Everybody Now/Transcript

Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

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Seth Price 0:00

Hey there everybody, welcome back. It’s whatever day it is that you happen to be listening to this. Today is the second of two episodes that I said were slightly different but before I get there I wanted to quickly thank both Merinda Diane and Zach Dentmon for becoming the newest Patrons of the show. If you haven’t done that, consider it. I think it’s worthwhile and I know I’m biased. You patrons make the show work-shows like this one.

So I was honored to be asked by David Benjamin Blower and Tim Nash of The Nomad Podcast to be amongst many others; I have no idea how many. To spread the word about a special episode around the climate crisis. It is called Everybody Now and there are some wonderful, and beautiful, voices in them. None of them are me and none of them are my guests but it is impactful. It is very powerful. It is full of poetry and philosophy and science and compassion and empathy and I think it’s important.

You and I, we both live here, and my children live here. We have got to get it right. We have to collectively figure out how to do something. Not just in America, not just in the United Kingdom, not just in China but everywhere. And it is going to take everybody and it needs to be now. And with that a special episode of Everybody Now.

David Benjamin Blower  01:33  

The poet Pádraig Ó Tuama 

Pádraig Ó Tuama  1:37  

The Tree of Knowledge

Having eaten only one fruit from it, we cut the tree of knowledge down

We broke its bows, ripped it from the landed, fed and fed from

some man made branches with machines. Some woman put new leaves from steel, the tree sent up its size,

lamenting that the land had held together could no longer no be held together.

From the trees remains, we made paper, but words kept on appearing on the pages with warnings that we didn't want to read. We burned it and dumped it waited. We wanted something else to save us.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook  2:49  

My name is Dr. Gail Bradbrook. I'm one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion.

I first experienced a sense of utter dread and panic around what we're doing to the environment. As a really young woman, I guess I was nine actually in a factory was being built on some land. And I didn't have any say in it. And I felt really aggrieved. And it's been there over the years. But I remember it really strongly in 2013, when I looked at images of tar sands, but mostly it's just been this feeling of hidden a hidden buoyed feeling. And then that nothing's really happening here. And we're just letting this thing run and run. And then last summer, I started to really grieve and panic and recognize that I hadn't fully faced the meaning of these times. And it's quite an unraveling when you do. I definitely have had those feelings before, but there was some weight of it that came in in the summer. I think there's something in the consciousness that shift in personally and you know, it's an opening up that happens when you grieve, because the price of love is grief and grief opens the space for love. And I think that's what's happening right now is we're facing what we've been doing to our home. And our home is heaven on earth. And I look around now with my heart more open, feeling more courageous. And I look at nature, and I'm in love, I feel hopelessly in love with life at times. And I think that's the gift of grief.

David Benjamin Blower  4:45  

The climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson

Professor Kevin Anderson  4:49  

Lets just use the barrier reef that people people know about, they've heard about that at 1.5 degrees centigrade, the estimates are that we probably will have destroyed something like three quarters, the barrier reef, but if you go to two degrees centigrade, you pretty much wipe out that whole ecosystem. So when we're not talking 1.5, it's not as if this is this is a good position to be in, it's probably the least worst position we can be in. And across a whole suite of really important emblematic ecosystems, we see high levels of destruction at 1.5. But most of them have elements of us still surviving. As you head towards two degrees centigrade, then the level of destruction of ecosystems becomes more severe to levels where sometimes some of them will simply not recover. And so whether it's in terms of rain forest cover weathers in terms of things like the coral reefs and so forth. 

But then in terms of your pest movements, agriculture, but in terms of human systems have the exposure to additional droughts and heat waves, or severe weather conditions, increased sea level rise as that plays out in the longer term. Almost all of the things that we think about in terms of climate change get noticeably worse between 1.5 and 2 degrees centigrade. Now, clearly, two degrees centigrade is better than 2.5. And 2.5 is better than 3. But I think what was important in that report was saying there here's a set of impacts that look pretty bad at 1.5 and here's a have impact at 2 degrees centigrade and then noticeably worse. 

I cannot envisage how we can now hold to 1.5 degrees centigrade of warming, I cannot imagine scenarios that would deliver such rapid cuts in emissions. But I think there's still a reasonable to outside chance we can hold below two degrees centigrade of warming. I hope to be wrong, I really would like to be wrong with the 1.5, I hope other people can come up and say, Well, here are ways that we can do this. It's the area I work on, I can't understand how you would make those sorts of changes rapidly enough. The only way that I can envisage it is that if we make all the reductions that are unnecessary for two degrees centigrade by actually cutting back on our emissions, that's primarily through three phases. One is consuming less energy in the very near term, in the medium term, to dramatically improve our use and efficiency of that energy. And the third part is to switch our energy across to zero carbon options very rapidly, indeed. 

If we do all of those things in line with two degrees centigrade. And there's technology that a lot of people talk about now called negative emission technologies, these don't exist. These are in a few pilot schemes, but mostly in the imagination of professors and academics, and on computers, and so forth. If those can be made to work, and we do everything possible for two degrees centigrade, on the outside chance that we might, if we're lucky, we might hold the 1.5. I think it's incredibly dangerous. We're now relying on those technologies that don't exist, not only for 1.5, but also for two degrees centigrade. Indeed, if you look at some of the scenarios developed for the IPCC, even some of the scenarios for three degrees centigrade, also assume lots of negative emission technologies. The benefit of those, at least the short term political benefits of those is that it means we haven't got to reduce our emissions as rapidly as we otherwise would do. 

