On climate change, Hispanic Catholics hear pope's message - and it's personal | Environment | The Guardian
Latest US news, world news, sports and opinion from the Guardian | theguardian.com | The Guardian
On a June morning, Father Rob Yaksich, a park ranger until he found his calling in mid-life as a Catholic priest, presided over his first ever Sunday Mass at the historic Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That day, he chose the power of spreading the faith as the theme of his sermon.
“Think of the mustard seed,” he told those gathered for the early morning Spanish language mass. “We all carry little mustard seeds of faith in our hearts. This mustard seed grows, and if it is nourished, it grows into a great tree.”
The roots of the Catholic church run deep here; New Mexico is considered one of the most culturally Catholic states. The first permanent Franciscan mission is in present-day Santa Fe, which is surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
The power of those Catholic faithful will now be put to the test twice over, with the pope’s radical message about climate change in the global economy, and his call for a phase-out of fossil fuels in the name of protecting the poor.
It’s now up to Yaksich and others to spread Francis’s message of urgency and make the seed of action planted by the pope grow, even in New Mexico, a poor rural state with a Republican governor caught in a pincer hold by the oil and gas industry on its northwestern and southeastern flanks. The industry accounts for about a third of the New Mexico’s general fund.
As priests speak out from the pulpit and the ranks, their advocacy on climate change could eventually help build the critical mass of public support needed to push political leaders to take the bold action. In return, the pope’s support for climate justice – a cause that resonates strongly with a younger generation and the rapidly rising Latino population – could help stop people from drifting away from the church.
The question in both cases is whether a wildly popular and progressive pope can make a difference in the face of a slow-moving existential threat.
Chimayo
About a quarter of Americans identify as Catholics – around 80 million people. Photograph: Pat Cunningham/Sygma/Corbis
About a quarter of Americans identify as Catholics – around 80 million people, although those numbers are slipping. There are also the faint beginnings of a political realignment, with those who identify as Catholics shifting their allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican party.
But Catholics still worry more about climate change than Americans overall, according to the Pew research center. Catholics who identify as Latinos or Hispanic are even more concerned: 82% say the earth is warming due to human activity, compared to 64% of white Catholics. About 63% of Hispanic Catholics say climate change is a very serious problem, compared to 39% of white Catholics.
In his long pastoral letter, which contained almost as many references to science as to scripture, the pope cast climate change and degradation of the environment as a consequence of a global capitalist system that had been left to run riot over the poor and the planet. Our world had come to resemble a pile of filth because of reckless use of resources, he lamented. He urged leaders to act swiftly to protect our “common home”.
The pope will get a second shot at expounding on those views to a US audience – and to those Republicans who are openly hostile to the idea of a pro-poor, pro-climate pope – next September when he is due to visit the United Nations and address a joint session of Congress.
In Father Yaksich, who spent nearly 20 years teaching school children about bird life in his native New Mexico as a conservation biologist, the pope has a willing disciple.
“It’s an issue that’s near and dear to my heart” Yaksich said, speaking on the steps of the church as parishioners filed out, with one or two asking for blessings or gently correcting his Spanish.
Water and drought were a natural concern for people in New Mexico, he said. Late snowfall and unusually heavy spring rains this year brought some relief to four years of a vicious drought. But by then at least one town, Magdalena, south-west of Albuquerque, had run out of water and several were on the brink of catastrophe.
It was impossible not to see the connections, Yaksich said. “When the human family is taken care of deep down ... then the natural extention of that is taking better care of the environment, protecting and sharing resources in such a way that benefits everybody,” he said.
Father Rob Yaksich
Father Rob Yaksich after mass. Photograph: Catalina Arevalo Martinez
On the Sunday afternoon before the pope delivered his climate treatise, the newly ordained Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, joined in a tradition stretching back 303 years: the annual procession in honour of Diego De Vargas, who crushed the late 17th century native American pueblo revolts and re-established Spanish colonial rule over New Mexico.
Women and girls, draped in layers of white frills, traipsed through the streets from the basilica to an historic cemetery in the withering heat.
The next morning, Wester arrived for his first official day on the job as Archbishop of Santa Fe, at the archdiocese headquarters located on the west side of the Rio Grande, across from downtown Albuquerque.
After the elaborate pageantry of Sunday’s events, Wester acknowledged there were some who would prefer to see the Church relegated to upholding such rituals, rather than taking on the life-and-death issues of the modern day.
