Helicopter Tjungurrayi, a well
known artist from Balgo, who will
travel with others from this east Kimberley desert community to attend an exhibition of their artworks in Japan. Photo: CAS

“There is a variety of gifts
but always the same Spirit;
There are all sorts of
service to be done,
But always to the same Lord;
Working in all sorts of
different ways in different people,
It is the same God
who is working
in all of them.”

[1Cor 12:4-6]

Issue 2, May 2010, Highlights:

Editorial - Juvenile Justice, an offence against society

A message of peace for us and the earth - Office of Justice, Ecology and Peace

Kimberley Collage - Broome Residential College

New Cathedral mover and shaker

Kimberley Volunteeers

Meeting for a Mission Moment ...

Justice Matters - How does your garden grow? GM and Western Australia

Year of the Priest - Icon and Prayer

Pilgrim Cross

School News - Gibb River

KCP Magazine

Office of Justice Ecology and Peace

A message of peace for us – and the earth

Late last year in Copenhagen, world leaders desperately tried to come up with a solution to the perceived threat of climate change brought about by human activity. An agreement was reached, but it disappointed many who are deeply concerned that our lifestyle could irrevocably damage the earth’s climate and the system that supports life on this planet.

Since then, Australian politics seem to have moved away from a bipartisan position on climate change. Indeed, the whole debate about human activity and climate has become divisive, bitter and confusing. If you’re not a climate scientist, you might be entitled to ask whom to believe among the conflicting claims and often personal attacks.

In the midst of this conflict, a message of peace sounds like something we need. In fact, the Pope’s World Day of Peace Message for this year, I suggest, reminds us of another perspective on our environment and the way humanity is treating it.

The theme of this year’s Message is: If you want to cultivate peace, protect creation. Its message is that preserving the integrity of creation is essential if humanity is to live together peacefully. Pope Benedict describes climate change as a reality, but it is not the only reality that poses a threat to our world. Among many other issues are ‘desertification, the deterioration and loss of productivity in vast agricultural areas, the pollution of rivers and aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the increase of natural catastrophes and the deforestation of equatorial and tropical regions’. Australians will know many of these problems – increasing salinity in soils and waterways, endangerment and loss of species and the unsustainable demands on our river systems, to name only a few.

Pope Benedict’s message also demands that we think about the justification for the huge pressures we place on our own environment. For him – and for many popes before him – ‘development’ is not simply an economic concept but one that takes into account every aspect of human life. Individuals and societies haven’t ‘developed’ just because they have accumulated more or consumed more.

There is yet another moral issue. ‘The goods of creation’, the Pope says, ‘belong to humanity as a whole. Yet the current pace of environmental exploitation is seriously endangering the supply of certain natural resources not only for the present generation, but above all for generations yet to come.’ The riches from the earth and the sea are not solely ours to take and use.

So whether or not human activity is causing climate change, the matter does not end there. We still have to devise a just way of living on the earth – one that does not demand an infinite supply of energy and does not drain the water from rivers and the nourishment from the soil. A sensible way of limiting our output of greenhouse gas, for example, will help to do more than simply dealing with climate change.