So if you come to a country like the UK, you've got our committee on climate change, you're sort of a semi independent arm of government in many respects. And their latest report was a lot of people hell, there's been a wonder that basically, this ramped up increase still further their original assumption that negative emission technologies, so they can say things like, "yes, you can expand aviation in the UK, it's probably okay to have some shale gas and some further offshore oil and gas exploration if we're careful about this. And all of this is still possible within our Paris commitments." But the caveat to that is, if our children can develop and deploy at huge scale, these negative emission technologies

We don't know exactly how things will play out. And things are not looking positive. When we're rapidly changing sort of ecosystems and social systems, then there are going to be lots of problems and issues and challenges, and lots of pain and suffering that will emerge from these rapid changes. So we're seeing pest movements, changing rainfall, changes in heat waves, changes in migratory patterns of species and of people. As certainly patterns that the world will be moving to find more appropriate areas that are climatically more suitable to live in. And often these will play out against other existing tensions. Some people have argued that climate change is one of the exacerbating factors. And let's be clear, it exacerbated factors, it wasn't causing what happened in Syria. 

So, you know, they'd had a very long drought, and which had some implications on stressing certain communities. But then, obviously, on top of that, and much more important than that were all the other stressors that occurred there. But this is, with just one degree centigrade of warming. What we're already starting to witness is climate change exacerbating existing problems elsewhere in the world. And in Darfur, we saw changes in rainfall patterns that looked like they were linked to ongoing climate change. And that created because of the way the pasture lands were used, and because of the migration of some of the tribes and so forth, and cultures, within those communities that occur every year, that people weren't moving on as fast as they had done previously. So the next group were coming in, and you've got fighting again, there are lots of deaths as a consequence. 

So climate change plays out in ways that it builds on other tensions, at least at the moment. I think as we get increased levels of warming, what we're going to start to see is the climate change is sometimes actually the principle cause for some of these, but some of these social frictions that we see around the world. You can also see things like Haiyan which was only a devastating typhoon in the Philippines a few years ago, or indeed in Mozambique more recently, or more well covered in the media, things like Sandy, there's in New York, the storm event there. That we've already seen about 20 centimeters of sea level rise as a consequence of the additional warming from burning fossil fuels. And we are going to see ongoing increases in sea level, and they could be very significant. I mean, a meter across this century is a reasonable estimate, some people estimate, it could be quite a lot higher than that. 

What we will be seeing is a lot more across the following century or two, because we are locking it and we are setting in train now ongoing melting in Greenland and parts of the Antarctic, once we've started that is hard to imagine how you could possibly reverse it. And there are some very worrying signs that we're starting to see this happening a little bit earlier than we had expected. And this means then once we started that now,  once you trigger that, then we will be seeing changes to the land matters significant changes the land masses across the globe. And when you think (of the fact) that most cities, most people live around the coastal zones, you start to see a whole suite of really major implications for these parts of the world.

Dámaris Albuquerque  12:29   

My name is Dámaris Albuquerque. I come from Nicaragua, a country in Central America. And I'm currently directing SEPA, which Stands for the Council of Protestant Churches in Nicaragua. And Nicaragua, it's an agricultural country, and also our farmers, they do basic agriculture, not technological. So they rely on the climate for growing the crops if it's dry, if it's too rainy, then in the affects them. And our rainy season usually runs from May to November. And that has been how they have formed in the in the past, but recent years that has changed. And so we don't know when the rainy season will start or when will it end. 

And it is more has been more dry in the recent years. And also bring some flooding at the end. Because we are close to the Caribbean we get all the hurricanes in the month of October. And those hurricanes come now stronger, you know with harder rains. And that of course affects the way they grow things and we are always suffering from droughts or floods. We work with communities (and) villages, and one of the programs is directed to farmers agriculture. How they can farm in these conditions. And we teach them techniques on how to make use of their ground, how to conserve the water, soil conservation, how to use resistant seeds to the climate, native seeds. And how to grow other crops that are more resistant and also that are more short term crops so they can have food all year round. And also it's affecting water because now the rivers are drying out and are contaminated as well. In for example in Teustepe which is in the dry corridor, we call it a dry corridor. And they have a river that goes dry in during the dry season and then gets its water during the flooding season. But the water is diverted a by the rice growers. So the rice growers have enough water for their rice crops. But then the people are left without water.

All of us should have equal rights to the natural resources, to the creation. And so that then those who have more take advantage of the resources and leave the others without them.

We are hopeful for the present. But in the long run we also are affected by those phenomenon El Nino, y La Nina I don't know if you're aware of them. El Nino brings dry season. No rain. And La Nina is on the contrary, a lot of rain. And so we are afraid that there will be no water enough water. We work with farmers helping them To make what we call microdrop dams, there is a hole in the ground, you put plastic to capture water. But if the pattern continues as it is now, there will be nowhere to capture. And also we work with them with water filters, because the water that is available is contaminated. I think it will not be sustainable in the long future if we don't make any changes to protect our, our environment.

Rachel Mander  16:46  

My name is Rachel and I work for Hope for the Future. 

