Respect due: Archbishop Rowan Williams

Last week (13 October) Rowan Williams gave a lecture at Southwark Cathedral, sponsored by Operation Noah, with the title 'The Climate Crisis: Fashioning a Christian Response' (if you go to this page, you'll find a summary of the lecture first, followed by the full text). Interestingly, the Guardian saw fit both to report the lecture and to print an extract from it.

The lecture links climate change with other aspects of the current malaise of Western society, and looks at the resources in the Jewish and Christian traditions that may help us to think about, and respond to, the crisis we find ourselves in. In passing, Rowan reminds us that the narrative in Genesis is not an invitation to dominate and exploit the earth. The economic patterns of our material consumption habits are linked into the climate change issue, in a way that chimes in with the discussions around the recent Zero Growth Economics Conference (see earlier posts below); and Rowan also refers at some length (and approvingly) to Alastair McIntosh's book Hell and High Water: climate, hope and the human condition.

Rowan asks, in the third section of the lecture,

'When we find ourselves facing massive insecurity of this sort and when we sense that we have somehow sacrificed our happiness along the way, what is it that we have lost? And how can we work to restore it?'

He continues,

'the role of religion here is not to provide an ultimate authority that can threaten and coerce us into better behaviour; it is to hold up a vision of human life lived constructively, peacefully, joyfully, in optimal relation with creation and creator, so as to point up the tragedy of the shrunken and harried humanity we have shaped for ourselves by our obsession with growth and consumption.'

There are lots of quotable passages - but read the whole for yourself to get a sense of the argument as Rowan puts it together.

This is by no means the first time Rowan has lectured, or preached, on this vital subject. One previous occasion was 25 March this year, the 2009 Ebor Lecture given at York Minster under the title, 'Renewing the Face of the Earth: Human Responsibility and the Environment' - this is a more demanding text, both intellectually and theologically, but well worth the time to read it. (There's a link on the Arhbishop's website to listen to the recording of the lecture, but it will require you to download a Microsoft application which will then try to take control of all your computer's audio! Better to listen to it from the link on this page, which works like iPlayer, and will play direct from the webpage. It's recorded in the Minster, so it echoes a bit and is quite hard to listen to - but you do also get the questions at the end.) In this lecture, Rowan is absolutely clear about the magnitude and urgency of the crisis, makes it clear that faith is no 'get out of jail free card', but sees the times we are in as a call to spiritual transformation. Among the questioners is a non-comformist minister who says that when he raises these issues with his congregation, he is accused of 'not preaching the Gospel of Christ' - this makes clear that the challenge to faith groups is one of 'inreach' as well as 'outreach'. Quakers are not immune to this - I was told recently of Friends who questioned the work Woodbrooke is doing in this area as mere 'jumping on a bandwagon'.

During this lecture, Rowan refers to some other resources from the Church of England. One is their website devoted to this whole issue, combining practical advice and theological and spiritual reflection, under the title, 'Shrinking the Footprint'. It's a good site, and I recommend browsing around it. There is some practical advice about church buildings which could also be of use to Quaker Meeting Houses, as well as much else that is good. There's also a pamphlet called, 'How Many Light Bulbs Does it Take to Change a Christian?', which is an excellent and to-the-point title, even it you never get beyond the front cover!

Reading these two lectures of Rowan's has prompted me to think about the usefulness of having a figurehead who can speak with authority, facing both inwards towards the faith group, and outwards towards 'the world'. It reminds me of the recent dilemma that the UK Green Party had - whether to have a national leader who could speak for the party, and be a point of reference for the rest of the political world. It's not straightforward, of course - because the Archbishop is saying things that I agree with, and things that I think need saying, and saying with authority, I of course think it's good that he's saying them. If he were saying things that I deeply disagreed with, I might feel that he was misusing his position! But his position does mean that his words can reach out beyond his own 'parish'. As Friends we have a different issue to face if we want our views to be more widely known - we were widely reported over the same-sex marriage issue this summer, but for less controversial issues it's not clear how our voice gets heard, either nationally or locally.

The other salutary lesson, it seems to me, from exploring the 'Shrinking the Footprint' website, is that other church groups are, thankfully, forging ahead on these matters. As Quakers we sometimes fall into the habit of assuming that we are 'ahead of the curve' on key social issues - in this instance we most certainly are not. When Woodbrooke sent out the free 'Good Lives' introductory study pack, to about 250 local meetings, we built into it a feedback mechanism that also acted as a research tool. With about 50 sets of feedback returned to us, one thing has become very clear: in places where there is a lot of activity around these issues (such as a Transition Town group, or similar), Friends are also active, knowledgable and involved; where the local community has no such action happening, Friends are also inactive. In other words, Friends are not, in general, being leaders in our local communities in this matter (although some individual scertainly are) - we are, in general, just like the communities in which we live.

