Ecological Conversion

CHRISTIAN BANNERS were visible in every direction. ‘Operation Noah says cut the carbon’; ‘Christian Ecology Link’ and ‘Westminster Diocese Justice and Peace’, were among them. The location was a park in front of the US embassy in London and a rally was forming to urge world leaders to act immediately on the issue of climate change. The US was targeted in particular because it produces one quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and these gases are causing human-induced global warming.

It was November 4, 2006, and peaceful rallies were taking place in many cities around the world on the eve of UN climate change talks in Nairobi, which examined what progress had been made by the Kyoto Protocol that requires industrial nations to cut their emissions. Many of the London crowd had seen 10,000 campaigners marching through Sydney, Australia, on their morning news bulletins. The crowd in the park made a colourful picture as they set off towards Trafalgar Square where 25,000 people came together for speeches and songs in the Saturday afternoon sunshine. Cyclists carried notices reading One Car Less, some young people wore hats carrying 3-dimensional images of endangered species, and a succession of samba and brass bands accompanied the walkers. It was unusually warm for November – many people were in tee-shirts and most leaves were still on the trees, despite it being officially a Winter month.

The Stern Report

Just a week earlier, the Stern report, compiled by Sir Nicholas Stern for the UK government delivered a staggering recommendation - that the world has to act now on climate change or face devastating economic consequences. The former chief economist of the World Bank said that the time is now to move on from arguing about statistics to taking drastic action at an international level. It presented a convincing argument for human society to change its energy-guzzling behaviour.

According to Stern, a rise in temperatures of between 5°C and 6°C, which is “a real possibility for the next century,” could trigger a global loss of economic wealth (GDP – Gross Domestic Product) of 10 percent, with poorer countries, which have contributed least to the problem, suffering most of the damage. A ‘worst case’ scenario could cut Gross Domestic Product by 20 percent, with global floods displacing 100million people and drought creating hundreds of millions of “climate refugees”. He emphasised the seriousness of the figures by reminding people that the world is only 5°C warmer now than in the last ice age.

The unambiguous message from Stern is that politicians have no alternative: action must be taken on a world scale. Yet, is the capacity there to do it? The world’s politicians will be required to think beyond the confines of the next four or five years, and to consider a statesmanlike span of 50 years or more, because what is at stake is not the ‘electability’ of a political party, but the survival of the planet. Also, global institutions such as the World Trade Organisation have shown little evidence of capacity to acknowledge the environmental destruction caused by the prevailing ‘development’ model.

Rising global awareness

Global awareness of climate change is certainly rising. This includes India and China, which have plans to reduce energy usage, despite their drive for economic growth to tackle poverty, and the US where individual states are taking measures despite the inertia of President George W. Bush. Prominent public figures from both sides of the political divide in the US have been taking a stand on serious measures to tackle global warming. A film by former Democratic party vice-president, Al Gore, called An Inconvenient Truth warned of the need for the US to address global warming. The film was widely acclaimed, and the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has introduced initiatives that will put a cap on carbon-dioxide emissions from the manufacturing plants and set targets for greener cars.

Many countries are already experiencing problems related to longer drought periods and extreme weather causing flooding and destruction of infrastructure. Millions of Bangladeshis in low lying regions are already flooded out for several months of the year, and Zimbabweans face a shorter rainy season which damages food production. Speaking last November, Archbishop Pius Ncube of Bulawayo reported that, on top of the economic meltdown in the country, “the expected rains have not come and more hunger will follow”. He said that “if this is down to climate change then world leaders must take this issue very seriously”. The impacts are not only affecting poor countries. Australia has been grappling with its worst drought in 100 years and the scientific projection that Australia will be permanently hotter and drier has converted Prime Minister John Howard to the view that global warming is real.

Vatican perspective

In a public audience on January 17, 2001, Pope John Paul II warned that human society, “has made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydrogeological and atmospheric spheres and turned luxuriant areas into deserts, and undertaken forms of unrestrained industrialisation humiliating the flower-garden of the universe”. He called for an “ecological conversion”.

