LAST Saturday at The Feast, Senior Feaster Builder Alan Brillantes roused me from my drowsiness during Thursday’s The Feast. It had been a long day at court-annexed mediation at the Hall of Justice.
Alan began talking about climate change and how without the joint action of humanity, the next generation of kids—the Gen-zers and perhaps the millennial Feasters I serve with—will suffer.
Bro. Alan pointed out that the Light of Jesus Catholic Charismatic Community is all for the conservation of Moth Earth, as St. Francis of Assisi called our common home.
And the present generation of Filipinos had a foretaste of what suffering will be with mega storms Yolanda, Pablo, Frank, Ondoy—the mega typhoons that wreak havoc on our shores.
Climate change caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing more extreme rainfall and snowfall—and floods, says Scientific American.
Human-induced climate change has already increased the number and strength of some of these extreme events. Over the last 50 years, much of the U.S.—whose current official policy—is the denial that climate change is human induced.
That means mega storms are force majeure or acts of God. Blame God for worsening greenhouse gas emission due to pollution, deforestation, burning of fossil fuels.
Yet the country has seen increases in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, heavy downpours, and in some regions, severe floods and droughts.
From the perspective of a Catholic faith community, climate change has a dire impact on our common home. In Laudato Si, Pope Francis wrote that the climate is a “common good,” belonging to all and meant for all. It is a complex system linked to many of the essential conditions for human life.
At The Feast, our lay preachers on relationships: with God, with one another, and with ourselves. That resonated well with me.
In ecological science, environmentalists study the relationships and processes linking living things to the physical and chemical environment.
In the 1971 book “The Closing Circle,” cellular biologist Barry Commoner listed four basic and inescapable laws of ecology. The principles describe a beautiful web of life on Mother Earth.
Commoner noted that everything is connected to everything else; everything must go somewhere; Nature knows best; and there is no such thing as a free lunch.
As the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines recommends in its pastoral letter Upholding the Sanctity of Life: “that dioceses, parishes and other institutions especially the government would foster education on the protection of nature. We encourage every citizen to eliminate wasteful consumption.
We pray that the government, in making economic and political decisions, would always consider that true stewardship does not mean economic gains for the powerful few. True stewardship is the constant and continuing work for the benefit of all.” (bqsanc@yahoo.com)