At Operation Noah, a faith-based movement on climate change, we're launching our Reclaim Christmas campaign. In this year of the credit crunch, our "Pray Now Buy Later" message stands to go down rather well. And for present-giving, don't burn a hole in your credit cards on mass-produced goods from a department store -- you can go to our website and get some great ideas -- for free!
We've been working with The Make Lounge, a contemporary craft workshop, to combine dexterity and thrift and introduce that personal touch into present-giving. Come on, how many of your readers can ever have given gifts with the label attached: "made for you with my own fair hands?" Me neither, but that's all changing.
Now I'm not the most nimble-fingered creature ever to grace planet Earth, but if I can do these, anyone can. They're bath bombs! Wonderful little islands of effervescent aromas fizzing in your bath tub. You need to mix 180gs of bicarbonate of soda with 60gs of citric acid powder (available at Boots and most chemists -- it’s very mild, just don't attempt this with exposed cuts on you hands and fingers!) Using a small teaspoon or better, a teete pipette, add droplets of water, colouring and your chosen essential oils for the scent. (You can get a good choice of these either online or at most health food stores.) Favourite flavours? Rose and lavender with the ladies it seems and citrus and vanilla with the men. I plumped for a gently seductive grapefruit, though for those of you with an eye on the Epiphany calendar, you can get frankincense and myrrh according to Jennifer Pirtle, my bath bomb instructor! Essential oils are better than fragrance oils as they come from the real resins of the plants and are less synthetic.
Care is needed with the liquids. Too much at once and it all starts to fizz away, so fold them in gently and mix it with the powder so that after a few minutes, you get that compressed "sand and water consistency" which holds its own shape. You then pack the mixture into a series of moulds. The rubber ones are best and most flexible and come in all shapes and sizes. Leave the mixture for at least an hour to set, preferably longer. At around 10p a bath cube (depending on which scent you choose), they are a snip – and very attractive too.
Other ideas: hand made cushion covers from recycled materials and wallets for Dad, big brother or the boyfriend. All on the Operation Noah website.
Go here to get instructions for how to make all of these crafts for your friends and family.
]]>En route to Australia on a plane (God does do irony), the holy Father spoke of the need to "wake up concsciences" on climate change. "We have to be capable of responding to the great ecological challenge and to be up to the task of this challenge." "We have our responsibilities toward Creation," he said.
This is encouraging, as the Pope is due to release a new encyclical later this year on social teaching, and it is possible he will go into more detail. Apparently he told reporters that he didn't want to get into the technical and political detail involved indiscussing what sort of agreement the world should be aiming for in Copenhagen 2009 to replace Kyoto. Fair enough.
But he can lead on the "waking of consciences" by making it very clear that Catholics the world over have to undergo what JPII called "ecological conversion."
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Dear Mark,
I do despair of any energy reductions when at my doctor's surgery this afternoon, one receptionist said that the energy-consuming, ubiquitous TV could not be switched off because of patient confidentiality. The receptionists talk about patients and need the damn television blasting out to drown out their confidential talk!
Such people will not be impressed by 90% cuts by 2030. Nor those who carelessly leave lights on, or install constant boiling hot water boilers that are never allowed to be switched off in my office, or use the much-loved 2 Kw heaters to supplement the central heating or, the latest, portable air conditioners that are now brought in and used even when windows are left open, or my directorate that builds new social care centres with floodlighting for CCTV cameras when they have super-secure windows and doors and are in low-crime areas anyway!
Aren't targets always missed and even simply ignored? Is not 99% of the population energy illiterate, complacent and careless and just not interested in saving energy let alone are prepared to meet targets?
What do you think? What answer would you give to Tim's despairing questions?
]]>About 60 folk turned out and more sent their apologies (including the local MP.) Monmouthshire Cable TV were there (with access to 75,00 viewers), so we'll soon have a weblink to the event and you can all see what you missed.
Well done to Lexi and team - now time to recruit more members and engage in a campaign of action locally!
