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By Marianne Comfort, Sisters of Mercy Institute Justice Team

Sometimes the interconnecting pieces of economic and environmental injustices are hard to fit together, and the whole puzzle can seem overwhelming when it does come into focus. How refreshing, then, to have Loyola University-New Orleans law professor Bill Quigley, who is also associate director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, create a list of the 10 top steps needed for the U.S. to achieve true justice and peace.

It certainly doesn’t make the goal any easier to achieve. Still, it’s helpful to have the steps laid out there so that we can see them and then begin chipping away at them

Some of the steps come right out of the founding statement of Faith, Economy, Ecology, Transformation. Among them:

• Corporations are not people and are not entitled to human rights, so the U.S. needs to amend the Constitution to make this clear.
• When current property and privilege arrangements are not just they must yield to the demands of human rights.
• Earth must be defended by stopping pollution, pipelines, new interstates, and the destruction of the land, sea, and air by extracting resources from them.
• Dramatically expand public spaces and reverse the privatization of public services such as education, health and safety.
• Allow everyone who wants to work to do so and earn a living wage, and protect the right to labor organizing and collective bargaining.

Quigley told Jesuit Father John Dear, for a National Catholic Reporter blog posting, that to realize the goal of true justice and peace first requires nourishing hope. Then it requires working with others and in many different ways.

“There is no solo social justice act,” Quigley said. “First, you have to work with other people. Second, the history of social change shows we have to work on several different levels. Some take direct action through personal risk to raise the profile of the problem. Others educate, and education is critical. Most are appalled when they learn about what is happening. Then, we need to create opportunities through organizing so that people can engage the issue. Then there’s outreach to be done — to legislatures, to the media, to the churches. Social justice advances happen when many people are committed to this and work on all these levels. Right now, all of these 10 points have people working on them. We just need more people working on them.”

He also said that people have to look to the long term, not just to the next election or next legislative session. And they have to work both at the local and national levels.

“I don’t think there’s one strategy,” Quigley said. “I think there are lots of strategies. The civil rights movement had a national strategy to force the agenda upon the government and the media. But a lot of change is based at the local level. We see it with the Occupy movement, with the Tar Sands movement, with the work of anti-war people. People are trying to push the questions on to the national agenda. The Republican debates show that the Republicans are trying to go backward, not to push for the transformation of the nation, but the restoration of the way the U.S. was years ago. It will take a lot of people to put in a lot of work to get our agenda out there. For most of us, that means working at the local level, but we need to be connected to national and international work.”

A subtle but incredibly profound change is currently taking place that has the potential to dramatically improve the living conditions of people everywhere. Governments around the world are finally acknowledging that increasing gross domestic product (GDP, the market value of all officially recognized final goods and services produced within a country in a given period) does not necessarily indicate success or improvements in well-being. In fact, sometimes well-being decreases as GDP increases, especially in higher-income countries. While the outcomes of the upcoming Rio+20 UN Conference will probably be disappointing, it is likely that governments will agree to start using measures beyond GDP to orient public policies. Paragraph 111 of the Rio+20 base document says, “We … recognize the limitations of GDP as a measure of well-being. We agree to further develop and strengthen indicators complementing GDP that integrate economic, social and environmental dimensions in a balanced manner.” Growing research into how to measure and increase levels of happiness offers concrete data for developing workable alternatives to GDP.

The Earth Institute recently released the World Happiness Report which summarizes the decades of research into causes of happiness and techniques for measuring it. While dismissed by many for years, research shows that “happiness, though indeed a subjective experience, can be objectively measured, assessed, correlated with observable brain functions, and related to the characteristics of an individual and the society… It can signal underlying crises or hidden strengths. It can suggest the need for change.”

Happiness surveys have been carried out for many years by the Gallup World Poll (GWP), the World Values Survey (WVS), and the European Social Survey (ESS). The GWP is the largest, covering more than 150 countries. The surveys have shown, perhaps not surprisingly, that “[h]igher income, better health of mind and body, and a high degree of trust in one’s community (’social capital’) all contribute to high life satisfaction; poverty, ill health, and deep divisions in the community all contribute to low life satisfaction.”

