ECO-JUSTICE

Welcome to this update of what’s happening in Edmund Rice schools around the world. Lots of exciting projects are underway. Our commitment to eco-justice has students, staff, school leaders and school boards all helping to green our schools, in partnership with Earth itself and in the spirit of Edmund Rice’s care for the marginalised.

If you have a good news story of something you’ve done to make your school more sustainable or to restore your local ecosystem, send it to me at moyh@erc.org.au . If it’s short (one or two paragraphs), I’ll publish it here. If it’s a longer report, we can summarise it here and hold it for others to access.

I hope the stories published here encourage you to listen to the cry of the Earth in your own area, and to respond generously.

Moy Hitchen, Congregation Promoter of Eco-Justice

The osprey is large fish-eating hawk, found along the world’s coastlines, and increasingly endangered in the wild. Thanks to the work of Jan King and a dedicated team of her co-workers at Aquinas College, a pair of ospreys has been breeding on a special nesting platform constructed for them.

The school has a beautiful stretch of banksia scrub woodland growing beside the Canning River, in Perth, Western Australia. Jan and her team have lovingly restored this native vegetation, thus granting the ospreys the habitat they need to breed. The students and staff of Aquinas are developing a strong partnership with their local ecosystem. Great work!

Goethals’ Memorial School, Kurseong, run by the Christian Brothers, is perched on the steep lower slopes of the Himalayas, not far from Darjeeling, in the north of West Bengal. The magnificent coniferous forests have been slowly stripped from the hills, over generations, and precious soil is washing away down the gushing streams, to clog rivers down on the plains.

Br James Joseph and a willing band of students are fighting back! They have planted over 10,000 trees on these steep slopes, surrounding their school with a shaggy mantle of protective green. They are also involved with the local people who need firewood and other forest products, building better relationships and planning better management of the local resources.

Carrick-on-Suir, upstream from Waterford, boasts a long and rich history in the Christian Brothers. The second community founded by Edmund Rice (in 1805), it holds the graves of some of the early Brothers (Austin Dunphy, Patrick Corbett). The yew tree standing in the front yard was probably there in the days of Edmund. The Suir flows past behind the property, through its screen of weeping willows.

But Kevin Codd, Eddie McEvoy, Tom Costello and Mel Donlon, living there today, have transformed the site into Bru na Cruinne, an eco-centre for the whole Edmund Rice Network and its schools. If you want to experience a community living eco-spirituality – visit them!

Br Miguel O’Donnell spent many years in Moyobamba, in the tropical jungle (selva) in the north-east of Peru, working with prisoners and ex-offenders in that isolated town. Moyobamba is also the site of our pre-novitiate in Peru, and the house is built around open courtyards, one of which is dominated by a huge cedar tree. Cedar, one of the most valuable timbers tree in Peru, is now rare. This tree is one of the vanishing giants of the rainforest.

For years, Miguel collected the papery seeds that this tree shed so generously each year, and lovingly planted them, nurtured them and distributed them to any school or organisation that would plant them. The Catholic school in Moyobamba used Miguel’s cedars in its reforestation project. Miguel has ensured that over 1,000 cedars will grace Moyobamba and its schools.

A combined class of Government and Biology students were workshopping the Earth Charter with me in Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame Catholic High School, in Miami, Florida. Br Sean Moffett, the Principal, had invited me to work with them. The students showed pride in their local ecosystem, the Florida Everglades, one of the most extensive wetlands in the world. When we reached the question of living sustainably on this planet, there was a thoughtful pause.

“Everyone will have to want to change,” said one student. “They’ll have to change in their hearts.” Another one asked: “How do we get people to change their lifestyle?” One of the Government students said, “We need to document things [as in the Earth Charter], so that they do change.” Another immediately added: “But things won’t change unless people implement what’s written.” I was impressed with this rich mixture of idealism and realism. I sensed they are already caring for our common future on this planet.

Livingstone is a town on the Zambesi River, Zambia, within sight and sound of Victoria Falls. The locals call it “the smoke that thunders” in Swahili, and the mist from the tremendous volume of water crashing over the cliff there can be seen from the gate of the Brothers’ house in Livingstone. Both Zambia and Zimbabwe, who share the Zambesi, look to eco-tourism for much needed foreign capital and a chance to restore and maintain their beautiful ecosystems.

