Reader Writes - November 2019

Should we talk about Brexit? It’s mesmerising, and a storm that is shaking our democratic institutions. Or do we talk about carbon? Our comfortable and familiar habits are hastening climate breakdown. The first is urgent, and neighbours from Kington have been marching for a people’s vote to resolve it, but the other towers over us dwarfing all other man-induced threats; other neighbours have been demonstrating more dramatically with Extinction Rebellion. Both threats are existential and dire. Brexit will be painful but eventually become history. Climate breakdown, alas, is here for ever and won’t afford us the luxury of calling it history. So what should we do?

Kafka said ‘There is infinite hope, only not for us’. Having just read The Uninhabitable Earth, a journalist’s review of the present and anticipated effects of climate breakdown, it is impossible to be sanguine; we, the lucky, are leaving our world with a devastating atmospheric carbon load that will change and go on changing our planet. Today’s children who will have to manage their stressed world didn’t vote for Brexit and didn’t have the power to rein in and redirect our fossil fuel economies. So is there hope or are we doomed? It may be wise to back both options; take urgent action to decarbonise, no matter what it costs to our way of life, and at the same time take steps to strengthen community where we live together day by day to manage better the storm that is coming.

We know the hard personal and local work required for zero-carbon: save energy, think about what we buy, fly less or not at all, dig a garden, etc. So what about disaster-proofing larger society? The Brexit storm and climate crisis have often revealed common ground. “Tell the truth!” is a cry directed at both Government and newspapers; the rule of law, the supremacy of Parliament, and a free press are precious foundations of robust civil society where there is a chance of arriving at just solutions. Bringing it home to our own community there are many opportunities to strengthen the neighbourly bonds that hold us together: talking to each other, listening to the other, pausing before shouting on social media, shop locally, nurture friendships, look after neighbours, and listen for the prophetic voice, whether artist, philosopher or priest.

To be a Christian is to expect and trust the prophetic. The God of all the earth is sovereign over the universe, and our futures are in his hands. Our response must be gratitude for what we have and repentance for hoarding and exhausting the bounty of the earth entrusted to our generation. The prophets of the Old Testament were often speaking to a threatened and broken society with this same ambiguous mixture of disaster and hope. In their world Judah faced invasion, defeat and exile, disaster by any measure, but the prophets were compelled also to speak hope and restoration at the very same time. That is what it means to trust in a sovereign God. There may seem little hope but there is also infinite hope. The psalmist struggled with this in Psalm 37, despairing in human folly, at the same time trusting in God’s provision; “Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him;  ….turn from wrath, do not fret.” Somewhere, faintly, a bird sings.

Robert MacCurrach