Speech for Climate Walk, 5th December, Wellington
By | Dec 4, 2009
Tena tatou katoa, and greetings from the Anglican Church.
He Maori ahau no Aotearoa, I am Maori from this land of unending light. I stand before you as one voice and many faces:
- As bishop of the Anglican Church and Chair of its Social Justice Commission.
- As Maori – part of a people whose connection with the environment is literally our life.
- As sportsman, teacher, artist, anthropologist, and a desire to understand and transform people.
- As husband, father and a grandfather, filled with a passion for my family and their future.
- And so in the face of climate change, I stand before you with tears in my heart and hope in my voice, but I wonder if I am hoping for nothing.
In the Psalms we hear the cry of the Israelites: “by the rivers of Babylon I sat down and wept. How shall I sing the lord’s song in a strange land?”
And today, I weep for similar reasons – it is as though no one understands our cry. What do we really seek to achieve through this action? How can the voice of truth ever be heard, understood, accepted, and precipitate change of the magnitude we need right now?
What can we do in order for us to avoid being perpetrators of the biggest act of genocide and wanton natural destruction in human history? We tend to avoid the word genocide and instead prefer user friendly terms like natural disaster and human tragedy. But these are simply lies, we tell ourselves to let us sleep at night. We are all complicit in the destruction of lives all over the world on a grotesque scale – the lives of people alive now, and the lives of future generations. None of us seem to fully grasp the enormity of our actions and our inaction to change.
I am just a normal person. I don’t know the details of climate science, nor the behind the scenes talks in climate negotiations.
But you know, what I do know is people. It’s part of who I am. And people are formed by habits. In the church we do a great deal to encourage people to adopt habits that are life giving not life taking, but to be really honest with you, even in the church sometimes we find it hard to work out how best to do that these days.
Scientists give us information, but they can’t change what we do. Politicians have the ability to create laws and shape our nation, but all of them seem to lack the political will to act responsibly in the face of the biggest moral issue we have ever faced. And that’s what climate change is all about – it’s primarily a moral issue, not an economic issue, nor even primarily a scientific issue. Economics and science report the state of the world, but morality shapes that world because it informs and guides how we act.
To act in ways that deliberately cause the destruction of people and the planet is immoral. History, even just since the second world war, has shown that ignorance is no excuse. Either we act to stop it or we are complicit in it – I am complicit in it.
We are all very good at words. That’s especially true in the church. We get so used to talking about action that we begin to believe that our talk is in fact action itself. This of course is a nonsense. We have also come to believe that consensus means the lowest common denominator, rather than something more aspirational. That too is a nonsense.
The problem is, climate change isn’t your normal disaster. It doesn’t seem to happen in real time.
We will all remember recently the disasters in the Philippines due to flooding or those in Samoa because of Tsunami and earthquake.
The general response to such disasters is to send in a disaster response team – to rescue the living and wounded, recover the dead where possible, and to try and restore some kind of order in the face of the tragedy which affects us.
Climate change is a disaster that appears to be occurring in slow motion. It seems intangible; ungraspable, unseeable. Climate change is more like a runaway train. It may seem a bit on the slow side now, but once it’s got momentum it’s going to be harder and harder to put the breaks on. Distant deadlines make us feel we have all the time in the world. That’s deadly.
Copenhagen as it stands would mean, that agreement would be something close to a comic tragedy – and I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The real disaster may not be that we do nothing – the real disaster may be that we do a little and think it’s a lot.
I said at the beginning that while I weep, I have hope.
My hope is that all of us can find the moral courage to act.
We need leadership and engagement that is more intuitive, more imaginative, more willing to take risks.
We need, new personal, national, regional, global habits. And we need mechanisms for forming them. New questions require new answers.
But most of all we need to end the silence. But demonstrations like this are simply not enough.
Climate change requires a quantum shift in how we form societies and act as members of them.
We can raise awareness and ring bells, but it isn’t going to make any real difference. It’s just going to make us feel better. Like the offerings of our politicians it’s too little, too late. We are refusing to face the reality of our situation.
And the reality is, as history shows: what we need is a revolution. Peaceful, if possible, but a revolution nevertheless.
We cannot wait for inaction and indecision to determine our future – we, the people, need to act decisively for the sake of our mokopuna and for the planet.
Haeremai tonu ra te Wairua Tapu runga i te Upoko hau i te po marangai i te puehutanga mai o te aroha. Come Holy Spirit, as the windy cloud, the night storm, to energise us with your compassion. Kia ora tatou katoa.
The Right Reverend Muru Walters
Users
“Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets.” Num. 11:29
Join in and add to the JUSTwiki today. Stories, reflection, news, comment. Be heard. Be just.
Hikoi of Hope: Walking On – Introduction
Submit a comment