Welcome. This week’s blog is in preparation for COP26 beginning on Sunday, October 31st in Glasgow. However else you respond, please Pray!
Race and the Crisis of Climate Change.
Last week it was widely reported that flash floods wreaked havoc in Knightsbridge, amongst other consequences damaging much of the stock of the luxury designer, Jacques Azagury. One feels for the owner and the designers; and much more for the villagers in the German Rhineland whose picturesque homes were recently destroyed by flooding; or over the tragic loss of human life, natural life and vegetation and property in endemic wildfires in Australia and California, or the deaths caused by the unprecedented heat dome in western Canada. All these disasters have been widely covered by the media.
Less attended to is the devastation taking place in parts of the world less accessed by media and less drawn to people’s attention. Irregular harvests in East Africa, flooding in Mozambique, submerging coastlines in Bangladesh, and the threat of some island communities simply disappearing. Our concern over the ravages being brought upon us by climate change is still very largely Eurocentric. The future threats to our grandchildren makes a more emotive appeal than the here-and-now threat to many of our fellow world citizens.
To a degree this is understandable. As emotional beings we respond more readily to those we feel greater affinity to, especially if those affected have close connections to us – relatives who live in Australia, places we have visited on holiday in Germany. Bonds of kinship and cultural congruence mean that at a feeling level we can empathise more readily.
But faced with a danger to humanity comparable only to widespread nuclear devastation (but one that comes only slowly not suddenly) the motivation to respond as substantially as the threat requires easily eludes us in the face of more immediate pressures; especially for politicians for whom it is unsettling to make the outcome of the next election less significant than serious damage affecting those in distant lands or in a distant future.
Yet the evidence is quite clear. Near the start of Jeremy Williams’ ‘Climate Change is Racist’ he prints on opposing pages (pp 2 & 3) a world map with rates of carbon emissions per capita facing a map of vulnerability to climate change. As Williams says, they are like negative images of each other. In particular, Africa is the lowest carbon emitter (Malawi produces 0.001% of carbon emissions) has the highest level of vulnerability.
In the Tear Fund webinar (referred to below) Ruth Valerio referred to Psalm 113, a great psalm of praise to the Lord, where the focal action of the high God is that ‘He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people’ (vv 6 & 7). It is our privilege and our challenge to be part of that action. With the threat of increasingly disastrous climate change having its most destructive impact on the ‘poor’ our faith requires us to respond with vigour and urgency.
1. Our Faith expands our definition of neighbour.
‘Who is my neighbour?’ is a question that follows naturally from the command to love our neighbours as ourselves. The most obvious answer is the immediate one – those for whom we have those close attachments of kin, neighbourhood and personal encounter that deserve respect and require cherishing. To use again David Goodhart’s schema, they are the ‘Somewhere’ people in our lives. But Jesus’ parable of the Samaritan pushed the definition wider, both by making a priority of need and by drawing into the story one who was not regarded as a valued neighbour by his fellow Jews. In effect, he is commended for showing an ‘Anywhere’ mentality. In the first instance it may be a cold rationality that expands our vision – the Abolitionist challenge ‘Am I not a man?’ that takes us from Genesis 1 to confronting and overcoming any partiality over to whom we extend a concerned response. But for Christians, rejoicing in our fellowship in a world-wide family, it is also a response of heart-felt love for our fellows.
For us, as for Wilbeforce’s collaborators, racial distinctions are central. The overwhelming sufferers from climate change are dark-skinned, and living in environments and facing serious deprivations very much worse than all of us in this country face. At the recent Tear Fund conference Amanda Khozi Mukwarhe of Christian Aid referred to Paul’s challenge to ‘count others more significant than yourselves’ (Phil 2:3, ESV). In response we tend to focus our minds on people we meet in church, and it requires intellectual and especially moral effort to include farmers in Malawi. That effort is not intrinsic to our nature, it is part of ‘sin exercising dominion in (y)our mortal bodies’ (Rom 6:12) to be comfortable with local and untroubling horizons. It needs a thoughtful, re-invigorated answer to Jesus’ question for us to incorporate the suffering of multitudes who never cross our path and only occasionally cross our television screens. In theory we would not, but in practice we may, subscribe to what David Lammy MP calls ‘the evil notion that some lives matter more than others’.
2. Faith gives the energy that comes from hope.
The awful seriousness of climate change is not in doubt. Rather than being unjustifiably alarmist, instead, as over the melting rate of Arctic ice-caps, climate scientists have at times underestimated the seriousness of the danger. In that sense flash floods in Knightsbridge are providential. These things didn’t used to happen. London Transport didn’t used to need to close lines or stations. We have been warned, so that Greta Thunberg’s mantra – so straightforward and unrevolutionary- that we should ‘listen to the science’ is incontestable.
