Eco-Justice Team - September 2025

Scholar and activist Joanne Macy recently died at 96. She spent her career working to

change the popular view of how to solve the urgent environmental issues of our time,

and to help us understand that we are not free-floating individuals, but part of a larger

whole that contains all of life. She believed that we will not solve the climate issue with

technology and policy alone, but a spiritual renewal is necessary. Her views influenced

Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, “Laudate Si’.”

As reported in the Washington Post, this view was recently echoed by prominent

environmental scientist Gus Speth. The co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense

Council and founder of the World Resources Institute, he once thought the century’s

biggest challenges were “biodiversity loss, eco-system collapse, and climate change.”

He now says, “I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and

apathy. . . and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we lawyers and scientists don’t know how to do that.”

Perhaps we at BHCC can be a small part of that spiritual revival. On Aug. 10, we heard

a sermon about imagination and hope as part of faith. “Selfishness, greed, and apathy”

seem to be at the heart of the chaos and cruelty that surround us. As we embark on a new program year, we can keep imagining the world it was created to be, and the people God wants us to be.