Last Monday night we attended a presentation entitled “Hope for Planet Earth”. Put together by a Christian organisation called the John Ray Initiative their key vision as a charity based educational group is to bring together scientific and christian based understandings of the environment and how we interact. In short – understanding climate change and our responsibilities in relation to the earth as custodians of this while we are here.
At the end of the day there are often a lot of christian organisations valiantly trying to convey gods word but they often fall short because of a lack of resources or possibly drive to meet the high expectations of a media savvy society. So often the talent that many christians possess in their day to day jobs is often not used effectively. Why are our expectations of quality lowered and accepted if it is run by a christian organisation? In short, I wasn’t expecting a lot out of this but was keen to attend.
We were both pleasantly surprised. Yes, the hall was freezing, it was 4 minutes late starting (just within my tardiness tolerance range) and the sound issues were unpleasant. However, the content was informative, well balanced and took a new perspective on what we have heard many times before from many different angles. Key things I personally took away from the presentation were as follows:
1. In Mark 12:33 we are given the great commandment to love God with everything in us (I paraphase here) and to love our neighbour as yourself. I get this but hadn’t been applying it far enough outwardly. Our relentless drive for more is obviously impacting our environment which in turn significantly impacts poorer nations more so than us due to the effects of drought, floods, deforestation etc which creates environmental refugees. We might quite enjoy the warmer weather here in England however the pressures placed specifically on struggling nations means the concept of loving your “neighbour” is broadened.
2. Population growth. Limiting population growth or the opportunity to industrialize in developing countries is short sighted. We need to look at our use of resources. We have had our time of getting to a point where we can generate income and resources to be sustainable, now we need to look at how we use these wisely. Did you know that the resources used to raise one child in Britain is equivilent to resources required to raise 12-16 children in a country such as Bangladesh. With low wages, limited or no access to public services such as hospitals or aged care facilities etc a support system is required and this comes in the form of a large family. Each one of those family members is needed in order to survive. This is what our nations did before the “nuclear” family scenario set in. Over the years wages got better which we feed back into taxes which supply our basic services, we have money for our luxuries and less need for a big family to take care of us in old age. We have gone from an average sized family of 7.3 children to 3.2 children between 1800-1900 (note latter half of 1800 was a key time in the industrial revolution) to today in England it is at 1.86 children per family. What does this mean? We need to limit our excessive need for more and live within our sustainable range. Also, we need to support our neighbours in the developing countries so they can get to a point of sustainable balance.
3. Carbon air miles. The big issue on many peoples minds at this stage. It is driving many people to buy locally etc which is great but we need to ensure that we are not inadvertantly punishing struggling nations from becoming sustainable themselves. Think about where and what you are buying. Where it can be sourced locally do so but think about other products that are assisting developing countries in getting out of the poverty cycle.
4. Alternative fuel sources. Initially a fantastic idea however the issue now is land usage. Greater deforestation is occurring in some developing nations in order to grow this crop which kind of defeats the purpose in many ways. In addition land for food production is now being used for this fuel source leading to food shortages in the nations most needing it. Biofuels are not the be all and end all answer to our woes. Biofuels possibly make us feel better about our carbon emission decrease but don’t address the issue of consumption.
I am still digesting the information at this point and wanted to download from my head what I got from it. It is an ongoing dialogue with myself and I am sure in 5 years time I will look at it again and say “what was I thinking?” given new information and advances in technology etc. Anyway, that’s the download at this point. Hopefully it has given you food for thought, digest it, rebuke it, add to the discussion or whatever takes you fancy.