Nonetheless it can still be easier to deride the messenger rather than act on the message. It is good that the appeal to COP26 by Christian leaders, and then world faith leaders, indicates the strength of consensus that has grown. Pushing against responding to it is inertia, especially in societies and economies seeking to recover from the impact of Covid19. Additionally, the slow build-up of awareness of the devastating consequences of climate change over the past thirty years or more has created a miasma of fatigue and uncertainty that takes the edge of making decisive and strong responses to the crisis.
Christian faith doesn’t give us a radically different scientific assessment of the situation. It certainly doesn’t comfort us that less radical alternatives are not needed. But it does point us to a God of hope. It tells stories of God acting to reverse situations: the hopelessness of Israel enslaved in Egypt, the despair of exile, the absurdity of the first disciples thinking they could impact the entire world. Behind all of which is the God ‘who gives life to the dead, and calls into being things which are not’ (Rom 4:17). Consequently, we can and must cry out to God both for a powerful, radical outcome from Cop26 that will rectify the unjust balance between the prosperous carbon emitters and the struggling climate change victims; and also be energised ourselves and in our churches to make the small, continuing, incremental changes that reduce our carbon imprint. Reverting back to the Knightsbridge flood, 10% of carbon emissions are caused by clothing and fashion, more than air freight and sea travel combined.
3. Faith prepares us for painful sacrifices.
Central to our faith is the most painful of all sacrifices – the Son of God surrendering himself to the agonising and shameful death on the cross. It underlines the awareness that essential change doesn’t come without cost. The imbalance of climate injustice is so great that rectification will demand large sacrifices from the wealthy carbon emitting nations, both by changing to carbon-free fuel sources and by following, and trumping, Biden’s offer of funding to help poorer nations transition away from carbon consumption.
Whilst transitioning to a green economy will not be without benefits in terms of new skills and jobs, overall transitioning costs money, and governments ought not to avoid saying that our moral duty to the climate vulnerable poor and to future generations will require economic sacrifices in the present. This not simply a question of being virtuous. Our climate crisis is the result of our choices, of the pursuit of wealth with insufficient regards for consequences; of slowness in responding as those damaging consequences have become increasingly clear. We in the West have prioritised a comfortable life over justice for the very largely non-white poor. We have a moral responsibility to produce reparations for our past actions.
Conclusion.
The last few years have seen a dramatic calling to account of our nation’s involvement and guilt over enslavement in the Caribbean. The danger has been to focus very largely on the guilt of a relatively small number of individuals who profited directly from slavery, and to ignore the extent to which the nation as a whole benefitted and colluded in the practice for two centuries. It is easy to focus on guilty people in the past (or American policemen in the present) and thus avoid recognising the different expression of evil from which we currently benefit and are reluctant to alter substantially. If we are shocked and wonder ‘How could they have acted like that?’ of our slavery-benefitting forbears, how much more will people in a hundred year’s time be shocked and shamed that we too turned a blind eye to the even greater and more far-reaching evil of climate destruction, and failed to take serious action. As David Lammy MP asked (see video reference below) ‘why, as Black Lives Matter roared across the world, there’s been so little mention of saving black lives from the climate emergency’?
We should apologise to Edward Colston et al if our generation tears down their statues, all the while colluding in and profiting from an even greater evil. Jesus challenged his hearers: ‘You say “If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets”. Thus you testify against yourselves that you are descendants of those who murdered the prophets’ (Matt 23:30,31). We should shudder at the likely judgement by historians of the next century; even more at the judgement of our earth’s Creator.
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Videos of the Week
* Climate Justice can’t happen without Racial Justice – David Lammy TED Talk (10 mins)
* Christianity, Climate and Race: What is God saying to the Church – Tear Fund (86 mins)
Coming Events
Equip - Mind the Gap - Join Oak Hill's Director of Global Missions David Baldwin, as we take time to understand cross-cultural dynamics in the local church. We’ll be asking ‘how do we listen to and understand one another well?’, and ‘how do we recognise and address the cultural assumptions we all bring to church life?’.
This teaching event is delivered in two 45 minute teaching sessions, with opportunities for interactions and questions. This event will be available online and in person at Oak Hill College on Thursday 14 October 2021 (7:30-9:30pm) and Saturday 16 October 2021 (9:30-11:30am). Both dates for this event will cover the same content and do not run in series.
Theos Annual Lecture: Reimagining Western Education in a Time of Racial Crisis, by Willie Jennings - 10th November at 7.30 on Zoom. Register with Theos. Jennings is the highly regarded Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale University, ordained Baptist minister and award-winning author. His lecture will explore the past, present and future of race in the Western world, proposing a new vision around which to imagine societies that promote equity, inclusion, and belonging.