Small World

Small World and the Jubilee Debt Campaign by Rosie Venner

The chain is an emotive symbol. It brings to mind images of oppression but when we link ourselves together it can also be a strong statement of solidarity and interconnectedness.

On Sunday 18th May 2008 I joined hundreds of other people at the Jubilee Debt Campaign’s event to celebrate 10 years since the Birmingham human chain that brought the world’s attention to the need for debt cancellation for the world's poorest countries. The event was called ‘Journey to Justice’ and highlighted the impact of debt cancellation so far and what still needs to be done.

It reinforced for me the urgency of the campaign - because over $400 billion of debt still needs to be tackled. After 10 years of demonstrating, petition-signing, letter writing and shouting from the rooftops, it would be easy for frustration or apathy to overtake us. But when six million children die each year from lack of adequate nutrition and when countries like Kenya have to spend millions of dollars more on debt repayment than on health and education, there must be no slowing down.

Yes, we can pause briefly and celebrate the 20% of unjust and unpayable debt that has been cancelled so far, but then we must carry on campaigning with even more spirit and determination than before. That's where young people and students come in - let's commit ourselves to campaigns like Jubilee Debt, to ensure a fairer world in the near rather than the distant future. Be part of a chain of solidarity and interconnectedness, so that we can break the chains of injustice.

To find out more and to take action go to www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk

Rosie is SCM’s Links Worker

Nonviolence and Interdependence by Ethan Nichtern

The connection between nonviolence and interdependence is crucial. When the nature of anger is misunderstood, no mental force can take us away from the truth of interdependence more swiftly. Violence makes us fall into grotesque and primal misconceptions of separation. The growl of aggression sucks us from the realm of human decency down into a hellish zone of Us-versus-Them, and me-against-the-world mentalities. The bitter mind-frame of violence is ancient, engrained in our evolution since the first two amoebae battled over a tiny glob of protein.

For thousands of years our human cultures have been utterly dysfunctional about the relationship between aggression and peace. The twentieth century was almost a hundred straight years of wars among empires of hungry ghosts, viciously addicted to the fleeting economic fix of creating new enemies. Each war carried a surprisingly similar rhetoric of xenophobia. And each time, violence was presented as the necessary precursor for a true and lasting peace. We were always fighting in the present so, somehow, we wouldn’t have to fight in the future; fighting them over there so we wouldn’t have to fight them over here, and on and on. Each time the rhetorical future became the actual present and then the textbook past, the cycle proved to be both endless and fruitless. The twenty-first century is picking up right where the twentieth left off, with better weapons. There’s only one little problem with the logic of violence: war doesn’t end war – any more than a heroin fix ends a heroin addiction.

An extract from One City: A Declaration of Interdependence by Ethan Nichtern, Wisdom Publications (2007). Ethan is the founder of The Interdependence Project (http://www.theidproject.com), a grassroots movement bringing the principles of meditation and interconnectedness to the arts and activism.

Skating on Thin Ice by Rev. Jamie D. Schmeling

Skating on thin ice is a tenuous endeavour—not to mention a dangerous one, yet the evidence of global climate change is all around us and we haven’t quite ‘cottoned on’ to the reality of our choices, consumption, and “free”-market places within the closed system that is the earth.

These issues would have been well understood by the under-emphasized physicist, Lord Kelvin. Lord Kelvin was influential in testing the laws of thermodynamics, which when put simply state: a)”you cannot get something for nothing” and b)”you cannot even break even”. These laws govern our universe—and have yet to be refuted, thwarted or re-envisaged. The laws are constants.

So, does the human part of the natural world have an innate propensity for risky business—or was that just Tom Cruise?

In Glasgow, I’m a member of a planning group that organises an event called: HOLY CITY (http://www.holycity-glasgow.co.uk). We create a space to explore contemporary and global issues through workshops and worship, from a faith perspective. This year’s programme, Dancing on the Edge, included a specific opportunity for folk to consider the concerns of global climate change: “Skating on Thin Ice”.

The Biblical exploration workshop at that event centred around these questions: How do we as people of faith respond to the evidence of Global Climate Change? Do we need to ‘re-think’ our understanding of the Divine? For example, can we make a case for: a green-God?

