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CHRISTIAN ECOLOGY LINK

March 2008

Prayer-Guide

for

The Care of Creation

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“Why has the land been ruined and laid waste like a desert that no-one can cross?”

The Lord said: “It is because they have forsaken my law, which I set before them.

Instead, they have followed the stubbornness of their hearts.

They have followed the Baals, as their fathers taught them.”

Therefore, this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says:

“See, I will make this people eat bitter food and drink poisoned water.

I will scatter them among nations that neither they nor their fathers have known,

And I will pursue them with the sword until I have destroyed them.”

(Jeremiah 9.12-14)

“The time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine.

Instead, to suit their desires, they will gather round them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.

They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship,

Do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.”

(2 Timothy 4.3-5)

“Act as if everything depended on you; wait as if everything depended on God.”

(St. Ignatius Loyola)

Saturday 1st March

The Asian tsunami, apart from the damage to lives and livelihoods, drew together many different nations, cultures and religions in the face of common threats. A shared sense of vulnerability and a dawning recognition that ripping-up natural defences can have deadly consequences, reinforce the growing awareness that we belong to one world. As we face the looming shock-waves of climate change, we can begin to understand that we either get through it together or not at all. Pray for scientists, diplomats and politicians as they struggle to build a consensus in the world’s response to climate change.

Sunday 2nd March

Lord, we pray that your people, whether they be ministers, scientists or lay people, may find the strength to give clear witness of the need to care for the world that you created. May they speak out courageously on the massive changes in our lifestyles that are now seen to be necessary to protect your creation.

Monday 3rd March

“The Last Giant Oil Frontier: Access to a Trillion Dollars in oil and natural gas! Profit from the Biggest Energy Story of All Time!” reads an online advertisement referring to the estimated 40 billion barrels of oil and gas supposedly lying under the Arctic ice.

Nobody should underestimate the appeal of this type of message to those bent on extracting a quick buck, regardless of the consequent damage to the Earth’s climate and to the prospects of future generations. “Do not be deceived,” wrote St. Paul (Gal. 6.7) “God is not mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” And, in the next verse, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”

Tuesday 4th March

In a speech to the European Parliament Prince Charles has called for an alliance between public authorities, private interests and non-governmental organisations to work on the crisis of climate change. “I only pray I may be proved wrong in believing that the doomsday clock of climate change is ticking ever faster towards midnight. We are simply not re-acting quickly enough.”

He focussed on the plight of the rainforests, describing them as global utilities that provide essential public services to humanity. “We are destroying our planet’s air-conditioning system,” he said. The Prince’s Rainforests Project, launched at Hampton Court last October, aims to work with the private sector, governments and environmental experts to find solutions to the destruction. “These need to provide credible incentives to rainforest nations, down to farmers on the ground, and must out-compete the drivers of rainforest destruction.” We can all play our part in refusing products implicated in rainforest destruction and supporting projects which protect the forests.

Wednesday 5th March

“Losing Ground” is a new report from FoE, Savit Watch and Life Mosaic which exposes the human rights abuses fuelled by EU targets to increase the use of biofuels in transport. Oil palm companies in Indonesia use violence to grab land from indigenous communities. Families who were self-reliant on the forests around them are tricked into giving up their land with the promise of jobs and new developments. They end up being locked in debt and poorly-paid work while the pesticides and fertilisers used on the palm oil plantations are leaving some villages without clean water. FoE is calling on MEPs and EU Member States to reject the 10% target for biofuels when it comes before the European Parliament and Council. The EU should instead strengthen its proposals for emission limits on all new cars.

Thursday 6th March

Prince Charles in his speech called for the nations to be put on a war footing. “If military policy has long been based on the dictum that we should be prepared for the worst, should it be any different when our security is that of the planet and our long-term future? If we are not courageous and revolutionary in our approach to climate change, the result will be catastrophe for all of us, but especially for the poorest in our world. This is surely comparable to war. Do we, as a world community, have the resolve to wage it?”

Accountants KPMG, in a survey of 200 corporate leaders, found that 85% rate climate change as a key issue, but only 22% aim to become carbon neutral. Prince Charles was told by corporate leaders that, while a market-based approach to climate change can make a difference, a proper framework is required, with governments setting consistent long-term targets and providing responsible and equitable regulation.

Friday 7th March

The University of East Anglia, in research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, uses the term “tipping elements” to describe a critical threshold where a small change in human activity can have huge long-term consequences for the Earth’s climate. These are the nine “tipping elements” with the approximate time when they might be expected:

·  Melting of all Arctic sea ice – 10 years

·  Decay of the Greenland ice sheet – over 300 years

·  Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet – over 300 years

·  Collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (Gulf Stream) – 100 years

·  Increase in the El Nino Southern Oscillation – 100 years

·  Collapse of the Indian summer monsoon – 1 year

·  Greening of the Sahel and disruption of the W. African monsoon – 10 years

·  Dieback of the Amazon rainforest – 50 years

·  Dieback of the Boreal Forest – 50 years.

Source: Tyndall Centre for Climate Research.

Saturday 8th March

In his speech to the European Parliament, the Prince asked: “Can we possibly allow another 20 years of business-as-usual before coal-powered generation becomes clean? Are we truly investing enough in renewable energy?”

The proposed Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent is expected to receive Government approval by the end of April. It will not be built with CCS (clean coal) technology. Instead, it will be a “business-as-usual” plant. Jim Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist, has described Kingsnorth as “a terrible idea”. Former US Vice-president Al Gore asks: “Why aren’t there rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power stations?”