St Raphael’s School in Livingstone has active science and geography programmes, instilling a pride in the students and the skills that will help them manage their own wildlife and national parks. The school has vegetable gardens and chickens, to teach more sustainable farming methods. They believe that slowly the region will develop a better balance between the needs of agriculture and eco-tourism.

Not every school sponsors a pod of killer whales! Vancouver College, on the west coast of Canada, has an Environment Club, ably run by Kate Keogh and supported by the Business Manager, Kelly Lattimer. The school has a good recycling scheme; in fact, in 2005, it diverted 15.6 full-sized garbage trucksí worth of garbage into recycling.

The members of the Environment Club helped collect the beverage containers into glass, aluminium and plastic, which are then sold to local recyclers. They then decide how to spend the money on improving the environment. Sometimes, they go on excursions into wild places. But one year, they decided to sponsor a pod of killer whales in nearby Johnstone Strait, where scientists are monitoring and protecting the whales. What a great idea!

Regina Mundi is a Christian Brothers’ college at Chicalim, on a rocky laterite headland in Goa, on the west coast of India. The school is a spectacular example of a garden within a school, and a school within a forest. Principal, John Pereira, has ensured the school’s beautiful courtyards are full of flowering shrubs and tropical foliage. As the students pass on their way to class, squirrels, sunbirds and flocks of babblers are feeding in the gardens.

Around the school boundaries, a rich display of local and introduced trees are flourishing. In one corner, it is hoped the original forest will be encouraged to re-grow. No wonder the local troop of grey langurs (tree-dwelling monkeys) like to drop in – and raid the Brothers’ fruit trees!

The natural ecosystem of coastal Peru is a grey desert. But, like all deserts, it supports a range of hardy plants and animals adapted to the arid conditions. The Christian Brothers run a school called Fe y Alegria 26 on the edge of Lima, at Canto Grande, where people struggle to make a living between the desert and the city. Yet, on these barren rocky slopes, the school and the local people have created a green garden.

Ricardo Glatz, the principal, has kept this terraced slope and the school grounds below it watered and weeded, while a wide a variety of trees and shrubs gain a foothold. Each family volunteers three hours a year to help maintain the precious water supply to the plants. The science teachers help select the species which will grow in such conditions. Between the crowded dwellings on the ridge above, and the dusty school playground below, the garden offers spiritual refreshment – and hope.

How big is a school that has four pairs of breeding wedge-tailed eagles on the property? With 33,000 acres, Christian Brothers Agricultural School at Tardun, on the wide semi-arid plains of Western Australia, must be one of the biggest schools in the world! Yet huge areas of this prime wheat-growing country is threatened by rising salt – dryland salinity. John Walsh, the farm manager, and the students, many of whom are Indigenous Australians, are battling the salt - with science and enormous energy.

How do you reduce the salinity? You plant local trees, whose root systems drive down the water table, and keep the salt below the surface. So John and his helpers plant thousands of York gums, the local eucalypt, and saltbush, a local shrub. How many? Well, in one paddock (field) they planted, by hand, 34,000 trees. In those temperatures, that shows a huge dedication to the Earth!

In the sweeping grasslands of Tanzania, one school is not just providing education to the poorest families, but showing the rest of us how to recycle school wastes into energy. Edmund Rice Secondary School boasts a small herd of seventeen dairy cows, which provide the boarding school with milk. But the wastes from the cattle, plus sewage from the students’ toilets, also provides the school kitchen with enough biogas to cook the meals for boarding students and staff.

Frank O’Shea, the principal, has added another energy-saving twist, to protect the school’s silos of wheat and beans, and one which saves the need for pesticides. The biogas is piped though the silos, killing the insect pests which eat the stored grain, and then to the kitchen’s burners. Needless to say, the students grow vegetables, maize and beans for the kitchen. This is a school reaching for sustainability!

Paul Hendrick is director of The Life Centre in Pearse Square, close to the heart of the bustling city of Dublin. Here, in a tiny courtyard, amidst the inner city’s crowded walls, is a garden. The young people who attend the Life Centre are learning about life – how to gain some control over their own life, how to appreciate what life has to offer them, and how to see that life in its green and flowering sense is a wonderful gift.

Paul encourages the youth to express themselves through art, and writing, and gardening. They seem to need the flowers and leaves, there, in Pearse Square. As Hopkins says, “There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Edmund Rice would want the young people to experience the greenery and growth, as he was himself a child of the green countryside. And Edmund would understand the ‘freshness’ they offer youth.