Regardless of our response, the way we think about God, the Sacred, determines how we live.

Time to ante-up! As icebergs, twice the UK’s size, come adrift from the polar ice caps, can we remain innocent in our ignorance—or is it time to face up to the implications of this inconvenient truth?

The Rev. Jamie Schmeling is the Project worker for the Wild Goose Resource Group, a semi-autonomous project with the Iona Community. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

A case for Christian Vegetarianism by Fr. John Ryder

It is a sobering fact that the meat industry has a severe and negative impact on the environment, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity and human health. ‘Livestock’s long shadow’, a major report from the UN, published November 2006, revealed that the meat and dairy industry are responsible for the third highest source of global greenhouse emissions, more polluting than the entire global transport system and nine times higher than global airline emissions. The report continues that the meat and dairy industry are responsible for land clearances which account for 70% of the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest (home to 50% of the planet’s animal and plant species).

These unpalatable facts bring home to us the inter-connectedness of the created order. We have to face the fact that, ‘a high-meat diet translates into a tremendous amount of carbon emissions. It takes far more fossil fuel energy to produce and transport meat than to deliver equivalent amounts of protein from plant sources.’ (Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006, p317).

According to the Movement for Compassionate Living’s agricultural leaflet, it takes 8 times the land and 10 times the fossil fuel to produce the Western omnivorous diet compared to vegan. George Monbiot claims, ‘Within as little as ten years, we will be faced with a simple choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.’ (George Monbiot, ‘Why vegans were right all along,’ The Guardian, 24th December 2006).

So we stand on the brink of pursuing a path towards destruction unless we radically change our lifestyle. Christians bear a particular responsibility to safeguard God’s creation for future generations.

Father John Ryder is the Spokesperson from the Christian Vegetarian Association for the UK.

The Global Ethic by Prof. John Hick

The idea of a global ethic is variously understood, but for me it means basic moral principles that are common to all the main religions and cultures of the world. Is there such a global ethic?

I only have space here to refer to one aspect. All the long-lived cultures have so far been religiously based. Within the world religions there is the universality of the Golden Rule, in either its positive or its negative form.

We find this in the Hindu Mahabharata, ‘One should never do that to another which one would regard as injurious if done to one’s self’; in the Jain Kritanga Sutra, where we are told that one should go about ‘treating all creatures as one would oneself be treated’; in the Buddhist Sutta Nipata, ‘As a mother cares for her son, all her days, so towards all living things a man’s mind should be all-embracing’; a Zoroastrian scripture declares, ‘That nature only is good when it shall not do to another whatever is not good for its own self’; Confucius taught, ‘Do not do to others what you would not like yourself’; Jesus taught ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye likewise to them’; the Jewish Talmud says, ‘What is hateful to yourself do not do to your fellow man'; and Muhammad taught, ‘No man is a true believer unless he desires for his brother that which he desired for himself’.

Professor John Hick is a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham, and a Vice-President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion and of the World Congress of Faiths.

For more on the Global Ethic see http://www.johnhick.org.uk/article17.html

Like the morning stars by Dr Isabel Carter

Climate change is not an environmental issue – though thankfully environmentalists have been raising awareness of the issues for decades. By giving climate change a green or an environmental label, it makes it easier for us to shake off responsibility. Climate change needs to be mainstreamed. It is an issue of human rights and of justice; it is a political issue; an issue of economics. It is an ethical issue that we as Christians need to take responsibility for.

It will also become increasingly an issue of political stability; political leaders are ultimately responsible for dealing with the impact of climate change - whether from the floods we’ve experienced in the UK, or the heatwave, drought and loss of crops experienced here in S Europe this summer. Who got the blame for Hurricane Katrina?

This is ultimately an issue of human survival for life as we know it. Whatever happens with climate change, human life will continue but it may not be in ways or in numbers that we would like to envisage. Societies can and do crumble. We have a tendency to believe our civilisations are stable and secure – but we have numerous examples of civilisations that crumbled, often very fast - the Mayan civilisation or Easter Island. Our societies are often more fragile than we would like to believe. Blockading fuel stations in the UK in 2000 brought the UK to the point of collapse within 5 days.

