Mark Dowd's talk to MPs and members of the House of Lords on Ash Wednesday (6 Feb 2008)

^{Picture: David Hunt from Warwickshire, UK}

CAFOD, who have very kindly asked me to come here and address you today, inform me that this Ash Wednesday event of spiritual reflection, is normally given over to a member of the clergy. Well the best I can offer you is just under two years training with the Dominicans back in the 1980s and since then, as some of you will know, I have been a television journalist, presenting a variety of programmes on a number of religious themes. The most recent of these, shown on Channel 4 last year, was GOD IS GREEN [note: you can watch God is Green by clicking here]. In that programme I contended that many of the world's religions had hugely positive messages about the importance of respecting creation. Sadly, with some honorable exceptions, there was and still is, a lack of courageous leadership. Humanity is sleepwalking its way towards climate disaster. The latest science from the oceans and forests on the weakening carbon sinks and reports on melting sea ice from the Arctic make for anxious reading. The post-Bali world brings us face to face with our fate. It's as though all the world's nations are trapped in a dark room. We see the slimmest of exits and an inviting light beckoning beyond, but that door is closing on us. At a conference I attended at the Royal Society of Physicians last week, numerous scientists spoke of 2015 as a cut off point. That's why I have thrown in the towel with television and decided to become a full time campaigner on this issue with Operation Noah, the ecumenical group led by Ann Pettifor, who many of you will remember from the amazing Jubilee 2000 campaign.

Christianity is a religion of realism but also of hope. Despair is never an option since God's saving word is pledged to us at all times, in this life and beyond. So, if the ecological crisis is at root, a spiritual crisis, (which I resolutely contend it is) how might we begin to pull ourselves as a species, back from the brink? What I want to place before you all today are the words uttered by Pope John Paul II in 2001. He spoke of the need for "an ecological conversion." What might that mean for us in this hour of need?

To help us, I want to take you back to my childhood a seven year old altar boy in Salford. It was there, at Ash Wednesday mass in 1967, that I first remember hearing the words : "Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Now facing up to mortality is a tall ask for one of so few years and I remember hearing these words repeatedly as I followed Father Caulfield along the rows of expectant faces. I didn't like them one bit and was more than a little relieved several years on when they were replaced on most Ash Wednesdays with the now more familiar: "Repent and believe the Gospel." Until now, I've always thought of these two sets of words as unrelated. What I want to invite you to reflect on today is the message that our present world so badly needs to embrace and take action on, namely that true repentance involves realising, once more, that we are, like the rest of creation, connected in a web. Repentance, of course, conjures up images of sackcloths and ashes and saying "sorry", but it is much deeper than that. Its etymology suggests a radical re-orienting of our hearts and minds so that we see the world totally anew. If we begin to see the world differently, we will begin to act in relation to it differently.

When I say "we are connected in a web," what does this mean? In scientific terms, it means our fate is caught up with that of a complex ecosystem of which we are but a small, if at present, rather damaging part. Biologists predict that at least twenty per cent of all present species of plants and animals are, in their words, "committed to extinction" by 2050 because of the changing atmospheric temperatures with little sign of new organisms evolving to take their place. Changes to food chains and the like will ultimately have their rebound effects on us too. How has this come about in what seems so swift a period of time?

The humility required to know our place and observe our limits was a central part of the tradition of early monasticism, celtic spirituality and latterly the prayerful outlook of St Francis. This isn't some woolly minded environmentalism that worships nature as goddess, it is that integral part of our tradition that knows that as physical creatures we possess an intimate solidarity with the earth and our fate is tied to its. When God breathes life into creation, it is the Hebrew word "ruach" , the breath of God, which binds all created matter. Nature is not God: that would be idolatry, but as Augustine reminds us, the reality of God is mirrored in but not identical with creation.