I had some vegetarian friends at church at university. And I was very confused as to why on earth they were vegetarian. And why they kept saying that that was part of their faith, I really didn't understand. And, so it's sort of through my friendship through them that I kind of asked questions. And I was kind of wondering what was happening with that. And then and a group of students and that I knew were also involved in the divestment movement also at university. I was like, "Oh, interesting", I will start getting a little bit involved in that. And I studied philosophy. And part of my political philosophy paper was a little section on climate change, which I found so utterly distressing. And I mean, that in a sense of like the philosophical arguments for why it doesn't matter, that climate change gets worse, because the identity of future persons isn't fixed. 

And I was alarmed that you could think that that was a reason not to act. And, sort of, I guess, once you start having something on your radar, you start noticing it in other parts of your life. And so I started on a very slippery, slippery slope into that environmental movement, which became more and more entrenched. And after I graduated and moved to London, that was just at the time that XR was starting. And so I was at that point, compelled enough that I became involved in that. And then through that, lots of other activism movements. And now I work in the sector. 

Yeah, so I started with sort of the more personal things, and that was at university. So I was vegan for lent in my second year of university. And, and most mostly, it was just like, well, I want to be able to say that I've tried it. And at the end, during Holy Week, I was like, I will reflect on this. And then that was when I started making the links between faith and the environmental movement. And I was very convicted by it. And so that was the beginning. And then the following year, I kind of made that decision that I wouldn't fly on a plane ever again, which was a big choice, but one that I felt I needed to make that sat right with me. And that still kind of helps through. 

Deciding not to fly, for example, was a huge thing for me, because it effectively meant shutting down quite a lot of the world. So previously, if someone was talking about Australia, or Indonesia, or their trips to those places, there was a sense that that could be me at some point. But now that very much isn't. But interestingly, actually, the vast majority of people on the planet don't ever get to make that choice. And I had the privilege to be able to make that choice. I think there's something really interesting about kind of a biblical parallel between you find your life when you lose that. And actually, when you make choices that are costly, you also gain in a richness of something else that I don't really know how to put into words. But that has definitely been true in my own life. And the things that I've decided in this area, is that I've it now no longer feels like a sacrifice at all. It just feels like I found new sources of life and being able to make those decisions.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook  20:00  

We're in the sixth mass extinction event that's clear from the science. It's named in the science and scientists use words like "biological annihilation" on their papers, you know. There have been five other extinction events, people know about the dinosaurs, and we're looking at, I think around a million species potentially going extinct. And if they don't go extinct, they're going to be near obliterated. One in five mammals in this country may be gone within a decade in the UK. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world. 

And that's one of the things that breaks my heart and also lifts my heart. You know, I was on an organic farm recently a small one. And there were swarms of insects, like there used to be in my childhood. And when I go to places where there are packs of sparrows, and it always seems to be the sparrows that get to me, they're like little working class birds on the hill, like impacts in a bit poured me in look in and gorgeous. So the Yeah, it's important that we are real, and I think what we stumbled across Rogers original paper that he put together was called tell the truth, and ask people to act accordingly. And it was like, let's stop doing this thing that the green movement is doing, which is pussyfooting around reality. Let's say as it is, let's tell the science as it is, and including the precautionary principle. 

So I don't know if you know, but the 2050 target the government seems to have adopted, which is a nightmare it has only a 50% chance of succeeding. So they've given themselves a target. And we know they've missed targets. And with only a 50% chance of succeeding, of keeping the temperatures in any kind of safe domain, this is not I mean, if you don't get the waiting list, right on the NHS, people will suffer and some people will die. And that's appalling. And what we're talking about here is the potential extinction of the human race, and a mass extinction of plant and animal species. 

You have to use strong words when you're dealing with things like that. And the other word rebellion, you know, it's a very British thing, in some ways, rebellion, it's not something we do easily, but we do have a history of rising up. And as we say, we're not in protest, we're in a space where the social contract is broken. You know, wherever you are on the political spectrum, you might be more centrist, or a bit more on the right. There are political commentators like Hobbes or Locke, who talks about the right to rebel and actually the duty to rebel. So the declaration of rebellion if people read that online, I think is a beautiful piece of prose. It was written by Simon Bramwell, who's one of the first people who were part of extinction rebellion and rising up. And it has that depth of Britishness in it, I think of the idea of duty and things being sacred. And how we love this land. 

You know, the the idea that you love your land, and you love your country seems to have been again, adopted by the right. Whereas I think, you know, I absolutely love this country. It's gorgeous. And I love the people, I love our humor, and love how we play with irony. I love that cringing feeling of embarrassment we have around each other, that's just ridiculous. And none of us seem to be able to get over you know. I mean, we're wonderful and we've f*ed, the world over, it's down to us to really undo what we've done and to melt our hearts.

So I was talking about tell the truth and ask people to act accordingly and the Green Movement needing to change how it does things. And we stumbled across this, well, it was Rogers idea. And it was a good idea, but it had a piece missing. When you look at Jane Martin's work, who's a psychologist, she talks about emergency mode messaging and how the Green Movement needs to move into that. So it was very much backing up on this idea that you tell people the truth, and in an emergency, a new bit of people emerge, you know, an opportunity is there within an emergency, it's not all bad. And people are willing to act according to their values. Everything else gets set aside and emergency doesn't it and you do what's necessary. And the other piece that needs to be in there is the idea of a vision that it's possibly going to work. So if your house is on fire, you are going to break in, because it's possible you're going to save your children in the bedroom or whatever, you're not going to worry about, you know, and just sit there and calculate the percentage likelihood, are you just going to go and do it because that's the right thing to do. And maybe you'll succeed. And of course, you're going to try. 

