A Time to Speak — We must join together for our ‘common home’

Dr. Aruni Bhatnagar
Dr. Aruni Bhatnagar

By Aruni Bhatnagar and Christina Lee Brown

In this season when we pause to give thanks for all of our blessings, we would like to offer our heartfelt gratitude to Pope Francis. We are so blessed to have this faith-filled man in our midst, leading each of us to care for one another by caring for the health of our “common home,” the Earth, in ways that will enhance our health and wellbeing as well as the health, welfare and the happiness of our descendants for generations to come.

Last month, we traveled to Rome to participate in a timely conference through Religions for Peace (RFP), which has launched the Partnership in Ethics in Action Initiative, a multi-faith collaboration for moral solutions to global challenges. This meeting — entitled Ethics in Action for Sustainable and Integral Development — was designed to develop a moral consensus around great challenges related to sustainable and integral development, and to convert this consensus into concrete action.

Christina Lee Brown
Christina Lee Brown

The Ethics in Action program was launched at the Vatican a year ago, in the glow of the pope’s encyclical “Laudato Si’,” as well as the speeches he made to both, the United Nations and the U.S. Congress on his trip to the United States. We in Kentucky were deeply honored that of the four American religious leaders the pope cited, two were from our own state: Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Merton.

President Lincoln cared for our common home by saving the Union and by leading to freedom millions of God’s creations who were in bondage. In more modern times, Thomas Merton warned us of dangers to our Earth heralded by the writings of visionary environmentalists like Rachel Carson.

While he was reading Carson’s “Silent Spring” in early 1963, Merton wrote, “The whole world itself, to religious thinkers, has always appeared as a transparent manifestation of the love of God, as a ‘paradise’ of his wisdom, manifested in all his creatures, down to the tiniest, and in the wonderful interrelationship between them.”

Pope Francis is renewing this understanding of the relationship between our “common home” and all of God’s creatures. To assist him in this grand and worthwhile endeavor, we have to join together on a global basis to address the problems of climate change and sustainable growth.

However, success on a global level requires action on the local level. And here in Louisville, many of us are seeking to create an urban laboratory where we can take actions that exemplify our commitment to health in all policies, and work together to heal the ravaged earth.

The organization that we formed, the Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil, seeks to lift up the many ways in which we can regain and reclaim this “paradise,” that Merton spoke of so eloquently.

Accompanying this article is the Circle of Health and Harmony, a pointed flower, each petal of which identifies an area of health. Each of these petals contributes to the overall health of a person as well as the community as a whole. It is only by nurturing health — nutritional, financial, environmental, psychological, intellectual, spiritual, cultural and physical — that we achieve a true harmony.

Our goal is to seek this balance in all areas of life, leading us to protect the earth’s air, water and soil from harm — and provide us with a platform to protect our environment and therefore all of our world’s people.

Here in Louisville we can use this paradigm to guide us in making important personal, social and civic decisions: Whether it’s where we locate an important new hospital, how we structure our educational system to provide improvement for all, or how we treat our fellow citizens, including those who are new to our land, how we can be informed stewards of our environment; and how we can discover new ways of living harmoniously with nature.

For more information about the Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil, visit www.instituteforhealthyairwaterandsoil.org.

Christina Lee Brown is founder of the Institute for Healthy Air, Water and Soil.

Aruni Bhatnagar, Ph.D., is a Smith Lucille Gibson Professor of Medicine at the University of Louisville. He is a senior member of the Institute of Molecular Cardiology and the Director of the Diabetes and Obesity Center. He also is co-director of the American Heart Association Tobacco Research and Addiction Center.

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