So when did it all start to go wrong? Not in 1750 and the industrial revolution, but well before. Many of our leading thinkers in the west began to speak in disturbing language that saw nature as an externality. They began to view our relationship with the natural world in purely instrumental terms, more, "I-It" than "I-Thou." Descartes talked of us becoming "Lords and possessors of nature", Francis Bacon and a whole flock of scientist rationalists in the seventeenth century did the same. In the dominant utilitarian thinking, nature became an instrumental externality manipulable from without. This mindset already held sway once the fossil fuel bonanza got under way: a process as you know that began right here in Britain. In the twentieth century, forests could then be cut down for huge profit, oceans acidified and at the back of the collective mind, was a there always a consoling thought that whatever was happening "out there" to "it" and not to us. As one Hindu guru told me when we made that God is Green film: "when we cut down the trees, we don't realise that we are sitting on the branches."

A minor villain in this disturbing play has also been a brand of fundamentalism that has sought to justify human behaviour in the name of "Dominion": a word that occurs in the early chapter of Genesis. There's a strong case that suggests that this word never meant "mastery" and suggested much greater overtones of "nurturing" or "tending to creation", as a tenant would his master's land. But the "devil can cite scripture for his purpose" as Portia tells us in The Merchant of Venice. Psalm 8 says: "Thou hast made him [man] little less than a god... made him lord over the work of your hands, set all things under his feet." Lynn White, an American ecologist in a famous 1967 critique, sought to blame Christianity exclusively for the manner in which we were plundering the planet. But this is a mindset that permeates wider and deeper in our human history: listen to the words of this Soviet commentator, Pokrovsky writing in 1931:

"It is easy to foresee that in the future, when science and technology have achieved a perfection that, as yet, we are unable to visualise, nature will become nothing more than wax in our hands which we are free to cast in whatever form we please."

The urgent priority now is to avert ourselves and thousands of other species becoming wax in nature's hands in the latter part of the twenty first century. How might genuine repentance and a re-focussing on our status as "creatures of dust" aid us in this?

CAFOD's "Live Simply" campaign is a good place to start. Consumption and waste is driving this process and genuine questions now have to be asked as to whether we worship the god of growth unquestionably, or whether we ask serious questions about the manner in which we organise our lives. Lifestyles which promote less frenetic activity with renewed emphasis on locality and community stand a much better chance of securing the inner fulfilment that thirty years of material economic growth has not delivered for us. This isn't hair-shirted "miserablist pessimism": it's about reclaiming a tradition that we once had. Detoxing means slowing down: it means allowing those moments for God to break through our hastily-erected carbon heavy defences and change our hearts.

A story to illustrate what I mean. Some weeks ago I was travelling up one Friday morning from Wimbledon on the District line. Storming through the doors at Putney Bridge came a young couple in the throes of a heated dispute. Their argument centred on the fact that there had been a breakdown of communication as to which of them was organising the social events for the weekend. Blame was being noisily apportioned on both sides in full view of a packed carriage. Nothing in the diary. Crisis! At Earl's Court, suddenly realising he had a mobile signal, the young man interrupted his journey and was heard to say to his girlfriend that he "could fix this." Now even though I was travelling up to Blackfriars, this was not a narrative I could leave in mid-air. Resembling a character out of BBC TV "Spooks" I hastily alighted onto the platform and then stood at ninety degrees to them, pretending to read my copy of the Guardian. Within two minutes, this threatening gap in their lives was speedily plugged courtesy of Lastminute.com and a 48 hour round trip to Budapest. More rushing. More distractions. Not exactly fruitful soil for the seeds of intimacy and openness to flourish.

I wonder whether there's a huge biblical precedent for all this?
In Jeremiah 5:28 the prophet speaks scathingly of contemporary society: "they have become rich and powerful, fat and sleek." The corrupt society faces the consequences:

"The nobles send their servants for water
They go to the cisterns
But find no water; The ground is cracked
Because there is no rain in the land
The farmers are dismayed and cover their heads."

In the West we face an obesity epidemic while at the same time throwing away a third of the food we consume. And this is the so-called "developed world." The trends point to a species that is radically out of sync with itself, with nature and with God.

