A climate for concern
Gregory Norminton writes about the background to his new book
In March a book that I have been working on for nearly six years was finally published. Beacons: Stories for our not so distant future is a collection of original short stories by some of Britain’s finest writers. They were tasked with finding new narratives to encompass the enormity of our climate crisis. Beacons is a campaigning book, as well as being a literary project, with author royalties going to the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition.
I began work on the project – a pipe dream, for much of the time – in 2007, just as my wife and I were becoming active in Central Edinburgh Meeting. My journey in search of stories corresponded with my journey into Quakerism, and it was through conversations with my wife, with Friends in Scotland and England, and inspiring talks from Pam Lunn and Alastair MacIntosh that I came to see how climate change challenges, and is met by, our central testimonies. Here, briefly, is my attempt at a summary.
Peace. Put simply, climate change leads to food and water scarcity, which lead to conflict both within and amongst nations. It is – in the words not of the usual eco-suspects but of the Pentagon – a ‘threat multiplier’ that endangers all of the gains made, in recent decades, in global security.
Truth. Our ecological crisis is a horrible reality and addressing it inconveniences powerful interests, which muddy public understanding with untruths, evasions and outright lies. We have a shared duty to defend the truth from those who profit from distorting it. Yet, the fact remains that although the truth may set us free, as Jesus says, it can also be painful. Our task, as Quakers, in keeping with our testimony, is to undergo that pain and to help our fellow sufferers do the same. We have to own our condition if we are ever, collectively, to have a chance of improving it.
Equality. The developed world has grown rich on the short term miracle of fossil fuels, yet it is in developing countries, amongst people without systems to insulate them, that the worst impacts of climate change are already being felt. The climate crisis is a crisis of equality as much as anything: how can we pretend to view the other as our equal when we are prepared, in defence of our convenience, to inflict unimaginable suffering on millions?
Simplicity is – challengingly, for all of us – the best solution. Yes, massive investment in clean energy is vital, but no number of technical fixes (even supposing they could get past the obstacles thrown up by the polluting industries) would suffice to save us from the consequences of our fossil fuel binge. I have spent years hoping otherwise but all the evidence suggests that without a countercultural movement to live simply, to buy and own less, to focus on the pleasure of human company, on the blessings that we cannot buy – without true simplicity – we will save ourselves neither from physical disaster nor from the spiritual emptiness that marketers require in us to sell their products.
These, in plain and, perhaps, simplistic terms, are the connections, as I see them, between the climate and our central Quaker testimonies. They are connections that Britain Yearly Meeting has recognised in Minute 36 and they explain, for me personally, why my faith and my activism are indissociable. It is as a writer and an activist – in my desire to reconcile these paths – that I spent six years trying to make Beacons a reality. The role that my discovery of Quakerism played is not articulated in the book itself, of which I am editor, not author. Yet, I wonder whether, in the absence of my wavering yet rooted faith, I would have been able to see the project through its many setbacks to the book, despairing and hopeful, vibrant and strange, which sits on my desk and now must make its way in the world.
Beacons: Stories for our not so distant future edited by Gregory Norminton. Oneworld. ISBN: 9781851689699. £8.99
