Are Christians thinking about the environment?

I’m putting together a background paper for a half-day workshop I’m running next month, including a couple of paragraphs complaining about our lack of action and the virtual absence of the issue in the last election.

Happened to see on Facebook a link to a Premier Christianity article “6 issues Christians will be rallying around in the new Parliament“. A pleasant surprise that “The Environment” appears as number 2, and hoping that this proves true, particularly in the leadup to Paris this autumn. It also notes that Amber Rudd, the new Energy and Climate Secretary, is reputed to be a Christian. News to me, but again an encouraging sign for our involvement in this area.

Scientists call for religions to transform our world

A somewhat surprising headline appeared in the Telegraph last week: Scientists turn to Pope Francis and world’s religions to save the planet. Even more surprising: it was reporting a paper in Science, in which two professors, of economics and oceanography, argued that some of the world’s key problems – unsustainable consumption, population pressure, poverty and environmental degradation – were unlikely to be addressed by our national governments or our existing “socioecological processes”. Instead, religious influences might be the answer:

The transformative step may well be a massive mobilization of public opinion by the Vatican and other religions for collective action to safeguard the well-being of both humanity and the environment.

Readers of this blog will find this a familiar idea, but it is not a viewpoint often expressed by scientists who (as far as we know) have no publically professed faith.

What lies behind this? One factor is that Pope Francis is widely known to be writing a papal encyclical on the environment. It is hoped, with some justification, that he will call for the Roman Catholic church to become far more active in tackling this issue than it is at present. But it is also worth noting that the initial invitation to partnership came from the Vatican. Both authors were invited to a Workshop on Sustainable Humanity held at the Vatican in May this year. Its concluding statement included parallel calls for practical action on environment, poverty and renewable energy sources for all – true sustainable development – and a renewed attitude of humanity to itself and its surroundings, seeing them as inextricably linked.

A human ecology that is healthy in terms of ethical virtues contributes to the achievement of sustainable nature and a balanced environment. Today we need a relationship of mutual benefit: true values should permeate the economy and respect for Creation should promote human dignity and wellbeing.

It’s regrettable such a powerful statement and the workshop as a whole failed to attract more media attention. Let us hope that Francis’s encyclical receives more notice, particularly in the light of the round of climate negotiations now underway.

Time for a Missional Ecophilosophy?

Erik Assadourian (Senior Fellow at Worldwatch Institute and involved with the annual State of the World reports) has written an interesting piece on the new Milllennium Alliance for Humanity & the Biosphere (MAHB) blog. Entitled Time for a New Environmentalism it reflects on the success of religious missionary groups, who some decades ago realised that just telling people about their religion wasn’t enough: they needed to help them in practical ways too, because there were needs to be met, to help build community and to demonstrate in practical ways how religious belief could be a benefit.

Missionary religions have rooted themselves across a variety of geographies, eras, and cultures, and today have billions of adherents. Religious philosophies offer something fundamental that the environmental movement has so far failed to provide: a way to understand the world and humans’ place in it, as well as how to behave in that world. Just as important, religious movements build committed communities of adherents — helping each other in times of need and celebrating and mourning together — and draw their resources and power directly from these communities.

Why haven’t environmentalists done the same?

Assadourian thinks they should, in two key respects: firstly to provide real help to those in need and to help with the skills required for a future more sustainable world. But secondly to devise and spread a new philosophy or philosophies, based on the principles of care for the environment, that the Earth is sacred and sufficient to answer issues of meaning and suffering, but ‘who cannot accept the otherworldly orientation of existing missionary philosophies’.

In many respects this project has a similar goal to the one that people like me are aiming for: a set of beliefs that include a faith to live by and a responsibility for the environment and future generations. One of the projects I’m working on is editing a book for the Lausanne Movement which fundamentally is aimed at making the point that care for creation has to be an integral part of our mission as Christians.

It also has some similarities to Transition, which again has something of a missionary and community focus, and (in some places at least) seeks to link in with people’s spirituality and philosophies. But this isn’t enough for Assadourian.

He argues that Transition isn’t philosophical enough, and isn’t laying down roots that will enable it to stay intact through the forthcoming crisis and collapse to a time when a new human civilisation emerges and needs something to keep it from the same growth-obsession that plagues us. Here I fear he’s being too ambitious. Transition seeks to be open and to evolve in response to local and global circumstances and community wishes. If it has successfully built communities of sustainably-minded individuals, it seems far more likely to derive organically the new principles needed to take us forward post-collapse than trying to do it now. The lesson of Christian theological history at least is that creativity and new thinking comes about best when previous theology is applied to new circumstances. The rich strand of post-exilic thinking that we find in the later Old Testament could only emerge as the people of God reflected on and regrouped after the disaster of the fall of Jerusalem.