Who will take the leadership? What will future generations say of us? Did they not know? Could they not understand, Why did they do so little, so late?

Let us take the initiative and say ENOUGH!

We have only one, infinitely beautiful, varied and fertile earth. So precious in God’s eyes.

Like the morning stars that sang for joy at creation, let us too cry out, burning brightly.

We can stand together in unity in the light and love of Christ to say – ENOUGH!

Extracts from a speech given by Dr Isabel Carter at the Third European Ecumenical Assembly in Sibiu in September 2007. With thanks to the European Christian Environmental Network www.ecen.org

Connections with the Natural World by Sarah Pillar

Kevin lived as a hermit in the south of Ireland in the early 7th century. In his vocation to seek God, Kevin chose to live fully dependent upon and engaged with his environment. Nature was to be embraced as the place to experience God. Once, whilst praying in stillness and silence, a blackbird settled upon the palm of his hand. She began to build her nest. Kevin faced a choice: to withdraw his offer of openness before this availability became too costly or to value the fragility of this encounter above his own comfort, to hold his exact posture … for a long time! For Kevin, as this beautiful story recounts, the initial, humbling thrill gave way to endurance, pain and sustained commitment. Through what had now become an extended prayer-time, Kevin’s aching open hand mirrored his open heart to God. He held the nest until the chicks learnt to fly.

Kevin’s costly hospitality speaks to us in a way facts and figures cannot. As God reveals to us the treasures of His creation should we simply catalogue them that we might ‘own’ them, to marvel and move on? Rather, here is a challenge to hold an open hand to the increasingly fragile world of which we are a part. We learn to value God’s creation, glimpsing His value of us.

In the words of a traditional Irish blessing, we draw together both the challenge of Kevin’s costly nurturing care and God’s tender care for us:

May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

Sarah is from the Northumbria Community

The freedom of radical obedience by Matt Gardner

Probably one of the most damning indictments of our modern cullture’s obsession with freedom is that it’s a name we even give to our wars. Like other concepts which become removed from their context and valued in an absolute manner, freedom can become a very dangerous tool – being free from all forms of control and domination (and increasingly, free from ‘offence’) soon means being free to control, dominate or offend others. Absolute freedom has no end beyond itself, but as John Milton recognised in the 17th century (just as the great era of privatisation and individualism was dawning), freedom that is not directed towards virtue is not freedom but merely licence, ‘which never hath more scope or more indulgence than under tyrants’.

This utilitarian definition of freedom, where everybody is free to do whatever they like ‘so long as it doesn’t interfere with anyone else’, poses huge problems for all modern human politics. But perhaps the place in which it comes unstuck most spectacularly is the way we treat our natural resources and damage our environment. For if there is one thing the increasing environmental awareness of the last 20-30 years has shown us, it is that we are incapable of ‘not interfering’ with our environment, and if there is one thing that the processes of globalisation over the same period have shown us, it is that ‘our environment’ includes the whole planet. All animal and plant life, the atmosphere, soil, sea, rocks and desert – all are created as one interconnected community.

In this context then, our neat Enlightenment concept of freedom as essentially amoral, individual and privatised breaks down. Other people do not merely exist as restrictions to my freedom, and neither does the rest of the natural world. We need to learn that true freedom comes not from asserting ourselves over each other and over nature, occasionally banding together to lobby on shared agendas, but from learning to co-operate and co-exist in community. This means discourse based on ‘needs’ rather than ‘rights’ and the acknowledgement that human will is not the most powerful force in the universe.

Operation Enduring Freedom, the name given by the US military to their response to the 11/09/01 attacks, was originally called Operation Infinite Justice. The name was changed to avoid offence to Muslims (for whom only God, the Al-‘Adl, is Utterly Just) but the blasphemy and presumption remains. For, paradoxically, true freedom is not to be found in the separation of violence and individualism, but in community, islam (submission) and radical obedience to laws not of our own making.

Matt is SCM's Administrator