Skip to main content

It's heavy !

The Guardian reports that global C02 emissions totalled 29,195m tonnes in 2006 – up 2.4% on 200. That's really heavy. Their interactive map highlights how each country is doing. Our slowing economy results in no change to our carbon emissions in the year - still at around 585 million tonnes. How will we make the change to an 80% cut in our carbon emissions ?

At heart the problem is a spiritual one - something to do with the movements of the heart, a sense of relation to others and about hope. That's why we in the Church should be ever more involved. We have a lot to say.

Popular posts from this blog

Nicholas - Bishop at Myra

What are people like ? Some are saints, some are sinners...you may say. Perhaps in the current age we would say : “Some are celebrities, some are scroungers” We do have a way - don't we - of putting things into binaries, black and white, yes and no, good and bad, this and that. It works for computer code but I don't know if it works for human beings made in the image of God..... Perhaps now more than in previous ages and certainly since the economics of the Thatcher era arrived, the neoliberal economics that makes the market its God, we have so many stories that make people other than ourselves...and so make it possible to cut their wages, to implement austerity. We have heard the stories about those who are poor and how they are to blame for their property because of the lack of initiative, laziness, fecklessness etc.  In today’s Rochdale Observer the story about poor children not being ready for primary school can be told to us as poor parenting causing t...
Read more

Greening the Eucharist ?

At breakfast at the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre yesterday I struggled to explain my research to an undoubtedly intelligent woman. Whilst certainly partly my failing, I was reminded that it is not natural to connect in the contemporary Christian mind (She was a practising Roman Catholic  the Eucharist and the Environment. Of course not ! That's why I am doing my research - that's the problem the research tries to tackle. So you can imagine how encouraged I was yesterday reading the book Greening Paul: Rereading the apostle in a time of ecological crisis which I would humbly suggest is trying to the same with St Paul as I and others are trying to do with the Eucharist. The authors of this book try to develop some "hermeneutical lenses" which are from the Christian tradition and yet at the same time can be the means for its critical reading afresh. I know that this sentence sets up some barriers immediately...
Read more

Changing the truth - Peer pressure

Two strands of thought have come together for me this morning. I was reading about how Margaret Thatcher, in 1990 made the conservative case for climate action but by 2003 had shifted her position. In 1990 Global warming was, she argued, “real enough for us to make changes and sacrifices, so that we do not live at the expense of future generations.”. But by 2003 she was calling climate action a “marvelous excuse for supra-national socialism". This is all recorded on the Grist website . Why the shift for Margaret ? Is the answer peer pressure?  It's not just politicians who follow the pack, we all do. To step outside of the reassurance and identity of the group you belong to, takes courage. It seems that Margaret Thatcher was influenced by right wing think-tanks. And I don't imagine that the ordinary conservative voter wanted to hear about the need to change lifestyle. (None of us do.... ) The other strand was hearing about Hannah Arendt's and the trial of Adolf...
Read more