InterfaithNews.Net

Rowan Williams
Archbishop of
Canterbury
17 April 2005

Too often in recent decades, the two big "e" words - ecology and
economy - have been used as though they represented opposing concerns. Yes,
we should be glad to do more about the environment, if only this didn't
interfere with economic development and with the liberty of people and
nations to create wealth in whatever ways they can.

Or, we should be glad to address environmental issues if we could be sure
that we had first resolved the challenge of economic injustice within and
between societies. So from both left and right there has often been a
persistent sense that it isn't proper or possible to tackle both
together, let alone to give a different sort of priority to ecological
matters.

But this separation or opposition has come to look like a massive mistake.
It has been said that "the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the
environment". The earth itself is what ultimately controls economic
activity because it is the source of the materials upon which economic
activity works.

That is why economy and ecology cannot be separated. Ecological fallout
from economic development is in no way an "externality" as the
economic jargon has it; it is a positive depletion of real wealth, of human
and natural capital. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to
manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in
itself - to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of
the laws of nature.

It is time to look seriously at the full implications of this. We need to
start by recognising that social collapse is a real possibility. When we
speak about environmental crisis, we are not to think only of spiralling
poverty and mortality, but about brutal and uncontainable conflict. An
economics that ignores environmental degradation invites social degradation -
in plain terms, violence.

It is no news that access to water is likely to be a major cause of
serious conflict in the century just beginning. But this is only one aspect
of a steadily darkening situation. Needless to say, it will be the poorest
countries that suffer first and most dramatically, but the
"developed" world will not be able to escape: the failure to manage
the resources we have, has the same consequences wherever we are. In the
interim, we can imagine "fortress" strategies (with increasing
levels of social control demanded) struggling to keep the growing instability
and violence elsewhere at bay and so intensifying its energy.

And we are not talking about a remote future. There are arguments over the
exact rates of global warming, certainly, and we cannot easily predict the
full effects of some modifications in species balance. But we should not
imagine that uncertainty in this or that particular seriously modifies the
overall picture. On any account, we are failing.

It is relatively easy to sketch the gravity of our situation; not too
difficult either to say that governments should be doing more. But
governments depend on electorates; electors are persons like us who need
motivating. Unless there is real popular motivation, governments are much
less likely to act or act effectively. There are always quite a few excuses
around for not taking action, and, without a genuine popular mandate for
change, we cannot be surprised or outraged if courage fails and progress is
minimal. Our own responsibility is to help change that popular motivation and
so to give courage to political leaders. And this means challenging and
changing some of the governing assumptions about ourselves as human
beings.

One of the reasons sometimes given for not being too alarmed by
predictions of ecological disaster is that we are underrating the
possibilities that will be offered by new technologies. But to appeal to a
technical future is to say that our most fundamental right as humans is
unrestricted consumer choice. In order to defend that, we must mobilise all
our resources of skill and ingenuity, diverting resources from other areas so
that we can solve problems created by our own addictive behaviours. The
question is whether, even if this were clearly possible, it would be a sane
or desirable way of envisaging the human future.

All the great religious traditions, in their several ways, insist that
personal wealth is not to be seen in terms of reducing the world to what the
individual can control and manipulate for whatever exclusively human purposes
may be most pressing. Religious belief claims, in the first place, that I am
most fully myself only in relation with my creator; what I am in virtue of
this relationship cannot be diminished or modified by any earthly power. In
the environment there is a dimension that resists and escapes us: to reduce
the world to a storehouse of materials for limited human purposes is thus to
put in question any serious belief in an indestructible human value.

We have to return constantly to what sort of structures and sanctions
might assist in making effective a change in our motivations and myths. We
could imagine, for instance, a "charter" of rights in relation to
the environment - that we should be able to live in a world that still had
wilderness spaces, that still nurtured a balanced variety of species, that
allowed us access to unpoisoned natural foodstuffs. It may be that the time
is ripe for an attempt at a comprehensive statement of this, a new UN
commitment - a "Charter of Rights to Natural Capital" to which
governments could sign up and by which their own practice and that of the
nations in whose economies they invested could be measured.

A manageable first step relating particularly to carbon emissions,
supported by a wide coalition of concerned parties, is of course the
"contraction and convergence" proposals initially developed by the
Global Commons Institute in London. This involves granting to each nation a
notional "entitlement to pollute" up to an agreed level that is
credibly compatible with overall goals for managing and limiting atmospheric
pollution. Those nations which exceed this level would have to pay pro rata
charges on their excess emissions. The money thus raised would be put at the
service of low-emission nations - or could presumably be ploughed back into
poor but high-emission nations - who would be, so to speak, in credit as to
their entitlements, so as to assist them in ecologically sustainable
development.

Election campaigns seldom give much space to environmental matters;
governments need strengthening in their commitments and need electoral
incentives to be involved in the sort of internationally agreed aspirations
But it is because the ecological agenda is always going to be vulnerable to
the pressure of other more apparently "immediate" issues that it
cannot be left to electoral politics alone. We still need a steady background
of awareness and small-scale committed action, nourished by some kind of
coherent vision.

Ecologists have argued regularly that some religious attitudes are part of
the problem; once again we have to ask whether religion is part of the
solution. Religious faith should steer us away from any fantasies we may have
of not "interfering" with the environment (the first planting of
grain was an interference), but it tells us that our interaction with what
lies around can never be simply functional and problem-solving.

Religious commitment becomes in this context a crucial element in that
renewal of our motivation for living realistically in our material setting.
The loss of a sustainable environment protected from unlimited exploitation
is the loss of a sustainable humanity in every sense - not only the loss of a
spiritual depth but ultimately the loss of simple material stability as well.
It is up to us as consumers and voters to do better justice to the
"house" we have been invited to keep, the world where we are
guests.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 10:22 pm and is filed under Editorial and Op-Ed, Development and Sustainability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.