has been campaigning to clean the river since 1982, when he founded the Swatcha Ganges Abhiyaan (Campaign for a Clean Ganges) organization, an effort that combines his knowledge of the spiritual with the scientific. "On a practical level 400 million people rely on this water. Spiritually for practising Hindus, the river is a medium of life. We want to touch our mother, submerge our bodies in the water, sip the waters. But we only have human bodies. If the river is polluted they will die, and with them their heritage, culture and faith," he says. "The Ganga is the silken thread which binds this country together. What will happen if it breaks?" Mishra says GAP has categorically failed. "The planning was hasty and unscientific. They did not know how many million litres of sewage flowed into the river, what the organic content of the water was, or whether there were chemical pollutants in the water." Varanasi produces about 39 million gallons of sewage per day, but can treat only about 26 million litres. Each day, samples of the water are tested in the campaign's laboratories.