But a higher income does not guarantee more happiness: “A household’s income counts for life satisfaction, but only in a limited way. Other things matter more: community trust, mental and physical health, and the quality of governance and rule of law. Raising incomes can raise happiness, especially in poor societies, but fostering cooperation and community can do even more, especially in rich societies that have a low marginal utility of income. It is no accident that the happiest countries in the world tend to be high-income countries that also have a high degree of social equality, trust, and quality of governance. In recent years, Denmark has been topping the list. And it’s no accident that the U.S. has experienced no rise of life satisfaction for half a century, a period in which inequality has soared, social trust has declined, and the public has lost faith in its government.”

The studies show, and more governments agree, that “GDP is a valuable goal, but should not be pursued to the point where economic stability is jeopardized, community cohesion is destroyed, the vulnerable are not supported, ethical standards are sacrificed, or the world’s climate is put at risk. While basic living standards are essential for happiness, after the baseline has been met happiness varies more with quality of human relationships than income. Other policy goals should include high employment and high-quality work; a strong community with high levels of trust and respect, which government can influence through inclusive participatory policies; improved physical and mental health; support of family life; and a decent education for all… The most basic goal is that by measuring happiness across a society and over time, countries can avoid ’happiness traps’ such as in the U.S. in recent decades, where GDP may rise relentlessly while life satisfaction stagnates or even declines.”

The potential for significant change in public policy caused by focusing on better measurements of well-being must not be underestimated. Our obsession with GDP for so many decades has led many governments to adopt policies that increase economic growth while at the same time decreasing happiness and overall health of citizens. This has resulted in new crises of obesity, smoking, diabetes, depression, and other ills of modern life. By focusing on increasing happiness instead of an outdated number like GDP, perhaps the U.S. could truly fulfill its promise to help people secure their God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

By Pamela Haines, Quaker social justice educator with a concern for economics and the environment

While growth is generally seen as a good thing, it’s not always true that if something is good, more of it must be better.  We don’t want our children to be seven or eight feet tall.  Living things will grow, for the most part, until they are at their mature size, and then they’ll stop.  Some mysterious internal mechanism knows when more growth would actually hinder their long-term ability to survive.

But with our human-made institutions we have no such internal regulator, and economic growth has become enshrined as a central, unquestionable, quasi-religious belief.   Yet this economic system is looking less and less like a little child that needs to grow, and more and more like a seven foot person who’s having trouble fitting into ordinary spaces and showing no signs of slowing down. The idea of continuous growth inevitably runs into the limits of the system that contains it, in this case a finite planet. A few cancer cells in a big body are not a problem. It’s when they keep growing that they overwhelm, and finally kill, their host.

Luckily there are other ways to think about growth. We can trade in this outmoded model centered on bigger for one centered on smarter, cut out the cancerous growth, and start learning all the joys as well as the challenges of finding our place within the constraints of a finite planet.

By Marianne Comfort, Sisters of Mercy of the Americas Institute Justice Team

Many of us have heard about the Millennium Development Goals, which set out to improve various indicators of well-being in impoverished nations by 2015. I was intrigued recently to learn of the Millennium Consumption Goals, a complementary initiative that calls for more sustainable consumption by developed nations while meeting the basic needs of persons who are poor.

The initiative has been submitted for consideration during the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June. The conference is also known as Rio+20, to mark the 20^th anniversary of the original Earth Summit in 1992.

The Consumption Goals were established:

• to ensure that the basic needs of poor people are met;
• to preserve and strengthen Earth’s natural resource base;
• to enhance global prosperity, while ensuring good quality of life and well-being for every one before 2020;
• to improve intra- and inter-generational equity; and
• to accelerate the shift to more sustainable consumption and production.

It is heartening to realize that Earth’s limited capacity to feed our immense appetites is being recognized and addressed in a systematic way, even if only in suggestion form at this point.