“We think of religion as the bible, morality, sacred tradition, doctrine, ritual, liturgy. That is the domain of religion,” he said. “When we talk about things like the death penalty, immigration, climate change, these are issues that are very much out there in the public political arena. Now some people may say: ‘tell the priests and bishops to stay in church and we will take care of this’. But that’s not true. The church has an obligation to speak the truth in the public square and then people can do what they want in the voting booth. The church has an obligation because they are religious matters, human matters.”
A week before the pope’s intervention on the environment, US bishops gathered in St Louis for their annual assembly. Wester, who was there, was still serving as the conference’s spokesman. Admittedly climate change was not top of the agenda for all of the bishops at the gathering. But, Wester said, he had never met a bishop who was an outright climate denier. “Some will be more vociferous about it than others,” he said. But he added: “They will all be anxious to promote the pope’s message.”
Some priests and bishops, especially those in conservative parts of the country, or where the local economy is heavily dependent on extractive industries, would welcome the pope’s intervention for giving them licence at last to touch on subjects they dared not raise for fear of offending their parishioners. “This will be a wonderful boost for them,” Wester said.
For others, and Wester puts himself among them, the strong message from the Pope was a signal to press even harder for change. “What good does it do if 100 years from now we wake up and say: ‘Oh my goodness. We missed the boat. It’s too late now. We can’t reverse what we have begun,” he said.
A few miles to the south of the campus, Richard Moore got up at 6am to fill a rush order for organic lettuce from a local restaurant.
Moore, the son of Puerto Rican farm workers, had spent the better part of half a century as a community organiser, much of it among the poor and working class immigrant neighbourhoods of New Mexico.
After an early run-in with the law as a gang member, Moore briefly entertained the idea of entering the priesthood, but then devoted himself to a life as an activist, as director of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice.
There were fights against chemical plants, oil refineries, slaughter houses, dog food factories, and landfills – all heavily polluting industries dumped unfairly in working class neighbourhoods.
And then there were the very elements: earth, water and air.
After four years of drought, the wells in some small towns were running dry. Farmers were pumping up brackish water, which was damaging the crops, and much of New Mexico was a tinder box dry. Megafires ripped across the forests, darkening the sky with ash and fouling the air quality for those with asthma and other respiratory conditions. On some recent summer days, there were warnings in Albuquerque to keep the windows closed, because of the gritty haze of surounding fires.
Bells and a cross on top of Mission San Jose de Laguna Church, New Mexico.
Bells and a cross on top of Mission San Jose de Laguna Church, New Mexico. Photograph: Getty Images
These days, community groups are organising against plans to divert about 20 million gallons of water a day from the Rio Grande from smaller farmers on the outskirts of Albuquerque to a big condo project.
From where Moore stood there was always a link between the environment and economic justice, long before the pope drew the connection. For all of the fights about dirty air and dirty water, there was a single unifying principle, so far as Moore saw it. The struggle was about justice, not the environment.
“Take chemicals, there are 86,000 chemicals on the market, and less than 200 are regulated,” Moore said. He said he fought for environmental justice every day.
“The Catholic church has always been a little bit slow so far as we are concerned in terms of moving on social justice issues, whether it is food or immigration or police repression.”
The current focus of Moore’s struggle is the two-acre organic farm which operates as a community garden, raising lettuce, spinach, peas, onions, arugula, radish and kale.
Such small plots are quite common on the edges of Albuquerque and other towns, reminders that New Mexico is still primarily a rural state. A number of the homes in Moore’s neighbourhood have chilis drying on the porch. Moore’s farm, organised by Los Jardines or gardens institutes, supplies produce to about 100 families, who volunteer on the farm, as well as restaurants.
Over the last few years he noticed an increase in real-time effects from climate change. Last spring, he lost hundreds of seedlings to a grasshopper infestation. Moore blamed the mild mild winter. Low temperatures in December and January would ordinarily be relied on to kill off the pests. But this year they destroyed an entire hothouse of tomatoes.
Moore was glad, he said, that the Pope had committed the entire Catholic church to fight climate change – but he didn’t entirely trust the outcome would be in the interests of the people he had fought for in his lifetime.
“The voice of the Pope lifting up these issues is very very important to the work that we are doing, but we have to be cautious,” he said. “Corporate leaders and CEOs will go to church on Sunday and on Monday, they will go right back into the office doing the same thing.”