And I think for me, there is a need now to hold this vision for each other that we have woken up to what we've done, because it's a mess. And how you know, as Greta said it How dare we?! But also we were broken and traumatized. That's why we did it. We didn't realize now we're waking up to it. And falling back in love with each other in life. And it's time to clean up after ourselves. And I think that's a such an honorable way to spend our lives. I've been trying to start mass civil disobedience for a while. And through praying, I met Roger Hallam and we started organizing together and pulling meetings together in groups and other people joined us and a momentum developed to me tried out various tactics. And so it was this group called Rising Up that we named it in the end. And we would gather every few months at people's houses. So you're sitting in my sitting room and this is where we made the decision to do Extinction Rebellion. And then we gathered in a cafe in Bristol a few weeks later to start planning it. So we'd have like, I was just thinking about this room just behind there. We had embraced a Quaker where he would sleep somebody down the corridor there we thought like 20 to 30 people crashed out and if a little three bed house And it feels incredible. 

Like I actually often don't believe it's actually happening that we're now in 63 countries there's, we have a reach on social media of a million people and it's growing all the time. There's over 200 groups in the UK and it's heading so far so good, you know in the right direction in terms of numbers, it needs to have about 2 million people in the UK actively supporting a rebellion.

Alastair McIntosh  26:46  

I am a freelance academic, I have an honorary position at Glasgow University. I am an activist. My work is best known for land reform and various environmental campaigns. Also urban poverty and matters to do with human ecology as well as natural ecology.

David Benjamin Blower  27:07  

Alastair McIntosh calling in from Glasgow during lockdown.

Alastair McIntosh  27:13  

Issues of climate change and how we appraise for science of climate change have been very much on my mind and your I've used the lockdown usefully to complete that work. I'm noticing a much greater propensity to anger, to flashpoint, type stuff. And I think it's a combination of the actual effects of being in lockdown, and starting to go a bit get to get a bit rattled by it. And the whole constellation of circumstances of our time, of which the virus obviously, is one element, but by no means the only element. And in the longer term, a relatively small element compared with climate change.

Pandemics go right back in our history, you know, the earliest annals, whether from China or the annals of the Celtic monks and so on top of a peated great plagues coming upon the world. Archaeologists will tell you that when you find a deserted medieval village, or signs thereof, usually it's been a plague that have been behind the cause of it being deserted. Trends in human behavior very much increase the likelihood of pandemics. The World Health Organization, since the 1990s, have had on its pandemic section of its website a warning that pandemics are likely to happen in the future. It's not a question of if but when, and that when they do come they could kill millions. The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 killed between 20 and 40 million. The Coronavirus as of yesterday had killed 400,000 people worldwide. (that number is dwarfed today). 

And this is in a world where we have far more advanced medical support facilities than we had back then, at the time of the ending of the First World War. So yes, pandemics are likely to keep on coming to keep on hitting us. And in the case of the coronavirus. I think we can see very clearly how modern living and particularly fossil fuel driven living are key drivers in what is happening. Because fossil fuels have enabled us to live with very intense population density. So when you've got a lot of people close together, you've got a considerable pool for infections to spread combined that effect with the mandates of things like factory farming. And the intensive factory farming of animals could well be a factor in this Coronavirus. And then the third factor is that fossil fuels enable rapid transportation around the world. 

So you know, it's sort of the reason there was so much of it in northern Italy was that they had close trading links with Wu Han province, that the violence was maybe brought back there and got a foothold early on. That's only made possible because we can jump on a plane and be across the world tomorrow carrying the virus with us in ways that in the past would be a very much slower proof. And what the IPCC report on climate change and the land affairs, the one that came out last year, it says that it's a combination of changing land use, partly driven by climate change that can cause human beings to encroach into wildlife areas. 

Basically, you know, if you're a bit short on food then you go poaching for wild animals or what have you. And when you bring those back into the human food chain, there is a higher risk of epidemics and possibly pandemics breaking out. So a threat multiplier is something which you can't directly lay a finger on. But it is likely to increase other forms of threat, whether threats of agricultural failure, threats of conflict, or threats of pandemics breaking out.

I think that the EU, the pause, as I heard a friend of mine call it the other day, the way in which we've all had to go and flow, we've been laid off our work and all the rest of it. The pause has led to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. At the peak of it in China, I saw one statistic that said that CO2 emissions had reduced by 25%. But you know, still churning out 75%, most of the factories kept going, most of the agriculture kept going. And so aviation alone, we focus on it a lot, is responsible for only something like 2% of emissions. So simply dropping the planes in itself has not led to a dramatic drop in CO2 emissions. So the CO2 is still building up. And the concern that I have is that you know, what are we seeing but as soon as it's spiting, you get President Trump in America, saying that he's going to relax environmental regulations on corporations to make it easier for them to compete again. You have the Chinese advertising cars to try and get the car economy going. And here in Britain, Boris Johnson doing the same thing with reopening, not just garden centers first, but also car sales rooms first. So my concern is that we've seen a little bit of what can be done. But there is huge counterpoint pressure to bring back consumerism as usual, with all the missions that that will entail.

