In recent reflections, I’ve explored two great moral crises of our time: the plight of the Palestinian people under occupation, and the global immigration crisis, driven by war, economic injustice, and failed states. These are not isolated issues. They are symptoms of a deeper sickness — a world order that privileges profit over people, security over solidarity, and borders over belonging.

But there is a third front that cannot be ignored: climate justice.

The Climate Crisis is a Human Crisis

The climate emergency is not just about melting glaciers or endangered polar bears. It is about mothers who can no longer grow food because the rains won’t come. It is about children coughing from the toxins in the air they breathe. It is about entire communities being swallowed by the sea, while the nations most responsible for carbon emissions continue to expand fossil fuel projects.

Climate change is the great multiplier. It magnifies existing injustice — hitting the poor hardest, displacing the already vulnerable, and amplifying every inequality from race to class to geography.

According to the UN, more than 20 million people are displaced annually by climate-related disasters. These are climate refugees — a term not yet recognized in international law — people fleeing hurricanes, drought, floods, or heatwaves made worse by human activity.

They are not unlike the asylum seekers at our southern border, or the families trapped behind checkpoints in Gaza. They, too, are caught in a world that sees them as problems, not people.

The Roots: Colonialism and Corporate Greed

The climate crisis did not emerge in a vacuum. Its roots are deep in the soil of colonial extraction, Western industrial expansion, and the myth of limitless growth. For centuries, land was taken, forests were felled, and people were enslaved to serve an economy that now threatens the stability of the planet itself.

The same corporate greed that has hollowed out local economies in Latin America — forcing families to migrate — has also polluted rivers, poisoned air, and deforested vast regions. The same empires that drew arbitrary borders in the Middle East are now drawing profit lines in oil fields and lithium mines, with little regard for ecological balance.

To speak of climate justice, then, is not to add another issue to the pile. It is to uncover the common thread — a system that exploits land and labor alike, that commodifies creation and discards the poor.

A Theological Reckoning

As a person of faith, I cannot ignore the sacred connection between justice and creation. Scripture tells us the earth is the Lord’s — not ours to dominate, but to tend and care for. The Hebrew prophets warned that oppression of the poor defiled the land. Paul writes in Romans 8 that all creation groans, waiting for liberation.

And today, the earth groans still — under the weight of wildfires, floods, and relentless consumption.

The call to repentance is not only individual. It is structural. It is economic. It is ecological. To follow Christ in this age means standing with those on the front lines of climate collapse — indigenous water protectors, subsistence farmers, youth activists, and environmental defenders. It means lamenting the ways the church has sometimes blessed empire instead of resisting it.

Toward a Whole Justice

If we are to be credible witnesses to the gospel of justice and peace, we must speak with one voice for the oppressed — whether in Rafah, Honduras, or the Arctic Circle. We must see that Palestine, the borderlands, and the burning earth are all connected — not just by politics, but by a spiritual crisis of disconnection from God, neighbor, and creation.

Climate justice is not a distraction. It is the terrain on which the future of human dignity will be won or lost.

Let the church not be found asleep.

Let us listen to the groaning of the earth, the cries of the displaced, and the call of the Spirit.

Let us rise.

“The ecological crisis is a moral issue. It is a call to conversion and responsibility.” — Pope Francis, Laudato Si’