Divided we fall

Two Catholic environment campaigners (Operation Noah's Mark Dowd and BBC Mary Colwell) respond to Austin Williams' accusation of "creeping Malthusian misanthropy" in last week's Tablet and explain why addressing global warming is essential to the survival of humanity.

Divided we fall

As committed Catholics, who see human beings as part of the complex web of God's marvellous creation, we are bound to say that Austin Williams appears to have misunderstood the Christian approach to environmental issues in his article "This happy breed" (The Tablet, 8 March).

People are fundamentally a part of the ecology of the earth. We are meant to be here. We have a right to be here, and we are all loved by God. But with our place on earth comes a responsibility to care for and respect the earth upon which every human being depends.

Report after report brings into ever sharper focus the thousands of animal and plant species that are already facing extinction in the decades ahead because of changes to the planet's climate. This would be bad enough even if there were no direct effect on humanity. Remember, it was four times during the Creation narrative that God looked back on the work of Creation and pronounced on its goodness prior to the making of man.

Natural Creation has an intrinsic worth and wonder which is independent of mankind: that is the stark, yet ignored, reality of the very first chapter of sacred Scripture. This is not misanthropy, it is a restatement of religious wisdom. Where Williams' remarks really are flawed is in setting up some schizophrenic dichotomy between "people" and "the earth".

In the making of a Channel 4 programme last year, God Is Green, an ageing guru, Swamini Gangananda, in a Hindu temple in Mumbai, spoke of the madness of felling huge swathes of the tropical rainforests. "Man talks as though he is cutting down the trees for his benefit," she said, "but he doesn't realise he is sitting on the branches." She makes a profound point. We are gnawing away at the very womb that sustains us.

Many Christians believe that it is high time that world religion and ecology joined forces to bring us back from the brink. We invoke the words of the late John Paul II: "If one looks at regions of our planet, one realises immediately that humanity has disappointed the divine expectation. Man has unhesitatingly devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted the waters, deformed the earth's habitat, made the air unbreathable." The late Pope goes on to say that man has humiliated the earth, "that flower bed of our dwelling".Those remarks were well publicised in January 2001 yet we don't recall anyone accusing Pope John Paul of misanthropy.

Williams makes much of the issue of population. "Anti-growth environmentalists and all other kinds of critics of man's existence exhibit an utter contempt for ordinary people," he writes. No one is arguing against the developmental needs of the poor who rightly crave access to refrigeration for foods, to better medical care and to justice in the fair distribution of economic growth that will take them and many in their emerging societies out of poverty. But we have to place limits of what our natural surroundings can endure. If everyone on earth lived at American rates of consumption we would need seven planets (the figure for European Union rates is three to four). If nine billion people by 2050 aspire to live at these levels, with the same business as- usual, fossil-fuel-intensive modes of energy production, we will be ushering in an ecological Armageddon.

Williams' logic seems to operate in a world free of limits to either population or growth. In the planet's increasingly fragile state, that is little short of suicide. It's time for a frank debate on whether we really do want the developing world to repeat, step by step, what we have achieved.

The New Economics Foundation's "Happy Planet Index" contains some damning findings on the relationship between non-stop material wealth and human happiness in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. In the decades ahead, technology will, almost certainly, have a major role to play. Cleaner forms of energy production may allow many emerging economies to avoid the worst excesses of carbon-intensive production and achieve improvements without damaging the biosphere.

Sponsored by Prince Hassan of Jordan, the Desertec organisation is proposing to erect giant, parabolic mirrors in the Sahara desert and unleash a new wave of solar energy. Egypt has a £30 million pilot plant south of Cairo, which will produce electricity for 200,000 homes for starters, and similar schemes are planned for other countries. Sequestering carbon from power stations is another major hope. But techno-fixes alone cannot offer us salvation.

China is cited by Williams as a country "riding high on optimism." It is an optimism being lived in an increasingly precarious relationship with nature. Advancing desertification in the North claims hundreds of human dwellings every year. Millions of its citizens complain of acute respiratory symptoms owing to pollution, while Shanghai is just one of many of its coastal megacities vulnerable to relatively small levels in global sea level rises. If this is optimism, it is not a soundly based view of the world.

Every human being has a right to a dignified and comfortable life. No one has a right to a lot and another to nothing. That is where justice and morality fit in. The range of complex decisions that are having to be made now have to have a strong element of moral insight. They have to embody the wisdom, right judgement and understanding that comes with a sincere love of God. The influence of the world's religions to bring this to the environmental table is being increasingly recognised as not just helpful but essential.

The whole sense of the article written by Austin Williams fails to see the contribution Christianity can make. It attempts to force a division where there is none; it seeks to destroy an endeavour that is working for good, not evil. No one who takes the role of Catholicism and the environment seriously sees people as less important than the planet. The most positive thing that can be done now is to stop seeking intellectual superiority through spurious argument and to accept the place we are in and work for change. If we fail in that task, most notably through failing to put the brakes on runaway global heating, we will have failed God. But we will also have failed ourselves and most notably those poor and vulnerable people who are least responsible for polluting the biosphere, the very ones who are in the firing line of expected droughts and floods. If the current warnings are not heeded and millions are displaced and lose their livelihoods, who then will be accused of misanthropy?

Mary Colwell is a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit. Mark Dowd is campaign strategist for the Christian environmental group Operation Noah.