Living sustainably doesn’t have to be a burden, here’s the case for action

How not to get hot and bothered about climate change.

Barnabas Aspray

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

A protester holds up a green sign reading: 'It's hard to be green. Kermit'.

Markus Spiske on Unsplash.

The fundamental tenets of Christianity show why Christians are called to love not just one another but all created things.

1. God is love.

2. God created everything.

Therefore, God loves everything he created.

3. God appointed humanity as the guardians of creation.

Therefore, a fundamental part of our identity and calling as human beings is to protect and sustain all that God created.

This lies at the basis of everything Christians believe and do. But a case can be made that is more basic still because it appeals, not to anything distinctively Christian, but to natural human wisdom. The climate crisis is not a Christian crisis. It’s a crisis for everyone who cares about their future and that of our planet. The climate crisis may be something unprecedented in the history of humanity, but the principles that are needed to resolve it are not new at all. Sustainability is not a new or particularly abstruse idea. It is something everyone understands as basic common sense. If I cut down trees faster than they can grow, I won’t be able to do that forever. One day I will cut down the last tree and then there won’t be any more trees, ever again. If I catch fish faster than they can reproduce, then one day I will catch the last fish and then won’t be able to catch any more ever again.

But it’s not only about foresters and fishermen. Since the dawn of humanity, we have been living sustainably – wisely preserving resources and using only what we can replace, so that we and our descendants can continue to live. This applies to everyone regardless of their profession. All of us, if we spend more money than we earn, are living in a way that cannot last for long. If we use resources at a faster rate than we can replenish them, we will run into trouble at some point in the future. Every person possessed of reason and common sense knows this intuitively without having to be taught it. Only someone seriously deluded, foolish, or with some kind of mental health problem fails to understand the need for sustainability in order to have any kind of future at all, let alone a pleasant future.

The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are...

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We are burning fossil fuels at hundreds of times the rate they can be produced. We are producing plastics that cannot be recycled, meaning we have to dump them in landfills that are growing all the time. We are pouring carbon dioxide into the air faster than anyone can take it out. All of these things mean that there is a time limit on the kind of lifestyles we are all leading now. If we carry on in this way, then one day we will cross a line from which there is no returning. As Mark Scarlata has pointed out, the solution cannot be technological. Even if we find a way to balance carbon outputs with inputs, we are only kicking the can further down the road. Our inability to live within our means will simply resurface somewhere else later on. The problem is spiritual, not technical.

Everyone understands this at some level even if it’s the kind of truth from which we prefer to avert our eyes. The harder problem is to understand why this basic common sense isn’t proving effective. Why are we living collectively in a way that only a foolish or insane person would live, when most of us taken by ourselves are neither foolish or insane?

The problem, at least in part, is that we are all entangled in systems that make it very hard for us to live sustainably. If I am an ordinary Brit living in an ordinary town or city, and I need to buy toothbrushes or nappies or cucumbers or strawberries, I go to the local supermarket: and the only options available are made of plastic or wrapped in plastic that will not decompose for 500 years, and often brought here from the other side of the world using huge amounts of carbon emissions. Most of us are busy people with limited financial resources. We don’t have the time to find sustainable alternatives and often they are too expensive even if we can find them. The societal structures that we live in limit the choices we have. The call to live sustainably can lead us to feel burdened by a permanent sense of guilt, a feeling that we ought to be doing more than we are, but also an inability to see how we could be doing more given all the pressures, needs and constraints on our time and money.

Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means.

We are all culprits in part, since we all contribute to non-sustainable living. But we are also partly victims of forces beyond our control, large cultural forces that shape and determine our actions more than we can imagine. We have very little power over those structural forces and currently things do not look good. Common sense principles aren’t working. The climate crisis is only getting worse. So, what do we do?

It is at this point that Christianity has something special to offer to the problem.

First, Christians are never called to be defeatist or to throw in the towel. This is because we are called to an enormous hope, a hope that surpasses understanding, a hope that the world cannot understand because it stands over against all the odds and all the possibilities. This hope is rooted in the conviction that our God is God Almighty, that he has not abandoned his creation, and that he has power to save. He is a saviour. He is the God of our salvation. This is the God we believe in. The climate crisis may look bleak right now, but Christians need never despair or become indifferent. If we do our small part, we can trust that God is in control of what is out of our control.

Secondly, Christians believe that every human being is a free agent with the capacity to choose how he or she will act. Our freedom may be limited by the societal structures that shape and constrain our choices, but it is not destroyed. We can still make choices within those limits to buy and live more sustainably – anything from choosing a holiday destination within driving distance, to giving up beef (by far the worst food for carbon emissions). There is something all of us can do.

Thirdly, Christians believe in a God who transforms hearts and lives, winning them to the power of the gospel and to a new way of living that is free of the shackles that this world – the structures of society – puts on us. This transformation is slow – slower than we would like it to be sometimes. We feel the shackles still gripping us at times. We are not expected to change everything all at once, to become holy overnight. Nevertheless, God gives us the power to change our lives, and to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. The way towards sustainable living is not to try to change everything at once, but to ask: what one thing can I change in my daily lifestyle that would make it more sustainable? And then once we’ve mastered that and integrated it so we no longer even think about it and it’s just a default, then we can ask: what’s the next thing I can do? All of a sudden what looks like an unimaginable height of transformation, when it is broken down, becomes a series of manageable steps.

