When we think about the importance of water, we tend to think of our earlier experiences in life. For some, it is learning to swim, a hydrant open in the summertime, seeing the ocean for the first time, taking a shower somewhere, or quenching a thirst after a race. Simultaneously, there is another narrative others are compelled to experience: the countless droughts in our country and throughout the world, oil spills like the Exxon Valdez that polluted the sound of Alaska, lead poisoning in the Flint, Michigan water crisis, and those are only considering the ones in our country not to mention the water crisis that still plagues our distant neighbors in foreign lands. Water is no longer a birth rite but a privilege. It is comparable to people who have the chance to go to college from east and west cultures. Its regulation has been corrupted by the “throw-away” culture of our western societies. The many forms of water are not just material but heavily embedded in the orders of globalization. Water is the essential element of life. It is needed for drinking, sanitation, agriculture, obtaining the ecosystem, and many other vital variables. Water exists in all life forms, yet what lives it reaches has become a commodity of which to be entitled. The substance of which we are born of, mainly composed of, and depend upon for daily living and sanitation is the very substance in which we exploit. A common refusal of interconnection and biodiversity has developed and has been instilled in most first world cultures starting with the United States of America.
“Water poverty” is now prevalent in not only western but most societies throughout the planet, which is covered with water by 71 percent (usgs.gov). Surely, many may think that sounds amiss. How could a planet so rich in water have so many issues with its role in poverty? Our socio-political boundaries have no respect for water’s own boundaries and properties. The world is already exhausting it supply of water by making unhealthy collective choices every moment. The political distribution is upsetting its natural flow and the nature of its commodity is fueling a global competition.
“The fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflict and wars in the future.” – Kufi Anan, Former United Nations Secretary-General.
Laudato Si, the encyclical letter by our Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home, approaches the issue of water as in the form of scarcity, not abundance. The quantity of water is no longer reflective of the quality of water. The natural form of water has now been infected by the fallen human condition which has obstructed its flow. Pope Francis is calling upon our awareness to an awakening of a reality that is beginning and ending in our common home. It is a problem that goes full circle and he is urging us to be aware of the consequences of our short-sighted centric choices, not only as Catholics but as a human race. The privileged turn a blind eye to the relative connection of water and global oppression. It is more natural for the privileged to get caught up in their own access to water than the way they misuse it and pollute it eventually sending it off downstream to our “distant others”.
The environmental issue of water is relevant to the preferential option for the poor. Scarcity and abundance are the parameters that define the geology behind the common home for the marginalized. Scarcity is becoming a new norm in the science of distribution. Availability is altering the capacity of water’s impact on the integrity of the life of the poor. International river basins, aquifers, and canals are being depleted forever because of pollution.
The quality of water is relevant to the preferential option for the poor. Sickness, disease, and death is the result of unclean water that limits the quality of life for the marginalized. The shortage of clean water is also a matter of necessity as a factor in the connection of food security and agriculture here in our country also extending to others.
The inequality in the socioeconomics of water is relevant to the preferential option for the poor. If water is ubiquitous, then oppression can be insidious in the deviation of justice. We have become a “throw away” culture that has fallen unconscious to the context of commercial consumerism. The distraction of our own instant gratification has subdued our attention to where exactly the things we “throw away” actually go, how they affect the places and people they flow toward, and how they influence the chain reaction that will ultimately lead to our own demise.
Pope Francis is calling for a meditated attention for all to increase our perception of community. Cultures are interconnected and dependent on one another. Pope Francis is asking us to redefine what we have come to know as “our culture” in a less anthropocentric mentality and a more creative consciousness of inclusivity. Our relationship with nature is being segregated and disintegrated by a socially and politically wielded egocentrism. It is apparent that our relationships with nature are reflective of our relationships to the human condition, to ourselves and each other. The solidarity of living on earth itself is enough to not only raise but increase the accountability for which we are responsible to uphold and pave for future generations.
We are poisoning ourselves as a race along with all others. There have been five major extinctions in our planet’s history and we continue to usher in the first Anthropocene extinction with undaunted individualism. Conversion can only begin where we are situated, in our home and homelands. There is no way to erase all the destruction that has left permanent damage to our world by our hierarchical societies, but, we can begin to create systems of anti-oppressive commonality through restoring justice to its rightful purpose of egalitarian principles. It is not an ultimate solution (just as clean water is not the antidote for poverty). It is a shift in perception, a profound praxis of altering our identity for the better.
