While the earth is dying

The excesses of the industrial worlds lifestyle will have the most devastating effect on the poor in sub-Saharan Africa. This includes our region.

The consequences of global warming the first man-made climate change in history will kill 185 million people in sub-Saharan Africa alone by the end of this century if carbon dioxide emissions by developing countries are not cut by two-thirds by 2050.

These are not doomsday warnings by frenzied environmentalists; these are figures from the United Nations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Over the next decades, Africa will see rising sea levels, expanding deserts, and increasing floods and hurricanes. While we pollute the skies, creating global warming, our collective voracious lifestyle causes deforestation, extinction of animals, a worldwide and abrupt depletion of fish stock, and the salination of arable land.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that when God made the earth, he found all that he had created to be good. Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature, to avoid any disordered use of things which would be in contempt of the Creator and would bring disastrous consequences for human beings and their environment (208).

Such disordered use undermines the delicate balance of Gods creation. The abuse of nature has already produced disastrous consequences.

The obvious bad guys in the devastation of Gods creation are easily fingered. They can be found in governments, in industrial corporations, in the propaganda machines that have for decades slandered environmentalists as ludicrous alarmists. Yet, as wasteful consumers, we too are morally responsible for harm to the environment.

Green concerns have long transcended the extinction of a tropical bird here or the loss of a picturesque dune there. Ecological damage has already become a question of death. Today. Right now. Just look to northern Kenya.

Matters of ecology and the environment have not always occupied places of precedence in the Churchs social response either. It is time they did.

Fr John Coleman, a Jesuit professor of social values in Los Angeles, has neatly staked out the principles that should embody a truly Catholic response:

All human beings have a right to an environment adequate to their health and well-being.

The environment is a common concern of all humanity In the words of Pope John Paul II: There is a social mortgage on private property.

All humans have common but differentiated responsibilities to sustain the environment.

Humans have a duty not to cause environmental harm.

The environment must be seen as an integral part of all schemes of economic development.

All peoples have a right to economic development. Equality is the only rational way to allocate rights to consume and pollute.

An ecological ethic would subscribe to the principle that the polluter must pay. Otherwise, distributive justice is violated if the polluter can be a free-rider.

When we have serious and imminent threats to the environment, we do not need to wait nor should we until there is full scientific certainty.

Environmental ethics will stress forms of deliberative democracy or consultation. Recent Catholic social thought has included strong statements about justice as participation, [therefore] the many stakeholders who will be affected by decisions should have an active voice and input about them.

An environmental ethic will show a care for future generations.

We humans have desecrated Gods gift of stewardship over his creation. We must sustain what we still have, and restore what we can.