For interest, here is where the Methodist Church has got to with sustainability. There is a book which shows, in detail, how sustainability is mandated in the Qur'an, 199 Ways to Please God; the author blogs at http://www.greencreation.info/. And in Birmingham we have have an interesting project called Faith and Climate Change based in the Birmingham Friends of the Earth Office.

Walking humbly, walking cheerfully

A bit of a change of focus this week. Last weekend we (that’s my colleague, Lizz Roe, and I) were running the 3rd module of the Good Lives programme, ‘because we need to walk humbly as well as cheerfully’. It was focussed on our spirituality, and on how we create and sustain a spiritual discipline that will nurture us as we work on the pressing issues of our time.

In case it’s obscure to any readers here, I should explain the title. It comes from two well-loved (by some people!) phrases. The first is biblical:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6:8) (King James Version)

Yes, I know, the ‘man’ language is anachronistic! But the rhythm of this language is the one I grew up with, and I still find it resonant, in spite of the ‘man’.

Here it is in ‘The Message’ translation:

“But he's already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It's quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, And don't take yourself too seriously— take God seriously.”

Terribly ‘correct’ and ‘accessible’ – but so clunky, and no poetry in it! The version we ended up using for the Good Lives Study Pack was the best compromise we could find – the ‘God’s Word’ translation:

“The Lord has told you what is good. This is what the Lord requires from you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to live humbly with your God.”

The second well-loved phrase is from George Fox, and there are no translation problems:

“And this is the word of the Lord God to you all, and a charge to you all in the presence of the living God: be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one.” (Quaker Faith and Practice 19:32)

So, having run the event, I thought I’d include here some of the exercises we did with people. We did a lot of sharing in threes and in the whole group, but you could reflect on the questions by yourself, perhaps in journalling.

If you’ve never tried journalling, here are some places that might get you started: http://www.annunciationtrust.org.uk/approaches/journalling.shtml
http://www.kporterfield.com/journal/Journal_Index.html
http://42explore.com/journl.htm
http://www.soulfulliving.com/spiritualityjournaling.htm
http://www.howtodothings.com/religion-spirituality/how-to-keep-a-spiritual-journal
http://www.awomansjourney.com/journaling.html

Or you might want to gather with a couple of friends and try sharing your answers and reflections.

But first, here’s an adaptation of one of the inputs that Lizz Roe gave during the weekend:

Most faith based communities have particular things in common – it’s what marks them out and means they get included as faith based communities in dictionaries of religion!

In Britain there is huge variety, even within a single faith group, differing beliefs, theologies, and so forth; nevertheless, broadly speaking what we can say about faith groups in general is the following:

Most faith based groups have the following 8 things:

- A shared sense of what is holy, and what is meant by that
- A shared set of behaviours, practices, liturgies and rituals
- A shared set of values/ethics
- A shared understanding of God in their community (which may be that God isn’t really important, or that faith in God is not as significant as observance of particular practices etc)
- A shared understanding of the place of any scripture or holy writing or sacred texts in the community (eg as a source of authority, as an inspired set of writings, as the rule to live by etc); this understanding could be that there aren’t any such texts
- A shared understanding of the role of belief in the group
- A common personal discipline (and encouragement of it)
- A shared understanding of where power, leadership and authority reside

It’s interesting to observe that in the strongest faith based communities, there is strong agreement about all of these things in terms of shared understanding, behaviour, and ‘ideology’. In ‘weaker’ communities there might be strong shared understanding but weak shared behaviour, or strong shared behaviour but weak ‘ideology’.

What we do know is that where the congruence between all three is strongest, this leads to stronger faith based communities - which may or may not always be a good thing!

At the core of this are two things:

- A shared set of behaviours, practices, liturgies and rituals
- A common personal discipline

Amongst Quakers in Britain, we’re strong on the first of these, but we’re increasingly less good at the second – at a common personal discipline!

Quakers in the 17th and 18th centuries would have recognised the need to meet regularly with an Elder, to read the bible (every day), to pray (every day), to read other texts, pamphlets and writings, to go to business meetings (dealing with the life of their community) as well as to attend Meeting for Worship, if they were endeavouring to live up to the Light and to make real the Republic of Heaven here on earth.

