U.S. Columban JPIC Newsletter

Challenging Structures, Changing Lives

 January 7, 2008

Contents

Useful Websites & Resources

With the U.S. presidential campaign season in full swing, caucuses, primaries and pundits cover the news almost to the point of exhaustion. There is no lack of analysis and speculation about frontrunners and long shots. From the JPIC Office, we hope to offer you something different for your reflection over the next year in preparation for Election Day.

As globalization brings us closer and more connected across borders, it is increasingly urgent that we consider how U.S. policies affect our global neighbors. We have identified issues that we believe deserve special consideration and reflection when considering the next president of the United States. We will not endorse a candidate, but we present issues we believe are key to being global good neighbors. We invite you to consider your preferred candidate in light of his or her position on these issues.

Thank you to those who responded to our JPIC Newsletter survey. We will work hard to incorporate your feedback to provide you with an ever-more engaging newsletter. One new feature is a section dedicated to highlighting a Columban-specific project related to our monthly topic. We hope this puts a human face behind the issue and how Columbans are responding. As always, we invite you send us your comments.

We wish you many blessings in 2008, and we thank you for starting your year off with us!

In peace,
Amy Woolam Echeverria

The Issue: Water for All

Access to clean water is a fundamental human right that’s essential to all life on this planet. When water is defined as a tradable commodity and source of profit, rather than a right, it is the poor who lose out.   Problems of pollution, privatization and dams have unjustly made water a luxury for too many members of the global community.

Countless waterways have been poisoned, used as dumping grounds for toxic chemicals and waste. Also, global warming, triggered by the emission of greenhouse gases, affects our water supply in a more subtle, but no less-menacing form.

Glaciers serve as a vital water bank for 60 percent of the world’s population, yet as the glaciers melt due to warming, they are no longer being replenished by yearly snowfall and may eventually disappear altogether. Rainfall patterns also are changing, becoming more concentrated and less predictable, and extended droughts are becoming more common. The livelihoods of many of the world’s poorest people, many of whom depend upon rain-fed agriculture, are at risk.

Large dams, pushed as a solution for clean energy and sustainable development, have grave social and environmental costs, including the forced displacement of communities in the wake of their construction. Poor farmers and indigenous peoples are particularly vulnerable and, as a direct result, many suffer cultural decline, loss of livelihood, decreased access to water, deterioration in overall health and political repression when they demand their rights.

At the same time, environmental impacts include the loss of fisheries, decreased water quality, production of greenhouse gases and a decline in farmland and forest fertility.

In response to the increasing scarcity of safe, clean water, corporations and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, have sought to push the privatization of water, arguing that setting a price to water will lead to increased efficiency and conservation. Nonetheless, water privatization schemes around the world have a history of failure, including skyrocketing prices, water-quality problems, deteriorating service and a loss of local control. As water becomes a commodity rather than a right, the poor suffer, unable to afford access to water.

It is anticipated that future wars will be about water. Although our planet is more water than land, only 2.5 percent of that water is fresh. As deserts expand, garbage and pollutants are dumped into our waterways and glaciers melt and rivers dry up, water distribution increasingly reflects the vast inequalities in income distribution in our world, with the poor ever more marginalized.

Yet beyond its environmental, biological and geopolitical significance, water has profound religious symbolism. In the moment of our baptism, we are reborn and reconciled with the Divine through water. Water is, above all, a symbol of life and hope that, in its sanctity, must be protected and shared as the common heritage of humankind and our world.

Columban Response:  
Alternative Water Use at the U.S.-Mexico Border

By Columban Father Bill Morton

After emptying my bucket of “humanure” on the compost pile out back of my home, I take the water used to rinse the bucket and pour it around the trees.

By participating in the rhythms of creation, I help sustain what God has created and avoid polluting the increasingly scarce clean water in our U.S.-Mexico border community. In six months, Columban Father John Wanaurny and I have conserved about 4,000 gallons of water.

The sawdust toilet we use in our tiny house on the El Paso, Texas, side of the border was simple to make and inexpensive: a pine box with a toilet seat, a five-gallon bucket, sawdust, an active compost pile and the willingness to change a lifetime of using flush toilets are all that’s required.

The process of conversion that has led to my new relationship with the Earth grew directly from my work with the disenfranchised people of Anapra, Mexico, the squatter area of Ciudad Juárez just south of El Paso. This new relationship is rooted in faith and my increasing thirst for justice more than any political ideology.

Water is a sacred gift, as is all of God’s creation, and the call to celebrate and steward these gifts is more urgent than ever for our human family. From the time our mothers “broke water” and we swam into the world, drinking, bathing, growing, washing and playing in this miraculous substance has been essential for our lives. Fresh water is a limited resource to be used with care, gratitude and justice.