David Benjamin Blower  33:20  

The theologian Hannah Malcolm; calling in from lockdown.

Hannah Malcolm  33:26  

I guess it's three months now for us. My husband and I have been in lockdown in Merseyside in Manchester where we live. And my husband is more vulnerable. So we have to abide by strict social distancing rules. And I think one of the real challenges that is brought home for me as someone who has to manage my own chronic mental health condition, and who also relies quite heavily on being outside; being amongst other creatures, in order to manage my well being has been a reminder of just how uneven access to other creatures access to the living world is for people in our country. The losses of green space, losses of other creatures, the loss of living worlds is getting much more keenly felt in low income neighborhoods, and communities. And something like how much local park how much green space per person in a neighborhood, it's a really telling measure of the uneven ways that we treat each other. 

Historically, we've made this theological distinction between natural evil and moral evil. Which has been our way of dealing with the fact that some kinds of bad things that happen in the world we can say, Well, that was the direct result of human sinfulness and other bad things that happen, seem to be part of, you know, being in systems of violence more generally. So a natural evil might be something like an earthquake that kills people. Moral evil is a person that goes out and kills people. And one of the consequences of climate breakdown has been that the lines between moral and natural evil have become really blurred. So, we know that this virus is a consequence of our sinful relationships that other creatures, and lots of people have made the connection that environmental destruction makes viruses jumping from animals more likely. And that also, as climate breakdown continues we're going to see more and more of these kinds of events. So things like SARS, Bird Flu, and coronavirus. Those kinds of epidemics and pandemics are going to become more and more frequent and wrapped up in that kind of blurring of those lines between what we've maybe traditionally considered human space. is a non human spaces is that you know, that's the result, that blurring partly, of our prioritization and our current economic models over everything else. And so I think it's fair to say that the two are kind of inextricably linked.

I think this is the moment of, you know, it's a revelatory moment where we have a glimpse of both our capacity and our willingness for responding to global disruptive events. One of the things people have said about Coronavirus, you know, has been that it's demonstrated that we are capable of quite rapid and far reaching change. Our emissions globally have dropped by 17% since lockdown began. And that I mean, that's really not very much given that we need to reach a kind of net zero state, but it's also worth bearing in mind that really nothing actually has changed. We haven't really changed our our habit, we haven't really changed the way we consume things. We haven't really changed our energy systems. And our economic system has changed slightly, but not really. I suppose the thing that I found quite difficult to hear in people's comparisons between something like this pandemic, and wider climate and ecological collapse has been, you know, people say things like oh nature's healing itself, or humans with the virus after all, because of stories like clean air, you know, animals returning to cities, that kind of thing. Or, you know, nature has sent us to our rooms to think about what we've done. 

And one of the ways that we can talk maybe with more clarity about the relationship between something like a pandemic of scale, and learning how to change our behavior, is that we can make distinctions between changes in activity and the human beings involved in them. So people have said things like, "Oh, well, there's fewer people on the road, and so the air is cleaner". Well, that's not true. What it is, is there are fewer cars on the road, that have made the air cleaner. And that kind of distinction might seem really small. But it challenges that underlying current in our thought that human life should be seen as at best separate from, at worst, the enemy of other creatures. That shift in the way we imagine our relationships to the world around us, I think will create the space for us to do the creative and transformative work we need to do. We can't imagine that it's a binary of choosing between human flourishing and the flourishing of the living world.

David Benjamin Blower  40:00  

Poet Zena Kazeme

Zena Kazeme  40:03  

You bring me a doll and tell me to point to where it hurts.

I tell you, I need an atlas. Bring me a globe. I placed my fingertip on the northernmost point and let it spin before me and watch grand mountains and dying oceans and pillaged forests, and lifetimes pass before my eyes and wonder how I would rearrange it.

If the earth was just a small sphere in my hand, I'd fill in the disappearing coral reef with the colors the world is so ready to forget. I'd dip both hands into the oceans of time and carry back home the extinct species to the seas. 

I'd take the water from the melting ice caps in buckets, so the barren deserts move the unsung clouds from our gray skies to drought stricken lands and fill the hands of farmers extended in prayer with the rain we so readily complain about. 

I'd move the bulldozers out of the rain forest so that the trees will not be disturbed. their frustration to the Lord and take them instead to the separation wall in the West Bank in Palestine. 

I'd bring watercolors, the calmest blue, the brightest yellow, to paint over the black blankets of pollution, shrouding continents in eternal darkness, hanging of a factories, when little hands stitch their childhood into the hem of our skirts, watching their lives pass by in the reflection in the small, intricate mirror work on our dresses. 

When I have finished around my finger along the borders, erase the sketch marks of the colonizers, until the globe is no longer a map, 

until the world map is erased from history. And the earth returns to just being God's canvas, ready to be adorned by tomorrow's hands.

Rowan Williams  42:24  

I'm Rowan Williams, the Master of Magdalene College in Cambridge, I first woke up to some of the environmental crisis in my 20s. I was that generation that I suppose picked up from Rachel Carson. And then Schumer her those early voices, the first swallows of the summer, if you like, talking about the devastation that we were creating, and it clicked for me very, very strongly with some of the work I was doing as a theologian at the time. I was working on Eastern Christianity, which has a very powerful sense of how the natural world carries the energy of the Divine. And how that teaches us kind of veneration to the material environment we're in. It's easy enough to construct a story about Western civilization where, at some point, everything goes completely wrong. It's never as simple as that. But there is a watershed moment somewhere in the 16th - 17th century, where you can actually see (that) somehow the gulf between mind or spirit and body a bit wider.

