Climate Crisis an Opportunity to Change Says Archbishop

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has always spoken strongly over climate change. Early this year he claimed that “God would not stop climate change”, calling for a “radical change of heart” to current inadequate actions. This week he has has spoken out again climate change, and actually made a lot of sense.

He wants people to use the climate change crisis as an opportunity to “Become Human Again”, calling for an end to “addictive and self-destructive behaviour that has damaged their souls”. He claims that many people have allowed themselves to become “addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost”. Well said, I couldn’t agree more.

Having met Dr Williams, head of the Church of England, in person I was surprised to find that he was actually quite grounded and intelligent. So it is good to see someone with a large influence take climate change and the state of society seriously. He claims the consequences of our now status-quo lifestyles of greed and ignorance for self destructive behaviour is causing the human soul  to become “one of the foremost casualties of environmental degradation”.

Here is more of his lecture:

Many of the things which have moved us towards ecological disaster have been distortions of who and what we are and their overall effect has been to isolate us from the reality we’re part of. Our response to this crisis needs to be, in the most basic sense, a reality check. We need to keep up pressure on national governments; there are questions only they can answer about the investment of national resources. We need equally to keep up pressure on ourselves and to learn how to work better as civic agents. When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the sure foundations for change at the national and international level. If I ask what’s the point of my undertaking a modest amount of recycling my rubbish or scaling down my air travel, the answer is not that this will unquestionably save the world within six months, but in the first place it’s a step towards liberation from a cycle of behaviour that is keeping me, indeed most of us, in a dangerous state — dangerous, that is, to our human dignity and self-respect.

Dr Williams, unlike most people, seems to understand that climate change is as much of a social problem as it is an environmental one.  Only changes in society as a whole can lead to the changes needed to reduce emissions and build a sustainable future.

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