'Dry' Toilets
With a population double that of El Paso and the presence of more than 400 foreign-owned factories, Juárez is expected to deplete its only supply of fresh water—the Hueco Bolson aquifer—in as little as five years.

The consequences of this impending crisis could be paralyzing, yet in the spirit of “better to light one candle than curse the darkness,” we began collaborating with the Mexican Sisters of the Incarnate Word to build sanitarios ecologicos secos, Spanish for “dry ecological toilets.”

In Anapra, where the Columbans minister in the parish of Corpus Christi, we see concern for creation as an essential dimension of our mission. Although our “dry” toilets are more complicated and expensive to build (about 500 U.S. dollars) than sawdust toilets, they require little maintenance and almost no water. They are a welcome alternative to those who still use a traditional outhouse as there is no odor, flies, mosquitoes or ground contamination.

Cristina Estrada, an Anapra resident who coordinates our Columban scholarship program, and her husband, José, considered installing a flush toilet when Anapra was finally connected to the Juárez water supply. After discussing the water situation and the benefits of the dry toilet, they agreed to try one. Now she and her family are delighted with the results and proud of the water they conserve.

Like the sawdust toilet, the end product of the dry toilet is clean, safe compost that can be put back in the earth and used to grow plants, trees and food. And like a sawdust toilet, the amount of water they save is available for drinking, bathing, washing clothes and many other household uses.

Water For All
For Christians, the sacrament of initiation and incorporation into the Body of Christ takes place in the waters of baptism. Our whole salvation history is intimately connected with this simple substance.

Water, precious, clear and flowing abundantly from God’s generosity, is meant to be poured out on all on Earth without distinction. The good things of the Earth were created by God to be used equally by all and not to made into a commodity or marketed to serve the needs of the better off and enrich a small entrepreneurial elite.

Augustina Contreras, a pastoral agent for the Columbans in Juárez, and her team has been making the tazas (traditional ceramic toilet bowls) used in the dry ecological toilet system. Using Fiberglas molds and cement, the hand-made toilet bowls are given two coats of paint. The work provides a small income and satisfaction for the women who know they are helping conserve water.

Ironically, it is the poor, the marginalized and those with the fewest resources who are most open and enthusiastic to trying new ways to live in harmony with nature. Ultimately, it is their risk, their generosity and openness of spirit that will offer models for us to transform affluent consumer lifestyles.

Water is a limited resource. It is overused, exploited, polluted and mismanaged. The ingenious system of self-cleaning and replacement God created in nature planned is out of balance because of human carelessness and lack of wisdom. For example, the Hueco Bolson aquifer that the border area in and around El Paso and Juárez depend, has 20 times more water pumped out of it each year than is replaced by nature. In just a few more years, nothing will be left but brackish water that can only be treated by expensive desalination.

The Discipline To Change
Individually and as communities, we are called to change. When the U.S. bishops issued their “Renewing the Earth” pastoral message in 1991, the document began with a quote from Pope John Paul II’s own writings on the topic: “Faced with the widespread destruction of the environment, people everywhere are coming to understand that we cannot continue to use the goods of the earth as we have in the past. … The ecological crisis is a moral one.”

Traditional Christian disciplines such as fasting, abstinence and almsgiving can offer models of using water with more care and using less of it to ensure that others have their share. Still, some resist this idea. We were discussing water issues with a group from a visiting U.S. parish when one woman asked, “What difference is it going to make if I use less water?” After a brief silence, her 13-year-old daughter piped up, “Well, Mommy, you’d be different!”

Like rain that falls and nurtures plants and crops, we are called to change our world. As we make painful and difficult sacrifices to change our way of living, we will find ourselves creating ties of friendship thousands of miles away.

The “Our Father” tells us we are all brothers and sisters. Our faith tells us all good things are created by God to be shared by all. Living more simply and more justly is an active way of cooperating with God’s grace received through the waters of life of baptism.

Action Alert: 'Water for the World Resolution'

No one can survive without water, but today as many as 1.4 billion people struggle daily without access to an adequate water supply and 2.5 billion people lack access to improved sanitation. And as the affects of global warming become more apparent, water access will be further imperiled.

In an attempt to respond to this need, on December 6, 2007, Representative Janice Schakowsky introduced the Water for the World Resolution (H.Con Res. 266). The resolution recognizes the urgent need behind the global water crisis, asks for adequate funding for water projects and prioritizes communities currently without reliable access to this vital resource. Furthermore, it emphasizes water as a global public good that should not be treated as a private commodity and calls for meaningful public participation and local decision-making in regards to water resources.

Tell your representative that access to safe, clean and adequate water is a fundamental human right. Ask them to co-sponsor the “Water for the World Resolution.” Take action at:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1185/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=21922

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