Social Justice

By: Kat Liu

Delivered at: Cedarhurst Unitarian Universalists, in Finksburg, MD

On: March 9th, 2008

Reading:

by Wangari Maathai, from her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.

In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.

That time is now.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: there can be no peace without equitable development; and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space. This shift is an idea whose time has come.

Sermon:

Putting the Justice in Environmentalism

First, let me thank you all for inviting me into your congregation this Sunday to worship with the Cedarhurst Unitarian Universalists. I am honored. I’m here today, first as a fellow Unitarian Universalist, and second as the Assistant Director of the Washington Office for Advocacy of the UUA. Our office exists to represent your voice on Capitol Hill, and also to provide support and resources to UU congregations and individuals in your advocacy work.

I didn’t start off thinking this is what I’d be doing now, living in Washington DC, working for a religious lobbying group. Long before I’d ever heard of Unitarian Universalism, I grew up in the San Francisco bay area wanting to be a scientist. Not that political activism was that far a stretch. I was a good, Northern California liberal, attending my first political protests in high school, many of them having to do with environmental concerns. Every Friday at noon we had a “die-in,” where everyone in the courtyard would drop to the ground to “simulate” what would happen in the event of nuclear war. College at UC Berkeley in the early 80’s meant campus protests for divestment from South Africa and also against nuclear proliferation. Those of you who came into adulthood later may find this hard to believe but for young adults at THAT time, the threat of mass extinction from thermonuclear annihilation was a pressing fear on many people’s minds.

In addition to nukes, there was save the whales. Save the rain forests. And by the time I got to graduate school at Caltech, it was save the spotted owls. By then, I had at various times been a member of Green Peace, Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense, the Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, and Union of Concerned Scientists. I recycled, fretted over paper or plastic, bought Seventh Generation cleaning products. And there was also the camping, communing with nature. From Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and Anza Borego in California to the beautiful national parks in Utah – Arches, Bryce, and Zion. If you haven’t been to these places, you really should.

And in all of this, there was almost a hostility to humankind. If I was enjoying the scenic beauty, experiencing the spirituality of being one with nature, the last thing that I wanted to see was humans, other than the ones I had come with. If there were too many of them, well, we just had to move, to go some place more remote, more pristine.

Indeed, my view of “nature” was that it was pristine, virginal, having not been touched by man.

And one could have seen the same thing in my approach to environmental issues. I never went so far as to say, “If only humans weren’t around then the whole world could live in peace.” Well, ok, maybe I said that once or twice. But in general my misanthropy was more subtle. The rain forests were being destroyed. It was all the fault of those greedy people who were cutting them down for money. The spotted owls were endangered. It was all the fault of those loggers.

Sure…. I had vague misgivings when I actually thought of the loggers as people, trying to earn a living and feed their families…. But surely they should be able to see that saving a species is more important. That they would just have to find other jobs, and if that was an inconvenience for them, well, that’s unfortunate but it couldn’t be helped. Vaguely… I understood that a truly just approach to environmentalism would involve helping those affected to find new jobs – training, assistance, economic development – instead of just vilifying them. But that kind of work was for someone else to figure out. What was most pressing was to save the owls. Still, it left me feeling uncomfortable. Something was not quite right.

Social activism aside, I went on in science, earning my Ph.D. in biology and moving to New York for a postdoctoral position. It was on Long Island that I found UU. Away from the social activism structures that I knew in California, I realized that if I didn’t join a group of some kind that would help remind me of the larger community, I was in danger of just working in the lab and not caring about the rest of the world. So I joined UU. A bit later, I decided to leave science, moved to DC to study religion at Georgetown, became very involved at All Souls in DC, and then involved in the workings of our denomination as a whole.

General Assembly of 2006 was my second GA, and while I was aware that we had been working for two years on a Statement of Conscience on Global Warming/Climate Change, I hadn’t bothered to look at the text. Surely, I thought, we UUs know environmentalism and we’ll craft a worthy Statement. Pam Sparr, who is a fellow member of All Souls and a member of the UU Ministry for Earth was one of the people that I was thinking of when I figured we UUs knew what we were doing. Well, Pam and others at the UUMFE do know their stuff on the environment, but that didn’t mean that all UUs did. When she showed me the text, I was stunned. On the eve of General Assembly, when we were supposed to ratify this Statement of Conscience on Global Warming/Climate Change that was to represent us as Unitarian Universalists to the wider world, there were some serious flaws with the penultimate draft.

