'Love your local ecosystem,' Christian Brother tells others

Published: 2007-01-02

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia (CNS) -- Everywhere he goes, Australian Christian Brother Moy Hitchen urges people to get out into nature and listen to the earth. "I'm trying to say 'Love your local ecosystem,'" he said. "Get out there and find the rocks, the soil, the trees, the bushes, the birds that belong to (your) part of the world, and then think, what does the earth want us to do?" As the Christian Brothers' international promoter of environmental justice, Brother Moy's travels have taken him from rural villages in Melanesia, where he learned about ancestral farming and hunting practices, to a school in India where 3,000 elementary and high school students share the grounds with hawks, mongooses, squirrels and parrots. In a sprawling slum in Nairobi, Kenya, he was struck by the contrast between environmental disaster -- a "filthy black river (of) industrial waste, human sewage and plastic bags full of household garbage" -- and vestiges of the natural world that were struggling to survive. Part of Brother Moy's job is to visit Christian Brothers around the world and encourage them to understand that ecology is an issue rooted in both spirituality and justice.

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