They recognised that witness and worship went hand-in-hand and would be supported by a regular discipline of prayer, reflection and worshipful discussion with another, perhaps a more experienced Quaker. What we think might work for us to sustain us for the long haul may now be different (although it’s worth asking ourselves where and what we might learn from these early Quakers), but it is the regularity of their practice that it is important to consider – it’s called a spiritual discipline for a reason, because it requires discipline to do it even when one is tired, frustrated, burnt out or fed up!

Richard Foster, an American Quaker, has some interesting things to say about this in his book Celebration of Discipline: the path to spiritual growth.


And now, here are some of the questions for reflection:

Pick one thing – the most important to you right now – that your spirituality means to you.

On a sheet of paper (maybe large, with coloured felt pens) – write down words that you associate with your experience of spirituality.

Reflect on that collection of words – what are they telling you?

In terms of a spiritual discipline, what do you actually do?

Is it helping? (In what ways, if it is? In what ways, if it isn’t?)

What do you intend to do, but don’t actually accomplish? Why is that? (time? Motivation? Resources?)

Does you have a spiritual community? If so, does it help you?

Do you need (or choose) to look elsewhere?

If you don’t have a spiritual community, would you like to have one?

What would you hope for, if you had one?

How is all this (above) for you in terms of action/activism in the world? What do you actually do?

What do you intend to do? (and what gets in the way? – is it time, motivation, resources?)

What do you want to do?

Does your spiritual community (if you have one) nurture you in this?

What might help?

* * * * *

It would be good if anyone felt moved to add some of your reflections on these questions as ‘Comments’, here on the blog. The sharing of our thoughts and experiences is one of the ways we can nourish ourselves and each other and create a community where we can speak freely of the things that matter most deeply to us.

The population question

Last week I reported on the Zero Growth Economics Conference (see post below). One of the issues that was raised a number of times, from varying perspectives, was the question of global population.

There’s a rather macabre but fascinating website on world population that displays a clock/calendar, ticking and counting the increase in world population while you’re looking at it (derived statistically, of course). It’s interactive so you can move backwards or forwards in time to see past world population, or projected future numbers.

The current figure is something over 6.9 billion (that’s US billions – ie: 6.9 thousand million). Various projections suggest that world population will peak at around 9.1 or 9.2bn by 2050, and then flatten off and start to fall (although the website above gives a different result).

Here's a useful global population growth graph, and a graph showing world population in age profile. This second graph shows the profile in 1960 and also in 2003. In these images you can see the post-war baby bulge working its way through, and then the secondary bulge of their children, and now there is a smaller number of infants – hence, as that smaller number reaches adult childbearing age, we get the conditions for the global population to peak and then decline.

Ok – that’s enough statistical stuff! The first of the two graphs above shows the difference in population growth between the industrialised and developing parts of the world – and herein lies the nub of the issue. The developing countries have overall a larger, and faster-growing population; but the industrialised world lives a much more lavish lifestyle. So, although the total carbon emissions of poor countries are high, the emissions per person are of course very much higher in the rich world.

In terms of justice, rich countries should reduce our emissions drastically so that poor countries can have the breathing space to acquire a decent modest standard of living. But in terms of realpolitik there is a real problem about how to ‘sell’ this idea to the rich. The two models that try to get to grips with this are Cap and Share and Contraction and Convergence – both of which are ways of trying to achieve global justice in terms of both economics and carbon emissions.

And this brings us back to the population question: the poor are more numerous but the rich are more profligate – who should reduce their numbers? And how do we even start to have a sensible conversation about this when we have hanging over our heads the shades of both eugenics and the drastic Chinese one-child policy?

In the issue of New Scientist that came out on the day of the conference (26 September) there was a major feature on world population – unfortunately I can’t give you a link to read this series of articles, as you have to be a subscriber to get full access on the NS website. So here’s a summary.

Alison George (‘7 billion and counting’, p.35) gives an overall introduction, ending with a quote from Tertullian, an early Christian, writing in the 3rd century:

“We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for us; already nature does not sustain us.”

This was when world population was around only 250 million – just a little over 3½% of today’s figure.

Paul and Anne Ehrlich (‘Enough of us now’, pp.36-37) argue that,

“With more than a billion already going hungry, limiting population growth has to be a priority.”

On the page is a quote from Jared Diamond:

“We often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies . . . they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax; we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even for now, for only one billion people.”

