(Marie Dennis, the Director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in Washington, DC, gave a lecture, “Reconciling Mother Earth and Her People,” in Wilmington on August 4, 2009 as part of our Summer Series, “Making Peace with the Planet.”  This article is based on notes taken at her talk by Mary Starkweather-White.)

 

Marie Dennis began by saying that her topic for the evening, “Reconciling Mother Earth and Her People,” combines issues in a way that is largely off the table during discussions at the present time.  Experts tend to look at issues of the economy, global warming, and religious cosmology separately.  We rarely get the chance to integrate faith, economy, and ecology together, but we will need to start doing so at this time of dire crisis, if we are going to be able to create opportunities for equitable and sustainable life for all people and for our planet. 

 

Maryknoll jumped into this work ten years ago, influenced greatly by the work of Herman Daley, an ecological economist, and of Gus Speth, an environmental lawyer and academic.   Prior to this, Maryknoll had paid attention to how the global economy was not working for the poorest people in the world.  Maryknoll had worked hard on debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries and had followed it up with work on corporate accountability and fair trade or just rules (as opposed to free trade NAFTA agreements) to see if a level playing field could be created for impoverished people around the globe.  We had done a lot of work on economics, but in the last ten years we started facing the ecological crisis as well. We began our work with a focus on marginalized populations and the devastation of the human community, but now we are linking economics to the devastation of the earth’s ecology.  

 

We are trying to understand the lessons we are learning from a new cosmology, underscored by the pictures from the Hubble space telescope that are unveiling the 13.7 billion-year-old and yet-unfolding universe story. What are the lessons we are learning from the new views of the cosmology?  What was the place of the human in all of this wonder?  Religious and ethical reflections on this new cosmology have led many people of faith to embrace a wholly new sense of our own location as part of a larger earth community and a cosmic reality with which our own future is inextricably linked.  We find it theologically challenging to grapple with our new understanding of the universe as a Gift and of God as a Creator of Gratuity.  We are looking more closely at what the scientists and the theologians are telling us about the profound planetary crisis we are facing.  We need to design a way forward that ends the false dichotomy between human wellbeing and ecological integrity.  

 

In the last two years we have realized we are standing in front of two profound historic crises. They are 1) the recent financial meltdown and economic crash of unprecedented proportions with a recovery that looks like it may be just as disturbing as the fall, and 2) a confirmed and serious threat to the future of the planet from global warming and other massive and enduring blows to the integrity of the ecosystem on which all life depends. 

 

Let us start the conversation by beginning to see that the global economy that was put together very deliberately over the last 20 years is an emperor with no clothes on.  The economic crisis and meltdown we were standing in a year and a half ago was very disturbing and it was doing and continues to do terrible things to people in the South.  Marie Dennis is hoping that out of this crisis we might find a way of imaging a new economy.

 

 We are listening with more respect to scientists and those who suggest that we are undergoing a profound environmental crisis.  A bleaker and bleaker picture of climate change comes from recent scientific studies and reports as well as Gus Speth’s book, Bridge to the End of the World.  The first page of his book has a dozen graphs charting our use of resources—all of which are peaking. We are facing an economic crisis and an environmental crisis simultaneously, and as peacemakers, we know that the intersection of economic and environmental problems creates strong insecurity.  It will bring more wars and violent conflicts. There are now wars being fought over land/food/ and security issues, limited access to water, and climate change migrations in different parts of the world.  We can see some of this fueling the wars and violence in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Nigerian, and Colombia.  In the global South we find the intersection between environmental and economic insecurities creating deep human insecurity, all of which wraps the current crises into a tight package which is frightening. 

 

The economic meltdown that began in major financial banks has gone a long way to expose the ideology of greed, consumerism, and the unregulated right to attain unlimited wealth. It is very temping to think that there is an unbounded supply of wealth and that there are no adverse consequences to how we get wealth. The economic crisis is causing us to ask hard questions about what is right and what is wrong and to discover that what is legal is not necessarily morally acceptable, because it has led to an on-going increase in global poverty. 

 

The economic failure is made worse by the older social failure – the level of poverty. There is too much poverty in the U.S., especially for a country that was experiencing economic prosperity during the last 15 – 20 years.  Here at home and around the world, there is a growing gap between the rich and the poor.  Maryknoll works in approximately 40 countries and tries to bring its findings back to the economic policy debate in Washington, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).  We are trying to make the economists see the human costs of globalization and to understand that the macroeconomic indicators that they use to judge the strength of an economy, do not tell the full story.  In some countries, 40-60% of the population is poor and left out of the economic benefits of globalization and growth capitalism.  For example, after Bolivia followed all the prescriptions of the international banks, a Bolivian economist at the World Bank said that his country’s economy was growing 6-7% per year and was doing well. Yet, the Maryknollers working in Bolivia saw the increase of poverty with their own eyes and knew that the lives of the majority of the Bolivian people were growing ever more desperate. 

