- Is it fear that if we do nothing, it looks likely to be an absolute catastrophe for our country, especially low-lying areas vulnerable to flooding?
- Is it guilt that in the UK, as the first industrialised country, we have been responsible since the 1750s for such a large proportion of the carbon dioxide emissions now causing so much harm to our neighbours, and that we continue to live as it if doesn't matter?
- Is it anger that we have known the scale of the problem for over 30 years, and every single international conference has been an abject failure to do anything about it? Or that millions of people will be made climate refugees, like most of the population of Bangladesh or the residents of Vanuatu and the Maldives who may see their homes disappear under the waves within 20 years?
I suggest a different approach.
Having spoken to many people over the years, trying to convince someone to change by coming from a background of fear, anger or guilt risks bringing out the defensive in both of us. It is so easy to feel like if only people knew the real situation, they would change tomorrow – but the simple fact of human psychology is that people do not change through knowledge. Changes that last come from the heart, which means we need to connect why we care with the things people care about.
I recently attended a conference called “Towards a Sustainable York”, where a number of different people spoke about what they are doing in the city this year to make a difference. People also spoke about their motivation. From working with schoolchildren to grow their own food and learn about energy use to St Nick's Fields and the York Timebank, this was the dominant theme: We act because we live in a beautiful world, which we want to protect and enjoy. This fits very well with where I'm coming from, because I believe in a loving God who made the world and everything in it, and made us “in his image” as his ambassadors, to care for it and for each other. If God loves this world and all the people he has placed here, surely I should love it too?
Another key point about our motivation is that rather than focusing on “giving things up” (always likely to provoke resistance), we need to emphasise the enormous benefits we can gain from refocusing our way of life. We want to create a better way, where we really value our families and communities, we value the things which we use and eat instead of being constantly dissatisfied and we are able to work near where we live because we recognise the huge costs of commuting aren't just about congestion, time and money but also about the damage it does to our sense of community (a recent study found that every 10 minutes extra on a commute represented 10% less involvement in the place where you live).
And we want an economic system that reduces inequality, because all the available research shows that unequal societies like the UK damage everyone across the income scale, from higher mental illness and crime to lower life expectancy compared to countries like Japan with a similar income level but a very different income distribution. Given the emphasis throughout the Bible on setting up a society where everyone has access to resources such as land and even the poorest can work to support themselves (for example, by requiring harvesters to only pass through the field once so that the poor can pick up whatever's left behind), this feels like another example of how research usually supports God's ideas of the best ways for us to live.
See also:
No comments:
Post a Comment