By Dave Kane, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns

For more than three decades, international financial institutions have pressured governments to privatize the production and distribution of natural resources (mining, water delivery systems, energy utilities, etc.), but a more recent phenomenon is the growing encroachment of the financial sector in the ownership of the natural resources themselves.

Financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are now heavily involved in food and energy resources, and Wall Street is working to create markets for water, carbon, biodiversity and even ecosystems.

Read more here.

Two public interest groups have petitioned the Attorney General of Delaware to revoke the charter of Massey Coal — whose disregard for law and caused the
deaths of 29 miners in 2010, along with incalculable environmental damage,
and health risks for residents. They call Massey Coal a criminal enterprise, and note that the corporate charter is a privilege and not a right. Read more here and join the petition to Attorney General Beau Biden here.

By Kevin Butts, Hank Pin, Carissa Smith, Interns, Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach

There are great lessons to be taken from the late-2000s financial crisis. We face for the first time in many years the ugly truths of income inequality, unjust economic policies, and reckless spending. We see now the fragility of living in excess and the stupidity of myopic, short-term spending. Now, almost five years after the bubble burst, is as good a time as any to reevaluate two concepts once seen as synonymous and pose the question: What is wealth? What is money?

This question will undoubtedly seem odd to many. Is wealth, after all, not simply the sum of one’s financial assets? In reality, the matter is far more complicated. Wealth, first off, is a vague and subjective term, not necessarily tied to finances at all. Second, even assuming the economic worldview of wealth as money, it is clear that money can never be a perfect representation of wealth due to its fluidity and volatility.

The Different Concepts of Wealth

Beginning with the nature of wealth, we see that the term is inherently subject to a diverse array of opinions. The economist’s wealth, for example, is the material benefits of labor. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations defines wealth as “the annual produce of the land and labour of the society.” Marxism defines wealth through the labor theory of value, namely that a commodity’s value is determined by the amount of labor put into it, and that wealth is created by exploiting the surplus labor of the workers. In day-to-day economics, wealth is simply the total value of one’s assets.

The economists, however, do not have the only say on the nature of wealth. For some, a sound environment is the greatest possible material wealth. Many interpretations of wealth stray entirely from the material realm, assuming the form of intangible concepts like fame, community, or spirituality. The definitions of as subjective an idea as wealth are, in fact, limitless. With this in mind, we see that equating money synonymously with wealth is a woefully small-minded and dangerous mis-pairing.

What, Then, Is Money?

In the simplest terms, money is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, and a store of value. But what gives money, a simple piece of metal or paper, these qualities? By themselves, these pieces of paper and metal have little intrinsic value: a castaway on a deserted island with $1 million in a briefcase has, in fact, nothing more than a case filled with dry, painted leaves that will probably end up kindling his fires. What gives money value is government regulation and social acceptance. The value of money is additionally subject to fluctuation based on money supply and financial policies. In other words, a currency’s value varies through no fault of its own but rather through external (usually governmental) interference. Its value being one-dimensional, deriving from society and government, money cannot be correctly equated with the infinitely variegated concept of wealth.

The Problem with Money

As explained previously, dollar bills and coins are by themselves inert, lifeless objects, devoid of any value save what value we — society and government — impose onto them. Similarly, the illness humanity suffers due to money is not of its doing but of ours. Much of our world has become engrossed in the all-consuming quest of moneymaking, a significant part of which seems to be purely for the sake of appearing rich. As Yes! Magazine’s similarly themed and titled “Money Versus Wealth” reports, “[T]he biggest profits are going to those who deal in pure finance. For 1996, the shareholders of the seven largest US money center banks reaped an average total return of 44 percent. Mutual funds specializing in finance averaged a 26.5 percent return, besting all other industry categories by a wide margin. Funds specializing in much-touted technology stocks came in a poor second at 21 percent.”

