Justice

Social Justice and the Environment

By Ant / 3 June 2008

A number of years ago in the early 1970s, Bishop John Taylor wrote a prophetic little book entitled “Enough is Enough”. Recognizing our over-occupation with consumption and the utilitarian use we made of creation to sustain this endless drive, he called us to account and asked a number of important and still unanswered questions. It’s an important book, about a hundred pages long, and well worth a read because Taylor also unpacked succinctly through his writing the connection between social justice and the environment.

I’d put the connection something like this. Social Justice isn’t about a number of issues relating to social policy. It’s about social transformation that seeks to witness to God’s reign and sovereignty in and over all the world. That is the just reign of God.

As a church, we need to recognize if we become fixed upon issues then we lose sight of the bigger and more important thing – that we are witnessing to God’s good and gracious life-giving presence in the world. We turn these social policy issues into something like idols, serving their own ends.

When, through Christ, God restores creation making it right once again (as God had intended for it to be), we also are made ‘right’ with God. The church is first and foremost a movement of people who seek to follow Jesus in the kind of life he called us to live. That kind of life exemplifies a way of living ‘as if’ God existed, ‘as if’ God loved the world, ‘as if’ God’s reign is absolute, ‘as if’ we have been restored to God. We have faith that these things are so, and we testify to them in our words and actions – our lives in the world. The church is that community of faith. Together, we engage with the world and support one another so that our faith journey may deepen and become more and more able to appreciate the height and depth of God’s love for us and all of creation. In the church, justice, mercy, peace, compassion and love are watchwords of what it means to be a community.

This community, the church, is the primary example we have of the sociality (way of relating socially) as God’s people. It’s a ‘first taste’ or foretaste of the Kingdom of God.

We live in a place. It might be a city, a town, or in the country. We live in a particular country. How we live makes use of resources. Who produces those resources, and how, is something that concerns us because we are concerned to see God’s justice and righteousness upheld throughout all peoples in all places.

Through Christ, God restores all of creation to its intended, graceful authentic self. As Christians we are called to witness to the reality of God’s reign, faithfulness and restoration of creation. One of the ways we do this is through the way we interact with and utilize dominion over the natural world (our environment).

Dominion requires us to relate to our environment in ways that are in keeping with the witness of Christ because he models for us the ‘righteous’ or ‘just’ life. Our relationship with our environment should be just, therefore, if it’s in any way going to be authentic of faithful. If we want to follow Christ, we can’t ignore this.

We must be careful of reading ‘dominion’ to readily through eyes too coloured by the Enlightenment, and specifically the development of certain political, economic and expansionist ways of thinking which emerged at this time. Utility for our own ends is not the same as dominion. How we ‘make use’ of our environment, and what principles guide our ‘use making’ are vital.

Use making is a very topical issue with regards to carbon based fuels and climate change.

Climate change raises a number of concerns about our use of and relation to the environment. The thumbnails to the right help to unpack some of those issues.
According to IPPC 4th assessment:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level… Paleoclimate information supports the interpretation that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4 to 6 metres of sea level rise.
We organize society, and the distribution of and use of resources (natural and manufactured) in places through a system of governance (i.e. Government).

CO2 production is a big deal. One of the factors most significant in its production has been the exponential increase of carbon based fuels since the industrial revolution. In fact, cheap oil and related products have largely fueled economic development, particularly since the 1950s (the post-war economic boom). For every kilogram of CO2 put into the atmosphere, a tiny amount gets absorbed quickly into the ocean, 80% will remain for 500-1000 years, some of the remaining amount will be taken up by the ocean in the next 10,000 years, but 7% will still be hanging around for hundreds of thousands of years.

If we continue at the rate we are going, within a few centuries we will have succeeded in turning back the climate 70 million years. That would result a climate like the prehistoric world.

CO2 is pretty significant stuff. What we are doing now has ethical implications for the future. It will impact significantly upon the lives of other humans, and all of creation. It has real implications, therefore, for our salvation in Christ. It might sound alarmist, but when you pause to reflect upon the long term moral implications of our short-sighted self-indulgent actions, in a very real moral sense continuing to drive your car and not seek to take responsible action (and get governments to do so) is akin to a form of genocide. Economic growth is no excuse – it’s merely an ideological justification.
In this country, we have significant greenhouse gas emissions caused by farming and agriculture. This is a huge and important area of concern.

As CO2 production continues, significant flow on environmental impacts will begin to be felt. As Pierrehumbert notes:

• Melting glaciers will increase flood risk during the wet season and strongly reduce dry-season water supplies to one-sixth of the world’s population, predominantly in the Indian sub-continent, parts of China, and the Andes in South America.

• Declining crop yields, especially in Africa, are likely to leave hundreds of millions without the ability to produce or purchase sufficient food – particularly if the carbon fertilisation effect is weaker than previously thought, as some recent studies suggest. At mid to high latitudes, crop yields may increase for moderate temperature rises (2-3C), but then decline with greater amounts of warming.

• Ocean acidification, a direct result of rising carbon dioxide levels, will have major effects on marine ecosystems, with possible adverse consequences on fish stocks.

• Rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year with a warming of 3 or 4｡C. There will be serious risks and increasing pressures for coastal protection in South East Asia (Bangladesh and Vietnam), small islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and large coastal cities, such as Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Calcutta, Karachi, Buenos Aires, St Petersburg, New York, Miami and London.

• Climate change will increase worldwide deaths from malnutrition and heat stress. Vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever could become more widespread if effective control measures are not in place. In higher latitudes, cold-related deaths will decrease.

• By the middle of the century, 200 million more people may become permanently displaced due to rising sea levels, heavier floods, and more intense droughts, according to one estimate.

• Ecosystems will be particularly vulnerable to climate change, with one study estimating that around 15-40% of species face extinction with 2C of warming. Strong drying over the Amazon, as predicted by some climate models, would result in dieback of the forest with the highest biodiversity on the planet.

These issues, and those in the images to the left, are indicative of the way in which the way we relate to our environment, and the use we make of it, has significant social consequences. To act faithfully requires us to take seriously the way in which we are called to obedience to God through Christ. That, ultimately, is our place to stand.

Whether or not they know it or believe it, the authority of Governments comes from God. It is the church’s job to remind Governments of this simple fact and hold them to account. The church, as the ‘redeemed society’ is a sign to Government of how things really are in God, rather than how we act as if they are in our ignorance of God. Largely, these days, Governments seem to act to make laws which govern how societies with no understanding of this simple fact. They assume their story of how the world is is true in and of itself. That’s largely because the church has abandoned its duty, and remains far too silent. In our silence, or in our abuse, we cease to be the church of Christ and become instead what the bible describes as demonic.

Acting responsibly in relation to the environment isn’t something we do out of fear, however. It’s a free and obedient act of worship – a response in love to the saving, loving, gracious embrace of God. In Christ, we have that freedom.