Eco Catholic

A little hot for you lately? I've been in both Washington, D.C., and St. Louis in the last couple weeks, and the temperatures in both places were well above 100 degrees most days. There is drought in the Midwest. There have been devastating fires in the dried forests of Colorado. Yes, some of these events may be short-term "weather." But the patterns of a warming planet are unmistakable. We are experiencing the signs of a trend.

Waking up to the enormity of environmental devastation can take a very long time. Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme spent 17 years passing through the stages of shock, annoyance, sadness and numbness before the truth reached him at the levels of heart and gut.

"I was humiliated that it had taken me so long," he said.

The dioceses of Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio, sponsored a daylong seminar on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) June 27, reports Catholic Climate Covenant on its website.

More than 100 concerned Catholics turned out to hear pros and cons on the topic from Peter MacKenzie of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, a trade group representing oil and gas producers around the state; John Stolz, a professor of environmental microbiology at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania; and Dr. Jame Schaefer, associate professor of theology at Marquette University and author of Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts.

The Catholic Climate Covenant website also features two comprehensive reports on the meeting -- a Vindy.com news story account and an in-depth essay penned by Catholic blogger Bill Patenaude. In "Cracking Open the Depths," Patenaude lays out the dangers of the technology and his own ecologically positive experiences as a regulator for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

A recent government study showed that about 75 percent of the polluting nitrates in the Gulf of Mexico come from manure runoff that travels down the Mississippi River from farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

These pollutants make it economically difficult for people who make their living by fishing in the gulf, especially those who gather things such as shrimp and only make enough money to live on the margin. These people were already reeling from the effects of the British Petroleum oil spill in 2010.

On Oct. 17, 2009, I received a call from my maintenance man at St. Elizabeth in Wyandotte, Mich. A woman wanted to talk with me. Since I was on my way to a wedding rehearsal at a parish 30 miles away, I told myself that I had a few minutes. Little did I realize how powerful that encounter with Jeanne Ingram would become. Jeanne's mother, Bereth, had just died and Jeanne was literally searching high and low for a cemetery that would honor her mother's wishes to be interred without any kind of chemicals or vaults.