Moreover, many countries and economists now use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of economic growth. However, GDP is nothing more than the sum of all products and services bought and sold. Public expenditures on crime, or natural disaster relief, actually register as “growth” on the GDP scale. A country concerned with giving the impression of a robust economy may therefore easily sacrifice long-term development for a showy but meaningless and detrimental increase in GDP. Said monetization has similarly pervaded our nation’s social fabric. Yes! Magazine describes the progressive abandon of non-paying home- and community-building jobs in favor of paid positions, noting the consequent neglect given to home and hearth. “Community service,” it says, “becomes the work of public employees – to the extent there is public money to pay them. As the social capital of caring relations is depleted, family and community life fall into disarray.”

Finding True Wealth

True wealth, as we have said, may or may not be material. In our lamentably consumerist society we find ourselves increasingly driven to accumulate money, to supply our incessant and ever-growing demand.

We should not, however, confuse this mindless, soulless consumption with wealth.

A better understanding of wealth would be that it lies in community, in our relationships with others, both on Earth and in Heaven. All of the world’s major religions realize this, that self-fulfillment can’t be found in even the largest paychecks or most extravagant bonuses, but lies rather in our internal spiritual satisfaction as loving, social beings.

Jesus had this idea when he exhorted us not to “store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal,” but rather to “store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21). True wealth is not material, and in fact is often antithetical to the material.

This opposition is the crux of one of the most drastic transformations in English literature, when Ebeneezer Scrooge amends his brutally materialistic ways after a ghostly tour of the forsaken joys and misery of his past, present and future. The next day, Christmas, “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness.” A Christmas Carol is thus a powerful testament to the discrepancy, even dichotomy, between money and true wealth.

With ample proof these days of the damage done by money and consumerism to both our physical lives and eternal human souls, is it not high time that we sever the false and abusive relationship between money and wealth, and seek out wealth where it truly lies?

By Pamela Haines, Quaker social justice educator with a concern for economics and the environment

A law implemented in California makes it legal for the first time ever for a corporation to put social responsibility before profits without the threat of legal action from shareholders. The law, which creates a new class of corporation in California called “benefit corporations” that could pursue a material positive impact on society and the environment, while meeting higher
standards of accountability and transparency, is modeled after successful
legislation in Maryland, New Jersey, Vermont and Virginia. Read more here.

By Sisters Aine O’Connor and Rita Parks, Mercy Global Action at the U.N.

 “The land belongs to me, and you are only strangers and guests.” (Leviticus 25:23)

Why, then, are vast stretches of land and ecosystems off limits for current and future use by peasants, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and nomads – jeopardizing their rights to food and livelihood?

How is it that these same people are denied or severely limited in their access to water because international corporations, absentee landlords, or rich landowners can capture whatever water resources exist on, below, and around these lands?

They are the victims of land grabbing, “the foreclosure of vast stretches of land and ecosystems from current and future use by peasants, indigenous peoples, fisherfolk and nomads, thus seriously jeopardizing their rights to food and livelihood security,” according to a collective statement against responsible agriculture investment. Land grabbing captures whatever water resources exist on, below and around these lands. Land grabbing enables land to be sold, leased or licensed to [national and] foreign investors in secretive deals, often by legitimate governments.

State and private investors, from Citadel Capital to Goldman Sachs, are leasing or buying up tens of millions of hectares of farmlands in Asia, Africa and Latin America for food and fuel production, according to La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement.

One way or the other, agricultural lands and forests are being diverted to commercial purposes and away from smallhold producers, fishers and pastoralists. The result is displacement, hunger and poverty.

“Natural resources such as gold, copper, gas, wood and oil are granted to mining companies without the consent of the people who live there. In Pacaipampa, Peru, a 94% vote against a copper mine was declared illegal by the government,” according to Mercy Sister Marielena McKenna of Peru.