I’ll tell you about the most glaring problem. As part of our efforts to combat Global Warming/Climate Change, our Statement of Conscience called on developing countries to limit their population growth…. Some of you may be wondering what’s wrong with that. After all, over population is a serious concern, taxing our earth’s resources and keeping families in poverty. Wouldn’t we want to promote responsible family planning? Yes. Yes, we would. But not as part of our Statement on Global Warming. Here’s why. The United States constitutes 5% of the world’s population, yet it creates 25% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. We are 5% of the world’s population, yet we consume 25% of the world's fossil fuel resources. Per capita, we use five times more resources than the average human and we belch out five times more pollution. And yet our Statement of Conscience was saying, yeah, global climate change is a really serious problem and we want you all out there to fix it for us. You all who use less than we do, and pollute less than we do are gonna fix this problem, even though we’re the main culprits.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it?

That was when the concept of Environmental Justice really hit home. Our Statement of Conscience had the right goal in mind. Yes, the overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming/climate change is a pressing reality, and we really need to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But environmental justice says that how we get to that goal is as important as getting there. Who is being most affected? Who is most responsible for the problem? Who bears the brunt of the “solution”? And who gets to decide what happens? These were the questions that were missing from our Statement of Conscience. Missing from our general awareness. As a result, despite the best intentions of the environmentalist communities, more often than not it is the poor and communities of color who are made to suffer the most from both the environmental problems and their solutions, even though they have less access to the benefits and little control over how resources are used. This is true both internationally and within our country.

Some other examples of environmental injustice:
In relatively affluent and thus shielded, middle America, people are still debating whether global climate change is even real. It’s discussed on a theoretical level, like whether life on Mars could have existed at some time. Meanwhile, within our own borders in Alaska, the Inupiak and Yup’ik peoples are losing their land and way of life due to the melting permafrost. Over 180 villages are expected to slip into the sea within the next ten years.[1] In the South Pacific, low-lying island nations are going under the waves as well, creating a tidal wave of climate refugees. Tens of thousands of islanders have applied for residence in New Zealand.[2] Entire cultures will have to be transplanted. The irony is that these people contribute the least to global warming, and yet they are the first to suffer.

Even more than loss of land, loss of fresh drinkable water is the greatest concern. All over South and Southeast Asia, sources of fresh drinking water are drying up or being contaminated by rising salt waters, ruining agriculture, creating refugees and conflict. Global climate change is a peace and security issue.

And speaking of the coal-burning power plants that are responsible for much of the change, where are they located in this country? Where do our garbage dumps go? Usually, power plants and garbage dumps are near the poorer neighborhoods or communities of color, people who don’t have the power to say, “Not in my back yard.” This is where the highest levels of lead and other toxins are located, and not surprisingly the highest incidences of children’s asthma.

To be honest, in all my years of trying to conserve and reduce, reuse, recycle, I never used to wonder where my electricity and clean water came from or where my waste went. I had wanted to reduce landfill waste for the sake of the “environment,” so that my beloved wildernesses would not one day be turned into garbage dumps. But I did not think of who already had to live down-wind of the land-fills we have right now.

To look at environmentalism through a social justice lens means to look at the picture as a whole, not just focusing on the immediate causes and effects. If people living near rain forests are clear cutting them to graze cows, we have to look at why a they doing this. And when we do, we see people being pressured into plundering their own natural resources in order to supply us with the cheap goods that drive our consumer-based economy. Given that we too depend on healthy rain forests as much as they do, to keep carbon gas levels lower and maintain biodiversity, perhaps we too need to take responsibility for their preservation. Perhaps we need to help them find ways to preserve the forests and feed their families, in partnership with them. To look at environmentalism through a social justice lens means that everyone involved has a voice in the decisions, at every level. It is a holistic and democratic approach to the environment.

My studies in biology taught me well that we humans are no better than other species. We share our DNA and a common origin, and from the standpoint of evolutionary theory are no “better” than the cockroach. But if I had really been paying attention, I would have understood this meant we humans are no worse than other species. Indeed, we are natural. Not separate from nature. And our Seventh Principle says the same thing. It calls us to affirm and promote the interdependent web of existence of which we are a part. We cannot think in terms of either or. It cannot be either the spotted owls or the loggers; it must be both/and. Thus, any truly comprehensive view of environmentalism must incorporate the needs of our fellow humans into the picture. Our Seventh Principle calls us to come into right relationship with our mother Earth, with our fellow humans, and with other species.