Then on pp.38-39 Jesse Ausubel (‘Ingenuity wins every time’) explains why he believes that technological innovation will come to our rescue – no need to worry. He is an environmental scientist, Director of the Program for the Human Environment at The Rockefeller University in New York City. He was one of the main organisers of the first UN World Climate Conference. Who am I to disagree with such an eminent scientist? But I do disagree. I just can’t see that we can innovate in sufficient quantity and quality, quickly enough, and sustainably in terms of raw materials. On the page is a quote from journalist Brendan O’Neill in Spiked :

“You can bet that when these well-to-do worriers about the human plague on the planet talk about burdensome people causing ‘congestion, overcrowding and loss of green space’, they aren’t talking about themselves, or their friends, or their neighbours.”

Next, Fred Pearce writes on ‘The greedy few’ (p.40) and concludes,

“Every time those of us in the rich world talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying our own culpability. It is the world’s consumption patterns we need to fix, not its reproductive habits.”

He has a new book coming out in February 2010, Peoplequake.

And to round off the section, Reiner Klingholz writes on ‘The era of decline’ (p.41) discussing the societal problems that come with a declining population – fewer people in work to support a larger ageing cohort. He concludes:

“Countries that learn to live in prosperity with an ageing, stagnant population, or even one that is shrinking, will be the trendsetters for a sustainable future. Europe has the chance to develop a blueprint for these modern societies – for economies that found their wealth and well-being not on growth but on sustainability.”

On the Tuesday immediately following the Conference, George Monbiot’s regular column in The Guardian also tackled population as its topic: ‘Stop blaming the poor. It's the wally yachters who are burning the planet’. He takes a very similar position to that of Fred Pearce in New Scientist. Writing of the very rich, Monbiot says:

“The owners of these boats do more damage to the biosphere in 10 minutes than most Africans do in a lifetime. ”

He goes on to argue that the rich should curb their emissions and stop calling for the poor to have fewer children. The letters page the following day included five responses to his article under the heading, ‘Planet's problems are multiplying’. The first two letters come down one on either side of the argument; the other three say, in different ways, that it’s both-and, not either-or. But on the same day as these letters, the paper carried a major article, across two pages, headlined, ‘By 2050, 25m more children will go hungry’, discussing the effects of climate change on world food production, which will decline even as population carries on rising.

So, how are we to approach this? How do we have a thoughtful and rational public debate about it? How can we put together justice, political realities, climate change, peak oil, population growth . . .? Is there ‘a Quaker view’ on all this?

Please post a comment, and let’s start practising how to talk with each other about this very difficult topic.

Conference on Zero Growth Economics

On Saturday (26 September) we held the conference at Friends House: ‘A zero growth economy – what would it mean for us all?’ On a lovely sunny autumn day, over 300 Friends and others sat in the Large Meeting House to hear our four speakers, with the whole day chaired by Jocelyn Bell Burnell.


The first participants arrive – doors opened at 9am for
a 10.30am start, and some Friends were there on the dot!

Opening the day were Miriam Kennet and Naomi Baster from the Green Economics Institute. They gave us an introduction to some of the technical aspects of ‘zero growth’ that doesn’t just mean a recession. An interesting distinction was between ‘growth’ (more of the same kind of stuff) and ‘development without growth’ (the same amount of better stuff). The latter takes seriously the limits of natural resources and the carrying capacity of the planet – these are not new ideas: see John Stuart Mill, Malthus and David Ricardo.

There will need to be a transition (substitution of activities) to a new economy characterised by new activities, work shared out fairly, less inequality and poverty, less impact on climate change. The economy must return to being labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive, taxation systems need to tax the ‘bads’ (pollution, greenhouse gases) not the ‘goods’; and the purpose of the economy is to provision for need – inclusive of the needs of poor people, the biosphere, other species.


Left to right:
Richard Douthwaite, Miriam Kennet, Naomi Baster,
Jocelyn Bell Burnell

The next speaker was Richard Douthwaite of FEASTA (The Foundation for the Economic of Sustainability). His title was ‘The Stark Choice is not growth or no growth: it’s share or die’. He gave us a hard-hitting and passionate presentation:
- honesty about energy and climate change is not comforting
- a gentle move from growth to zero growth is no longer available
- we have to move now from growth to negative growth

The choices we have are to manage this change, starting immediately, to protect the vulnerable; or we have chaotic change and the weak go to the wall.


Miriam Kennet and Naomi Baster speaking
in the Large Meeting House

Richard thinks that Peak Oil has already happened – he puts it in July 2008 – oil production is now in slow steady decline, of about 3.5% per annum (although Frederik Robelius, of Uppsala Hydrocarbon Depletion Study Group measuring actuals rather than forecasts, suggests the figure is 7%).

