Faith Statement on Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is a part of social justice.  

The environment is not something “over there” or “out there” that is disconnected from people.  Rather, people and environment are intimately connected.  As it says in Genesis, we are made of dust — that is to say, of the earth itself.  And so if the earth is poisoned, polluted, damaged, so are we.But, of course, some of us are better insulated from these effects than others.  Race, education, class, culture, gender — all these things make us more or less vulnerable to the effects of environmental degradation.  The water crisis in Flint in early 2016 is an example of “environmental racism” — the end result of a series of environmental decisions whose weight landed disproportionately on members of poor and minority communities.

One helpful concept here is “slow violence.”  We are drawn to media coverage of spectacular, sudden, violence, but most environmental degradation works much more slowly and incrementally, over years and decades rather than days.  Long after media attention has shifted, people in Flint will still be dealing with the effects of lead in their water.  Lead poisoning is an example of slow violence.  Agriculture policies that encourage monocultures and pesticide-intensive farming are another example.  So too the ripple effects of climate change (rising sea levels, salinization) which displace people and communities.

The Book of Revelation offers a beautiful (and hopeful) image of these interconnections:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

—Revelation 22: 1-2

The passage ends with the healing of the nations — in other words, with peace.  It is focused on the city — on the place where people live.  And it begins with a river full of clear, flowing water.