For those of you who don’t know how things turned out with our 2006 Statement of Conscience on Global Warming, I am very proud to report that when the injustice of the population control provision was pointed out to them, the UUs at General Assembly of 2006 were reasonable and fair enough to take it out. In the end, after much debate, which is de rigueur with UUs, we ratified a Statement of which UUs can be proud. It was another positive step in our prophetic tradition of witnessing for social justice. I believe that we UUs, with our long histories in the racial and economic justice movements and the environmentalist movement and the peace movement, (and the feminist movement for that matter,) can make the connections. To see the interdependency of all these things and realize they must be approached as one unified, organic movement. Now is the time.

Now is the time, as Wangari Maathai said in our opening reading, making the connections between all these things for us. She said, “There can be no peace without equitable development; and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space.” We are called to heal the earth and in the process heal ourselves, for as long as we see ourselves as separate from the earth and from each other, we cannot be whole. Now is the time for us to “shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground.”

Amen.

Building the World We Dream About

By Roberto Padilla

Delivered at First Unitarian Church of San Jose, CA

On February 24, 2008

Please allow me to start by quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“Today I have a dream that all children of God, white men and black men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestant and Catholics, will be able to join hands together and sing with the words of the old black spiritual: “Free at last!” This was Rev. King’s dream and it is also our dream. It is the premise that we have, to become multiracial and multicultural UU communities.

¿But how are we going to achieve that? The answer is, applying the UU principles.

We, covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, justice, equity and compassion in human relations. Acceptance of one another, and encouragement to mutual spiritual growth in our congregations. These are the basis of the premise for ‘Building The World We Have Been Dreaming of’.

Many years ago, our then senior minister, Rev. Lindi Ramsden, started the experiment to build here in San Jose, a multicultural, multiethnic, and bilingual community. The idea seemed good. And it did fit perfectly well with our UU principles. She was talking about the fact that our community where our church sits is a community where the BMW’s meet the supermarket shopping carts. In other words, in the Silicon Valley, there are the upper middle class people that belong to the High Tech world and those on the fringe who live in the back streets.

The idea was to work with both groups together but, How and where to start? There were a few obstacles to overcome. Some members of the church did not like the idea and left. Some of the people that remained also had fears of mixing with another culture. If we invite Latin people to our homes what can we talk about? How are we going to understand each other in two different languages, two different ways of being and acting?

Initially, the idea was to integrate our community with the unprivileged group, but we had the language barrier. We started by translating into Spanish, sermons, prayers, songs, poems, brochures etc, for all those who did not speak English. And then, after some negotiations, the UUA authorized the translation of the book “Our Chosen Faith” which was translated by Ervin Barrios. Also, Rev. Ramsden took several Spanish courses.

We also had the social and economic barriers. The income level of the Latino people was very low and they also had to be integrated into the productive world. Then we created the ESL and Computer courses. Behind it all was the idea of creating personal relationships, because that way it would be easier to integrate both groups.

Talking about personal relationships, privileged and unprivileged, it reminds me that I was privileged enough to be born in Mexico City, surrounded by different universities, different options. My parents, although not from a wealthy class, allowed their children to attend school, we had the privilege of studying without worrying about where the money for our food and for our books came from. I had the privilege of all city children. This privilege gave me the opportunity to go to school, to get an education and to pursue my dream of becoming a doctor, because I wanted to help the people in need. The day I graduated I swore that I would dedicate myself to those in need. I was going to use my knowledge for that purpose, the privilege that I had. That was my promise.

Privilege can be defined as an advantage that one has, one which one has not had to earn. I did not ask to be born in Mexico City, I did not ask to have the family I have, for me it was a privilege, but I also had the responsibility, of using that privilege I had. After I went to the university and in my quest for helping those in need I chose to go and work at a small village in the Sierra of the state of Veracruz. My privilege of being an urban, middle class, and well educated person, I took that with me. I was going to follow thru with my premise and my promise. On my way to that village I got lost in the middle of nowhere because I with nothing but my privilege of having studied at the university, with my knowledge, but that would not take away my hunger or my being cold, nor the fear of being at an unknown place.

When I finally reached that village, I came to a modest medical office with my knowledge and my dream to help. I came into a society that had never had a medical doctor, they all spoke Spanish (supposedly there was no language barrier) and my first patient said to me, “doctor, I feel ugly”. Ugly?, we were talking the same language but I could not understand my patient; I who had passed all my biochemistry tests, and I just could not understand what this man wanted to tell me when he said, ‘I feel ugly’, I who had written long essays with perfect spelling, could not understand what he meant by ‘ugly’. I had to ask someone from the village to help me in order to understand what he was saying to me. (he was feeling sick)

In this village, besides the health issues, they had some education issues; the only school they had was 1st to 3rd grade only. If they wanted to continue studying, they had to go to another village that was two hours away. Then, how was I going to achieve my goal of making my dream come true, with my premise and my promise of helping them? I started to talk to them, to come into their homes, to understand their language, their culture, their costumes and traditions. I took my doctor’s robe off and went to the field with them, I also went with them to milk the cows and get the milk that I would later drink. Besides being fun, I learned new things, started to build new relationships, to be part of their community. Instead of waiting for them to bring the food to me, I decided to go directly to the person who was cooking for me and wait patiently until the food was ready, having the opportunity to talk with the people about their own dreams, their own longings, but in their own terrain, where they felt more comfortable, in the heart of their homes. And people started to appreciate it.

