Laudato Si!
St. Vincent Pallotti’s Ecological Citizenship
Pope Francis, Laudato Si
“A sense of deep communion with the rest of nature cannot be real if our hearts lack tenderness, compassion and concern for our fellow human beings. Concern for the environment needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society.”
Caring for
Our Common Home
If we do agriculture very well, we can develop solid, economic stability in our missions. In our East African missions, we’re designing a program called Evangelization Through Sustainable Agriculture. It’s aimed at creating just what Pope Francis called for in his environmental encyclical, Laudato Si: ecological citizenship. More than providing information, it looks to instill environmental habits for the future.
“Environmental education has broadened its goals. It needs educators capable of developing an ethics of ecology, and helping people, through effective pedagogy, to grow in solidarity, responsibility and compassionate care; aimed at creating an ecological citizenship.”
To begin our environmental mission, we created both a list of challenges and solutions so that they may be overcome on our farm in Tanzania.
Problems We Face:
Cutting down trees: This has been a common problem to my surrounds, and it's done as most of the people around us use charcoal for cooking, and timber for building
Littering of plastic materials: In the community that we're staying, we are mostly surrounded with plastics all around, and it's because people do not know the impacts that it's causing for future generations
Destruction of water bodies: In the introduction of irrigation farming to the community, many people tend to do farming beside the river banks, and as a result most of our water bodies are disappearing
Livestock keeping: Most of those around us are livestock keepers, therefore due to this act they tend to destroy our natural environment by trying to feed their animals using our natural forests.
Solutions:
Planting trees for a sustainable environment, and to preserve our green environment
Educating our community on how to protect the environment, especially children
Installing of littering dustbins, to reduce on the amount of plastic materials
Drilling of water underground, to reduce the use of our water bodies for irrigation, hence assisting on the lessening and reduction of the water sources around us