And the sheer resourcefulness of the human mind and exploring the material world draws people into this myth of the active mind and the passive world. Here am I, the maker, the questioner, the inventor, famously in the image that Francis Bacon uses right at the start of the scientific revolution, "I put nature on the rack, I tortured nature to make her give up her secrets". 

It's a very powerful image and a very telling one, not least in its gendered nature. I put the female body of nature there where I can probe and intrude and impose. And that male, dominating, head not heart, mind not body, that's a strong myth in Western society, and it dies hard. You'll still have people, a very distinguished American philosopher, saying, "at the end of the day there is just stuff". And what he means by there is just stuff is actually there is just stuff plus people like me who write books or philosophy about it. And what we lose in that is the sense of involvement and interdependence with the world in that world out there, or something we're not part of. And there is that moment, in 16th 17th century, where the Gulf really starts opening up.

If you look at the history of science in the 17th century, there's a sort of battle going on, on the surface between people who still hold to a more mythological, mystical, participate or even magical view, whether it's in the poetry of Thomas Traherne, or actually in some of the philosophers who start the Royal Society. They're not all Francis Bacon types, who were very conscious of the immense complexity of factors and energies flowing together in the world, and are still not quite sure whether they are scientists or magicians. And then you have the people like Francis Bacon, for whom, no, it's simple, it's, it's out there. It's dead. Just cover it up and label it. The carving up and labeling tends to win over couple of centuries that follow Then very, very slowly. It's as if we're steering back towards a deeper sense of interaction and involvement. And so many powerful scientific minds of the last few decades have moved in that direction. People who say, well, let's face it, the world seems to be intelligent in a way we, we've never really reckoned with. The world exchanges information in a creative way. That's what the material world is. It's bigger than we thought.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook  46:49  

I think Wendell Berry said something like there are no unsacred places, there are just sacred places and desecrated places. And we look at what we're doing to the earth and how we're trashing her and trashing ourselves. It's a deep separation from our own inherent sense of purpose and love and our connection to our ancestors and the next generations to come after us. It I don't think that change comes driven by the intellect has its place in terms of planning things and understanding, you know, tactics and things like that. So it's definitely got its role, but ultimately, it has to be rooted in the heart. And I think that words like "sacred" is something that can speak to people to say that this is something of deep meaning that we're doing together. And I think it's important that things are rooted very deeply in our bodies. And that's how I feel that word.

David Benjamin Blower  48:24  

Reverend John Swales

Rev., John Swales  48:27  

Something built up sort of respecting creation, you know, filled in on online petitions, noticed a bit of Greenpeace stuff, and whatever, but really just going on about my life, just a general level of awareness, then about eight months ago, and a couple of things happened. One, my daughter went on one of the youth strikes, so I just got interested in the climate stuff. At the same time, I was preparing a series of talks on the book of Revelation. A series of sermons in that central part of the book of Revelation, it talks about famines, it talks about wars. And I started noticing parallels between what Revalation was talking about, and the climate discussion. So during that time of sermon prepping, I got into climate science, reading reports, reading a number of books, listening to podcasts. And I started to see that my general awareness of greenhouse gases and that we may have a problem at some point was was misguided. It wasn't enough that this is an emergency situation. That very likely, within my lifetime, almost definitely, well, definitely within the lifetime of my kids. We are, unless something drastically changes, we're going to see a world of mass starvation, global migration, and societal collapse. 

And, quite frankly, that terrify me…it disturbed me. And my peers, and colleagues, weren't talking about this. And so I said, well, I must be wrong. So let's do more research. Let's listen to more stuff. Let's see what's out there. Let's get a mainstream view. And actually, the more I researched into it, the my I realize yes, there's variety. There is different opinions in the scientific community, but the consensus is unless we've changed things drastically, the future looks tragic. The IPCC report, they say we've got another 10 years really to sort of really get a grip of decarbonizing radically or that the future is one which will be really incompatible with human existence. But the UN Secretary General last year, he said we've got two years to do something drastic. Yes, there's differing opinions there. But both of them are saying this is an emergency situation.

So I preached my series on the book of Revelation and I noticed the parallels. That in this beastly force that is at work today, the unholy trinity of unrestrained capitalism, of consumerism, and individualism and I'm complicit with their power and force. And now my eyes are open. And as I look at the climate science as we try and predict the future, well, all hell in one sense has broken out.

Climate change is a threat multiplier. We will see more wars, we will see more famines, we will see more disease, we'll see more refugees. All hell is beginning on one account. But what we see now in the Western world in a shadowy way we will quite soon see in technicolor. And I think what we'll see in the coming coming years, is people waking up and grieving for a future which will no longer be.

Actually, after preaching the series on Revelation, I fell ill with a chest infection. And for about eight weeks, I was really laid up in bed, antibiotics not working, staying awake at night, and crying I'd put my kids to bed, and I'd be crying for a future which will no longer be in a place of grief and lament. And at that time struggling to pray. But that changed and developed into a really prophetic calling of speaking truth, to power. 

