Christian Climate Action
In July, I attended the annual Summer School of the ecumenical group Christians Aware with the theme: ‘Faith in Life: Care for Creation by the World Faiths’. For five days at Parcevall Hall in England’s glorious Yorkshire Dales participants heard from people of various faiths talk about their commitment to caring for Creation. And we visited inspiring Church projects, such as an award winning eco-church where wall hangings showed their environmental work in the areas of Worship, Lifestyle, Buildings, Land and Global and Community Engagement.
Executive Secretary Barbara Butler of Christians Aware introduced the weekend: “Nothing is more important than the future of life on Earth and it is vital that people of faith work together to bring hope for its flourishing.” I underlined this with my own Columban presentation on the 2015 papal encyclical, Laudato Si’, which is much admired by ecumenical colleagues, particularly its call to “ecological conversion”.
So, if protecting God’s creation is that important what more can we do about it? And what role are Christians increasingly playing in challenging fossil fuel companies and environmentally destructive practices which are behind so many of the problems.
At the summer school, Hindu theologian Jayaraj Nambiar reported on India’s Bishnoi community in Rajasthan where lives have been sacrificed over the centuries to defend trees and wild animals in an ecologically sensitive area. Also, on India’s Chipko community of the 1970s where women hugged trees to prevent them being cut down by loggers.
And for Christians, putting oneself on the line to act on the climate crisis is increasingly an option being chosen by Christian environmental activists. Christian Climate Action was formed a decade ago to “take prayerful, non-violent direct action to push for justice in this climate emergency.” Recent actions have included lobbying the National Trust – which helps protect woodlands, wildlife and coasts - at more than 40 of its properties to stop banking with Barclays, the biggest funder of fossil fuel companies in Europe. Also, lobbying government offices in London with banners reading ‘Just Stop Fossil Fuels’ and ‘Sign the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty’.
At the summer school, such action was explained by theologian Jon Swales, author of Green Christian’s, ‘Lament and Hope: 40 Prayers for the Climate and Ecological Emergency’. “Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “The shadow cast by our reliance on fossil fuels grows longer with each passing year,” he added, and “if we are to live missionally in a warming world we should be tender and compassionate to those who suffer because of climate breakdown (to the refugees, those in economic hardship, the hungry, those overwhelmed with climate grief), but the Church should also be involved in justice-shaped work that seeks to avert the worst of what may be.”
He supported action that reveals the truth of the climate crisis and lamented as “utterly disproportional” heavy sentences handed to five Just Stop Oil activists in July when they were given four and five years in prison for disruptive, but peaceful, public protest. He and others asked: “Why are we punishing the people trying to prevent disaster while allowing the oil company giants causing it to reap super profits?”
Also critical of the heavy sentences was Rev’d Mark Coleman, another Anglican priest who spent several days with our group. He is one of the Christians involved in nonviolent direct action with Just Stop Oil and Christian Climate Action and has twice been jailed for it. In May 2023 he wrote from prison: “It’s faith that has brought me here for the offence of Public Nuisance. I sat in the road in the City of London in October 2021 along with many others, supporting ‘Insulate Britain’, and standing up against (by sitting down!) the scandal of cold, damp, uninsulated homes and thousands of premature deaths. Insulating social housing would be an easy win to cut the emissions that are killing us. At my sentencing, I told the judge that it was my duty and my joy to follow my Lord’s command and love my neighbour. I had a higher law.”
It's food for thought. I think of Irish Columban Fr Pat Cunningham in South Korea who has joined street protests and vigils on Jeju Island for over 15 years, supporting local people challenging the construction of the nuclear military base in an environmentally sensitive area. He endorses the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, a project of Pax Christi International (worldwide Catholic peace movement), and participates in that global movement “to promote the power of nonviolence in people’s struggle for justice and peace around the world.”
Ellen Teague, Columban Justice and Peace Media in Britain.
Related links
- Read more from the current Columban PEJ eBulletin.