First I had to build relationships at a human level, at a sensible level, in order to use the responsibility that my privilege gave me to help them. I had the ability to speak better than they did, to communicate with higher government levels when ever it was needed. That was part of my responsibility given the privilege that I had. That is how we managed to create a kindergarten, we made the elementary school go up to 6th grade, we created a distance learning junior high school, and introduced the telephone service into their village.

Whenever I needed their help for any public health related project that my job required, they helped me very gladly, because they were no longer working with the doctor, they were working with a friend, with one of them. When I first arrived in that village, I was, of course, afraid. When I left my home, I thought to myself, will I be safe? What will I talk to them about if we have nothing in common? Later, I understood that there was not a great difference between the man that milked the cow and myself. We both were drinking the same milk, we both had the same dreams of growing and seeing our own families grow, they were working in the field and I was working in my own field of knowledge. In reality there was not much difference. The cloths that I was wearing and the ones they were wearing did not make any difference, the difference was in the way we related to each other.

Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. was a doctor who had the privilege of having a father who encouraged him to study, he had the privilege of being born with the gift of being a great speaker, but he went back to the church where the conflict was happening, and he started building relationships. During the time of the boicott against the buses, he walked with the rest of the people, he walked with his friends. We also know that César Chávez, organized all the field workers, but first he created personal relationships with them in order to achieve a common goal. Here we see two different qualities of leadership. This community of San Jose, is a leading community, and all of you who are attending the “Now is The Time“ Conference, are also leaders, leaders in your own communities.

Multiculturalism is not about learning a language or translating some brochures. This goes even further, It means to sit down together at the table of the other people. It means to go and milk the cow and enjoy that process together, without the fear of what people might say. Without the fear of not understanding each other, without the fear of not doing well in this intercultural encounter. Let me ask you now, How many of you have visited the homes of people of different color, race or culture? How many of you have invited someone whose culture, race and color are different from yours to your table?

Most of the Unitarian Universalists in this country have the privilege of being born white. They did not ask to be white, but they have the responsibility that comes with that privilege, which means, figuring out how to use the privilege that one has. How to use that privilege for the common good. Those of us who have that kind of privilege do not have to worry about immigration issues, about language barriers, we know the system, we know our laws. We can become the voice of those who don’t have that privilege, and we can start by recognizing the worth and dignity of every person.

This is the premise and at the same time the promise: to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Justice, equity and compassion in human relations and acceptance of one another. With the promise of a world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all, respecting the interdependent web of all that exists, of which we are a part.

All of you who come from many different places in the country, and us here in San José, we all have a dream. Today we have the dream that in a not so far future, we might be able to see our UU communities converted into communities where blacks and whites, Asians and Latinos, Catholic and Muslims, and Jews, will hold hands like brothers, united by one single faith.

The book of Exodus tells us that Jahve promised to his people to take them to the promised land, to the land where they could be free. They followed him in spite of not being told where that land was from the beginning of their journey, nor they were told how long it would take for them to get there. They only knew that with faith they would be able to make it. We the UUs who are gathered here under this beautiful dome, we know that the road is hard, that there will be some very hard journeys within and outside our own communities, in order to reach our promised land, which is that of becoming intentional multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic communities, and why not multilingual communities too….

Come, come, whoever you are, says the song we sang at the beginning of this service. This song is inviting us all to belong to the caravan of love, no matter what race, color, language, sexual preference, religion or socioeconomic level. In other words we are inviting everyone to become part of this multicultural, multiracial community. Now is the time to start getting rid of our own fears, our personal arrogance, our misunderstandings. Now is the time to work together to make this dream come true.

Let’s pray to whomever might be the God that we worship, keeping in mind that Christ was not a Christian, that Mohamed was not a Muslim, nor Buddah was a Buddhist, nor Krishna was a Hindi, nor Jahve was a Jewish. Lets remember that God is multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial and multilingual.
Now is the time!

Amen.

(Read this sermon in Spanish.)