This session explores the idea of the problem we have being technical but spiritual.
What do you think are the root causes of climate change?
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Katharine Hayhoe refers to climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’, which amplifies the existing risks of social and economic disruption.
Climate change is also a vulnerability multiplier. This is because risks interact with the existing social and economic context.
For example, women as a group are already, and will be in future, more affected. This is because of a phenomenon called the ‘feminization of poverty’, where women experience poverty at rates that are disproportionately high in comparison to men. There is already UN research which shows 80% of people displaced by climate change are women .
Peter Harris talks about human greed being ‘the real problem’. Climate change is an outworking of living in a way which outstrips the replenishment of the vital systems on which all life depends. It is not a technical problem, but a spiritual problem relating to what we trust and where we put our ‘treasure’.
As Christians we profess that our ‘treasure’ is in Christ, trusting in God for the security and hope of fulfillment which the consumption of resources appears to offer.
And yet the lifestyles of those of us in the Western church are often highly carbon intensive.
Pray, repenting of your own greed and declaring the total sufficiency of Christ.