From the 7th to the 18th of this month (December), the world’s governments will be meeting in Copenhagen to try to agree a ‘climate deal’ that will shape our future. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by this subject (the news is full of it) but it doesn’t have to be this way.
As the writer Leo Hickman has pointed out, most of us appreciate that sawing away at the branch we are sitting on can’t be a good idea, but actually doing something about it requires us to make a leap of imagination and to stretch our ideas of self-interest and moral responsibility. The penny that has not yet dropped with most of us is that we have arrived at a make-or-break moment.
Giving a recent lecture in London, Archbishop Rowan Williams said that our relationship with the rest of creation is intimately bound up with our relationship with God. “To act so as to protect the future of the non-human world,” he said, “is both to accept a God-given responsibility and to honour the special dignity given to humanity itself.” Drawing parallels with the financial crisis, Dr Williams argues that we urgently need to revise some of our assumptions, including those that are incompatible with our duty of care for the whole of life.
The significance of small changes is obvious, but unless the spiritual roots of the challenge are grasped, our best efforts will amount to no more than what the psychologists call ‘displacement activity’.
Rowan Williams went on to point out how old rhythms in work and leisure have eroded and how we have lost patience with the passing of time so that speed of communication has become a good in itself. “We have been losing the ability to accept that living as a material body in a material world is risky,” he said.
If you want to be part of the solution, go to the websites of the 10:10 campaign (www.1010uk.org) or www.stopclimatechaos.org (you can also contact the latter by phone on 0207 324 4622).