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Belief

Climate

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Sustainability

13 September 2024

7 min read

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.

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Creed

Death & life

19 November 2024

5 min read

“Shortening death” sidesteps the real battle

We need to do more than protest bad deaths, we need to protest death itself, it's more than biological.

Tom Dove

Tom is a physician and completing a theology doctorate.

A hand drapes over the side of an object out of shot.

Michael Schaffler on Unsplash.

What is “death”? It’s surprising the term has received little attention in the assisted dying discussion so far, because more hangs on the answer than one might expect. At a press briefing, Kim Leadbeater MP stated that the assisted dying bill she is proposing is about “shortening death, not ending life.”

But what meaning does “death” have here?

The current bill defines neither “death” nor “dying.” Granted, it implies a biological definition. The bill speaks of administering approved substances to “cause that person’s death” and of capacity and decision-making around “ending life.” These fit the understanding of death with which the medical profession operates—death is the point in time when the combined functions required for human life cease. It is a one-time event, the end of physiology, and so is recognised by a combination of physical signs.

Death, then, is a diagnosis.

So, too, “dying”—though here the waters are murkier. Setting aside sudden deaths, medical talk of dying takes us out of binary territory. Dying speaks of a process, of the “terminal phase.” Within medicine a diagnosis of dying heralds the expectation that a person’s death will occur within hours or days. And so, the focus shifts. The task of care is no longer the coordinated work of investigation, preserving life, and treating symptoms. Now attention is on bringing relief to the process of dying.

The bill seems wise to much of this. Though definitions of death and dying are absent, the bill does define terminal illness—“an inevitably progressive condition which cannot be reversed by treatment” and from which the event of death “can reasonably be expected within 6 months.” And so, it clearly distinguishes terminal illness from biological death and, implicitly, from dying.

Of course, terminal illness and biological death are related. Terminal illness is irreversible, and where terminal illness leads is death. Or, you might say, it leads to the end of life. Apart from the timescale of six months, the same may be said of ageing: ageing is irreversible, and where ageing leads is death. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment was puzzling to me. I suspect what she really meant was “shortening terminal illness.” If so, this is confusing because, within the framework of the bill, “shortening terminal illness” and “ending life” are identical. It seems she was getting at something else.

“It seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.”

Stanley Hauerwas

I suspect Kim Leadbeater was echoing a conviction at home in the Christian faith. That is, try as we might to keep death at a distance and restrict it to a faraway frontier, the life of human beings involves death. I don’t simply mean the biological death we witness—the deaths of friends, relatives, or even strangers. I mean death intrudes upon the way we experience life. Death is more than simply biological.

The fear of death belongs in this category. For some, the impending loss of relationships and joys casts a shadow over life, giving birth to apprehension. Death is not simply a factual matter but something that exerts power and influence. Or take disease and illness. Built into the notion of terminal illness is the idea that the sickness borne by a human body will ultimately bring about that body’s death. That body already speaks of its death. Death is making itself felt in advance.

And so, death is more than a biological event. Even living things can bear the marks of death.

This is no novel claim. The creation account recorded in the Bible says that in the beginning, there was good. But an intruder appears. In the wake of humanity’s choice to go its own way rather than the way of its Maker, death arrives on the scene. And death is an imposter—not simply a physiological fact at the end of the road, but a destructive and alien presence in God’s good world.

Understood in this way, death is not something that God intends humans simply submit to. Death is something to protest. This is why Kim Leadbeater’s comment gets at something important: this kind of death should be protested. The marks of death should not be accommodated, because they do not belong to the goodness of what God has made.

At the heart of the Christian faith is God’s own ultimate protest against the force of death. Christians celebrate that God himself came in the man Jesus to “destroy death.” This is plainly more than biological. Jesus came to free humanity from the entirety of death’s grip. Hence why, when Jesus speaks of “eternal life” he means more than endless biological existence. He means liberation from all the havoc that death brings to bear within God’s world. To the Christian imagination, the power of death must be protested because God protested it first.

The question is how to protest death. Within the framework of the bill, shortening death or terminal illness is identical with ending life. This is the only form protesting death can take.

But the Christian faith makes a far more radical claim: God alone overcame death by dying. This is the point: Jesus was the one—the only one—who emerged resurrected victor in the contest with the power of death. In seeing his death and resurrection, an unshakeable hope emerges. Death is not the victor. And this hope stands above our present experience of death—in whatever form—and, at the same time, calls us to join the protest.

Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas once wrote: “it seems odd that in the name of eliminating suffering, we eliminate the sufferer.” I have deliberately avoided discussing suffering, not least because it would take me too far afield. Yet Hauerwas has put his finger on what I’m getting at. Protesting death—in the big sense—belongs to the Christian faith. Protesting suffering and pain, economic and racial injustice, fractured relationships and broken societies, are all part of this protest. But can eliminating those who live within the shadow of death be part of this protest? I think not. The Christian faith believes there is only one who can overcome death in this way, and that is God himself—who has already done it.