Juan Reynosa, an activist with the Southwest Organising Project, grew up in the shadow of industry power, in the small town of Hobbs, in southern New Mexico. A conservative, deeply Catholic town near the border with Texas, Hobbs functions as a hub for the oil industry. Reynosa’s father was an oil field truck driver.
After eight or nine years as an organiser, Reynosa said it was still hard for him to even begin a conversation about the environment in his hometown without being accused of wrecking the economy.
With the pope’s intervention, he hoped priests that had been silent on the environment would be emboldened to do more.
“If there was a big environmental issue in New Mexico that the archdiocese took a stand on it could pretty much change the conversation overnight. Talk about how the oil and gas industry could be safer, how it could treat communities better,” he said.
Everytime Reynosa talked about public health and air and water quality, opponents swatted back accusing him of sacrificing jobs to protect the environment. “People are trying to survive but they also feel like it is a little bit of a risk for them to be outspoken. Having God at your back or however you want to put it that can be pretty empowering,” he said. “Now it’s not just me, some random organiser on the ground. It is some very powerful person globally. It really does make a difference – especially when you have some politicians saying the exact opposite.”
A prime example would be New Mexico’s Governor Susana Martinez. A Republican, Martinez made history in 2010 when she was elected the country’s first Latina governor. Around the same time, she told Politico she had doubts human activity was responsible for climate change.
Martinez went on to reverse several of the environmental measures introduced by her Democratic predecessor, Bill Richardson. By late last year, after Martinez won re-election and Republicans took the house, Democrats were on the verge of despair, according to Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a member of the state Senate.
As in a number of western states, the job of an elected state official is part-time and only modestly paid – which is why so many of New Mexico’s representatives are more on the order of gentleman politicians: lawyers, ranchers, or oil men of independent means.
New housing developments are spreading through the desert basin west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. City planners in desert regions are on the front lines of rethinking how growing populations should maximize limited water resources.
New housing developments spreading west of Albuquerque. City planners in desert regions have to re-think how growing populations should use water. Photograph: Andy Nelson/Getty Images
It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the oil and gas industry to New Mexico. In the San Juan basin in the northern part of the state, oil and gas installations sprawl across 10,000 square miles of mesa, canyon and desert plain.
There is so much methane leaking from those 40,000 fracked wells, a vast cloud of carbon pollution is now detectable from space.
Oil and gas royalties feed the state’s $14bn permanent fund, which pays for public schools. Other royalty payments and taxes fund road repairs and other budget items. Oil and gas fuels also pays for cultural products from local colleges to museums, according to a report last year from the New Mexico Tax Research Institute.
Given those resources, it’s easy to understand the long losing streak for campaigners. Last January, the courts struck down a move to limit fracking in a rural county north-east of Santa Fe. A few months later, the state legislature voted to extend tax credits for solar power installations until 2020. But Martinez failed to sign the bill before the end of the legislature session in June, and the measure lapsed; the tax credits will fade out at the end of next year.
Likewise, a campaign to convert an old notoriously smog producing coal-fired power plant in the Four Corners to clean energy was thwarted when the state utility opted to shut down the old polluting units – but install newer coal.
Sister Joan
Sister Joan Brown: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in the faith community or otherwise.’ Photograph: Sister Joan Brown
Long before the Pope Francis’s pastoral letter, the US Conference on Catholic Bishops put its weight behind Obama’s clean power plant rules. Catholic church workers lobbied companies like Exxon to factor climate change into their future plants, and power plants to shift away from coal to cleaner-burning fuels. Earlier popes, including Benedict, spoke out about climate change.
Sister Joan Brown, who grew up on a farm in Kansas and has spent the last 40 years in the south-west, was deeply involved in many of those efforts, along with Interfaith Power and Light, a religious group that campaigns on global warming.
In September last year, when 400,000 gathered for a historic climate demonstration in New York, she and others organised a march of their own in Albuquerque, stopping at stations along the route: churches with solar panels, schoolyards with community gardens energy efficient homes – anything to show people that they could incorporate actions to fight climate change into their daily routines.
But there had never been a mobilisation on the scale of the one gathering behind the pope. With Francis’s message out, young people are getting involved.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in the faith community or otherwise,” she said. “I just haven’t seen this kind of enthusiasm. It is kind of like looking forward to a new light.”
