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Rowan Williams lecture

Rowan Williams’ on the Christian Response to Climate Change

I was fortunate to be able to attend the Operation Noah lecture on climate change in which Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury talked about the Christian response to climate change.  You can listen to his lecture and view the transcript at http://www.operationnoah.org/calendars/campaigncalendar/13-october-hear-dr-rowan-williams-wisdom-noah

Here are a few things which struck me about it, which seemed very in tune with the ethos of Earth Abbey –

He described us as living “inhumanly” and one of the reasons for our current ecological crisis is that we should be living as part of the whole Creation.  We need to re-associate ourselves with nature – it helps us to live as we are meant to live and we can all make a contribution to helping the planet through this crisis we have caused, by living in harmony with it. 

Dr Williams identified some interesting things we had lost –
•  a loss of the sense of the natural rhythms of life and a sense of time
•  a loss of patience
•  a loss of the sense that living in the material world is a risky thing
•  a loss of understanding of the poorer world by the richer

The world has had dangerous fantasies about profit with no risk.  We cannot live in a world with unchecked economic growth.  In a question about population control after the talk, he gave a very clear response that we could not live in a sustainable way without having some constraint on population growth, ideally through making sure that women in the poor world had good access to contraception.  He did have concerns about enforced population control, as that has had very de-humanising affects in countries such as China.

There is no one big solution to the climate change crisis – we all have to make a contribution, we can work as communities to make a difference, eg with CRAGs (carbon reduction action groups), and leaders have to take their responsibilities seriously.  Our overall response should primarily be doing the right thing, because it is the right thing – how God intended us to live, not just aiming to specifically avoid the climate crisis.