The Environmental Issue of Water
Water poverty goes hand in hand with oppression. It is multidimensional just as the environment it corrupts. It not only affects food security for the poor but the very infrastructure of their homes and agriculture systems. The exploited structures of these systems do not allow much promotion, if any, for human flourishing. If we come to recognize the corruption of water poverty, we usually only come to recognize it on a local and national scale. However, we rarely delve into a closer look at how far the damage goes into the lands of our “distant others.” The fluidity of water travels further than we can ever imagine. Along with its tracks also carries its instilled damage. We fail to see our other’s sickness and death from dehydration or disease or both because of corrupt distribution. We do not think about the environmental impact on ecosystems or water levels rising, destroying fertile lands and dropping, drying out communal basins and aquifers, and impoverishing the land. The option for the poor gets slimmer, if not dissolved, to find drinking water. IF they have the means, they will move toward a source. The problem with this migration is that it not only displaces a people but breaks them up and ultimately breaks down a cultural history of their native lands. People become dislocated with very little chance of assimilation and even less chance of integration. Local lineages become “rubbed out” and oasis becomes further and further to reach to attain drinking water.
Laudato Si’ repeatedly draws our attention to the question of vital values, most notably in sections 20–52, but also in its calls to attend to the impact of environmental destruction on the world’s poor. It mentions pollution and climate change which produce “a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and [cause] millions of premature deaths” (LS 20). Pope Francis specifically mentions the issue of bioaccumulation of toxins in the food chain and their impact on health (LS 21). Climate change threatens the poor’s “means of subsistence” as well as animal and plant species that “cannot adapt” (LS 25).
“Where is Christ in the Laudato Si? Where is his calling to action?” In Christology, we like to think of the human race as the collective body of Christ but Pope Francis challenges us to expand the idea to a perspective outside our anthropocentrism. The body of Christ is hazed and tortured on his path to crucifixion. The damaged body of Christ that hangs on the cross represents the ecosystem of all things interconnected. He thirsts for life-giving water and cries out in lament for reason, justice, and deliverance, just as the marginalized do at the point of disaster “at the foot of the cross”.
“God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement” (LS 89).
“What option can we extend to the poor when we can’t even recognize they are the ones who face the consequences of our ill means? How do we even access that part of ourselves that allows us the attention to pay to these catastrophic factors?” These questions address a conversion of a specific kind, not only an intellectual conversion but something on a larger scale, an ecological conversion. Ecological Conversion: What does it mean? (N. Ormerod and C. Vanin, Journal of Theological Studies) places Bernard Lonergan’s five-fold scale of values (vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious) as standards of transcultural methodology to uncovering the message of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si. Ecological conversion is not a single process but a series of revelation and epiphany that we must seek out in our daily lives. This process brings us to a better clarity of what it is to be accountable in communion with the world.
Pope Francis calls for our acute attention to living our choices with responsibility. Water is a power struggle in the world of scarcity. Abundance is no longer in sight but it is within our reach if we access a communal mentality. There is an individual moral moment that Lonergan emphasizes as a key variable to ecological conversion. That moment is the catalyst of attention, a sacred attention that is essential for the transformation of selfish individualism to selfless inclusivity. It is the summoning of attention that we access the body of Christ through ecological conversion. The connection is in our sacred and explicit attention to the world around us.
“whereby the effects of encounter with Jesus Christ becomes evident in their relationship with the world around them” (LS 217).
The Quality Of Water
Put simply, a sick planetary ecology creates a sick people, undernourished, prone to illness, and carrying a toxic load that undermines the very possibility of vital flourishing. Our vital well-being is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of the whole planet. (Omerrod,Vanin Pg. 337, Pgph 3).
“Where is the human condition in the Laudato Si?” The health issue of the oppressed is not the beginning or end to poverty but introduces the myriad of points that link us all to the responsibility of the well-being of one another. We connect to each other through sharing within our communities and the elements involved. Food chains, energy systems, infrastructures, all are relative and all require water. If one element is malignant then all are at risk of perishing, including animal and plant species that co-exist with us.