On climate change, Hispanic Catholics hear pope's message – and it's personal | Environment | The Guardian
Latest US news, world news, sports and opinion from the Guardian | theguardian.com | The Guardian
On a June morning, Father Rob Yaksich, a park ranger until he found his calling in mid-life as a Catholic priest, presided over his first ever Sunday Mass at the historic Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That day, he chose the power of spreading the faith as the theme of his sermon.
“Think of the mustard seed,” he told those gathered for the early morning Spanish language mass. “We all carry little mustard seeds of faith in our hearts. This mustard seed grows, and if it is nourished, it grows into a great tree.”
The roots of the Catholic church run deep here; New Mexico is considered one of the most culturally Catholic states. The first permanent Franciscan mission is in present-day Santa Fe, which is surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo mountains.
The power of those Catholic faithful will now be put to the test twice over, with the pope’s radical message about climate change in the global economy, and his call for a phase-out of fossil fuels in the name of protecting the poor.
It’s now up to Yaksich and others to spread Francis’s message of urgency and make the seed of action planted by the pope grow, even in New Mexico, a poor rural state with a Republican governor caught in a pincer hold by the oil and gas industry on its northwestern and southeastern flanks. The industry accounts for about a third of the New Mexico’s general fund.
As priests speak out from the pulpit and the ranks, their advocacy on climate change could eventually help build the critical mass of public support needed to push political leaders to take the bold action. In return, the pope’s support for climate justice – a cause that resonates strongly with a younger generation and the rapidly rising Latino population – could help stop people from drifting away from the church.
The question in both cases is whether a wildly popular and progressive pope can make a difference in the face of a slow-moving existential threat.
Chimayo
About a quarter of Americans identify as Catholics – around 80 million people. Photograph: Pat Cunningham/Sygma/Corbis
About a quarter of Americans identify as Catholics – around 80 million people, although those numbers are slipping. There are also the faint beginnings of a political realignment, with those who identify as Catholics shifting their allegiance from the Democratic to the Republican party.
But Catholics still worry more about climate change than Americans overall, according to the Pew research center. Catholics who identify as Latinos or Hispanic are even more concerned: 82% say the earth is warming due to human activity, compared to 64% of white Catholics. About 63% of Hispanic Catholics say climate change is a very serious problem, compared to 39% of white Catholics.
In his long pastoral letter, which contained almost as many references to science as to scripture, the pope cast climate change and degradation of the environment as a consequence of a global capitalist system that had been left to run riot over the poor and the planet. Our world had come to resemble a pile of filth because of reckless use of resources, he lamented. He urged leaders to act swiftly to protect our “common home”.
The pope will get a second shot at expounding on those views to a US audience – and to those Republicans who are openly hostile to the idea of a pro-poor, pro-climate pope – next September when he is due to visit the United Nations and address a joint session of Congress.
In Father Yaksich, who spent nearly 20 years teaching school children about bird life in his native New Mexico as a conservation biologist, the pope has a willing disciple.
“It’s an issue that’s near and dear to my heart” Yaksich said, speaking on the steps of the church as parishioners filed out, with one or two asking for blessings or gently correcting his Spanish.
Water and drought were a natural concern for people in New Mexico, he said. Late snowfall and unusually heavy spring rains this year brought some relief to four years of a vicious drought. But by then at least one town, Magdalena, south-west of Albuquerque, had run out of water and several were on the brink of catastrophe.
It was impossible not to see the connections, Yaksich said. “When the human family is taken care of deep down ... then the natural extention of that is taking better care of the environment, protecting and sharing resources in such a way that benefits everybody,” he said.
Father Rob Yaksich
Father Rob Yaksich after mass. Photograph: Catalina Arevalo Martinez
On the Sunday afternoon before the pope delivered his climate treatise, the newly ordained Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, joined in a tradition stretching back 303 years: the annual procession in honour of Diego De Vargas, who crushed the late 17th century native American pueblo revolts and re-established Spanish colonial rule over New Mexico.
Women and girls, draped in layers of white frills, traipsed through the streets from the basilica to an historic cemetery in the withering heat.
The next morning, Wester arrived for his first official day on the job as Archbishop of Santa Fe, at the archdiocese headquarters located on the west side of the Rio Grande, across from downtown Albuquerque.
After the elaborate pageantry of Sunday’s events, Wester acknowledged there were some who would prefer to see the Church relegated to upholding such rituals, rather than taking on the life-and-death issues of the modern day.
