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Put politics aside, the real challenge facing us is climate change
Church in the Community - Media Release in the Herald: 3rd June 2024
Source: TCN / Gary Koekemoer
Date Added: 2024-06-03
Category: General News, TCN News, Issues - General, Issues - Environment,
Date Added: 2024-06-03
Category: General News, TCN News, Issues - General, Issues - Environment,
Our world is heating up. The narrow band of life on our planet, the biosphere, some 20 kilometres in extent from top to bottom, is losing its resilience.
We humans are the cause.
We’re adding carbon dioxide (and methane) to the atmosphere through our insatiable need to burn fossil fuels.
We’re felling forests.
We’re polluting the planet (air, rivers, and the seas).
Our agricultural machines are taking nutrients from the soil without replenishing them to original levels while simultaneously destroying natural resources that used to be in abundance.
By illustration, there are more cows (by biomass) on the Earth today than there are wild creatures in total.
Changing the conditions of the planet, and reducing the biosphere’s resilience, means that we can expect things to get hotter, windier, with longer periods of little or no water interspersed with intense “bombs” of too much water.
We have experienced those changes in our metro in the last year.
We now know what a “cut-off low” means and the floods or tidal surges that come with it.
We know what seven years of drought looks like.
Wildfires now burn every year, and with our unseasonal easterly bringing new creatures to our shores, we have an inkling of what this change could look like.
Now imagine we turn up the volume.
What will 2055 look like? What world will our children inherit?
The relatively stable weather patterns we’ve adapted our human systems to over the last centuries are changing fast.
Which means our original design assumptions no longer hold.
Our architects and engineers didn’t design for 100km/h wind gusts, or 10 metre high waves, or 100mm plus in 24 hours every year.
Add to the mix the collapse of local government infrastructure capability and capacity, and that means that “natural disasters” are going to become a common occurrence.
What do we do? What can the church do?
In simple practical terms: inform, prepare, build, respond, and most importantly, orientate.
Every church is a community, and community is a powerful tool in the face of such change.
Use those within your community that are expert in areas such as climate and weather, in pollution, in botany and the like to share with your congregants the detail of what is happening.
Do you have a disaster response team and a plan for using the church premises as a temporary shelter?
What will people eat, what will they wear, where will they sleep, how will their children get to school?
Is your church built on a flood plain? Is its roof secure from high winds? Are you capturing the rainwater and recycling plastics and paper?
Doing something now will help lessen the impact of what we thought would be once-in-a-lifetime events, that are now likely to arrive at our doors more frequently.
And that brings us to the point of orientation.
How we think about our place on the planet, how we see ourselves in relation to nature?
I’m no theological expert, so all the necessary caveats apply, but it seems two dominant approaches have emerged from within the ranks of Christian thinking: dominion, and stewardship.
God gave us the planet to use for our needs, or God placed us in stewardship over the biosphere.
Those different approaches inform our relationship (and actions) with nature.
If we believe oil and gas is there to use for our human needs, then we will burn them as we need them, and we’ve needed them a lot more in the last 50 years than ever before.
If we believe wild animals are there to be used for their meat (or horns), then we start “farming” them so we can use them more efficiently as a meat supply.
If, however, we believe that we live in stewardship with nature, then we only use what the ecosystem can sustain.
We look at the natural systems and understand their peaks and troughs and consider the long-term implications of our actions on all the biosphere, not just the bits immediately in front of us.
And we adapt our needs to suit nature, we do not adapt nature to suit our needs.
There are many practical things church communities can do: regular clean-ups, running recycling projects, starting food gardens, teaching congregants about how ecosystems work.
But in my opinion, we’re in this place of planetary crisis because of how we think about our place in the world.
We think we own it, that it’s here to serve us.
And we’ve often turned to the Bible to prove it.
But the biosphere is dying, and our human actions are killing it off.
And therein perhaps the Church’s greatest possible contribution to addressing the crisis we face.
Ask the faithful, if dominion was God’s intention, why then is it turning out this way?
Is there not a different way, the way of a steward, someone who lives within the bounds of the planet?
