Dear Reader of Writer's Desk, We need your help. We are pleased to make available -- at no charge -- Writers Desk. But we cannot do all we need to do without your financial assistance. Please take a moment to consider contributing to the Friends of NCR campaign. National Catholic Reporter is a nonprofit organization. Contributions are tax-deductible in the United States. Contributions may be sent to: National Catholic Reporter 115 E. Armour Blvd. Kansas City, MO   64111 USA Make checks out to: NCR If you wish, you may print a form for submitting your donation. You may also use this form for credit card donations. Print a Contribution Form OR Donate Now Online

When I was a kid in Catholic school I memorized a list of virtues out of the Baltimore Catechism. The three theological virtues roll right off the tip of my tongue still -- faith, hope and charity. These three were followed by the cardinal virtues -- prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude -- that when cultivated led to a moral stalwartness fortified by the gifts of the Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, courage, knowledge, and fear of God.

These virtues were the goal and focus of our spirituality. They were resources to not only get us through life, but to enable us to flourish as citizens, as workers, as parents. Above all, they planted in our hearts dispositions to resist temptations and to do good.

Those afternoons memorizing the catechism took place, for me, in the late 1950s, while the Cold War was raging. Now it’s early in the 21^st century. Though these older virtues still abide, perhaps we need resources, vision and strength for completely new challenges, for the world is a very different place now.

Then the Cold War loomed and the battleground for the future of all that was good seemed located in remote lands, far off from me and my catechism. Now the struggle for the future seems as near as my own backyard. It will be fought in the ways we shop and travel and recreate, in adjusting our wants and needs to fit within Earth’s limits, even in the ways we imagine God and God’s connections with us.

Pat Mische, who gives workshops and retreats on ecological spirituality, says: “Our search for life in God must be worked out now in a global context, in the midst of global crises and global community.” The struggle for the future will be fought in the midst of our lives, in adjusting our wants and needs to fit within Earth’s limits.

Our task in the years ahead will be healing a world that is badly out of balance.

What will help us to live and flourish as citizens, workers, parents, seekers after God in this new context? Recently I ran across a list of nine ecological virtues, suggested by Christian ecologist James Nash. One by one, I will describe each virtue.

Adaptability: My stepson when he was a teenager wanted a car. His request for help put me in a bind. Though convinced excessive driving is environmentally destructive, I knew that he needed some breaks in a life filled with mishaps and trials. I decided to give him a loan. Though I’d like to report that this deliberation proceeded with great-souled equanimity and grace on my part, alas, that was not the case.

“Life is the great balancing act,” said the late Dr. Seuss. Sorting through these difficult dilemmas, working out the necessary compromises and finding practical solutions to knotty problems is true prayer, encounters with God working in our lives. It is unheroic, not glamorous, and very holy.

Sustainability: A TV comedienne talks of visiting the mall to buy a wastebasket for her new apartment. The clerk put her wastebasket into a sack. She carried the sack home, then threw it into the wastebasket she’d just bought. “What am I doing?” she yelped. Convenient, yes, but is it not an unnecessary waste of resources and an insult to the Creator to behave in such a way? Her story is an apt parable for the wastefulness that characterizes so much of our living today.

Our food distribution system is a good example of unsustainable practices, offering us vegetables and fruit grown thousands of miles away in the dead of winter. Such processes depend on the use of massive amounts of imported oil and harmful chemicals and, because this way of doing things dumps the costs of cleanup, repair of the damage and replacement of topsoil onto future generations, it’s massively unsustainable.

Often sustainability is the touchstone when trying to make decisions about technology. An electric tooth brush or can opener are probably inappropriate and wasteful uses, whereas a microwave oven or canning kettle actually conserve energy and resources.

Frugality: “ T’is a gift to be simple.”A friend reuses her bath and dishwater, hauling it out to the garden for her vegetables. It’s a lot of bother, but she says she doesn’t mind; she gets exercise and cuts down on her water bill, while at the same time deriving rich satisfaction from this way of living lightly on the Earth.

Living a sane, ecologically responsible life doesn’t mean self-sacrifice and austerity. On the contrary, it should mean a richer, more interesting, more creative, fuller, longer and healthier life. It is a paradox, but all manner of good things emerge from the practice of thrift and frugality.

Relationality: At the very heart of ecology is interdependence. The universe and the planet from which we come are woven-together fabrics made of interconnections, mutual dependencies, and relationships. Nature is not a hierarchy, with God at the top, humans in the middle, penguins, ants and rocks at the bottom. Rather it is a living web. Just as the environmental threats we face are interrelated, so are the solutions.

Equity: Restoring justice and restoring ecological balance are directly linked. It’s no coincidence, for example, that toxic waste incinerators are nearly always constructed just upwind from low income neighborhoods, since it’s much easier to manipulate public policy and ordinances in such places where the poor have little leverage or money. People who are concerned with ecological balance must also be concerned about justice, about equal rights and about grassroots democracy. Justice and earth care go hand in hand.

(I will conclude this discussion of the nine ecological virtues in my next Writer’s Desk installment).