The other challenge is to derive some philosophies that both gain broad agreement and provide a rationale for people to believe them. Assadourian may not appreciate the otherworldly, but uniting under the banner of a particular divinity or pantheon lies behind most of the world’s successful religions.

So we can appreciate the need being pointed out, and the passion to do something about it, but is it a feasible project? We’ll see.

 

 

Lydia Lives Lightly – sustainability blog

I’ve been looking a blog run by Lydia Groenewald, whom I met at a Christian Ecology Link meeting on Food. Called Lydia Lives Lightly it gives lots of practical ideas about how to live sustainably. It hasn’t been going very long, so I can’t say much about the posts, but the main strength is the lists of links of resources and organisations in categories ranging from travel to cosmetics to reducing our use of water, electricity and everything else. Recommended.

Book published!

Our book, Living Lightly, Living Faithfully, has been published today. Print copies cost £7, but we are giving away electronic copies (in PDF, epub and mobi/Kindle formats) for free. Get both from the Faraday Insitute bookshop.
The book contains essays from the speakers at our Sustainability in Crisis conference, a wide variety of authors representing diverse faith and secular positions, including academics, expert practitioners, campaigners and faith leaders. Together we explore how faith groups share important insights on the question of sustainability and the potential to mobilise large numbers of citizens onto the path to a more sustainable future. What is already being done and what more can be done?

Contents are as follows:

• Introduction—Faith in sustainability?
• Preface—The challenge of sustainability Bill McKibben
• Is economic growth compatible with environmental sustainability? Paul Ekins
• The role of credit and debt in our economic crises Ann Pettifor
• Environmental economics of Islam Mawil Izzi Dien
• Sustainable growth or right livelihood? A Buddhist approach to economic development Laszlo Zsolnai
• Growth, sustainability and behaviour change: a Christian perspective Tim Cooper
• Values and the role of charities Tom Crompton
• A critique of sustainability in the business world from a Christian perspective Cal Bailey
• Sustainable energy Juliet Davenport
• Sustainable production—insights from Islam Harfiyah Haleem
• Governing for sustainability—winning battles but losing the war Paul Chambers
• Campaigning for sustainability Andy Atkins
• Sustainability and food Peter Melchett
• The moral landscape of decisions in sustainability and climate change Douglas Crawford-Brown
• The environment and sustainability—an Islamic perspective Fazlun Khalid
• Religion and sustainability in global perspective Elaine Storkey
• Hopeful virtue: living in response to a world in crisis Ruth Valerio
• The role of the church in the coming ‘crisis of sustainability’ Colin Bell
• Spirituality and sustainability Satish Kumar
• Sustainable production Harfiyah Haleem
• Reading list and further resources

A firmer timescale on global warming

A recent article in Nature is getting a lot of coverage: see for instance The Guardian, Daily Mail and The Sydney Morning Herald.

A group of researchers led by Camilo Mora in Hawaii have taken the bold step of attempting to predict how long we have before the climate will depart from its normal variability, specifically when our existing record climatic extremes will become typical. These records have been taken over a period of about 150 years to 2005, so already taking into account some climate change. The analysis is done over particular areas, ecological areas and types of species.

Typical dates come out at about 2050 if we continue down our existing emissions path (the IPCC’s RCP8.5) or about 20 years later if we start making substantial cuts (RCP4.5). But the tropics come out considerably worse, and in particular coral reefs, where we have already reached unprecdented levels of acidification in the past few years. Some locations, including parts of Indonesia, and Jamaica, have only ten years before they reach a new climate.

This may not be an enormous surprise, but it puts the issue into clear relief, perhaps more than the recent IPCC report did. The authors are pessimistic: they note that most of this change is already locked into our system. Even if our particular area might be further down the track (Britain seems to have until into the 2050s), our global economic and ecosystem means that we will be hit by secondary effects earlier.

It all calls for a renewed dose of hope. I’ve been reading on this topic recently: particularly some excellent writing by Richard Bauckham – watch this space.

Renewable energy without intermittency?

One of the main arguments against a widespread switch to renewable energy is dealing with intermittency: if the wind isn’t blowing, or the sun isn’t shining, no power gets generated. So we need to have a backup source, say a gas power station, to fill in the gaps. Just maintaining it increases cost enormously, so you might as well run it full time.