With our conference falling just after the conclusion of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, all the newspapers we were reading on the train to London were full of their deliberations. Richard pointed out that they had totally failed to make the link between the credit crunch and the energy crunch. This is the link into climate change, because world leaders know only growth systems and are not being honest with themselves or us. The Stern Report was working on 450ppm of CO2, but James Hansen put the limit at 350ppm, and pointed out that sea ice started melting in the 1970s. We are already at 390ppm, are seeing rapid ice loss, and we need to be taking CO2 out of the atmosphere – not merely reducing the rate at which we put it in.

Without fossil fuel energy (one litre of petrol equates roughly to three weeks of one person’s manual labour) our incomes will fall rapidly, and global energy use distribution is currently in the familiar 20/0 ratio: 20% of the people use 80% of the energy. Richard strongly advocates the cap and share version of our future: it assumes each individual on the planet has the same rights to energy – within a country as well as between countries. The decline on fossil fuels will push up the price of everything, including those goods essential to the world’s poor – hence the need for a system which compensates for this.

After these two challenging presentations we broke for lunch, grateful that it was a fine day.


Friends relaxing in the garden over picnic lunches


Leaving the courtyard to start the afternoon session

Our first afternoon speaker was Duncan Green, Head of Research at Oxfam addressing ‘Should growth be rationed?’. For poor countries, growth is essential to lift people out of absolute poverty – but there is ‘good growth’ and ‘bad growth’ – ‘good growth’ is both equitable and environmentally sustainable. There are three scenarios:

• get much cleaner very quickly (with the kind of rapid shift we normally only see in a war economy)
• geo-engineering (but beware unintended consequences)
• limits to growth

The first of these is happening, but not nearly fast enough; you can’t talk to politicians about the third one – they all want the first one. The second is potentially dangerous. We also know that, above about $20K per year, increased income doesn’t equate to increased happiness. So how do we get growth for poor countries but not for the rich?

We could ration growth by price (a very heavy tax on carbon) – but without a redistribution mechanism this could lead to ‘carbon apartheid’. We could negotiate a binding international agreement – but this is not politically realistic.

We need to address the ‘three I’s’:

• Ideas (eg: the idea that ‘growth is good’ – we need challenges to this and we need other measures of well-being)
• Interests (eg: find allies – the insurance industry is very concerned about the way things are going, and does not see its own interests threatened by such measures)
• Institutions – we have a conservative economics profession advising politicians – so we need alternatives

Duncan Green (centre) with Anne Wilkinson of QPSW (left) and Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Can it be done? Historically, changes of this magnitude only follow from a very large shock to the system – and it seems that the recent financial crash wasn’t a big enough shock. The gap between what the G20 has accomplished, and what is needed at Copenhagen, is enormous.

Our final speaker of the day was Alastair MacIntosh. He asked us: ‘How do we convert a ‘burden of awareness’ in to a ‘precious burden of awareness’? He was clear that for people of spiritual or religious conviction, it was not our place to try to play the politicians and economists at their own game – we are required, rather, to exercise a deep ‘holding’ of the issues, to exercise discernment, no matter how painful. What light might we be able to throw, from that place, on the human condition? Consumerism, beyond necessities, is about status, filling gaps in our souls, and so on – to the extent that we are not well-anchored in God, to that extent we are prey to consumerism – and we are all complicit.

I cannot possible summarise Alastair’s presentation here on the page! All the PowerPoint presentations, and podcasts of all the talks will be available shortly at:
www.quaker.org.uk/zero-growth-economy-conference

And Alastair's own account of his contribution appeard in 'Face to Faith' in The Guardian on 4 October.


Left to right: Richard Douthwaite, Alastair McIntosh, Jocelyn Bell Burnell

After each talk, participants had been invited to write their questions on cards provided – these were sorted and categorised during the stretch breaks and lunch interval, so that representative questions could be put to individual speakers, or to the whole panel, at the end of the day.


Suzanne Ismail (left) and Sunniva Taylor (of QPSW) sorting questions during the lunch break

I hope the questions/answers will be added to the podcasts. A few of the points were:

• We heard about the German economist Ignacy Sachs who distinguished between frugality and destitution – we need to move towards a society of ‘rich frugality’ – this is, of course, entirely consonant with our Quaker testimony to simplicity, as Alastair pointed out.
• We were reminded of Tim Jackson’s report Prosperity without Growth
• We need to de-link consumption from self-esteem; hair-shirt-ism doesn’t work, said Duncan!
  