I do not envy your task as legislators. This mother of parliaments is the very location where, in the months ahead, you will agree on measures to combat climate change. The UK is rightly proud of itself as the only country which has so far committed itself to a legal framework which will bind all future governments, but as the home of the Industrial Revolution, maybe that is only meet and fitting. We have placed ourselves in the shop window. The measures we adopt will do much to influence those crucial talks leading to Copenhagen 2009 and the Kyoto Treaty's successor. The latest science suggests that a stated target of sixty per cent cuts in CO2 emissions by 2050 is woefully weak. The talk now is of making this eighty per cent. At Operation Noah, after discussions with bodies like the Tyndall Centre and others, we are calling for a ninety per cent cut by 2030. It sounds scary no? Too radical? Politically unrealistic? Yet bear this in m mind, the former government chief scientist, Sir David King, stated that global warming constitutes a much bigger threat to our society than terrorism. In 1941, the USA, after the Pearl Harbour attack, turned society on its head through gallant political leadership. Within twelve months, the military share of the country's GDP had risen from a mere two per cent to forty per cent. Look at the threats that face us and ponder on what we invest in R and D every year into renewables and subsidies for retro-fitting of houses compared to the proposed investments in widening of motorways and expansion of airports. Surely any Martian watching us would assume we are hell bent on collective suicide?
Is it too much to suggest that every country in the G8 pledge a minimum of ten per cent of its annual military budget to the transformation of its energy economy to help ward off this huge threat to our future security?

There'll be some of you sitting here who are, no doubt, beginning to curse this upstart ex-Dominican, turned eco-nutter, for straying into the sanctuary of policy. Well, no apologies there I am afraid, for those of you who want me to render unto "Gore what is Gore's and God what is God's." For too long we have suffered from the schizophrenia of dividing religion and environment into completely unrelated categories. Politics and religion are not ultimately the same thing, but in the climate crisis that now stares us squarely in the face, a global emergency requires national and international governmental solutions. You can't throw it back on the altruism of the odd enlightened individual and church to change light bulbs and wonky old boilers. First, it's unjust that there be so many "free riders" who remain unaffected and secondly, in terms of scaling down pollution, the figures simply won't add up to where we need to get to. But my point is that these practical measures need to flow from right thinking and getting ourselves back on track. There is much in our Christian heritage that we need to dump: "dominion" thinking and a suspicion of the world as a trap sent to ensnare us. But also much to encourage us on our way: "The Earth is the Lords and its fullness" says Psalm 24; we are but a small if very sophisticated part of God's mesmerising plan.

I want to end by going back to John Paul II. Like a number of Roman Catholics, I was frequently ill at ease with a more than occasional authoritarianism he displayed in his twenty six year papacy. But I have no doubt he was an inspiring figure. In 1987, in his encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, he wrote about solidarity, "not as a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good: that is, the good of all and each individual because we are all really responsible for all."

John Paul cannot have been thinking about global warming as he wrote these words, but they are eerily prophetic. Our individual and collective polluting of the planet is absorbed into the biosphere in a way that makes us all responsible. The distinction that John Stuart Mill made between "self regarding" and "other regarding" actions completely breaks down. That the poorest of the world who pollute the least are the most vulnerable to the threats of floods, famine and rising sea levels makes this an issue of justice and peace and the development agencies like CAFOD are right to have made this a central plan of their work. But it is more than that. This issue effects us all. The climate issue is a wake up call to all of us.

We are but tiny fragments of dust in the grand kaleidoscope of God's creation. Man's urban dwelling history dates back around ten thousand years at most, a mere speck of time compared to the planet's four and a half billion year history.

We need to repent and see the world and our lives anew, observe our small place in nature and act, once more, in ways that respect limits. The world is in dire need of leadership. Those of you gathered here today, I contend, have no small part to play. I'll finish with the following words from an unlikely source:

"No generation has a freehold on this earth - all we have is a life tenancy with a full repairing lease; we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come."

Margaret Thatcher at her party conference in 1988.

We're twenty years on from when she uttered those words. If a similar period is to pass without urgent action we really will be falling back on the mercy of God. I pray those dark moments are never upon us.