Rev. Charles L. Currie, SJ AJCU President

We have come a long way—in time and in the substance of the issues—since the first Earth Day in 1970. That year, at Georgetown, I coordinated an enthusiastic celebration featuring then-Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, a great environmental supporter, only to be faced with an embarrassing cleanup of trash left behind by the celebrators. A week later, I hosted a lecture on clean air by an EPA official who subsequently drove off in a car engulfed in the smoke of noxious pollutants. Thus, from the beginning, there has often been a disconnect between what we say and what we do about the environment. This issue of Connections features impressive stories about what our campuses are actually doing about the environment and about sustaining our planet and its people.

Today the environment is a global concern, involving rich and poor, but especially the poor. We are more aware today that ecology is not only about trees, animals and rivers. It is also about hunger and the homeless.

Former Secretary General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil: “We can waste the planet’s resources at the current pace for a few decades more....(But) we must realize that one day the storm will break on the heads of future generations. For them, it will be too late….The time of the finite world has come.”

As early as the 1970s, some economists were warning that it would take many earths to sustain the rest of the world having our standard of living. Today, that reality is more urgent than ever in the competition for resources between developed and developing nations.

In 1987, then-Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway introduced the concept of “sustainable development,” which inextricably links economics and environment, economic development and environmental responsibility.

Larry Rasmussen, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor Emeritus of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, prefers to speak of “sustainable community.” Concerned about our living as “children of the great divorce of nature from history,” and our “lack of a sense of the whole,” he writes: “Whether we like it or not, it’s life together now, or not at all.”

Our national policies have vacillated from then-Budget Director Richard Darman saying in 1990, “Americans did not fight and win the wars of the 20th century to make the world safe for green vegetables,” to an enthusiastic former Vice President Al Gore alerting us to An Earth in the Balance, to skepticism about climate change, to a renewed commitment to the environment and sustainability by the present administration.

It is encouraging to read of what is happening on our increasingly green campuses, in the classroom, in dining halls, in construction and renovation projects and in institutional policies. Most importantly, these initiatives come from students, faculty and administrators, thus modeling the participatory, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary strategies needed to make a real difference in such a complicated arena.

Since this is a global issue affecting both developed and developing nations, rich and poor—but especially the poor—concern for sustainability is an important part of the contemporary Jesuit commitment to education for solidarity and for justice. The early environmental movement tended to be something nice to be involved in. Today, we are becoming more and more aware that it is a moral imperative in which we have no choice. Many of our campuses are showing us the way.

God’s blessings on all our endeavors!