Declaring that the earth is not a ‘limitless larder’, The Rt Rev James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, called for action on a ‘personal, parochial and political level’ to tackle the challenges of climate change. He urged that this should be an electoral issue. He was speaking in London in the week just before the Copenhagen summit on climate change.
Addressing a Greencoat Forum on ‘Saving the Earth’, in the London centre of Initiatives of Change, December 2009, the bishop said that churches are aiming to cut their carbon footprint during Lent, instead of just giving up things like chocolate. Last year, 300,000 people had taken part in a ‘carbon fast’ during Lent. He suggested this could become a year-round commitment for individuals and for churches.
Bishop Jones underlined fundamental inequalities in the world’s carbon use: the world’s poor who are the most affected by climate change are contaminating the least and don’t have the power to do anything about it, whilst those who have the power too often lack the political will to change the situation.
Bishop Jones said the environment had become a central cause for him after he had spoken to a number of schools in the Diocese of Liverpool in 2000. One of his topics was the environment. He was astonished to find that nearly all the children—even at schools in areas of high deprivation—were very worried about the environment and the future of the planet. The young people, he said, profoundly challenged his attitude to the environment and he realised that leaders in society needed to keep learning. ‘I’m learning all the time since becoming a bishop,’ he said.
Bishop Jones told how he had discovered a link between the Christian faith and the preservation of Creation. He had taken three months’ study leave at his previous theological college in Oxford, to reread the gospels and search for references about the environment. Meeting other faith leaders to discuss this, he talked with the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks. He told the bishop that, when it comes to the environment, Jews refer not so much to Genesis as to the Book of Deuteronomy, which speaks of ‘never destroying a fruit-bearing tree’.
Bishop Jones described the experience which further transformed his outlook. During his study, a question came into his head ‘from nowhere’: ‘Are there times in the Bible where Jesus calls himself the “son of man” and talks about the earth in the same breath?’ He found seven such places and this had come as a complete surprise to him. He realised that humanity is interconnected with the environment: ‘If you are wedded to Christ, you must be wedded to his environment.’ His discovery led to his book Jesus and the Earth (SPCK 2003).
Bishop Jones said that the bishops who sit in the House of Lords were instrumental in amending Britain’s climate change legislation, to include two very important clauses on poverty and role of international aid. But he also warned that politicians cannot do everything. He called for the environment to become an electoral issue, to force political leaders to make it a priority.
He urged that we should not see the Earth as a ‘limitless larder’ and questioned how we could have ever called ourselves a ‘consumer society’—which ‘devours and destroys’ the environment. Instead we should be a ‘conserving society’ because the consumption of one generation had the potential to blight a thousand generations.
In response to a question from a self-styled climate change denier, he said that reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were drawn up by some 2,500 scientists who had affirmed that there was an anthropogenic element to climate change. He also acknowledged that carbon dioxide ‘is one of God’s gifts’ essential to the growth of trees and plants that give off oxygen.
Since becoming Bishop of Liverpool in 1998, James Jones has been deeply involved in local environmental initiatives. He set up Faiths4Change, which works across the faith communities engaging local people in the holistic transformation of their local environments.
He also chairs the Governing Body of the St Francis of Assisi City Academy, jointly sponsored by the Catholic and Anglican Dioceses in Liverpool. It is the first City Academy to take the environment as its specialism, receiving its first intake of students in September 2005.
The bishop was putting his message into practice. He drives a hybrid car, has solar panels on his roof, and had walked from the House of Lords to the Greencoat Forum event.
Cheryl Gallagher
English