Bishop of London's speech - Shrinking the Footprint Conference
Speech given at the Shrinking the Footprint Conference. Lambeth Palace June 11th. 2009.
The fact that you have made your way here today from every Diocese in England together with friends from other Christian Churches and other faiths, despite all the discouragement of the tube strike is remarkable testimony both to the importance and urgency of our topic and to the way in which the work of the small number of diocesan environmental officers has now become mainstream.
On Tuesday of this week I was chairing part of a Waste Management Conference at the ExCel Centre in Docklands. The main speaker was Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for the Environment and the agenda ranged over landfill, incineration and anaerobic digestion. There was some surprise that the Church was interested or even involved in such areas. This reaction is perhaps an unhappy tribute to the way in which in the past, theology, science and politics have declared a truce on the grounds of mutual irrelevance. In a world where many are hungry how is it possible for followers of Christ, committed to neighbour love, to ignore the fact that "as a nation we waste around £10 billion of food each year - a third of what we buy"? It is not irrelevant that the classical imagery of Hell is derived from the perpetually burning waste, heaped up around the walls of Jerusalem. Today I guess that a more contemporary image would be gridlock.
Everyone in this room believes that the Church has a role and a responsibility. "Shrink the Footprint" is not a finger wagging exercise. We must beware of seeing only the mote in my brother's garden and not the beam in our own house. The campaign has already had a measurable impact and we shall be hearing the details later. There will also be an opportunity to hear from Bishop George Browning, Convenor of the Anglican Communion Environmental Network about the commitments made at the recent meeting of the Consultative Council in Jamaica.
The challenges that we all face as the 21st century unfolds are so complex and interconnected that there is a temptation just to hope that they will go away and that our present life style will be largely undisturbed - at least for our time. The scale of the problems and the energy needed to confront them has hardly begun to sink in. As Al Gore has said "De-nial is not just a river in Egypt".
The biggest challenges are obvious - climate change, the flaws and forces of globalisation, the scramble for resources, the conjunction of weapons of mass destruction and the lethal ambitions of people with an apocalyptic view on life - all of these need global as well as national and regional solutions. It is easy to be immobilised.
The President of the Royal Society, Lord Rees has published a book about the future of the human race entitled - "Our Final Century" - worrying without a question mark, although he attributes that to a publisher's error. But there are things we can do.
We certainly need a coherent communications strategy to bring before the church the implications of the decisions the Synod has already made about cutting our carbon emissions and the other initiatives which have been taken. We have a responsibility to put our own house in order as an institution with churches, parsonages, schools, and halls which produce as much CO2 as the largest supermarket chain in the country.
We need to identify our allies and we shall with gratitude be hearing from some of them today. This is an oecumenical and indeed interfaith cause. We must get beyond a competitive and merely rhetorical assertion of "how green are my scriptures". The Carbon trust and the Energy Saving Trust have been very helpful - we shall be hearing from them this morning. Tear Fund is another such organisation. With the Bishop of Liverpool, who has played such a very significant role in this whole area particularly in his work with American Evangelical leaders, I helped to launch Tear Fund's excellent Carbon Fast project at the beginning of Lent this year with Ed Milliband in one of our church schools, St Gabriel's with a splendid posse of ten year old eco-warriors.
Then we also have a part to play in enlarging the room for manoeuvre so that politicians who have some awareness of the gravity of the challenges we face, can operate without facing electoral suicide. The Church helped to create a positive climate for debt reduction in the Jubilee 2000 campaign and again made a decisive contribution to the Make Poverty History Campaign.
I am therefore especially glad that Joan Ruddock could be here today and in your name I can say that I am relieved that she has not been shuffled from the Department for Energy and Climate Change and I can also congratulate her most warmly for being appointed Minister of State in the Department.
The Government has offered leadership in this area. The way in which the Climate Change Bill was introduced with painstaking pre-legislative scrutiny was a model of how to build a non partisan approach on this subject. I do not believe that there is sufficient awareness of how rapidly we must change in order to meet the targets we have already agreed at the international level. Such changes are bound to be unpopular to some extent and maintain a bi-partisan approach is vital.
The report, which gives its name to our campaign "Shrinking the Footprint", was debated by Synod last year. Synod in response has set the parameters of Church Policy in this area. The preparation for the debate was in the hands of officers of the Mission and Public Affairs Division of the Archbishops' Council. It is good to be able to hear from Charles Reed today and from Stephen Bowler from the Church Buildings Division. I am not a member of Mission and Public Affairs and so in a sense stand here as what the American call a "non remunerated endorser". I am however Chairman of the Shrink the Footprint Campaign and of the Bishops' Panel on the Environment.