]]>Second, it centred less on the facts and figures of global warming and concentrated more on the central premise that mankind has got its thinking and values all wrong when it come to looking at nature and creation. It's a pity there weren't more religious/spiritual voices. But it was a refreshing watch and "brave" for a TV station to have a go at the advertising industry's role in the manic consumption mess we find ourselves in. Perhaps Ch4 has , at least in part, made up for broadcasting "The Great Global Warming Swindle."???
You can see a trailer on YOUTUBE:
]]>Confession: I have been on one plane since the pledge year ran out. That was last December to Madrid (a trip that cost me next to nothing as I used convenient air miles which for years have been linked to my Mastercard account!). But as from January, since taking up work with Operation Noah, I have been happy to shun the airports. It's mainly a credibility thing. Standing at public meetings and beating the drum for leadership doesn't sit well with frequent flyer trips to all ends of the earth, does it? It would be like working for the NSPCC and privately being a corporal punishment demon with your kids at home.
So this year's holiday takes in Scotland and Cumbria by train. Will I ever see the inside of an airport again, I wonder??
How about you? Are you ready to take the pledge to give up flying for a year? (We'll allow an exception for family emergencies.) If you are ready to take the plunge, follow this link to make your own pledge.
Then please come back here and leave a comment telling us about your experience and motivations. Will making a pledge not to fly for a year entail a major change of lifestyle for you? Are you adjusting your holiday plans to accommodate your commitment? Are there joys and pleasures you have discovered because you took a form of transportation other than flying? Would you recommend this to others? We want to hear from you! Leave your comments and stories below.
]]>(Follow this link to read full letter.)
This is how I replied:
Wilfred Beckerman (letters April 22) is right to say that our response to climate change cannot just be left to purely scientific and economic considerations. However, the ethical criteria he invokes run totally counter to the tough and searching demands of Jesus in 2000 years of the Christian tradition. Professor Beckerman says we must prioritise known family and friends over the claims of strangers and distant generations. But in this respect, Jesus' ethic was quite clear: blood ties alone are no basis for expressing moral imperatives. In his truly revolutionary call to a universalist approach, Jesus has little time for purely "defending your own." He warns that following the path of true love may well set "man against his father and daughter against her mother." (Matthew 10: 35) He asserts: "if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans do the same? (Matt Ch 5:47) Those who are really worthy of the name "mother and brother are these which hear the word of God and do it." (Luke 8:21)
That word of God, enshrined in the call to the people of Israel to look beyond their own narrow boundaries, reaches the heights ot true self giving when it is extended to those hitherto unknown: Leviticus 19:34 says "The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the homeborn among you and thou shalt love him as thyself, for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." No surprise then that Jesus frequently has Samaritans, the dreaded "strangers", as the unlikely recipients of his attention. No wonder also, that Al Gore, a committed Southern Baptist, was totally on the ball at the end of his film, An Inconvenient Truth, when he said that the unprecendented challenge of global warming requires enormous "moral imagination."
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I have to say, the Minister was impressive. First in his time allocation and also in his energy of engagement. He accepted that the climate science is moving on and although he didn't want to usurp the role of his Climate Change Advisory Committee by pre-empting them, more or less conceded that 80 per cent cuts by 2050 were inevitable. As for ON's 90/2030 target: he wouldn't engage with that. (not in public at least!)
Shipping and Aviation?: the stock answer about how impossible it was to work out emissions responsibiltiies for international journies. But as Tony Juniper had pointed out the night before at a big FOE rally: if scores of civil servants can sort out the minutiae of fiscal codes and tax bands, they could crack this one easily!
But the real heroes of the day were the religious. I told them in a pre-lobby address, that their lives were beacons of hope. So many of them live out the "Live Simply" lifestyle: sourcing food locally, keeping transport emissions to a minimum and eschewing the pace of the modern world which is inevitably carbon intensive. They are holding a mirror up to the world. We need their witness now more than ever.
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The former Chancelleor fancies himself as an alter ego to Al Gore and has become a lone voice of climate scepticism. "An Appeal to Reason" will tell us that science is still divided and that the planet really isn't warming at all. Lawson asserted that "the planet hasn't warmed at all since 2000" and that we have only seen "half a degree rise since 1900." Actually the precise figure is 0.76 degrees and with that we already have the evidence of melting glaciers, background extinction rates and disturned migration patterns. Tellingly, Lawson conceded that he had had to go begging at the door of an American publisher as "nobody over here would touch it."
