CARING FOR OUR COMMON HOME
Interview by Janark Gray, Communications Officer, Jesuits Australia
Fr Pedro Walpole is Director for Research at the Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC) Ateneo de Manila University Campus, Quezon City in the Philippines. He is also the face of Ecojesuit, the Global Ignatian Advocacy Network (GIAN) for Ecology. He has wide experience in sustainable environment and community land management in Southeast Asia.
His interests include seeking social justice through environmental management; poverty reduction in forest lands; partnerships for local development; advancing social concerns in forest law enforcement and governance; climate justice; and indigenous peoples’ rights.
You have an Irish background, don’t you?
I grew up in Ireland and left when I was 17. I worked in England for a time, had several different activities there with environmental organisations. I also did summer work in Iceland, which ended up being related to climate change as we would term it today. I progressed through Asia, where I worked in Malaysia first on animal parasites. I then worked in Mount Kinabalu National Park. What I did was always tied to the environment.
Was this before you became a Jesuit?
Yes. At the time, I was in Sabah, which is close to Mindanao in the Philippines. I visited several times, and that’s where I saw Jesuits working with the farmers, with legal support, with agriculture, and that’s where I first got involved with the Jesuits in Asia.
Did your interest in environmental issues lead you to the Jesuits?
Fr Pedro Walpole SJ
I knew about the Jesuits as a kid. I went to a Jesuit school and I was involved with environmental things when I was a child. So there was a two-way connection there. A lot of my time when I worked with the state park in Malaysia also involved the local people. There was major migration from Tawi-tawi in the Philippines to the mangrove swamps in Sabah, so we had thousands of displaced people. When dealing with national parks, you’re also dealing with people and trying to make sure that the basic needs of the people are met at the same time; this is crucial.
I never see conservation or the environment as something that should be put in the terms of protection or conservation, rather an integrated relationship is needed, and particularly Indigenous peoples have a relationship with the land and sea. It’s not a case of nature over there, society over here. That’s part of the problem today. Our economy and our ecology have diverged. The economy is eating up the ecology, if you like. The ecology should really enclose the economy to make it sustainable. That basically sums up the last 40 years.
When you joined the Society of Jesus, you had several strands to your environmental experience. Did you have to speak to your Provincial about including environmental work in the scope of your vocation?
When I joined the Jesuits in 1981, I was willing to do whatever was asked of me. But my Provincial asked me to go back and study science, because he knew I’d come from that area. And that’s what I went back to do after Martial Law. After the Marcos regime we could walk across the land again, we could go and literally meet the people, meet the farmers again.
So that’s what I started to do as I looked at land use management. A lot of what I did was looking at climate, land use management, forest loss and where the people were in all of this. Later on, I was asked by Fr Provincial to shift my work and set up an Institute of Environmental Science for Social Change in Manila. That’s really what Laudato Si’ is about. It’s the environmental and the social concerns coming together. After Martial Law we needed to bring together the ecological and social concerns of the time and develop collaborative methods to establish new social agreements caring for the land and resources. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources, along with the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, were initially great allies in building the rights and responsibilities of living on the land and seas.
In the ’90s, I started to work with community forestry activities in Asia as part of the Asia Forestry Network. We had about 600 collaborators, mainly across India and insular Southeast Asia. In the process, I became involved with a number of Jesuits both in India and in Australia.
Fr Pedro Walpole SJ at the 2023 Ecojesuit Meeting in Sitio Bendum, Malaybalay City, Bukidnon, Philippines. Photo: Danielle de Jesus.
What has that collaboration with our region been like? Have there been progressive steps?
I’ve done a lot of work with support from Mick Kelly SJ in media and Jesuit Social Services, facilitating reflections and workshops in an environmental way of proceeding. So there’s a lot of social connectivity in JCAP, because we’re a small group and both institutionally and personally make the commitment. Julie Edwards has championed the Ignatian way of proceeding from business process to human spirit in JCAP and there are so few people in the social apostolate as we call it, and particularly in the Philippines, that we get to know each other and we try to find out what everyone is doing. Jesuit Social Services has a tremendous social engagement, and I’ve always been invited to bring in the ecological side of that. My job now is to build a global network. Sue Martin (Project Officer, Care for our Common Home Committee at Jesuits Australia) has been great working with Sylvia Miclat and with Gabby Lamug-Nañawa SJ in terms of trying different ways to build the Asia-Pacific region.
Sue Martin with Fr Pedro Walpole SJ and Fr Gabriel Lamug-Nañawa SJ in Rome, Italy. Photo courtesy of Sue Martin.
Sue has also been very helpful as we’ve developed what’s called the River Above Asia Oceania Ecclesial Network (RAOEN). That’s coming out in a sense from the Synod on the Amazon where the Church globally realises we have to organise with respect to the biomes. This is another aspect of not the geopolitics of Asia Pacific, but the actual climate of Asia Pacific is bound together, as the driver of the climate is the Pacific Ocean and what is happening there with carbon absorption, temperature rises, and extreme events. So I’m always telling India that we must pay attention to the Pacific, because this is what influences the Indian Ocean back up to the Himalayas and their weather patterns and the whole of Southeast Asia.
Sue also has been helping a great deal with many of the bishops in Australia to get them connected to this environmental reality, because the environment is not simply the ecosystem. The environment most impactful today is a combination of multiple ecosystems that create the climate that is changing that binds us all together in addressing the problems. So we have to go further than ecology, further than the ecosystem and understand the biome because that’s now the scale at which climate change is impacting us.
It’s almost like there are two sides to your life. There’s the spiritual side, and then you’ve got the environmental side as well. How do you blend both?
We have so many silos that the world is divided into, and we all have our special areas, but actually none of it is working in totality today. The same way that I deal with the social and the ecological coming together and that is also the spiritual, the actual human dynamics of the human person and the recognition that God is acting in my life. So the spirituality very quickly comes to the surface, because spirituality is what people feel. It’s theology if it’s what people are thinking or dogmatics, but the faith of the people is found in their feelings for God’s presence, their humble hope in God’s love. Pope Francis has brought a great correction in that we now are able to understand within the Church afresh that our spirituality connects us as part of God’s creation to the rest of creation. And so too with Indigenous peoples we can learn to live simply and acknowledge the natural flows respecting the air we breathe, water we drink and the food from land and sea without the abuse of over-exploitation or pollution.
What is the path to genuine change?
It takes a generation to achieve real change. For instance, you can spend 10 years segregating household waste and in many places it still gets dumped into the same landfill. So what’s the point? It’s the next generation that will really make a difference, both in politics, in economics, corporate responsibility, society. Civil society has really shrunk in the last couple of decades. So we have to rethink and act together in a relationship that makes the difference. It’s important that people are present, that people are engaged. It’s fundamental, precisely because the technocratic paradigm that drives our society’s economy and principles justifying the present system is going the wrong way. We’re now no longer talking of zero emissions in terms of the fossil fuels. We want to keep the fossil fuels in there, because these are the biggest corporations in the world and they want the profits. As with the COP system, there’s very poor global governance.
We’ve lost the belief in humanity, I feel, in many ways. I think the coming generation has to re-establish that belief that the human is inherently good, and that there is such a thing as the global human family. I think the key to it is to consume less and care more, learning to enjoy what we have and to share life; understanding that we are blessed.
Find out more about the 2023 Ecojesuit Global Meeting hosted by Pedro Walpole SJ in the Philippines.
To enquire about becoming a Jesuit in Australia, contact vocations@sjasl.org.au and for more info, visit our Vocations page.