The whole human race suffers as a result of environmental blight, and generations yet unborn will bear the cost for our failure to act today. But in most countries today, including our own, it is the poor and the powerless who most directly bear the burden of current environmental carelessness. Their lands and neighborhoods are more likely to be polluted or to host toxic waste dumps, their water to be undrinkable, their children to be harmed. Too often, the structure of sacrifice involved in environmental remedies seems to exact a high price from the poor and from workers. Small farmers, industrial workers, lumberjacks, watermen, rubber-tappers, for example, shoulder much of the weight of economic adjustment. Caught in a spiral of poverty and environmental degradation, poor people suffer acutely from the loss of soil fertility, pollution of rivers and urban streets, and the destruction of forest resources. Overcrowding and unequal land distribution often force them to overwork the soil, clear the forests, or migrate to marginal land. Their efforts to eke out a bare existence adds in its own way to environmental degradation and not infrequently to disaster for themselves and others who are equally poor.
Sustainable economic policies, that is, practices that reduce current stresses on natural systems and are consistent with sound environmental policy in the long term, must be put into effect. At the same time, the world economy must come to include hundreds of millions of poor families who live at the edge of survival.
Excerpt from Renewing the Earth - An Invitation to Reflection and Action on Environment in Light of Catholic Social Teaching
A Pastoral Statement of the United States Catholic Conference
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Ecology comes in the appreciating of the gift that nature is between persons, between God and man. All analysis and use must fall under this appreciation of the gift. Can we understand these gifts properly if we don't understand the giver who is Gift himself?
March 6, 2008, Tim Cronin
The approach chosen in this discussion seems to one of prolonged handwringing about environmental abuses and their effects on us all, particularly the poor.
Is it not time to say "enough"? Why don't we insist that our governments-local, state and federal stand up to their responsibilities on the environment, energy and other key matters. We have the ballot and public pressure make the needed changes.
March 5, 2008, Richard j. Green
My economic background of living in the US shields me effecs of enviromental degredation. In Mexico people live in literal dumps. There is much talk about immigration in this election year but not much about why people are migrating here from Mexico and what we can do to help their country.
March 3, 2008, Tim Cronin