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Christians must take direct action
Climate change demands Christians’ united voice and action, argues Tamsin Omond
 Direct action: the protest by Plane Stupid on the roof of the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday of last week |
| There are three truths I take as given: climate change is the greatest threat of the 21st century; the powers of the world are unwilling to implement change to curb this crisis; we are the stewards of God’s creation.
Only the last of these truths is absolute. The two that precede it are rooted in our time, in our unrelenting need to consume all that the world has to offer — the excesses needed to sustain our creature comforts. All this raises a question about what kind of creature humanity has become.
We cannot escape the truth of climate change, and so we shrug our shoulders, preferring to accept various facts: entire ecosystems have died; new disease spreads because the temperature has risen. As Christians, we are required to do more than accept the problems we create. We are challenged to repent. And repentance should be more than saying sorry. It requires a change of both and action.
Our repentance must be loud, and it must be visible, if we are to act as an example, and to suggest a way out of the complacency into which our society has sunk. I am a member of the Church of England. I am also a member of the campaigning group, Plane Stupid.
Last week, in our most high-profile action so far, we took to the roof of Parliament. It was just one of more than 20 recent actions directed at halting airport expansion, and putting an end to short-haul flights. Our aim was to demand that Gordon Brown acknowledge the dissent of 70 per cent of Londoners, their mayoral candidates, the environmental NGOs, and climate science, before he allows BAA to build a third runway at Heathrow.
Our Government allows no room for public opinion here. It has an intimate relationship with the aviation industry: Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, spoke at the opening of Future Heathrow, a lobby group headed by Lord Soley (a Labour peer); Glenda Jackson MP, our first aviation minister, is the mother of Dan Hodges, director of Freedom to Fly, an aviation-industry lobby group.
The list goes on, and so the decision is made. Mr Brown would not want to alienate his friends and stop the runway, especially for the sake of a public that can instead be distracted and disempowered by a sham consultation.
Like all airport expansion, the plan for a third runway makes a mockery of the UK’s (albeit inadequate) target to reduce carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Aviation is the fastest growing cause of climate change, and makes up 18.5 per cent of the UK’s climate impact.
The British are the world’s most frequent flyers. This is not surprising, places such as Paris and Manchester being so close to London. They are, respectively, the first and fourth most popular destinations from Heathrow.
Some expansion is all about economics, yet the Government’s consultation paper could not even make those arguments wash. Its economic reports, commissioned by the Department for Transport but largely paid for by the aviation industry, have already been discredited by research from the independent economic consultancy C. E. Delft.
Direct action is our last resort. When lobbying becomes ineffective, and the avenues of diplomatic procedure are closed, we must demand that our opinions be represented.
Yet the expansion of Heathrow is unpopular with the public, so it becomes one of our easier fights. People can also be seen to want their five flights a year to a place in the sun and their weekend retreats to Scotland — all at £21 return.
We prefer to sidestep the ecological costs of our economic saving, and Gordon Brown keeps failing to deliver the “tough decisions” he promised to help tackle climate change. He is concerned with short-term public opinion, but short-termism has no close ties to morality.
National policy is the only thing that will effect real change, but the Government will not support unpopular policy. It will push for change only when it believes that the public wants what is right, rather than what is easy. Until then, direct action becomes ever more necessary to demonstrate the gap between the reality of our society and the ideals we espouse.
The global situation urgently requires a united response, and the Church should lead in this. We have a responsibility that goes beyond this world and the mess we have made of it. The Church should be confident in its environmental imperative. We should also be proud of the social change we have already enabled to happen, and the change we could still pioneer through peaceful protest and direct action. Last year, we celebrated William Wilberforce and his part in the abolition of the slave trade. He is one of many inspirations.
As Dietrich Bonhoeffer said: “[The apostles] know that where grace is proclaimed, man is called to ask ‘What shall I do?’, because otherwise grace becomes a judgement on him.”
As Christians, we bear witness to the grace of God, yet all we will do to halt the destruction of his creation is adopt diffuse environmental agendas. It is too little — a tiny sacrifice compared to all that has been cancelled out from that infinite evolution begun by God. His gift, our planet, has become a judgement on us all.
Quiet regret is not enough. We must assert our repentance for the misuse of creation. We need to unite our voices. If we could have the courage to challenge the status quo and all it represents, then we could force the Government to count the physical presence of our non-violent direct action.
Tamsin Omond is parish administrator at St Mary’s, Primrose Hill, in London, and a campaigner for Plane Stupid (www.planestupid.com). |
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