In the American Journal of Public Health (Mona Hanna-Attisha, Jenny LaChance, Richard Casey Sadler, Allison Champney Schnepp, Feb 2016), Michigan continues to battle a drinking water catastrophe by unattended caustic and deficient water systems that allow high gradations of lead into main channels of water canals concluding:
The percentage of children with elevated blood lead levels increased after water source change, particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods. Water is a growing source of childhood lead exposure because of aging infrastructure.
Flint, Michigan is in the immediate localization of our very own country, society, and culture. The ignorance we choose to accept keeps us in a comfort zone of not feeling responsible. We tend to think that because the oppressed are not in the present moment in front of us then we have little responsibility for them. However, it is because of our daily choices of what brands we choose to buy, how we use or waste our resources, how much collective waste we accumulate that the oppressed continue to fight for their right to survive.
As American citizens, we are segregated by race and class. We are inherent separatists that subscribe only to our own state of comfort. The truth of the matter that Lonergan would see would be we are the cause and the effect of sickness and poverty. The Laudato Si places great emphasis on the centrality of our home as another limb to the body of Christ. If one part of the body is ill, so are we all accountable to tend to it. If pollution comes from our home, then we alienate our family by spreading disease to them and in return infesting our homes and selves by ultimately becoming the end to our own extinction. (LS. 20-52)
Socioeconomics and Water
Water has passed through every living organism in world history. It has been in existence before the human race and it is not to be subdued by the human race. It belongs to no one but God. It is a gift from God to the world to be shared by one another, as well as a binary covenant to take care of one another and the planet left to us. The water molecules that were once in our ancient ancestors are now in us and we will continue to pass them into the future. It is a fluid that sutures all life outside the body and within, surpassing its material properties by its life-giving potency.
After World War 2, in 1954, the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) allowed larger nations to set up military bases on foreign lands for the sake of protecting vulnerable smaller nations for national securities. The United States set up a nuclear base in the Nothern Pacific islands of Enewetak Atoll to conduct testing of the hydrogen bomb, “for the good of mankind.” Testing produced radioactive waste to the island so a dome structure was placed on the Runit Island where radioactive debris was kept. In the past, environmental damage has compromised the structure of the Runit dome and resulted in toxic leakage to its surrounding lagoons and they are now more radioactive than the original debris itself.
In the book “Life Under a Cloud” by Allan M. Winkler the steps to devising a workable strategy for the “protection” of the people of the Enewetak Atoll islands for the ethical engineering of the subsidiary notion that the “Point of Decision” should be close to the “Point of Consequence. The point of decision is a global and national security issue. The point of consequence is the gradation of impact on the immediate party involved, (in this instance, the native people by bomb testing). Hydraulic fractioning (better known as “fracking”) was now justified on the islands with what the U.S. assumed to be the “Catholic Principle of Subsidiarity.”
The fracking penetrated lagoons, sounds, basins, and aquifers where all the Islanders received their water. The islands became uninhabitable and the people and their culture were exploited and misplaced under the assumption of “protection”.
The idea of a subsidiary is normally at “the lowest level possible.” Catholic Social Teaching applies it to an even greater accountability of the parties involved by raising the stakes at “the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary.” Lonergan would view the half principle as the perspective of the individual. Pope Francis is emphasizing the full principle in the Laudato Si as the rightful means of flourishing. In the case stated above, the United States Military did not act in the best interest of all, it acted in self-interest.
Drinking the “kool-aid of individualism” can be poisonous. We must
take active steps to end our wicked ways and to strive toward balance and self-examination. Human flourishing does not equate to “the lowest level possible.” What good is it to give the poor water if it is undrinkable? “IS and OUGHT” are the logistics that mask the means of exploitation. The paying of attention is what presents to us the prophetic voice of “OTHERWISE”. It is the herald of the Laudato Si. Pope Francis calls upon the use of our prophetic voice. This is where Lonergan encounters the Christian voice in the Pope’s letter as the embodiment of resistance. We must take deliberate steps to avoid the subduing threat of oppression while organizing against tyrannical regimes of power. This is Pope Francis’s call to the discipleship of Jesus. We can no longer rely on the strategical logistics of politically embedded reason to live as we “ought” to be. “Lowest level possible/Highest level necessary” is not enough to justify integrity to live. FLOURISHING must be an essential part of the solution and it must be a solution available to all in abundance.