However, there seems to be some good news on this front. This article on the thinkprogress site describes a new generation of wind turbines which include a storage battery so that excess electricity can be stored for the lean times (I can’t see for how long though). They also employ some more advanced technology to take account of weather forecasting and the state of the power grid to optimise how they run.

So: some good news on this front. Let’s hope we can get some of these installed in the UK.

Climate change and farming

One of the concerns of climate change scientists in recent years is not so much that global temperatures will rise a handful of degrees, but that this will cause considerably more extreme weather due to greater energy in the atmosphere: Bill McKibben’s ‘global weirding’. Science isn’t in a position to predict what, where, or how much, except in extremely broad terms, but it seems from the evidence of the past few years that these kinds of changes may be beginning to start.

This has been picked up by the President of the (UK) National Farmers’ Union, Peter Kendall, as reported in the Guardian and was featured on Radio 4’s The World Tonight last night (audio from 21:58, may not be available long-term).

Kendall has been speaking to farmers about this and sums things up as:

A gentle increase in temperature is fine but extreme weather events completely stuffs farming: just look at last year. Farming is risky enough as it is.

As noted by a Welsh farmer quoted on the radio programme, the problem is that we seem to be getting long blocks of the same type of weather, often more extreme: drought, snow, rain and heat over the last year. These affect yields of both crops and livestock, and make feeding the UK more difficult.

Is this good news? Yes, in that an influential voice is raising the issue. But some farmers are yet to be convinced, and Kendall’s plans for action seem to involve other people taking action, not farmers. There is no acknowledgement that farming makes substantial contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, pollution and species loss and should at least re-examine its own practices.

Although an unprecedented stocktake of UK wildlife in May revealed that most species are struggling, Kendall said: “As I travel around, I see a fantastic British countryside and I do not accept that the countryside and environment is going to hell in a handcart.”

So this is an important step forward, but not the whole story. I hope that Kendall and others can have a frank discussion with environmentalists (some of whom in turn need to recognise that the need to feed the UK population puts some limits on what is possible) and all come to a suitable plan for adapting to climate change, together with helping to mitigate the worst effects.

John Vidal on climate change and its effects on food supplies

Well worth reading is an article by John Vidal from yesterday’s Observer which gives some forecasts as to the likely effects of climate change on food supplies over the next 20-40 years. Nothing particularly new, but good to have everything in one place reasonably clearly.

As you might expect, the news isn’t good, with North Africa and South East Asia possibly at greatest risk in the short term. The former is likely to be hit by increased temperatures beyond which most current crops can’t grow, the latter by increased and more unstable rainfall patterns, damaging rice crops in particular.

Cleaning the Ocean Gyres and entropy

One of the less well-known aspects of environmental damage is the problem of plastic (and other debris) in the ocean gyres. These are parts of the ocean where currents go in circles, tending to concentrate waste in those areas. Often it’s a case of “out of sight, out of mind” since they’re well away from land, but researchers are beginning to discover just how much plastic ends up there. And others are thinking about how they might conceivably be cleared up.

This has led to a detailed but interesting post explaining just how impractical and expensive this might be. While the popular perception might be of floating islands of garbage, reality is that the pollution is spread over hundreds of square miles and to a considerable depth, and becomes combined with animal and plant life. Extracting it thus becomes near-impossible without denuding the ocean of life, and it makes any recycling of the plastic very difficult too.

Not that the plastic is of much use: it gets degraded through use and exposure to the elements, so there is not much that can be done with it economically.

It’s an illustration of the point made well by Tom Walker on the SCORAI list:

Messy systemic problems do not lend themselves to tidy one-size-fits-all
solutions. And they lend themselves all too easily to confirmation-biased
research claims. Contrary to popular usage of the term, it isn’t
“consumption” that is the problem as much as it is the fact that nothing is
really consumed—it is transformed from low-entropy material and energy
to high-entropy waste.

Entropy, for those who don’t know their physics, can best be thought of as equivalent to chaos as opposed to order. You can think of plastics as going from reasonably well ordered when made, to more chaotic when finished with, to totally chaotic when discarded, shredded and degraded in the ocean. The point at which we grab them and do something with them determines how much of this order is “lost” – not using the plastic at all preserves the order, recycling saves much of it, grabbing it from the ocean causes it to be lost.

There’s a spiritual aspect to this too. God’s original creative act, as described in Genesis 1:1, was to bring order from chaos. This continues: we have a world in which, eventually, our waste products will be dealt with and recycled into something new. It just takes rather longer than we’d like. Or we have the energy from the sun to be able to help us along. Our problem is that the rate of consumption (or entropy increase) is too much for either of these processes to deal with, at present, and as noted above, technological solutions are as yet rather limited.