Letters - 19 August 2011
From the YMG epistle to population and sustainability
Yearly Meeting Gathering Epistle
I was shocked to read the words ‘We have not only inherited the earth from our ancestors: we have borrowed it from our children and from their children’ in the Epistle from Yearly Meeting Gathering.
We have not inherited the earth. It is entrusted to us to look after for the benefit of those who come after. I do not know enough about the law to know whether taking assets, that we are unable to pay back, out of our children’s and grandchildren’s trust fund to pay for central heating or cars is fraud or theft. However, I am absolutely certain that it is not borrowing.
If we are not able to face the truth amongst ourselves and are reduced to lying to cover our sins, what hope have we of speaking truth to power or setting an example to others in this matter?
Ann White
Standing for election?
I am hoping, after the party conference season, to arrange a meeting for ‘Quakers in politics’ as a way of creating a space for sharing dilemmas and offering mutual support.
If you have been elected, or have stood for elected office, whether locally, regionally or nationally, know of others who have – or are a civil servant – could you let me have a contact address email, and telephone number so that you can be included in an invitation?
Michael Bartlet
Parliamentary liaison secretary, Quakers in Britain
Michaelb@quaker.org.uk
Large Meeting House
I must challenge some of the thinking in the letter by Anthony Woolhouse (5 August).
Of course, £4.25 million is an enormous amount of money. There will always be other ways such money could be spent. However, the modernisation of Friends House to make it a building that demonstrates our commitment to sustainability, instead of a place where we swelter in the heat generated by the outdated and malfunctioning heating system that makes us seem ludicrous, surely must be important.
The income generated from the letting of this rare large space in its central London site should sustain our national and international work for many years to come and surely must have some priority. I suppose we could leave our buildings to deteriorate into disrepair and dereliction. That would certainly give a message about us to people considering joining us in the future. Is it suggested that we should do without architects altogether? Is there any reason to suppose that a creative design with the support of pro bono advice from major international artist James Turrell will be any more expensive than a less inspiring design from other architects? As a practicing Quaker artist, I have often been dismayed by the fact that Quakers seem to feel that professional artists and designers are fair targets for attack (witness letters attacking our current Quaker logo a few short years ago, which is actually a real echo of our testimony to simplicity). Would we consider this lack of respect to be appropriate to mete out to other professionals such as doctors and lawyers?
Jill Green
I agree with Anthony Woolhouse and his thoughts about alterations to the Large Meeting House. A lot of work has been done at Friends House in recent years; to do more will be very disturbing to the staff and an unnecessary expense. There may well be a local Meeting house in need of upkeep and perhaps facing closure.
Ruth M Stone
Peace Testimony
On Friday 22 July, after our midday worship, we tried to update our peace testimony.
We were not in unity. We felt unable to envision a world without war at this time. The Peace Testimony seemed a thing of the past. We recognised that people are capable of huge good and huge evil. Maybe God in giving us freedom made a mistake!
Our youngest attender had put her thoughts on Quaker peace into fifty words and we united with this. It begins: ‘To actively wage peace. To hold compassion for those whose eyes are closed, whose backs are turned or whose behaviour I reject.’ That afternoon the worst atrocity in Norway since the second world war happened when a bomb went off in Oslo and a gunman went in the Labour youth meeting on a nearby island and shot dead eighty young people.
Jill Allum
Quaker Week outreach posters
My thanks to Kate Bone (letters 12 August) who speaks my mind exactly. As she did, I have asked a number of people for their reactions to the outreach posters and their responses have been similar to those she describes. One Friend told me that she felt she had to apologise for the cover of Quaker News when she was distributing them.
I have written to the Outreach Planning Team at Friends House to make the following points:
• that the posters are so dark that all that will be visible across a crowded room or market place will be grey/black rectangles;
• that the text will be unclear to anyone with a visual impairment;
• that the message of ‘light coming out of dark’ is not obvious unless one has the explanatory text to accompany it; and
• that the expressions and body language of the four people portrayed suggest negativity at best and aggression/despair at worst. (The young woman with arms akimbo seems to be saying: Just you make peace now or I’ll hit you!)
I wrote to the planning team and received a full explanation of the discussion and decisions behind the chosen designs. One reason given is that they do not want ‘soft’ visual cues of doves, clear water, feathers, clasped hands and so on or to portray us as middle-class white do-gooders. I agree but I suggest that their solution is at the very least unfortunate.
It is probably too late for the posters to be withdrawn – but we do not have to use them. I, for one, would not wish to be associated with any Quaker Week stalls where they are displayed.
Sally Mason
Population and sustainability
I agree with Tom Greeves and David Pawlyn that overpopulation is one of the core sustainability issues. My wife and myself pledged ourselves to a ‘zero population growth’ family when we married forty-six years ago and we have been consistent in our commitment to that issue.
On the basis of my half-century of development work in Africa, however, I would like to point out reasons why this issue has to be pursued with sensitivity and that more subtle work on the issue continues. First, in the context of very high deaths from AIDS in Africa, the promotion of population control is interpreted as genocidal. In any case, the sensible use of condoms as an AIDS preventative leads to planned family sizes.
Second, in India and China, where the drop in family sizes has been dramatic, the policies that produced the changes have produced serious human rights abuses as well (forced and sex-selected abortions). Secondary education for women reduces these abuses as well as also lowering family sizes.
Third, in most poor countries children are the ‘old age pension’ of their parents and when mortality rates are high a larger family is a wise security strategy, so that improved health care most often is an important, indirect family planning measure. Thus, fourth, we must be sensitive about preaching to others. We elderly in the rich democracies have not yet accepted that the ageing population produced by smaller families means that we ourselves either will have to work longer or accept reduced retirement benefits. In other words, the considerable progress made over family planning in the last half century has put us in a place where the next steps require development agencies (and we who support them) to show still greater creativity, skill, and sensitivity.
David Leonard
The African food crisis now has the status of a famine. We have all seen the pictures of people with emaciated children, and have read the harrowing reports of people walking for hundreds of miles to refuge, many dying before they can reach sanctuary. Of course we must do everything we can to relieve this suffering.
One aspect of this crisis is being neglected, however. The population of Somalia has risen from 4.5 million in 1980 to nine million in 2009, and other countries have experienced similar growth. If there had been an adequate programme of family planning in place in that period, there would now be that much less of a problem. One hopes that the relief now being given to Somalia will be enough to bring this suffering to an end: but other famines will occur and, if the population continues to rise as it has, forthcoming famines will be more frequent and increasingly more difficult to counter. Therefore, aid should, must, be accompanied by the offer of family planning.
I am not suggesting coercion, but a properly administered programme of education in health and in family planning. Without it, the cycle will not be broken, and the children who survive this famine will live to see their own children face the same extremity. As David Attenborough said in an address to the RSA: ‘Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social, becomes more difficult and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.’
Roger Plenty
Comments
In reply to Roger Plenty’s letter and his point about Somalia - for most of the time since 1980, Somalia has completely lacked a stable government, let alone one that might begin to consider a population policy. Somalia suffers from continuing civil war. David Harries.
By DavidH on 18th August 2011 - 11:42
Please login to add a comment
