Hope, action and transformation
Paul Parker describes a recent global dialogue
There’s a walk I go on from home which takes me past my old school. It looks smaller now, despite having new classrooms and a lick of paint, but children play outside it as they always did. The other week I met a man who’d been to visit his father’s old school. They found it, but it was not only in ruins, but under a metre of salt water. It was claimed by the rising Pacific Ocean; children will never play outside it again. While we in the UK enjoy a bit of sunshine and grumble about the heat, for many the reality of climate change bites hard.
The speaker, from the island nation of Tuvalu, was one of many at an early July conference at the Vatican to bring personal testimony of how our profligate western lifestyle is destroying the natural world on which all life depends. We were marking the third anniversary of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Sì, a radical statement on ‘Care for our Common Home’ encompassing our relationship with the environment and the need for economic and personal transformation; it connects poverty, inequality, sustainability and migration. Friends will find much in its 246 paragraphs to agree with, and resonances with the leadings of our own Yearly Meeting in 2011 and subsequently. I was there to represent Friends, but more importantly to be part of the global dialogue that Pope Francis hopes to foster ahead of a series of forthcoming conferences: the United Nations COP24 climate talks in Poland this December; the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco this September; the annual World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund meetings in Bali this October; among others.
The conference’s first day – attended by senior church figures, diplomats, and representatives of climate NGOs, youth and indigenous peoples – focused on identifying the problem. UN scientists and the people most impacted told us of the unfolding climate catastrophe and its causes. Melting ice, rising waters, vanishing forests, failing rains, all driven by human activity and an economic disregard for environmental consequences. One speaker memorably summed the problem up in ‘three A’s’ – avarice, arrogance and apathy. A fourth ‘A’ – aggression – was added; the environmental cost of wars, themselves driven by resource conflicts, cannot be ignored. As Laudato Sì states: ‘The pace of consumption, waste and environmental change has so stretched the planet’s capacity that our contemporary lifestyle, unsustainable as it is, can only precipitate catastrophes, such as those which even now periodically occur in different areas of the world.’
The second day centred on action – and hope. Addressing the conference, Pope Francis sought to embolden the climate justice movement, calling for engagement by citizens’ pressure groups worldwide. He set out a role for financial institutions: ‘A financial paradigm shift… for the sake of promoting integral human development.’
Representatives of pressure groups, governments and grassroots communities described successful initiatives worldwide. But there is a long way to go. Bill McKibben, of fossil-fuel divestment campaign 350.org, challenged the Vatican Bank to divest – something which Quakers in Britain did years ago – and the Polish president of COP24 spoke of challenges the UN process will encounter, whilst expressing the hope of a raised ambition among nations to tackle the issues.
The overarching message, though, was of transformation. Transformation of systems, economies and the relationship between humanity and the natural world. But crucially the need for personal transformation – what Pope Francis called ‘ecological conversion’ – a change in our hearts and minds. Change starts with us, and within us. Until we can honestly say we have done all we can, we cannot look the victims of climate change in the eye and say with integrity that we recognise them as equals.
Paul is recording clerk for Britain Yearly Meeting.