We all know without benefit of special revelation that if everyone in the world lived as we do, then we should need three planets worth of resources to make it possible. As it is we only have one planet - already under strain and we are living on the capital which we should be passing intact to our children.
As I have already said, sometimes in the past religion, science, politics and economics have declared a truce on the basis of mutual irrelevance. But now is the time for a re-alignment - a new holism. It is this spirit which informs today's business.
The Church and other religious bodies have not been quick off the mark partly because many people feared that a concern for the natural environment could be a distraction from the needs of the world's poor and the need for development.
Stern and countless other reports, however, have established the connection between the need to tackle climate change and the threat to the well being of some of the poorest and most vulnerable communities, world wide. The reality of our interconnected world is that we are all afloat in a great ark. The first class accommodation will not long remain immune from the effects of leaks in steerage. I hope to be illustrating this truth visually next month on the River Thames in an ark, with 300 children, sundry alpacas and a supporting cast of farm animals. We shall be landing at Westminster to lobby our MP's.
One of the first tests of our own commitment to help mitigate climate change is whether in the midst of our own economic woes we shall be able to help people focus on this event with the kind of passion which will strengthen the hands of the politicians involved. This is very much an ecumenical matter.
We are participants in a web of life, responsible as stewards "to till and keep the earth" - to develop and husband its resources for all the people of the world and also other life forms. Instead of the self serving way of being which has scarred the earth and polluted the waters, we need a greater awareness and a genuine enlightenment that happiness does not come from accumulating more and more but in sharing "enough" with our neighbour.
These are ancient spiritual themes, a glimpse of the deep reality in our world which is being revealed afresh by the challenge which confronts us all. The key is a recovery of balance in our lifestyle.
Part of the answer is to reinvigorate ancient spiritual practices. Don't let's wallow in guilt, mainline on apocalyptic visions or be measured for a hair shirt but recognize that life can be more joyful if feasting and fasting are kept in balance; if it is all carnival with no ensuing lent then the result is just a hangover; let's recover the idea of a Sabbath in the week, in the year, a time of lying fallow and attending to our relationships - no one in my experience on their death bed ever regrets that they did not spend more time in the office. We are not going to be successful in persuading others unless we have taken heed to ourselves.
But for the churches and Christian organizations there is also the opportunity of our network and our institutions. I deputize for the Archbishop of Canterbury as the Chairman of the Board of the Church Commissioners. The Commissioners' now invest substantial sums in vehicles explicitly established to support the development of technology in renewable energy generation and in water purification. It is estimated that about 6% of the world's investment capital is in the hands of religious foundations and their influence is even wider than that.
Well over 70% of the population of our country claimed to be Christian for the purposes of the most recent census. Practice is obviously much lower but even in Greater London the most sober estimate is that there are 630,000 Christians worshipping every ordinary week in more than 4,000 churches. If that were true of a political party we would hear about it. London's Church Leaders have made a united effort by distributing free to every one of those churches a practical tool kit to achieve a shrinkage in our carbon footprint.
The plan was launched by the Cardinal and myself with the support of Ken Livingstone In London's Living Room in City Hall. We intend to have a measurable impact of the emissions of the capital. There are many such initiatives country wide. We shall be hearing about some of them today and we need to send a message of support to the Diocesan Advisers where they exist and an urgent appeal to places where they do not to consider how we shall forward this great cause in a more united and coherent way.
The papers prepared for last Synod debate certainly did not condescend to members. It was assumed that everyone knew what COP - 13 stood for? I must confess that I didn't until I put it into my search engine. The COP is an annual event, a "Conference of the Parties" to the UNFCCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Currently the successor agreement to the Kyoto accord which expires in 2012 is being debated and there will be a particularly significant COP in Copenhagen at the end of this year. For the first time world religious bodies including ourselves will have a place not on the margins among the fringe events but as part of the official programme. The idea is that the various religions should present their own plans for responding to the global challenge of climate change.
In the Church of England we are fortunate to have been able to call on the service of the Christian Think Tank, "Theos" and an experienced researcher in the field Ian Christie who is present today. He will be incorporating some of the fruits of this conference in his report. We intend to harvest the commitments already made and the initiatives already taken and to provide a clear direction of travel for the next seven years.
With many other bishops especially Liverpool and Chester, I participated in the debates on the Climate Change and Energy Bills. One of the most fascinating things was that the science which everyone agrees should decisively inform our approach to this challenge is constantly changing. By contrast the moral imperative to embrace a low carbon world as a relevant expression of neighbour love does not change.
Today's Conference is a practical response to the Micah Challenge. What doth the Lord require but to do justly; to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?
(13/06/2009)
