The Cop26 summit is behind us and most of us are a bit disappointed and underwhelmed. Now it is over, all we can do is turn back to our daily rounds with uneasy hearts. I have heard that no-one involved in previous climate summits expected any miracles but many of us on the outside couldn’t help innocently hoping that maybe – just maybe! – the nations of the world would yield to a beautiful co-operation such as has never been seen before. For the sake of our young ones who are inheriting the earth.
In his 2010 essay “Confessions of a recovering environmentalist”, Paul Kingsnorth expressed his conviction for over a decade that it is already too late. After years of committed environmental activism when he was younger in which he devoted himself to “ecocentrism” – the belief that “the non-human natural world has value irrespective of whether it’s useful for human beings or not” – he deplores the way the environmental project has been colonised by an obsession with energy.
In the public sphere at least, concern for the earth has been reduced to talking about sustainability, carbon, climate change and engineering challenges for energy-generating technologies which need to be invented in order to keep us in the style to which we have become accustomed. “It may pain a lot of modern greens to hear it, but energy technologies are not the most important issue in the world,” he insists. If our utilitarian attitudes towards the planet continue (and there is no hint that they are about to change), even the invention of a carbon-free industrial society will not save us from the path of destruction down which we are currently speeding.
The fatal flaw with our post-modern world is our culture of profound disconnection and opposition to the rest of the natural world. Until as human beings we can take our proper place in the scheme of things – as a part of nature rather than a species aside from or above nature – all our efforts are as blowing in the wind.
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Kingsnorth is English but he and his family live in the west of Ireland, where he has a smallholding, plants trees and offers masterclasses in the lost art of scything. His is a refreshing, realistic and well-informed voice.
You could have knocked me over with a feather, therefore, when I was came upon an article written earlier this year by Kingsnorth in which he shared that he had (greatly to his own surprise) become a Christian.
His testimony is fascinating and improbable and his spiritual journey from being a practitioner of Zen Buddhism and a Wiccan priest to being baptised in the river Shannon into the Romanian Orthodox Church is an exhilarating read. He has been well and truly surprised by joy, hunted down by the Hound of Heaven, captivated by his creator, and it is sweet to hear. Like C S Lewis, he writes, he could not ignore “the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet”.
So where does this leave us, as common-or-garden people of faith, on our decaying planet? Here is my humble suggestion: We live the liturgical year, as faithfully as we can. This sounds so trite, yet everything that is good is contained in this yearly rhythm of worship and reflection and loving service. As the issues, concerns and insights of our time interface with the practices and principles of our faith, we can (and do) find fruitful ways of moving forward together faithfully which can be a blessing to the whole earth.
In the liturgical seasons we find birth and death, joy and suffering, seed-time and harvest and fallow, lament and thanksgiving, the ritual bath of baptism and the shared table of the Eucharist. We find community, shalom and music and a hunger and thirst for righteousness. “What if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through?” Kingsworth asks. “As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer each day.”