Will that not give our children a different and more blessed place to live?
Gary Koekemoer
is a climate change consultant.
We humans are the cause.
We’re adding carbon dioxide (and methane) to the atmosphere through our insatiable need to burn fossil fuels.
We’re felling forests.
We’re polluting the planet (air, rivers, and the seas).
Our agricultural machines are taking nutrients from the soil without replenishing them to original levels while simultaneously destroying natural resources that used to be in abundance.
By illustration, there are more cows (by biomass) on the Earth today than there are wild creatures in total.
Changing the conditions of the planet, and reducing the biosphere’s resilience, means that we can expect things to get hotter, windier, with longer periods of little or no water interspersed with intense “bombs” of too much water.
We have experienced those changes in our metro in the last year.
We now know what a “cut-off low” means and the floods or tidal surges that come with it.
We know what seven years of drought looks like.
Wildfires now burn every year, and with our unseasonal easterly bringing new creatures to our shores, we have an inkling of what this change could look like.
Now imagine we turn up the volume.
What will 2055 look like? What world will our children inherit?
The relatively stable weather patterns we’ve adapted our human systems to over the last centuries are changing fast.
Which means our original design assumptions no longer hold.
Our architects and engineers didn’t design for 100km/h wind gusts, or 10 metre high waves, or 100mm plus in 24 hours every year.
Add to the mix the collapse of local government infrastructure capability and capacity, and that means that “natural disasters” are going to become a common occurrence.
What do we do? What can the church do?
In simple practical terms: inform, prepare, build, respond, and most importantly, orientate.
Every church is a community, and community is a powerful tool in the face of such change.
Use those within your community that are expert in areas such as climate and weather, in pollution, in botany and the like to share with your congregants the detail of what is happening.
Do you have a disaster response team and a plan for using the church premises as a temporary shelter?
What will people eat, what will they wear, where will they sleep, how will their children get to school?
Is your church built on a flood plain? Is its roof secure from high winds? Are you capturing the rainwater and recycling plastics and paper?
Doing something now will help lessen the impact of what we thought would be once-in-a-lifetime events, that are now likely to arrive at our doors more frequently.
And that brings us to the point of orientation.
How we think about our place on the planet, how we see ourselves in relation to nature?
I’m no theological expert, so all the necessary caveats apply, but it seems two dominant approaches have emerged from within the ranks of Christian thinking: dominion, and stewardship.
God gave us the planet to use for our needs, or God placed us in stewardship over the biosphere.
Those different approaches inform our relationship (and actions) with nature.
If we believe oil and gas is there to use for our human needs, then we will burn them as we need them, and we’ve needed them a lot more in the last 50 years than ever before.
If we believe wild animals are there to be used for their meat (or horns), then we start “farming” them so we can use them more efficiently as a meat supply.
If, however, we believe that we live in stewardship with nature, then we only use what the ecosystem can sustain.
We look at the natural systems and understand their peaks and troughs and consider the long-term implications of our actions on all the biosphere, not just the bits immediately in front of us.
And we adapt our needs to suit nature, we do not adapt nature to suit our needs.
There are many practical things church communities can do: regular clean-ups, running recycling projects, starting food gardens, teaching congregants about how ecosystems work.
But in my opinion, we’re in this place of planetary crisis because of how we think about our place in the world.
We think we own it, that it’s here to serve us.
And we’ve often turned to the Bible to prove it.
But the biosphere is dying, and our human actions are killing it off.
And therein perhaps the Church’s greatest possible contribution to addressing the crisis we face.
Ask the faithful, if dominion was God’s intention, why then is it turning out this way?
Is there not a different way, the way of a steward, someone who lives within the bounds of the planet?
Will that not give our children a different and more blessed place to live?
Gary Koekemoer
is a climate change consultant.
Source: TCN / Gary Koekemoer
Date Added: 2024-06-03
Category: General News, TCN News, Issues - General, Issues - Environment,
Back to News IndexDate Added: 2024-06-03
Category: General News, TCN News, Issues - General, Issues - Environment,
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