This Ash Wednesday, Green Anglicans are beginning Lent by smearing carbon on their foreheads in order to find out what their carbon footprint is. The answer, of course, is: a littler higher than it would have been if you hadn’t set fire to palm leaves and plastered the carbon residue on your head.
For the non- green Anglicans among us, here is a song:
I know this isn’t particularly surprising – to really shock I’d need news that someone preached the Gospel in an Anglican cathedral – but here it is anyway:
In a winter when much of Canada has endured frigid temperatures and heavy snowfall, it may be hard for some to take climate change seriously.
But the deep freeze many of us have experienced this winter, said renowned climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, is actually connected to the overall warming of the planet.
“Massive snows are a symptom of climate change. A warmer planet increases the risk of heavy snowfall too,” Hayhoe told about 140 people who gathered on Feb. 19 to hear her speak at St. George’s Cathedral in Kingston, Ont. The diocese of Ontario’s Green Group, with support from the Sisters of Providence of Saint Vincent de Paul organized the event.
In the year 2000, before global warming was surreptitiously renamed “climate change”, in the halcyon days before climategate, Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, said:
within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”
He was speaking of Britain which has been buried in winter snow ever since.
Still, as I remind myself every time I step outside and my nose hairs frost over, even though the science was settled in 2000, it has now resettled and, in its resettling, is telling us that a warming planet is actually making it colder. What could be more obvious: you just have to have faith in the climate scientists. Particularly the ones who lecture in Anglican cathedrals.
What, according to Katharine Hayhoe, must we do?
A small and personal starting point is to measure our carbon footprint and see what changes we can make to reduce it.
Hayhoe flew from Texas to St. George’s Cathedral in Kingston Ontario to deliver that pietism, on an aeroplane that burns four litres of jet fuel per second, placing around two tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per person. And if, as we can only hope, she returns, she will do it all again.
So why should we listen to her?
On March the fifth, luminaries from Canadian Anglican and Lutheran churches, along with green politicians and assorted Gaia hangers on, will fast for climate change. The fasters include well known climatologists, Bishop Fred Hiltz and Bishop Susan Johnson. I hope they are successful because the climate needs to change: it was -24C in Oakville yesterday. Personally, I have set aside March 5th to have dinner at the local Mandarin where I will eat as much as possible.
The organiser of this worthy venture is Jennifer Henry from Kairos Canada. She reckons that the justice we most desperately need is not justice for the unborn who are routinely murdered in their thousands or for the increasing number of Christians who are being beheaded, tortured or displaced in so many places but climate justice, a incoherence which has no discernible meaning since climate is an inanimate phenomenon to which it is no more possible to act unjustly than to a bowl of porridge.
Still, to look on the bright side, Bishops not eating for a whole day will considerably reduce global flatulence; now if only they could be persuaded to stop talking.
From here:
“Fasting has long roots in our faith tradition,” says Henry. “The fast that God requires is justice and the justice we most desperately need is climate justice for all people who have been impacted, and will be impacted, by the current ecological catastrophe. Fasting for one day is a small gesture of solidarity for the hardship so many now face. Each and every one of our voices is essential to demand of the federal government an effective strategy to meet science-based emissions reductions targets in the lead up to the climate conference in Paris later this year.”
February and March are assigned to North Americans who are hungry for action on climate change. Notable leaders who agreed to fast one day during this period include the Rev. Fred Hiltz, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada (March 6); Rev. Susan Johnson, National Bishop, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (February 14); Rev. Mark MacDonald, the National Indigenous Bishop, Anglican Church of Canada (March 16); Mardi Tindal, Immediate Past Moderator, The United Church of Canada (March 19); Joe Gunn, Executive Director, Citizens for Public Justice (February 1); Elizabeth May, Leader of the Green Party of Canada (March 12); and Bill McKibben, author and co-founder of 350.org (March 30). Connie Sorio, KAIROS’ Ecological Justice Partnership Coordinator, will join the fast on February 28.
Various bishops – they call themselves “Eco Bishops” – are going to meet in Cape Town next week to commiserate together on how everyone else is causing global warming by producing too much carbon dioxide.
Canada has its very own Eco Bishops – I feel so proud; among them are: Jane Alexander, bishop of Edmonton and Mark MacDonald, National Indigenous Bishop.
My favourite sentence from the ACNS article is:
The goal is to strategise together in order strategies for raising the issue of climate change and environmental degradation throughout the global Anglican Church.
Only the Anglican News Service could come up with such a lucid definition of what this is all about. I have to admit, though, they have one thing right: there really is “environmental degradation throughout the global Anglican Church”; although, the global Anglican Church is more disintegrating than degrading.
When I was growing up in Wales, a sacred space becoming green would mean that moss was thriving on the local church roof. Today, Greening Sacred Spaces is an invitation to, among other things, prevent draughts in church buildings – a tragic mistake for many parishes, since that is the only breath of fresh air the congregation will ever experience – in order to focus on the cliché du jour: mission. No-one seems to have noticed that the mission of most mainline denominations is the greening of their sacred space: promising a false gospel of eco-redemption to carbon addicted sinners.
From here:
Do you want to make your church building a safer and more hospitable space for worship and fellowship? Are drafty windows and leaking taps drawing time and money away from mission and outreach? Does your parish need support in reducing ecological footprints and improving sustainability? If you answered yes to any of the above, then Creation Matters has an affordable and effective program to help get you started.
