Lambeth Conference participants challenged to make environmental changes now
Episcopal News Service, Canterbury. July 26, 2008 [072608-02]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Participants in the 2008 Lambeth Conference have been challenged to apply their moral leadership to the issue of climate change -- and to begin by mitigating the environmental impact of their travel to Canterbury.
The bishops and their spouses spent July 25-26 discussing the role of the church in ecological crises facing the earth.
While they entered a July 25 plenary session devoted to the environment, they were given a brochure explaining that all travel which was "paid for centrally" would be offset by way of a contribution to an environment project in Africa or Asia. The brochure invited those who had paid their own way or whose diocese had paid for them to travel to the conference to work with conference staff to calculate the carbon emissions of their trip and then make a similar contribution via the conference. The most expensive example given was $118.25 for a roundtrip from Sydney, Australia to London.
Christopher Rapley, a well-known expert in climate change science and director of the London Science Museum, told the plenary that "it is a conceit and an error" to think that scientists such as himself know everything about how the planet works, or how the ecological crisis can be addressed.
"We're looking for moral leadership," Rapley said. "As a scientist, I'm looking in your direction."
Wangari Maathai, who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with Kenyan Green Belt organization, spoke to the plenary session via a taped statement to explain how and why she came in 1976 to recruit women's groups to eventually plant more than 40 million trees on their farms and on schools and church compounds as a means of conserving the environment and improving the quality of their lives.
"We have the moral responsibility to protect God's garden," she said.
"Why is it that we do not take action?" she asked. "Why is it that the church cannot take this message to the pulpit?"
Mozambican Diocese of Lebombo Bishop Dinis Sengulane, who is attending his fourth Lambeth Conference, told the plenary: "If we blow the right trumpet, many will join us … Let us use our credibility to give credibility to the mission of Jesus who came to the world that we may have fullness of life."
During a media briefing on July 26, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said her Bible study group that morning had discussed "creation as the body of God; that all that is created reflects the image of God -- not just human beings -- and that our own Christian tradition has a very mixed history of being able to affirm that understanding."
She added that "if we do not pay attention to the incarnate reality of creation -- both human and non-human -- around us and the ways in which it reflects the image of God, we have not engaged our Christian duty."
Jefferts Schori told the journalists that "if we do not pay attention to the health of all of creation, the other issues that concern us will be of no importance."
Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn Bishop George Browning, who was representing the developing world's bishops, told the plenary that the bishops of his world must lend their moral leadership "because it is our core business."
Browning, who chairs the Anglican Communion Environmental Network, said he disagreed with those who claim that the call for churches to be advocates for the planet practice a "new religion."
"My brothers and sister, it is the old religion," he said, that dates back to Genesis and the prologue to the gospel of John, which both detail God's creation of the world.
During the July 25 plenary, Liverpool Bishop James Stuart Jones said a Lent 2000 discussion with thousands of young people in 16 schools made him "rethink my own attitude to the earth; it sent me back to the Bible and the teachings of Jesus and to the discovery of the biblical and the moral imperative of caring for the earth."
Jefferts Schori echoed both men's points the next day when she told the media briefing that "Jesus walked this earth and he healed people, he fed people and he announced good news to the poorest among us; climate change is of ultimate importance because it impacts all of those issues."
"It is the poorest on this globe who suffer the most from climate change already and will continue to suffer the most in the future," Jefferts Schori said. People from every part of the Anglican Communion can tell stories of that reality, she added, citing Alaskans who have lost homes to melting permafrost and South Pacific Islanders forced from their lands by rising sea levels.
Sengulane gave specific examples of the current and potential impact of climate change. For instance, he said, unless the effects of climate change are mitigated, malaria will soon be "knocking on the door" in places outside sub-Saharan Africa where it kills a child every 30 seconds.
He told the session how climate change has affected the growth of cashew nuts, which have been Mozambique's main cash crop and around which the life and economy of the country used to revolve. School began and ended each year based on that timing and men returned home from their mining jobs elsewhere in Africa to harvest the nuts.
"Today, cashew nuts have gone mad," he said, explaining that the trees now produce erratically, if at all.
"In other words, we have messed up the environment in such a way that even the production of cashew nuts is unpredictable," he said. "We wish this phenomenon would leave our cashew nuts alone."
Calling the typical Anglican a black woman carrying a bucket with 20 liters of water on her head as she heads home to her family from a communal well, Sengulane said, "Tonight, as we wash for perhaps the third or fourth time, minimum for the second time, there are people who are queuing up tonight to see whether they can be the first ones to collect 20 liters of water to carry to their whole family."
Browning warned the plenary that "the solution will not be found through politics or economics alone."
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hardly mentioned the seventh United Nations Millennium Development Goal of ensuring environmental stability in his July 24 speech to the conference's Walk of Witness, Browning said, "because he, like almost all western leaders, believe that Western self-interest will always prevail and that we will not be prepared to actually do what is required to meet this challenge." Western-world Lambeth Conference participants, including himself, must prove their political leaders wrong, Browning said.
However, the bishop said, he and his colleagues must first "put our own house in order; we need to put our institutional house in order" by conducting energy audits and making other plans to reduce their carbon footprints. Browning noted that the average Australian, by some measures, has the largest carbon footprint in the world at 26 pounds per person per year.
"The poor of Mozambique pay the bills of the rich in Australia, and that is immoral," Browning said.