For seven years, the cry of New Labour has been, “Education, education, education”. Central to education are the 3Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic. Today, with the majority of scientists agreeing that global warming is a reality, we need an education of a new kind. That has its own 3Rs: reduce, re-use and recycle.
The question is, why should these issues matter to Christians? And what difference can we make if we decide to adopt the global warming 3Rs?
During World War II, reducing consumption, re-using everything and recycling whatever was left, was the norm in Britain. That’s not true today. We throw away 106 million tones of waste each year, and that is growing by 3 per cent annually.
As a consequence, two things are happening. First, landfill sites are getting full. The Institution of Civil Engineers said last year that Britain needed 2,300 new incinerators, composting and recycling plants to cope with demand.
Second, landfill produces methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which is believed to contribute to climate change. So, the European Union has demanded that the amount of biodegradable municipal waste dumped in landfill sites must be cut to 75 per cent of 1995 levels by 2010, to 50 per cent by 2015 and to around a third by 2020. Just meeting the first target means an 8 million tonne reduction.
- Buy goods with no packaging, such as bread, fruit and vegetables, from market stalls
- Turn off unwanted lights, computers, televisions and DVD players when not in use
- Limit the amount of water you use by taking showers instead of baths; using a cup of water to clean your teeth and putting a water-reduction bag in the cistern of your lavatory
- Make sure your home / church / office is well-insulated. Does it have cavity wall insulation, or roof insulation? Are the pipes lagged? Use draft excluders and extra curtains to keep the heat in and the cold out
- Only use dishwashers and washing machines on a full-load
- Instead of buying new tools, share with a neighbour
Expensive rubbish
There are two costs in dumping our rubbish. The first is purely financial: over and above the cost of buying new stuff to replace the old, throwing our rubbish away costs £18 per tonne. Currently, we’re sending 70 million tonnes to landfill a year. If we stopped doing that (which we won’t) that would be a saving of £12.6 billion: an awful lot of money.
The second cost is environmental. According to the Prime Minister’s own think-tank, the Performance and Innovation Unit, waste is arguably the biggest problem facing the UK after climate change – and the two are linked because of methane gas. A reduction in greenhouse gases has to be made, scientists say, in order to stabilise climate change and reduce the risk of temperatures rising further.
Put simply: the more we throw away, the more long-term damage we are doing to our planet. As its stewards, we should be finding another way, indeed leading the way. Yet a survey of 1,000 churches in all the main denominations has showed that local churches are failing to carry out changes that would make them more environmentally-friendly. The survey was carried out by Just2Fish.org.uk last year and found that none of the churches it questioned were using renewable energy. Less than 5 per cent had made any changes to either transport or their buildings to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. And less than 4 per cent said that they planned to make any changes in the future.
Sir Ghillean Prance, the former director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, and a practicing Christian, commented in The Church Times, “If Christians believe that the earth belongs to the Lord, then we should be at the forefront of the battle to release creation from the bondage that it is under at present.
"As a Christian, I am not just talking about the destruction of the environment, but rather of God’s creation. We can all do our part by insisting on less wrapping of goods, taking re-usable bags to the shops, recycling and composting. Each small action makes a difference.
“But despite the many positive things that are being done around the world, we still seem to be losing the environmental battle. Species are becoming extinct at an alarming rate; over-fishing is closing fisheries; climate change is accelerating and we are failing to address the needs of the poor.
“My hope is that we can honour God both through our personal care for creation, and through our corporate care through the churches to which we belong.”
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