Mennonite Weekly Review

Nations with high greenhouse-gas output have a challenging New Year’s resolution: prepare action plans by the end of January for reducing their emissions.

It’s a chance for each of us as global citizens to re-evaluate our commitment to reducing our damage to God’s creation, and through that, our harm to the poor.

The Copenhagen Accord, the product of the United Nations Climate Change Conference Dec. 7-18 in Denmark, requires industrialized countries to reduce emissions. Higher-polluting developing economies — China, India, South Africa and Brazil — are expected to adopt cleaner practices too.

Rich countries pledged $30 billion from 2010 to 2012 to mitigate climate change damage in poor nations through projects such as preventing deforestation.

Indeed, the poor will be among the most affected by climate change, as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa pointed out in a Dec. 15 letter to heads of state at Copenhagen. Projections show likely crop yield decreases, water shortages and rising sea levels in coming decades.

“This is a moral issue, it is a matter of justice for especially the weak and most vulnerable,” Tutu wrote.

Following through on its commitments to reduce carbon pollution is not the only way the U.S. government needs to take responsibility for environmental damage it has caused.

Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers and their families, as well as Vietnamese civilians, continue to suffer from maladies linked to their exposure to Agent Orange and other defoliants, 20 million gallons of which the U.S. military sprayed in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. A recent series in the Chicago Tribune details the continuing effects of dioxin, a toxin in the defoliants causing cancer, birth defects and other conditions.

Death or debilitation wrought by dioxin can come decades after individuals are exposed to it. The poison can also affect their children. Some Vietnamese civilians continue to have dioxin levels as much as 100 times higher than what global health standards say is safe, according to the Tribune.

Despite such links between the use of Agent Orange and ongoing health problems afflicting Vietnamese people, in the past 10 years the U.S. government has given only $6 million of the tens of millions of dollars needed to clean up contaminated sites and provide medical care to those affected.

The United States expends a far greater amount of money waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan. What will we learn in 40 years about the effects of the weapons the U.S. military is using now?

Environmental injustice thrives on lack of awareness and concern for people already marginalized. Locally, nationally and internationally, we have a responsibility to find out how the poor are affected by pollution and global warming — the United States disproportionally contributes to both.

And we have a duty to change our actions to lessen harm to God’s creation and the least of these — those who are part of our communities and those we may never meet.