Prophets of a Future Not Our Own

Prophets of a Future Not Our Own

MARIE THERESE KANE (Holy Cross ’17)

In 2017, I traveled to Bangalore, India, for a month-long academic immer sion through College of the Holy Cross. Exploring “Social Justice in Context,” my peers and I dove into issues of development, globalization, gender, caste, and religious diversity. One weekend, we traveled to Manvi, a rural village, to visit Loyola Xavier School, which educates students who face discrimination as members of the Dalit caste. Dalits, or “untouchables,” sit on the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system. At Loyola Xavier, we participated in the morning assembly, during which students read aloud the daily news headlines. This is where I heard the headline from June 1, 2017: “United States withdraws from the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.”

The announcement struck me; it interrupted a moment of kinship between Loyola Xavier and Holy Cross our shared faith and Jesuit education, we dismissed school early because there was come from different worlds. Our country was responsible for this headline, and yet, the decision would disproportionately impact Loyola Xavier students. The U.S. is the largest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet, responsible for 27 percent of global historical emissions, while India, despite being the fourth largest emitter today, is responsible for only three per cent of historic emissions.

The announcement’s drama was magnified as we observed the inconvenience and insecurity of a climate-changed world during our trip. Manvi was in its third year of an extreme drought, which had made food, water, and employment scarce. Temperatures spiked to 106 degrees as we drove through the village. Our windows framed scenes that continue to haunt me—bridges reaching across empty valleys where rivers used to flow, miles of dusty, barren soil, and a few scattered women bowed over farming tools, trying to till life out of the scorched earth. Father Arun Luis, SJ, the principal of Loyola Xavier, shared that many students asked to stay at school over their last summer break so that they would have food to eat. Scenes did not improve in Bangalore, where we watched no water; their natural water source dried up a few years ago, forcing it to rely on biweekly, unreliable shipments.

Climate change can be subtle in its interruptions; its everyday tragedies do not always make the headlines. As an international studies major at a Jesuit, liberal arts college, however, I fought the urge to view the unsettling scenes as isolated phenomena, unfortunate parts of what it means to be poor or Indian. These events are emblematic of larger climate trends and call us to pay attention and act now in ways we have not before.

Students at the Loyola Xavier School in Manvi, India

The Call to Act

While many Jesuit schools have begun to address climate change through dialogue and on-campus mitigation efforts, its urgency demands a conversion that is distinctive to our Jesuit identity. By educating the Dalit children in India, the Jesuits take a radical stance against an unjust social structure. In the U.S., we have similar unjust systems, namely, an economic model which relies on the extraction of fossil fuels to drive economic growth at any cost. Pope Francis tells us that to address the climate crisis, we must move beyond technological solutions and confront our unsustainable overconsumption of our planet’s resources, “aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels.”

Loyola Xavier School is a model of how we can leverage our institutions’ moral and political power to address the structural causes of climate change - a problem as sprawling as our network, as entangled in culture, ethics, and politics as our mission. We can start with fossil fuel divestment, which involves releasing investments in fossil fuel industries as part of a global movement to shift resources from an extractive energy system. While a few Jesuit schools have achieved partial divestment commitments, including Georgetown, campaigns in the Catholic Divestment Network are organizing for full divestment and reinvestment in responsible funds. Institutions can also endorse carbon-pricing legislation, which puts a price on carbon emissions to account for their negative externalities (think: crop loss in Manvi), incentivizing the transition to a clean energy economy. In 2017, Fordham became the first Jesuit school to endorse carbon pricing.

The fact that some Jesuit students do not have food because of climate change, while other Jesuit schools continue to take small steps towards sustainability is embarrassing and unacceptable given the mission of Jesuit higher education. Every year on our campuses, we honor the Jesuit Martyrs who were murdered at the University of Central America in El Salvador for witnessing to the Gospel in a moment of political uncertainty, violence, and fear. What will it take for us to recognize that we, too, are being called to be prophets of our time?

You can read the full article, first published in Conversations Magazine, at conversationsmagazine.org/web-features/2018/7/20/prophets-of-a-future-not-our-own