“We think of religion as the bible, morality, sacred tradition, doctrine, ritual, liturgy. That is the domain of religion,” he said. “When we talk about things like the death penalty, immigration, climate change, these are issues that are very much out there in the public political arena. Now some people may say: ‘tell the priests and bishops to stay in church and we will take care of this’. But that’s not true. The church has an obligation to speak the truth in the public square and then people can do what they want in the voting booth. The church has an obligation because they are religious matters, human matters.”
A week before the pope’s intervention on the environment, US bishops gathered in St Louis for their annual assembly. Wester, who was there, was still serving as the conference’s spokesman. Admittedly climate change was not top of the agenda for all of the bishops at the gathering. But, Wester said, he had never met a bishop who was an outright climate denier. “Some will be more vociferous about it than others,” he said. But he added: “They will all be anxious to promote the pope’s message.”
Some priests and bishops, especially those in conservative parts of the country, or where the local economy is heavily dependent on extractive industries, would welcome the pope’s intervention for giving them licence at last to touch on subjects they dared not raise for fear of offending their parishioners. “This will be a wonderful boost for them,” Wester said.
For others, and Wester puts himself among them, the strong message from the Pope was a signal to press even harder for change. “What good does it do if 100 years from now we wake up and say: ‘Oh my goodness. We missed the boat. It’s too late now. We can’t reverse what we have begun,” he said.
A few miles to the south of the campus, Richard Moore got up at 6am to fill a rush order for organic lettuce from a local restaurant.
Moore, the son of Puerto Rican farm workers, had spent the better part of half a century as a community organiser, much of it among the poor and working class immigrant neighbourhoods of New Mexico.
After an early run-in with the law as a gang member, Moore briefly entertained the idea of entering the priesthood, but then devoted himself to a life as an activist, as director of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice.
There were fights against chemical plants, oil refineries, slaughter houses, dog food factories, and landfills – all heavily polluting industries dumped unfairly in working class neighbourhoods.
And then there were the very elements: earth, water and air.
After four years of drought, the wells in some small towns were running dry. Farmers were pumping up brackish water, which was damaging the crops, and much of New Mexico was a tinder box dry. Megafires ripped across the forests, darkening the sky with ash and fouling the air quality for those with asthma and other respiratory conditions. On some recent summer days, there were warnings in Albuquerque to keep the windows closed, because of the gritty haze of surounding fires.
Bells and a cross on top of Mission San Jose de Laguna Church, New Mexico.
Bells and a cross on top of Mission San Jose de Laguna Church, New Mexico. Photograph: Getty Images
These days, community groups are organising against plans to divert about 20 million gallons of water a day from the Rio Grande from smaller farmers on the outskirts of Albuquerque to a big condo project.
From where Moore stood there was always a link between the environment and economic justice, long before the pope drew the connection. For all of the fights about dirty air and dirty water, there was a single unifying principle, so far as Moore saw it. The struggle was about justice, not the environment.
“Take chemicals, there are 86,000 chemicals on the market, and less than 200 are regulated,” Moore said. He said he fought for environmental justice every day.
“The Catholic church has always been a little bit slow so far as we are concerned in terms of moving on social justice issues, whether it is food or immigration or police repression.”
The current focus of Moore’s struggle is the two-acre organic farm which operates as a community garden, raising lettuce, spinach, peas, onions, arugula, radish and kale.
Such small plots are quite common on the edges of Albuquerque and other towns, reminders that New Mexico is still primarily a rural state. A number of the homes in Moore’s neighbourhood have chilis drying on the porch. Moore’s farm, organised by Los Jardines or gardens institutes, supplies produce to about 100 families, who volunteer on the farm, as well as restaurants.
Over the last few years he noticed an increase in real-time effects from climate change. Last spring, he lost hundreds of seedlings to a grasshopper infestation. Moore blamed the mild mild winter. Low temperatures in December and January would ordinarily be relied on to kill off the pests. But this year they destroyed an entire hothouse of tomatoes.
Moore was glad, he said, that the Pope had committed the entire Catholic church to fight climate change – but he didn’t entirely trust the outcome would be in the interests of the people he had fought for in his lifetime.
“The voice of the Pope lifting up these issues is very very important to the work that we are doing, but we have to be cautious,” he said. “Corporate leaders and CEOs will go to church on Sunday and on Monday, they will go right back into the office doing the same thing.”
