OTTAWA - Faith communities must stay hopeful and engaged to ensure governments live up to climate change commitments, says the leader of the United Church of Canada’s delegation to COP21.

MISSISSAUGA, Ont. - John Kostoff sees Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: on Care for Our Common Home as a calling for Catholic educators to foster a sense of environmental responsibility rooted in religion.

“This is really a challenge that Pope Francis is presenting,” said Kostoff, director of education for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

TORONTO - To encourage his students to start thinking about the environment of tomorrow today, technology teacher Joe Ferro has brought renewable energy into the classroom at Neil McNeil High School.

In the early 1940s, as a barefoot-in-summer lad in Ireland, I had my introduction to the natural environment. My family had a small store and pub on a gravel coast road in The Burren, a barren karst limestone district on Galway Bay.

My father had built a small windmill, using the dynamo from a Ford car, with a wooden wind direction indicator, on an eight-metre pole. The constant winds from the ocean kept three “wet” batteries charged, which provided enough electricity for four light bulbs and a wireless radio. Every night, my father and the neighbours from miles around gathered around the wireless to listen to the news/propaganda from the war fronts.

Top officials from the Vatican, the head of the United Nations and leading scientists came together at a summit Tuesday (April 28) in Vatican City to label the fight against man-made climate change as a “moral issue.”