I have ordered the book off Amazon: "know thine enemy" and all that. The few remaining contrarians are making much of the fact that 2005 and 1998 tied with each other as the warmest year on record and that we would have expected much bigger rises since 1998 if the theory were true. What he ignores is the TREND...the fact that since 1990 fourteen of the hottest years on record have occurred...he mistakes snapshots (weather) with climate (the longer term picture.)
More when I have read this book. But what do we make of his assertion that "some people have an almost religious passion for this subject"? I plead guilty, like many of us. If you cannot get passionate, in a religious sense about wrecking the greatest gift given to us, then what is the point?
]]>Big day: the first outing for the new PowerPoint, 35 slide display which we put together at ON earlier in the week. Being a natural technophobe, I'm wary of the whole business. I have seen too many people falling flat on their faces as the projector fails to work or the slides all come up in the wrong order! But no! One press of my remote button and we're off and running.
Many of you have sat through text file after text file as people bore you stiff on such occasions. So I try and capture attention by concentrating on images. The moment when it all comes together, is when we move from an image of a shipping tanker to a shoal of fish. I can't claim originality for this: I heard it from David Wasdell from the Meridan programme at a London event recently. His point is that people say trying to get people to change their lifestyles and priorities is like turning round the proverbial tanker: slow, time consuming and taking an age. But no, says Wasdell, we're capable of more than that. One human cannot relate to a tanker, but if we assume we are all small components of a shoal of fish, it all looks very different. A shoal can change direction, (180 degree turns are their speciality) in a second. There are times in human history, says Wasdell, when man has been capable of such behaviour: most notably in times of war and conflict. This optimism is why Wasdell and others reject the pessimism of James Lovelock (who recently said in a Guardian interview that he expected 80% of humanity to perish by 2100).
So the shoal of fish stays on in the Power Point and comes with me to Halifax on Wednesday 26th March. Let's hope the technology does not thwart us!
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But most arresting of all was a contribution by Maggie Ross, an Alaska-based hermit who had come to tell us all about the dire effects that global warming is having in the northern latitudes. Stampeding walruses fighting and killing each other in a bid for shrinking land space, retreating glaciers, salmon struggling for survival in salt water. You can read it in full in her blog at www.ravenwilderness.blogspot.com.
Maggie said the real message that she wanted to bring was that the institutional church has lost its ability to teach and instil "core silence" in the people. Our obsession with nature programmes reflects a human species which is uneasily in awe of the rhythms and silences of so much of natural wildlife. Yet in contrast, we have constructed a world which is so full of inner mental noise and outward distraction, that we cannot hear and sense the deepest workings of what is going on around us. We are crowding out that special and remote, but peaceful place where God speaks to us and where we are transformed. I cannot do justice to her words. Please go to her blog and hear them, FEEL them. She is an iconic witness at a time of peril. Her presence made me feel both radiant and yet also filled me with fear because recovering that "core silence" involves turning back centuries of bad thinking and bad practice and have we the time? Nay have we the DESIRE to do it?
Classic case of some of the dilemmas that face us all in our attempts to try and follow the low carbon life. There I was having a very pleasant dinner with friends in London on Friday evening when the host issued an invitation.
"We've just finished the villa in Italy outside of Perugia. You must come and visit. I'm going to get my diary and we can all fix a date." My heart sunk. I really don't think flying for leisure is compatible with the work I am doing here at Operation Noah. It's just a personal decision, but I fell very awkward extolling the importance of changes to our lives while I am out on the road, and yet carrying on flying.
The train you say! Well, it's a messy old trip to Perugia with lots of changes and if I took a week off work, three to four days would be on the train...and of course it's much more expensive that one of those cheapo flights. So, I told my host that I simply couldn't come, but thanked him for his kind offer. The reaction! not anger, but a look of rejection: as though I was doing this because I didn't value our friendship enough. It rather spoilt the evening...these things are going to occur more and more frequently for all of us and many of our long-established ties are going to be challenged.