A planet on the brink: The Archbishop of Canterbury warns that the price of our

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http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=630141

 

 

Rowan Williams: A planet on the brink

The Archbishop of Canterbury warns that the price of our continued

failure to protect the earth will be violence and social collapse

 

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.

 

 

18 April 2005 16:58