TIM COSTELLO, chief executive of World Vision Australia, explains why he believes the need to address climate change is a spiritual issue as well as one about the environment, poverty and politics…
Climate change is an immense environmental battle. It is an immense battle about poverty. The poorest, the most vulnerable, are already being the most impacted by changes we are seeing reported from our work in developing countries.
We know it’s an intense political battle. That is what is going on with the fear and the confusion in our nation at the moment.
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“This is a spiritual issue because I hope that church leaders and their congregations will understand that the Bible is a book about what is good and sustainable, that the Earth in the Christian faith ‘is the Lord’s’, and is not to be consumed by greed and by power and by vested interests.”
As a Christian and as a church leader, i want to say that this is also an intensely spiritual battle.
I say, to my shame, the church has history in being on the wrong side of justice.
We love to sing Amazing Grace, written by an anti-slave trader John Newton who encouraged Wilberforce to stay in Parliament in England and fight the slave trade.
But when Wilberforce fought for the abolition of slavery, he was attacked by the church. When he introduced his abolition bill for slavery, he took on the most massive vested interests. The King, the aristocracy, the church leaders had slaves. So much money was being made by the Empire.
When Wilberforce took on slavery, all the British vested interests said “We are trade exposed! The Spanish, the Dutch, the French will just pick up our business!”
When he took it on, he actually was saying at that time – because the Empire depended on slavery as the economic backbone – something that would be equivalent to saying today, “In Australia we have to cut our dependence on fossil fuels. The consequences are hurting the poor, damaging communities. “
The moral courage of Wilberforce was in standing up to vested interests. And I say I hope that church leaders will condemn the death threats that have been made to climate change scientists.
This is a spiritual issue because I hope that church leaders and their congregations will understand that the Bible is a book about what is good and sustainable, that the Earth in the Christian faith “is the Lord’s”, and is not to be consumed by greed and by power and by vested interests.
Here in Australia we focus on our electricity costs and living costs, but the 40,00 staff of World Vision where we work around the world are seeing that climate change is costing lives, it’s costing livelihoods. It is having an impact now and it is increasingly devastating.
One of the extraordinary challenges i have is to help our supporters understand that as a child focussed organisation – for that is what World Vision is – is that climate change is the greatest potential violation of children’s rights in history. It is that serious.
I was in Pakistan some weeks ago. World Vision has been responding to the Pakistani floods that swept through the northern mountains almost 12 months ago and then submerged almost a third of the countryside, affecting 20 million people. An eighty year old man told me that the floods had never before come through at the height they did last year. In Myanmar, where Cyclone Nargis wrecked the villages of the Irrawaddy Delta, the Burmese people said to me: “The cyclones never hit us. They always miss us and hit Bangladesh.”
Staff recently back from Nepal are hearing stories of significant weather changes. Manis Neupane, a 63-year-old man interviewed in his small roadside shop, said “18 years ago, we used to get snowfall up to our chin and it would fall in December every year. Now, we only get 1 or 2 feet of snow, and sometimes only in January or February.”
These are not scientific studies, but these are the experiences of people on the ground, trying to feed their families, confused about changes in what were once largely dependable seasons. Weather their families have lived by for generations.
There is no doubt we are a living in a global village. People got sick in Mexico two years ago and we closed schools in Melbourne as the risk of swine flu spread. It is like a waterbed. You press down on one corner, and issues emerge in another.
Children, whose only crime was that they were born in the wrong place, are depending on us to act justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God, as the prophet Micah reminded us. We have made progress in saving the lives of innocent children. Preventable deaths of children under five years old has been cut by a third since 1990. As we look ahead, as we listen to people in poor communities, the impact of climate change threatens to undo years of progress in the battle to reduce extreme poverty.
We in the wealthier nations have developed our economies without paying the price of the pollution that is now affecting the atmosphere and changing weather patterns around the world. Australians, who believe in a fair go, must share the burden of these impacts and work together to create solutions.
Tim Costello is chief executive of World Vision Australia.
