Dear Church Family and Friends,
On a daily basis, I search certain news sources for articles of interest. One of my favorite sources is Democracy Now, a news show that can be found on the radio, television, and internet. Recently, the show had a segment that gave me a burst of hope for the future of our planet. It covered the largest youth conference ever held on climate change. In all, 12,000 young people attended this conference in Washington, D.C. Youth came from all fifty states as well as all the Canadian provinces and a dozen other countries. The purpose of the gathering was to explore strategies at both the local and national level for transforming our societies to clean energy.
The story began with a clip of a dynamic speaker named Van Jones poking fun at the notion of “clean coal.” Not believing that it is possible to have climate-friendly coal, he compared “clean coal” to the “equally fictitious, equally fantastical” idea of having “unicorns pull our cars for us.”
The true highlight of Democracy Now’s show, however, was the footage of the youth attending the meeting. Some of the youth told of the conditions from which they come. Nineteen-year-old Martin Macias, Jr. of Chicago explained how the working class Latino neighborhood in which he lives is roughly two miles from “two of the biggest coal power plants in the Midwest region and the only two coal power plants in Chicago.” About the pollution from these plants, he said, “It’s responsible for about fifty deaths a year in my neighborhood.” James Noble from Hazard, Kentucky spoke of the removal of mountaintops for coal and the deaths of two of his friends who worked in coalmines.
Despite the conditions from which some of them came, the youth had hope. Francisco, a Puerto Rican youth who was with his friend Adriana, said, “Even though we are young, we only have seventeen, sixteen years of age, we are gaining conscience, and we want to make a change, and we want a promising future for our nation.” In Francisco and Adriana as well as all the other youth, I saw seeds of hope for the rest of us.
Your brother in Christ,
Pastor Brooks