Although land grabbing is nothing new, in the past decade this blatant takeover of both small farming lands and vast tracts of forests, mountains and rivers has increased at an alarming rate and is driven by:

• Financial Investment: Growing financial speculation in food commodities as well as increasing farmland and commodities investments are causing a rush to acquire large areas of developing countries.
• Neo-colonialism: Multinational corporations and financial investors, country elites with extractive industry and commercial agriculture interests have gained unprecedented access to natural resources of countries, especially those of sub-Saharan Africa. These national resources, including land, have been grabbed and destroyed, often in the name of development.
• Climate change: Increasing consumer demand for food and threatened by food, water and energy insecurities due to climate change is driving developed counties to buy up land in developing countries in order to combat and solve their problems at home.
• Biofuel needs: Escalating energy demands and international energy policy that mandates the use of biofuels in gas encourages governments, corporations and wealthy landowners to convert land to sugar cane and palm oil production in order to satisfy the demands of developed countries for biofuels.
• Export commodities: Local people are driven to grow crops for an export and commodity market rather than for local consumption and sustenance. As a result of this shift, they lose entry to land for local food production.

What happens to farmers, peasants and indigenous peoples in land grabs? They lose.

“Selling of land to foreign investors and the de-nationalization of land degrades natural ecosystems by monoculture farming practices. Genetically modified crops and crops for biofuels replace a variety of food crops. Small and medium producers are rendered bankrupt and dispossessed when they cannot compete with large multinationals and are forced to sell their land,” according to Mercy Sister Ana Maria Siufi of Argentina.

Nothing less than decisive action by international, national and local advocacy can begin to eradicate this abhorrent invasion of the rights of peoples worldwide.

Peasant groups, social movements and civil society organizations – all unanimously agree what must be done to stop land grabbing and to achieve food sovereignty, land tenure and sustainable livelihoods:

1. Implement legitimate agrarian reform.
2. Demand that governments, corporation and foreign investors respect and protect the basic human rights of peoples.
3. Respect the resource rights of the rural poor in all large-scale land transactions.
4. Require governments to invest in agroecology to benefit peasants, farmers, fisher folk and pastoralists.
5. Reform farm and trade policies to embrace food sovereignty, as well as land and water rights.
6. Return the control of the commons to the local people.
7. Ensure environmental sustainability in decisions on land and water-based acquisitions and investments.
8. Regulate corporate and foreign investment of land, bioregions and wetlands.
9. Remove subsidies and overhaul international biofuel policies.
10. Regulate the financial markets and stop food speculation.
11. Hold accountable all investors and traders in food, land, water and energy.

By Michelle Knight, Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach

Each year preceding Easter, Christian communities around the world gather in public places to recreate the story of Jesus’ passion. In dramatic public liturgies, we remember who we are as people of faith and why we believe that even the greatest of evils will not have the last word. Often, in the retelling, this central story is cast in a contemporary context and serves as a powerful critique of social sins in our own times — sins that mirror the powers and principalities responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus in the first century. That is what we, who would be disciples, are called to do – to apply the message of the sacred story in our own lives, times and places.

This is what we attempt in the Economic and Ecological Way of the Cross on Good Friday, April 6. For those of you in the Washington, D.C., area please join us at noon at First St. NW and Constitution Ave. NW as we stop at public institutions to pray for change for social justice. If you are not in the area, please feel free to adapt the readings to your community, which you will find here.

We know that powerful political and economic forces, in a macabre mirroring of Jesus’ journey to the cross, are dealing death in our world by war and by working to the benefit of a privileged few while millions of people live and die in debt and in dire poverty. We touch, we feel, we live the pain of these many excluded ones and we see the brokenness of the earth. Because we are a global church, we are compelled to be in solidarity, to respond.

We are eyewitness to the destruction of our earth. We have stood by in the exploitation and waste of natural resources. Because our planet and all creation are gifts from God, we must care for them and see the beauty of God through them.

We know that the institutional roots of this suffering and devastation are painfully close to home – in government, in transnational corporations, in international financial institutions, in the set of transnational agreements that give shape to economic activity around the world and even in our own religious institutions.

To some of these institutions — often staffed by dedicated and well-intentioned individuals – we come in prayer to name our common guilt, to ask in public for pardon, to call for repentance and transformation.

However, also present in our community are signs of hope -those organizations and institutions that nurture solidarity and action for justice. To some of them we come as well -to pray for courage and strength on the journey toward a better world.