Juan Reynosa, an activist with the Southwest Organising Project, grew up in the shadow of industry power, in the small town of Hobbs, in southern New Mexico. A conservative, deeply Catholic town near the border with Texas, Hobbs functions as a hub for the oil industry. Reynosa’s father was an oil field truck driver.
After eight or nine years as an organiser, Reynosa said it was still hard for him to even begin a conversation about the environment in his hometown without being accused of wrecking the economy.
With the pope’s intervention, he hoped priests that had been silent on the environment would be emboldened to do more.
“If there was a big environmental issue in New Mexico that the archdiocese took a stand on it could pretty much change the conversation overnight. Talk about how the oil and gas industry could be safer, how it could treat communities better,” he said.
Everytime Reynosa talked about public health and air and water quality, opponents swatted back accusing him of sacrificing jobs to protect the environment. “People are trying to survive but they also feel like it is a little bit of a risk for them to be outspoken. Having God at your back or however you want to put it that can be pretty empowering,” he said. “Now it’s not just me, some random organiser on the ground. It is some very powerful person globally. It really does make a difference – especially when you have some politicians saying the exact opposite.”
A prime example would be New Mexico’s Governor Susana Martinez. A Republican, Martinez made history in 2010 when she was elected the country’s first Latina governor. Around the same time, she told Politico she had doubts human activity was responsible for climate change.
Martinez went on to reverse several of the environmental measures introduced by her Democratic predecessor, Bill Richardson. By late last year, after Martinez won re-election and Republicans took the house, Democrats were on the verge of despair, according to Jerry Ortiz y Pino, a member of the state Senate.
As in a number of western states, the job of an elected state official is part-time and only modestly paid – which is why so many of New Mexico’s representatives are more on the order of gentleman politicians: lawyers, ranchers, or oil men of independent means.
New housing developments are spreading through the desert basin west of Albuquerque, New Mexico. City planners in desert regions are on the front lines of rethinking how growing populations should maximize limited water resources.
New housing developments spreading west of Albuquerque. City planners in desert regions have to re-think how growing populations should use water. Photograph: Andy Nelson/Getty Images
It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the oil and gas industry to New Mexico. In the San Juan basin in the northern part of the state, oil and gas installations sprawl across 10,000 square miles of mesa, canyon and desert plain.
There is so much methane leaking from those 40,000 fracked wells, a vast cloud of carbon pollution is now detectable from space.
Oil and gas royalties feed the state’s $14bn permanent fund, which pays for public schools. Other royalty payments and taxes fund road repairs and other budget items. Oil and gas fuels also pays for cultural products from local colleges to museums, according to a report last year from the New Mexico Tax Research Institute.
Given those resources, it’s easy to understand the long losing streak for campaigners. Last January, the courts struck down a move to limit fracking in a rural county north-east of Santa Fe. A few months later, the state legislature voted to extend tax credits for solar power installations until 2020. But Martinez failed to sign the bill before the end of the legislature session in June, and the measure lapsed; the tax credits will fade out at the end of next year.
Likewise, a campaign to convert an old notoriously smog producing coal-fired power plant in the Four Corners to clean energy was thwarted when the state utility opted to shut down the old polluting units – but install newer coal.
Sister Joan
Sister Joan Brown: ‘I’ve never seen anything like this in the faith community or otherwise.’ Photograph: Sister Joan Brown
Long before the Pope Francis’s pastoral letter, the US Conference on Catholic Bishops put its weight behind Obama’s clean power plant rules. Catholic church workers lobbied companies like Exxon to factor climate change into their future plants, and power plants to shift away from coal to cleaner-burning fuels. Earlier popes, including Benedict, spoke out about climate change.
Sister Joan Brown, who grew up on a farm in Kansas and has spent the last 40 years in the south-west, was deeply involved in many of those efforts, along with Interfaith Power and Light, a religious group that campaigns on global warming.
In September last year, when 400,000 gathered for a historic climate demonstration in New York, she and others organised a march of their own in Albuquerque, stopping at stations along the route: churches with solar panels, schoolyards with community gardens energy efficient homes – anything to show people that they could incorporate actions to fight climate change into their daily routines.
But there had never been a mobilisation on the scale of the one gathering behind the pope. With Francis’s message out, young people are getting involved.
“I’ve never seen anything like this in the faith community or otherwise,” she said. “I just haven’t seen this kind of enthusiasm. It is kind of like looking forward to a new light.”
On climate change, Hispanic Catholics hear pope's message – and it's personal | Environment | The Guardian