Even if we do everything in our power, we cannot by ourselves avert a possible catastrophe. We are small players in a big game. Christians do not naively believe that God will sweep in and fix everything if we just wait. That would be to deny our responsibility, and it is not what hope means. Hope means the opposite: that we continue to fight to avert climate disaster even when it seems hopeless. Christians are called to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. We are called to live in such a way that, if catastrophe comes, it won’t be because of us – to live in hope that our actions are meaningful and worthwhile and that we are in the hands of a God who is far more powerful than the most powerful forces in this world.

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Politics

24 November 2025

4 min read

Covid inquiry: Johnson, Cummings, and the cost of refusing to grieve

The report exposes mistakes, but our real challenge is learning how to face loss without denial

Jonah Horne

Jonah Horne is a priest, living and working in Devon.

Boris Johnson sits, giving evidence to an inquiry.

Boris Johnson giving evidence to the inquiry.

UK Covid-19 Inquiry.

I distinctly remember the sheer confusion of January to March 2020. Should we flee our flat in London? Should we cancel the lease on our workspace? Will I be able to continue breakfast with my friend on Thursday mornings? I ignorantly scoffed that a lockdown could conceivably take place and then, stood devastatingly corrected only a few months later. However, the UK Covid-19 Inquiry reveals that this ignorance induced confusion was not restricted to the personal level but instead enacted on a national stage.

What’s glaringly obvious as you read the recommendations is that the government acted too slowly and too indecisively. If the initial restrictions been introduced sooner, say in January or February, the first lockdown “might have been shorter or not necessary at all.” This, the report suggests, could have saved approximately 23,000 lives. Brenda Doherty, of the Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice group, believes her mother could have been one of these. Instead, she and her sister stood by her graveside in March 2020 as her family members waited a few metres back sectioned off by red tape. The report and accompanying evidence call for sombre reading.

In response, those in charge at the time have understandably launched an attack in their own defence. Boris Johnson has labelled the inquiry "totally muddled,” which ironically sounds like the informal conclusion of his leadership in the report. Similarly, Dominic Cummings has hurled a 2,000-word response into the social media stratosphere, which feels almost as long as the 800-page paper itself.

What seems glaringly obvious about both men’s responses is the very thing Brenda Doherty displays with such elegance: grief. There is, in these men’s retorts, a stunning omission of any sense of responsibility or indeed any willingness to admit defeat. And what frightens me most, as we look towards the future, is our refusal to grieve over the things of the past. The threat on Europe from Russia is growing. AI’s disruption on our workforce seems to be being enthusiastically brushed aside. And another, potentially much more violent, pandemic is unsettlingly likely.

However, in the face of these disruptive forces grief is a remarkably generative power. Without grief we remain, much like Johnson and Cummings, frozen in time. Immovable in our ineptitude and ignorance. Grief, I’d argue, is the very thing that enables us to recognise our shortcomings and, when mixed with hope, energises us towards a future which lies on the other side of sorrow. Yet, when we exist in a place of fragility, the idea of imagining that life lies beyond my incompetency, if only I grieve it, is frightening. Devastatingly though, for us humans, this may be the only way to learn and move forward.

Our future and redemption is undeniably bound up in our ability to grieve. Grief is inherently futural. By grieving our ineptitude, we inevitably witness to the places that require growth, mercy and grace. When we fail to grieve, we remain frozen in time—precariously hiding behind the illusion of our infallibility. This is a deeply fragile state. From this position, any assault or critique on our mistakes becomes a personal attack rather than invitation to redemption. We find ourselves lashing out in fear, terrified of being exposed. Johnson and Cummings embody this predicament to a tee.

This situation however is not unique to the Covid iquiry and our late-prime minister’s response. Another character who lashes out in fear is St Peter, one of Jesus’s friends and disciples. There is a rather poetic story that illustrated this at the end of John’s gospel in the New Testament. One of Jesus’s friends Peter rejects him as he’s taken to be murdered. Peter attacks a guard, cuts his ear off and Jesus famously disarms him and heals the man. Moments later, Jesus is taken, Peter flees and we find him standing in a courtyard, by a fire and where claims not to know his friend and master Jesus. To make matters worse, he rejects him not once, but three times. However, when Jesus returns from the grave, he meets Peter again, at a fireside on a beach, and asks him “do you love me?” Not once but three times. The thing that I think is particularly remarkable about this meeting is that Jesus recognises Peter’s future in bound up in the redemption of his past mistakes. Jesus takes Peter to the place of failure, a fireside, and gives him an opportunity to declare his allegiance and love for him, the same amount of times he had rejected him. He reminded him of his wound to heal him for his future.

If we are to take seriously our response to the Covid-19 inquiry, we must take responsibility for our errors. Not begrudgingly but with a grace filled grief. Our future, one that is filled with hope, does not come to us without a confession of past errors. Instead, a hopeful future may only come to us when we confess, recognise and grieve our mistakes. Indeed, to freely grieve over my failures is to grieve believing in life beyond my defeat.

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