 

The problem is how the global economy was put together. It was the result of the unregulated, neoliberal free market economy that was ushered in by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and others during the 1980s.  It was trickle-down economics; “the freer, less regulated the market, the better.”  Maryknoll has worked on issues of macro-economics since the early 1980s. The people in the global South have been good at figuring out the dialogue they need to have with the IMF, World Bank, etc. and there has been some positive engagement with these institutions.  Congress is debating replenishment for the IMF and a Maryknoll priest testified at a hearing about the increased poverty that has resulted from structural adjustment requirements.  However, these efforts have led to a minimal response, but never the real changes that are necessary. Significant deregulation is required of about 100 countries to get new loans and to get debt cancellation. The IMF and others believe in a model of economics they thought would produce prosperity; however, their monetary policies have led to the rich getting richer and the poor get poorer; workers becoming more and more vulnerable, and youth struggling to get an education, but unable to find jobs when they finished school. 

 

In many countries power has become concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. There has been a globalization of US culture and fast food to the extent, that meat and crops required for export are threatening the rich heritage of many indigenous peoples. There is a great imbalance between the economic power in the global North and that of the countries of the South, which are on the receiving end of globalization. There is a sense that the whole world should look like New York City. There is an interesting pushback by some indigenous communities that are trying to hang on to their traditions. What did globalize, was the idea that profit has to be primary in order to grow the economy. The drive for profits in the North pushed people in the South into meeting our needs – not their needs.  We built economies that were not real, that served the purposes of multinational corporations, but not those of the local people in a sustained way.  For example, people in Phnom Penh, Cambodia were working in factories to create items for export to the North.  They were earning an income from their work, but then the factories closed. They had built an economy that was not real in the sense that it had not contributed to the local infrastructure because they were only making things for the North, not the South.  Speculative investment was taking precedence over “real” investment.

 

There was a time, some years back, when international corporations did invest in the local people, their infrastructure, and their economy, but this is happening much less so now, because speculative investment allows companies to move out quickly to new locations with lower costs and higher profits.  Such policies are hard on the South.  One example of what Maryknoll is  working on is an effort to regulate the commodity futures market in food and oil.  When the stock market and housing market began to fail, investors flooded money into the commodities market, which because of deregulation, had a devastating effect on the price of food in countries in the South. 

 

 The Story of Stuff  www.storyofstuff.org  is a short web-clip that illustrates our consumerist capitalism that keeps pushing us to buy more, and how we externalize the costs of this unsustainable system to people, to the environment, etc.  “The Story of Stuff” shows the connections between the kind of economy we have and the assumption that the way we will continue to grow the economy is by continuing to buy stuff,  throwing it away, and buying more. When we do this, we externalize the costs; we are blind to the real ecological and human costs of this way of doing business.  This has to change. To convince people to go out and spend is a frightening response. We hope that out of the crisis we will find the courage to imagine another way to define and create an economy that works for the common good rather than the bottom line. 

 

Climate change is a visible reminder that we live on a planet of limited resources. If we continue basing our economy on unlimited growth, we will fall off the earth. We would need four planets to supply all of the resources that we would need for all of us to sustain our present standard of living. We have to find a way to fit our economic model back into the needs of the planet. We face an enormous challenge. We cannot say to the world that every economy has to stop growing. Half the planet does not have enough. Two ideas we should pursue are the de-growth of the North and a steady state economy. The South needs to have space for policies to foster the economic growth necessary to meet their basic needs.  We have to find ways to limit our carbon footprint environmentally without stepping on the world’s poor. Our solutions need to be examined carefully, so that we do not create bigger problems. We need to be much more conscious about every decision we make—everything has ecological and social ramifications. 

 

There is HOPE.  Just paying attention to the seriousness of the planetary crisis is giving us a new way to think about our relationship to the earth and to each other.  Our assumption since the Industrial Revolution has been that the earth is for our use and its resources are bottomless, but we now know that there actually is not an infinite supply. We are hopeful that as a people, we can learn deeper lessons. 

 

Herman Daly, an ecological economist at the University of Maryland, talks about “uneconomic growth” —and the difference between growth and  improvement in the quality of life. We need to imagine a happy, fulfilled life without destroying the planet – one in which everyone can have a decent quality of life. There are places where we are seeing real movement in this direction and questions about lifestyle are being seriously asked.  

 

One of these creative movements is Transition Towns.  This is a movement that began in England in which a town decides what policies and practices it will develop in order to create a viable local economy.  Some of the practical examples of what towns and cities can do include community gardening, tree planting, urban and rooftop farming. 

 

There are also efforts to identify state-level and national policies that provide tools for the economy to fit human and ecological needs better. Examples are ecological tax reform, limiting inequalities in income. Does it make sense that the length of people’s work-week should vary so much?  Some people work twelve hours a day, seven days a week, while some cannot get any work at all. We need to allow for the right regulation in international commerce, in order to create the policy mechanisms needed to shift priorities. 

Maryknoll has been spending a lot of time trying to get the economic discussion onto the environmental table, and the ecological discussion onto the economic table.  We know these two challenges are inter-connected. Grounded in our faith and speaking from our core principles and values, we call on people of good will to join us in examining these crucial issues together in innovative ways that will protect and restore Mother Earth and her people.

Marie Dennis is the Director of the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns in Washington and Co-President of Pax Christi International.  She is also a Pax Christi USA Ambassador of Peace and the author of seven books.  She is active in international movements for peace and social justice.  She lectured on “ Reconciling Mother Earth and Her People” on August 4, 2009 in Wilmington, DE as part of the Pacem in Terris Summer Series, “Making Peace with the Planet.”

 

[The editor wishes to thank Mary Starkweather-White for her excellent notes which comprise this article.]