CNS STORY: 'Love your local ecosystem,' Christian Brother tells others

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CNS Story:

ECOSYSTEMS-HITCHEN Jan-2-2007 (830 words) xxxi

'Love your local ecosystem,' Christian Brother tells others

By Barbara J. Fraser
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 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."

END

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