So I feel as uncomfortable calling to speak out on these issues with as much clarity as I can. I would probably say that that grief is still there. So an example would be this morning I woke up in about half an hour of getting up, you know, having a coffee suddenly sort of kicks in, you know, I've reminded of that normal life nowadays takes place in the context of this catastrophe, which is unfolding. But grief can be a process. And for myself, I've been able to move from grief, which is almost like denial, then paralysis, to then being able to move forward with some level of hope. Or to go with Brueggeman I was in a place of orientation. My world makes sense. I understand the climate science and grieving, I'm in a place of disorientation. I don't know who I am, I don't know what the world is anymore. My worldview is collapsing and changing around me. 

But now I'm in a place of reorientation. So I'm not back at the beginning. I have grieved and I grieve and there is some despair in that. But actually I've moved into another place where I've reoriented my worldview, which means that I can actually get out of bed and do things and part of that would be leaning into lament, but then also leaning into the activism.

My hope is I'm more present in the present. I thought I could dictate and control the future, you know, just in the sense of that's how I imagined things I can't in the present I can really be there. So trying to notice more. I'm trying to appreciate the Earth better. I'm trying to appreciate things like laughter, joy, just family dynamics. And that life is a gift. I think that's breaking into the present, I can have a glimpse and a foretaste of what I still hope deep down will one day be of the restoration of all things and all tears wiped away.

Rowan Williams  55:47  

Grief is different from despair.

Despair says nothing will change inside or outside.

Grief says things have changed and things will change. If they're to change for the better rather than the worse. I've got to understand the grief and go into it and somehow makes sense of it.

So, yes, I grieve for the future in the sense that I think my children and grandchildren will live in a smaller world than I live in. And that's on the very best, the most benign forecast, but not so benign forecast is they'll hardly be a world at all. But at the very best, you know, we'd be living in a world where resources are shrinking, where biodiversity is all the time being eroded. And therefore, where anxiety, conflict, and rivalry are ratcheting up all the time. I think it's appropriate to grieve. That that's how change may work. That's where change will take us. But looking at it with intelligence, with imagination, looking at some of the roots of that in ourselves. That's what turns us away from despair. That's what says, change doesn't have to work one way. That if I'm prepared to look in, as well as look around, maybe there are other sorts of changes. 

Recently, I came across a wonderful phrase which said that we're homesick for the rest of creation. And that...that puts it very well. There is a kind of desolation, which I suspect, a lot of people are feeling, at the not quite conscious level of desolation that our company in this world is shrinking. The company of sentient beings, the company of others who shared this this space. And people often now feel this impulse to go and expose themselves to a Wilder environment. People talk about rewilding their environment, because they're aware that the sort of solitary humans only territory we've created, is really, really stifling us.

When we think of the bad old days in South Africa, and all this sign saying whites only. Occasionally, I think there's just a little bit of an analogy with the world in which we're putting up notice saying humans only, as if we really did not want to share our space with the rest of organic life. Now, the effect of that is, of course, to cut into our own flesh, almost literally, to cut into our own readiness to be fed and to be nurtured by the environment we're in as if we really don't want to be receiving what makes us grow and flourish. So yes, there's loss, there's bereavement there, and I think that image of homesickness is a very powerful one. That seems to be what people are experiencing. 

In a strange sort of way, I think the real impact on my faith has been to make me more and more aware of the way in which life, intelligence, and interaction permeate everything.

It's as if I've been weaned more and more away from the idea that there's a lot of passive stuff out there, there's an active mind in here inside me, to see that mind, consciousness moves in everything, that if the world really is in the hands of God, and part of the act of God, then God moves in everything. And the big mistake we make is to think that the world is just a lump of dead stuff. So in a strange way, I'd say the crisis has woken me up to a deeper sense of the vitality of things, the interconnectedness of things. We've discovered in thinking about the environmental crisis more and more vividly how much we depend on each other. How what seems to be a relatively small shift in the biosphere actually upsets all kinds of aspects of the ecology overall, we've discovered that a little adjustment in local ecology can have consequences across the globe.

We look at the problems that species of bees have and the effect that has on crop production and fertility. How the reduction in biodiversity along bee populations is not just something about bees are not just a problem of bees. It's a problem about the entire biosphere in which the bee operates. It's just one example. 

And when we see that interconnection we see I think more and more vividly, how the presence and agency of the Creator is just there working knitting itself together in every aspect--where we are and what we are. Jesus, it seems to me, in the gospels, is saying two things simultaneously. Saying, there is a great crisis coming. And for him, it was mostly the terrible crisis and tragedy that overtook the Jewish people in the first century. There was a great crisis coming, it's a time of testing, it's a time when everything will be turned inside out. Don't kid yourself, don't lie to yourself, things are serious. And the world is running down in some sense.

He also says at the same time, stand firm, be confident that you are loved and you're worthwhile. When you have that confidence, that you are reconciled, you are loved, you have the confidence to share that reconciliation and love with others, start now. Don't leave until tomorrow! Accept the offer of love and reconciliation, make that offer yourself today. And whether or not the crisis comes or what happens the day after tomorrow, you will be alive now. I think that's a rather pointed, address to us as we are today. Yes, things are dire and there's no guarantee that we will resolve the challenges of climate change. It is possible that we've passed the tipping point. But don't be passive. There is a better way of being now. And if you start living like that now, if you change now, well, who knows what was possible.