Right at the end we were asked to consider what artists and other creative people might have to offer us in this predicament.

Alastair had wondered if we were called to be ‘hospice workers’ to humanity, to the planet – to facilitate a dying process; as she closed the proceedings, Jocelyn wondered if we were, rather, called to be midwives to the birth of something entirely new.

And of course, here in the West, we live with a religious tradition that tell us that death and birth are deeply connected. As T S Eliot put it, in The Journey of the Magi (1927):

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation

Welcome to the new Good Lives blog!

To see more of what the Good Lives Project at Woodbrooke is doing at the moment, follow the link below. What I want to write a bit more about here is some of what lies behind the whole idea of Good Lives.

I hope to engage all of us in contemplation and re-evaluation of the profound psychological, social and spiritual crisis that we are facing; and, as a consequence to move us to action. Good Lives is, at one level, about climate change and peak oil and sustainability. But more importantly it’s about how we are all going to have to change – change our inner dispositions; change the ways we relate to our neighbours and the community of people within walking and cycling distance of where we live; change the ways we do all the ordinary things of life. We are going to be taken out of our comfort zones – individually and collectively – and so we need to be prepared for that.

The project isn’t about the technical issues around reducing our carbon footprints – important as that is – because there is already plenty of advice out there if you want to know about insulation, food miles, transport, or whatever. Nor are we a campaigning organisation – there are plenty of those already (and, by the way, if you haven’t caught up with 10:10 yet, do go and look: http://www.1010uk.org/)

Among Quakers we talk about coming to Meeting for Worship “with hearts and minds prepared”; Good Lives is really about preparing hearts and minds for what lies ahead.

The twin threats of climate change and peak oil raise fundamental questions about our familiar way of life. While there are obvious and real reasons for anxiety in the wake of these problems, focusing on the ‘danger’ is more likely to be paralysing than inspiring – we could be living better, more satisfying, more enjoyable lives! Our oil-fuelled, debt-fuelled economy has not increased human happiness. Mass transport has drained the life out of our local communities. Mass-produced consumer goods, sold by vast corporations, have destroyed the livelihoods of many small-scale producers and retailers, and reduced variety and local distinctiveness. The mass production and distribution of cheap food, wholly dependent on oil, is now generating health problems. What kind of lives do we want for ourselves, our children, our grandchildren? What can we start doing now to help ensure that it happens? We can make changes in our own lives and in the lives of our local communities; we can, together, create the popular will for change that moves our politicians (locally, nationally and internationally) to start making the large-scale changes that only they can do.

In modern times there have been, arguably, three major crises that have undermined our view of human beings – of ourselves – as rational human beings. The first was the carnage of the World War One trenches; the second was the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps in spring 1945, revealing to the world the reality of what had gone on; the third was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, facing us with the knowledge of our capacity for terrible, potentially global, destruction.

In each of these cases, the ‘ordinary person’ could look at what ‘they’ were doing, or had done, could look to the politicians or the generals, and blame someone else. In his memoir The Last Fighting Tommy, Harry Patch describes how his team of gunners decided not to shoot to kill, as the German foot soldiers were as much victims of the situation as they were themselves; they would aim for the legs, and the injured German would be stretchered off the battlefield and might thus hope to survive the war. So, even in the midst of the fighting, the responsibility was clearly felt to lie elsewhere than with the men who loaded and fired the guns.

In the anti-nuclear campaigning that followed the end of World War Two, it was clearly someone else who was in a position to ‘press the button’ – we could campaign self-righteously against it.

The present situation, the fourth crisis, is different. There is no-one to point the finger at except ourselves. Those of us who live in the rich industrialised West are part of the problem, just by living, just by getting up in the morning and going about our normal business, we are part of the problem. Even those of us who are working very hard at reducing our carbon emissions are part of the problem. So we can campaign and protest (and we surely need to do those things) but we also have to change our lives in ways that most people have barely glimpsed yet.

We can’t rely on technology to enable us to continue with business as usual by other means. We are going to be tested: as individuals, as families, as communities, as nations, and as the whole tribe of humanity. We, Quakers in Britain, will be tested as a religious body. And the outcome is uncertain.

This is an exciting time to be alive, because – quite literally – everything we do makes a difference.

So please join in the conversation here, take part in the Good Lives programme, spread the conversations and the work around to others you meet, live with, work with, worship with. I look forward to reading your comments here.

Pam Lunn
19 September 2009