Earth, Faith, and Justice at a School in Brazil

At Colégio Santa Maria, a private school in São Paul, Brazil, run by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, the environment is not a course or an extracurricular club, but is woven throughout the curriculum, whether a student is two-years old or an adult attending night classes. “Environmentalism…penetrates all of the disciplines, and is part of the air we breathe,” Sister Diane Cundiff, the principal, explains.

The school also finds environmentalism to be closely linked to the faith and justice values on which the school is based. “Nobody here at the school would separate taking care of the environment from taking care of people,” says Sister Diane. “The planet belongs to humanity. Justice and non-violence won’t happen until the planet belongs to everyone.” She makes the faith connection quickly: “If we don’t preserve Creation, we are not preserving life, and that goes against our Christian responsibility.”

Sister Diane and the school’s staff are motivated by the Earth Charter, a global effort to develop a set of ethical guidelines for progress in the 21st century. “You can’t read it without seeing God…You could read the whole thing and say ‘this is the Word of God,’ and everyone would say ‘Amen.’” Since 2001, faculty have used one of the four pillars of the Earth Charter—respect and care for the community of life; ecological integrity; social and economic justice; and democracy, non-violence, and peace—each semester as an organizing frame for class content. This was not easy: the faculty found that it was “impossible to do one pillar without bringing in the other pillars. They are all connected,” says Sister Diane.

Sister Diane offers examples of how environment and justice are made a part of daily instruction:

• A viaduct that flows through the school often carries sewage water originating in a slum some 20 kilometers away. The students test the water at the school as part of their science work. They also go to the slums to teach residents to test the water, as a way to help people avoid getting sick.

• Students are taught to avoid waste and to separate their garbage into color-coded depositories for paper, metal, glass, and non-recyclables. But they are also taught to cast a critical eye on the material: Is everything that gets thrown away really waste? To answer this, they work with the local waste pickers’ cooperative to identify art projects, toys, plants, and clothing that can be reused. Trash isn’t always trash, students learn.

• Students spend a few weeks of their summer vacation working in poor areas to teach recycling concepts, including how to build a compost heap, and to tend a garden, with the goal of reducing food costs in those areas and increasing nutrition levels.

• Fifth graders researching alternative energy technologies adapted a simple water heating technology to provide hot water at the school. Originally developed at a local university for demonstration at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the heater consists of a water box and a system of pipes through which the water circulates, without requiring electricity. An unemployed engineer helped the kids adapt the technology. The students, in turn, have shown residents of nearby slums how to build the devices, saving them energy and money.

The school’s impact is felt outside São Paulo as well. In northeast Brazil, where clean water is often scarce, many children die from diseases linked to contaminated water. Cisterns can help residents collect rainwater and keep it clean, but the materials to build them are too expensive for many residents. Students at Colégio Santa Maria make sandwiches at the school and sell them in São Paulo, then send the proceeds to the northeast for use in cistern construction.

Sister Diane’s experience at the school has even influenced her own, worldwide religious order. She and other Sisters of the Holy Cross decided at their worldwide congregation meeting in July 2004 to adopt the Earth Charter as a guiding document for their various ministries. Some of the sisters were not convinced, feeling that a document with an environmental focus would limit their work in myriad non-environmental ministries. “If you say this, you haven’t read it,” Sister Diane told her fellow sisters.

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Source: Sidebar 5-2 (page 73) from Sister Diane Cundiff, Principal, Colégio Santa Maria, São Paul, Brazil, conversation with author, 10 May 2005.