Creation Matters, the environmental working group of the Anglican Church of Canada, is partnering with Greening Sacred Spaces, a service offered through Faith & the Common Good, to offer Green Building Audits.
If you are not yet convinced that you should take a green audit, there is a Greening Sacred Spaces youtube channel where you can listen to an imam – who sounds uncannily like a common or garden Anglican bishop – explain that mankind’s problems are all caused by our failing to live in harmony with nature; that, he tells us, is the central message of all “sacred” texts. He didn’t get around to singing “All you Need is Love”, but I know he wanted to.
If Anglicans won’t listen to an imam, who will they listen to?
In a flash of rare brilliance, the Church of England has found a new way to entice the next generation of Anglicans into its churches: the opportunity to do number two in a church supplied composting toilet. It doesn’t get any more seeker friendly than that.
I do think the church might still be able to go one step further, though; especially parishes with adjacent allotments.
From here:
In our office we have a large map entitled ‘Devon’s Green Churches’ which contains a series of dots and stars covering the county from Ilfracombe to Ivybridge. Each symbol represents a church with a composting toilet or solar panels, or has completed an energy survey, or is registered as fair-trade or an ‘eco-congregation’, or runs a wood-burning heating system, and so on. They are examples of church eco projects. In total there are more than 200 coloured symbols and we add more each few weeks.
One way is to get taxpayers who never attend your church to pay for it:
Ever wondered how to start making your creaky, leaky, drafty church building more environmentally friendly?
Until May 31, Canadian Anglican congregations can apply for grants of up to $1,000 to subsidize a green building audit—a process that will help churches identify which areas of their buildings need to become more energy efficient.
Another, better way is to turn cow dung into electricity:
At the Huckabay Ridge biogas facility in Stephenville, Texas, a life preserver and a “No Swimming” sign hanging on the concrete exterior of one chocolate-colored pool are somebody’s idea of a barnyard joke. Early this year, the manure from 10,000 cows from Texas’ Erath County began stoking this facility, which is expected to produce enough pipeline-quality methane to power 11,000 homes.
Most Anglican Church of Canada parishes are such prodigious generators of BS, that they could be self-sustaining for centuries – long after the single remaining congregant has blown out his Earth Day candle, packed up his fair trade coffee and closed the draft proof door for the last time.
According to the Anglican Journal, we haven’t been doing enough to look after the insect population – or, as I expect it will soon be called, the Insect Community.
Since there 900,000 varieties of insect representing 80 percent of the world’s species and around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 individual insects currently roaming the planet, it seems to me that they are managing quite well without our help.
In fact, there are too many insects by far; insectophobia be damned, it’s time stock up on Raid and indulge in a little insect cleansing.
The Anglican Communion’s fifth mark of mission urges us to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth and all its forms. This is an issue that greatly concerns Dr. Stephen Scharper, an associate professor in the University of Toronto’s Centre for the Environment, department of the study of religion and department of anthropology.
In his promotion of planetary stewardship, the Connecticut-born expert in ecological theology often goes back to U.S. marine biologist Rachel Carson and her landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring. “This was a turning point in the environmental movement,” he says. Carson challenged the modern world’s domineering approach to nature and humankind’s need to control everything in it, especially insects, with increasingly potent chemicals.
‘This was a question of worldview as much as a question of science and data,” says Scharper. “What Carson helped people see was that this world view was at odds with the growing ecological understanding of integration and webs of relationships…” In other words, we must respect even with the creepers and crawlers of the earth.
[…]
Scharper, however, sees Carson’s wakeup call as an invitation to the Christian imagination and community to embrace this worldview of integration with creation and a refusal to adopt a view of control and capitalistic exploitation. “The invitation is to reflect on a larger Christian worldview that embraces creation in a radical relationship,” he says.
Pontificate on oil pipelines:
From here:
Six Anglican bishops from across British Columbia and Yukon came together on Good Friday in a call for the environ-mental review hearings on the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline to remain fair and free from political pressure.
“There’s some concern that the decision’s already been made and that the review process is just a rubber stamp,” said Bishop Michael Ingham, of the Diocese of New West-minster. “I think what we’re trying to do is call upon the panel itself to resist pressure – political pressure, industry pressure – and to come to a fair, balanced and thorough set of recommendations.”
Ingham signed the statement, which he said was prompted by bishops being inundated with concern for the process from members of their dioceses.
Rather than build a pipeline in Canada, I am quite sure that the six bishops would prefer oil revenues continue to flow to Middle Eastern countries who subjugate women, hang homosexuals and persecute Christians – much less environmental damage.
Rowan Williams and sundry lesser clerics have decided that Ash Wednesday is really all about condemning consumerism and fossil fuels. Let’s hope the ashes they use are not the product of a carbon spewing conflagration.
From here:
Rt Hon Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury; Rt Rev Richard Chartres, Bishop of London; Most Rev Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales; Cardinal Keith O’Brien, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh and leaders of the Methodist, Baptist and URC churches are among those signing Operation Noah’s Ash Wednesday Declaration.
[….]
“Traditionally, Christians commit themselves to repentance and renewed faith in Jesus Christ on Ash Wednesday,” said David Atkinson, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Southwark. “We must live out that faith in relation to our damaging consumer economy, over-dependence on fossil fuels and the devastation we, as a species, are inflicting on God’s world. We believe that responsible care for God’s creation is foundational to the Gospel and central to the Church’s mission.”