Conclusion
In the gospel of John, there is a parable about Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well. He comes upon a well where a woman is drawing water and he asks her for a drink. She is befuddled that a Jew is asking a Samaritan for a drink. Samaritans and Jews were not commonly friendly, if not hostile. Samaritans were considered foreigners by Jews even though they shared the same beliefs. Jesus crosses that barrier and sees no foreigner before him. He is in need and she tends to his thirst. By her act of generosity and good faith, she bears witness to the grace of God. It is like water that passes through many lands that the grace of God passes through Jesus and he shares an authentic encounter with his womanly neighbor. It is also like the face of the impoverished that she not only is a foreigner but a woman that gives Jesus water. Women and children are the face of the marginalized. It is not Jesus who grants her a drink, it is from the marginalized that his thirst is quenched and in return he offers her the “spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” (John 4:4-42)
Laudato Si is an invitation to reawaken a part of ourselves that longs to be connected to nature. We, in our western American society, subscribe to daily unhealthy habits and choices. We also subscribe to spiritual unhealthy habits that we “have no idea what we do.” However, in this modern day, we do have the reason to understand what we do and when it is wrong.
Ecological conversion is an invitation to the full attention of multidimensional realities of what is right in front of us in the present and the consequences “at the highest level necessary” in the future. Bernard Lonergan interprets the Laudato Si as an opening to collectivism and solidarity. The process starts with paying full attention. Lonegran’s idea of the purpose of Laudato Si is to dispel the idea that we are to subdue the earth. There is a need to get away from the idea to dominate the earth. Everything in the earth is interdependent. Even Theology can be anthropocentric and has even contributed to “throw-away” culture. If everything is for the purpose of human gain then it becomes exploitation. On that basis, Pope Francis and Lonergan pose the need to change our Theology to stop exploiting the earth, and in return, stop exploiting each other. This is the focus of Laudato Si. It calls for the stop of dominance language and opens the conversation of interdependence and solidarity with creation. It is a method of organizing people that looks to Jesus as an example to unify. It is an amplification in the meaning of “solidarity.” If we are in solidarity with the poor, it is not just seeing them on the news in pity. It is a recognition that we see ourselves in them. We do not share in their situation but we share in their humanity. If we are in solidarity, how can we go on voting for people or subscribing to corporations who put restrictive measures on the flourishing of the poor? Solidarity is an empathic experience that we share in existence with one another and with creation, being created by God. Whether we are a forest or a person, in the sense of Laudato Si, the forest is dependent on us to not tear it down as we are dependent on it to provide for us. All the same, if we destroy it, we ruin it for all, including the creatures that are dependent on it and also share in our existence. Pope Francis is calling us to remember the consequences of our actions. When we destroy something, no matter what measure, we destroy a large amount. This is reflected in our cycles of human relationships and our connection to our homes and world. Water is the material form of existence. It is the symbol of the grace of God in Baptism and the welcome to the Eucharist when we step into his common home. Pope Francis in Laudato Si encourages us to stop destroying each other and start creating for one another.
*The self-portrait is inspired by the song "MONUMENT" by Royksopp, a calling to the ideal world and the world we live in. We are in denial of the universal interconnectivity of all things we share this world with. What was left and the damage done can still be reversed if we hold the world not in conspiring against us but help it transpire on account of us. All the answers are inside us.
Make a space
For my body
Dead or whole,
Push this side apart
This is what I'm controlling,
It's a mole, the inside that I cart
This will be my monument
This will be a beacon when I'm gone, gone, gone
When I'm gone, gone, gone
When I'm gone!
Soon when that moment comes,
I can say I did it all with love, love, love
All with love, love, love
All with love!
Make a cast of my body
Pull back out,
So that I can see
Make a world
Are you ruling?
Make a world
That I used to be
I will let this monument,
Represent a moment of my life, life, life
Of my life, life, life
Of my life!
I will let this monument,
Represent a moment of my life, life, life
Of my life, life, life
Of my life!
Make a cast of my body
Pull back out,
So that I can see
Make a world
Are you ruling?
Make a world
That I used to be