In March 1996 the then President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, wrote to the presidents of the Episcopal Conferences of industrial countries, acknowledging that the World Council of Churches (WCC) “has taken a leading role in drawing the attention of its member Churches to the relationship between climate change and human activity”. He encouraged local Churches to examine ways in which they could co-operate with any World Council of Churches-inspired initiative in their country.

Global warming is mentioned in the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Paragraph 470 of the Compendium suggests that the relationship between human activity and climate change must be constantly monitored for the sake of the common good. “The climate is a good that must be protected,” it says. The Precautionary Principle and the Preferential Option for the Poor are enshrined in Catholic Social Teaching as important moral values, which is relevant for the climate change issue where the impacts are falling disproportionately on the world’s poorest people and countries.

Voracious consumers

The US Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued a statement in 2001, Global Climate Change: A Plea for Dialogue, Prudence, and the Common Good in which they stated that the level of scientific consensus on global warming obligated taking action to avert potential dangers. The Bush administration was urged to undertake initiatives for energy conservation and the development of renewable energy. US citizens were asked to reflect on their lifestyles as ‘voracious consumers’ and consider living more simply. In September 2006, New Zealand’s Catholics were urged to adopt simpler lifestyles by the country’s bishops, who identified climate change as “one of the most urgent threats” facing Pacific peoples. Rising temperatures and sea levels, and the greater intensity of storms and natural disasters, they said, are already affecting the food and water supply for people on low-lying islands. They warned that the Pacific region could have a million environmental refugees before the end of this century.

In Africa, Zambia’s Catholic bishops issued a pastoral letter in 2004 deploring that “we have not taken the best care for this environment on which we depend for our survival”. The letter identifies “massive deforestation” as a key problem and blames it on the ever increasing need for fuel wood. The bishops said that poor communities’ lack of access to electricity has encouraged charcoal burning. In South Africa, the Environmental Justice worker of the Southern Africa Catholic Bishops’ Conference has begun awareness raising work on the issue of energy. There is concern that more than 70 percent of total energy consumption in South Africa comes from coal – a highly carbon-intensive fossil fuel.

The Catholic Church in England and Wales, through its membership of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland, is signed up to Operation Noah, a campaign by Christian churches to curb human-induced climate change. Participants are invited to sign a ‘Climate Covenant’ promising to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions, and put pressure on the UK government and world leaders to do the same. Churches are urged to sign up to green electricity, deriving from renewable energy sources.

Less food

In 2002 the Australian Catholic bishops took a lead in the Catholic world and set up a new agency to focus specifically on environmental issues. Named Catholic Earthcare Australia, two conferences in Perth and Melbourne during October 2006 focused on climate change. In September 2006, the Church’s official international development organisation in Canada, Development and Peace, was part of a coalition which called on Prime Minister Harper to recommit unequivocally to the Kyoto Protocol to ensure that Canada does its fair share to minimize the impacts of global warming on the most vulnerable people in the developing world.

Global warming features prominently in the Environmental Justice section of Caritas Internationalis’ 2005 Report. “Climate change will impact food security – through diminished agricultural productivity and fishing – and could hasten the spread of waterborne diseases and accelerate desertification” it says. Environmental justice, and in particular climate change, is likely to be a major topic of study and discussion at the 2007 Caritas Internationalis General Assembly.

Our common future

A number of Catholic environmental theologians have been addressing climate change for some years. Thomas Berry, Edward Echlin, and Sean McDonagh are amongst them. In his new book on climate change and the Churches, Sean McDonagh, an Irish Columban priest, reminds that life-giving human social relations are always embedded in vibrant and sustainable ecosystems. Anything that negatively impacts ecosystems or alters the equilibrium of the biosphere, such as global warming, is a disruption of the common good in a most fundamental way – especially if it creates negative irreversible changes. The Church, he suggests, has a duty to speak out on behalf of future generations and, indeed, the whole earth community. God’s wonderful creation of planet Earth is the only home we have, and it needs healing from the human assault of its life systems.