Sunday 9th March

Show us, Father, what we must do to protect your wonderful world – not just the plants and animals, but the soil, air and water by which we live – so that no-one may exploit or pollute them for their own profit or convenience. Help us to cherish these necessities for our survival, and guide those in authority to ensure that the human spirit may not be starved in pursuit of material comfort and wealth.

Monday 10th March

According to Ivan Illich, the car is the supreme object of the energy inequity that is at the heart of industrial civilisation. While promising freedom to millions, the rise in car ownership and use has brought congestion and pollution to much of the planet’s built space, while pedestrians, cyclists, children and wild animals are denied quiet, unpolluted and safe space in which to move.

Yet no matter the cost to the climate, industrial governments are determined to extract every last barrel of oil from the earth, even when (as in the Arctic) the costs are astronomical. A Canadian environment minister has said: “There is no environment minister on earth that will stop this oil from being produced.”

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the country with Africa’s biggest oil reserves, the number of people living in absolute poverty (earning less than $1 a day) grew from 27% in 1980 to 66% in 1996.

Tuesday 11th March

The Old Testament prophets lamented the destruction of the cedar forests to support the economic expansion of nations such as Tyre, Tarshish and Israel (eg Ezekiel 27). Today’s fossil-fuel economy, like the ancient trade in cedars, requires a constant onslaught on natural resources, enriching the elites (oil companies and investors) but blighting the lives of ordinary people. However, present levels of oil production cannot be sustained. As prices rise and production declines, perhaps the people of the Middle East may at last enjoy peace – provided that the use of oil has not heated the climate to the extent that the whole region is reduced to desert.

Wednesday 12th March

Michael Northcott in “A Moral Climate” points out that scientists – even climate scientists – rely heavily on power-hungry super-computers, on satellites using huge amounts of fossil fuels and on research trips to far-flung places in aircraft with high-level emissions far more damaging than greenhouse gases at ground level. They sincerely believe that, if they can describe our perils with sufficient clarity, the public and politicians will respond with policies to match the seriousness of the crisis. The problem is that we are used to scientific language speaking of ongoing success in bringing the planet into subservience to the desires of our growth-led technological society. Yet the depth of the crisis requires not only clear talking but truthful action, including radical measures to conserve energy and reduce wasteful consumption activities by all of us – including the scientists who claim that there is a problem.

Thursday 13th March

“In an advanced industrial country, a policy of economic growth promotes mindless labour and mindless leisure” (Martin Borgmann in “Character of Contemporary Life”). According to Michael Northcott, the liberal quest for a just society involves a bargain with technology in the belief that more technology will produce a better society. “But this does not happen, because technological rule requires that liberal democracies give up deliberation over ends . . . Technological modernisation sustains the illusion that it is possible to create policies that ensure that such good ends as justice or prudence can be achieved without the people being good. This illusion is further sustained by the endless deferrals of agreed social goods in the collective pursuit of technological advancement.”

Friday 14th March

The spread of carbon trading is leading, according to Northcott, to “carbon colonialism”, which effectively commodifies the earth’s atmosphere and forests, privatising a common resource in the form of carbon credits to be traded between governments and corporations. The creation of a market in carbon represents a tragic distraction from the urgent need to re-regulate the money supply and re-invent industrial manufacture so that they are brought back into relation to the energy and nutrient flows of the earth system. Carbon taxation, he maintains, does not require the creation of new markets in carbon permits with the expensive and invasive bureaucracy and surveillance required by carbon trading. “A shift in taxation from profits and jobs to carbon would . . . dramatically increase the price of the most climatically harmful activities such as air travel, car travel, electricity consumption, space heating, meat eating and long-distance transportation of food and manufactured goods.”

Saturday 15th March

It is generally agreed that the poorest and most vulnerable people stand most at risk from climate change caused largely by the activities of developed nations, who therefore have a moral duty to compensate them with resources to enable them to adapt to climate change. But, as Northcott points out, the issue of compensation is a distraction from the more fundamental issue of the wasteful and destructive course on which industrial civilisation is based. So long as economic exchange is governed by techniques which neglect human and ecological welfare, it will be impossible to bring our energy demands into line with earth’s carbon capacity or to bring justice to those who will suffer from climate change.

Sunday 16th March

Lord, as we begin to see the radical transformations needed in our society if we are to meet the crisis of climate change, we pray and beseech you to raise up and empower the leaders of the future who will challenge the forces of inertia and inspire us all to think and act as if we, individually and collectively, bear full responsibility for the lifestyle changes that we must all make if coming generations are to survive.

Monday 17th March

According to Northcott, “The economistic neglect of biological laws and of the regenerative powers of ecosystems arises from the exclusive devotion of modern societies to economic above moral or spiritual ends. . . When wealth turns into an absolute good, it becomes a spiritual force, influencing the human spirit from within . . . This misplaced devotion comes at a great price in terms of the enslavement of the earth and its creatures to wealth accumulation. And it is not only the poor who suffer. The wealthy also suffer intellectually, morally and spiritually from their misguided devotion. As Bulgakov suggests in ‘The Economic Ideal’ a life without ideals is the inevitable logic of hedonism.

Tuesday 18th March

As Dave Bookless reports in “Planetwise”, there have been extraordinary stories of how the land can transformed when a community turns to God in repentant prayer and renewed obedience. At Almolonga in Guatemala, for example, almost sterile land has been transformed into fertile fields yielding huge vegetables as the local community turned from crime and immorality to Christ. (see www.sentinelgroup.org) The key to unlocking the riddles of climate change lies not in human technological cleverness but in repentance and obedience.