In other words, the end of the world is nigh-don't panic, which is a very strange message. The end of the world is nigh, you can still live, you can still change. It's still worth being human.

Rachel Mander  1:03:23  

I was just thinking about the IPCC report, and three to four degrees this century, and then 1.5 degrees. And I think for the first time it worked out hold I would be, and it's like 35, probably, when we hit 1.5 degrees. And I'd never quite let my thought process get to the realization that in all likelihood, I will see a world of 1.5 degrees and then two degrees, and then three. How on earth do I grieve for that? I don't really know. And so yes, of course, there are moments that it comes home and you're like, Wow, this is so much bigger than I am. And I don't actually know how to comprehend that just in my mind, I really don't. And at the same time, I have a real eschatological hope of life comes after death. And that love wins. And that light is stronger than the darkness. And so I hold on to like a very real sense that when you kind of plant some plant a seed in the ground, and you leave it in darkness, and you're like, How on earth would that grow? And yet it does. But that also applies to so many situations around us. And I fundamentally do not believe that there is anything that is irredeemable. And that is what I hold to.

So many people give me hope, and inspire me, so many people. And even, it's really little things. It's the people from the local environmental group sending me a postcard. It's watching people above the age of 70 underneath the track at Marble Arch and April rebellion chained onto it. And it's people who read me a beautiful bit of poetry, and like Wow, what an amazing gift of beauty that is. And seeing people who all say, care about this. And even people who don't care about it. Everyone models, something of life, and of goodness and of truth and beauty. And all of those things give me hope and they all inspire me in different ways.

Song  1:04:38  

Rowan Williams  1:08:57  

What is living the broadhall found between narrow walls what is acknowledging, finding the one root under the branches tangle. 

What is believing watching at home to the time arrives so welcome. What is forgiving, pushing your way through thorns to stand alongside your old enemy? 

What is singing? The ancient gifted breath drawn in creating? What is labor but making songs from the word and the wheat? 

What is it to govern kingdoms? A skill still crawling on all fours and arming kingdoms? A knife placed in a baby's fist.

What is it to be a people? A gift lodged in the hearts deep fields. What is love of country? Keeping house among a cloud of witnesses.

What is the world for the wealthy and strong? A wheel turns and turns? What is the world's to Earth's little ones? A cradle rocking rocking.

Professor Kevin Anderson  1:10:28  

For me personally there was no revelation in relation to climate change and no moment I suddenly think or wake up one day think this is an issue I've got to spend the rest of my life working on and I should hasten to add that I really you know I really some respects wish I'd never left my my earlier careers and now as I was used to work. In the Merchant Navy I spent my early life training as an engineer to work on ships traveling around the world carrying cargo and started to be interested in issues of climate change. And then I went back to university to study issues of climate change and with various small breaks in between are basically working on it since the 1990s. But at no point did I wake up to think this is the most important issue. It was a gradual evolution and that evolution came across I think because it became increasingly evident that we were choosing to fail. Who's the we? I mean, the high emitting people in our world that have the privilege of being able to understand these issues. 

So I think there's sometimes deliberate ignorance, sometimes willful ignorance, if you like, and others that then will deliberately massage our own assumptions and storylines to delude both ourselves and other people about our responsibility, the high emitters responsibility, and about the fact is that we have the agency to act, but choose not to. Our emissions in 2018 were about 67% higher of carbon dioxide than they were in 1990. And even a country like the UK has made almost no shift and its emissions since 1990. And other countries, progressive countries like Sweden, France, and Denmark have seen no reduction in emissions, since 1990. 50% of global emissions come from 10% of the world's population. 70% of emissions come from just 20% of the population. Then there are highly unequal countries like the UK, or in the US, for instance, then those those breakdowns are not that dissimilar. So it is not normal people driving occasionally and older and older car, living in a terrorist house or living in rented accommodation. These are not the people who are really the main causes of climate change in the country like the UK, they are the professors, the barristers that the well paid teachers, they, you know, there's a seat more senior people on on the moderate to high and the very high incomes in the UK. And broadly, the higher income, the higher the emissions, by and large, these the people responsible for the lion's share of missions, even in the UK. And yet we still describe futures where by we almost look at everyone as if they're all the same. And at the moment, we are still discussing and so most academics, about bolting climate change on to business as usual. This is a fundamental change to business as usual, because we have chosen to fail on reducing emissions for 30 years.

Rowan Williams  1:13:03  

What we have to address at the moment, of course, is not just one clearly defined, clearly focused enemy. It's a system. It's a complicated spider's web of practices and assumptions and vested interests, extending from right from the top end of the fossil fuel industry through to everything that the fossil fuel industry fuels investing investment policies that go with that, right through to food miles on the supermarket. Yeah. Where do you start with all that? That's, that's one of the difficulties. And that's why whatever options the individual might make about adjusting, as I've said, making the small changes that can be made, there are things that only coordinated action from higher up can really make a difference, too. So pressure on governments pressure on governments to cooperate, becomes enormously important. So yes, speaking to power is a key elements.

Dámaris Albuquerque  1:14:11  

They have the biggest responsibility, because also the Bible says that he who has more has more responsibility. And they have been the ones who have taken have abused our our resources, and our people and everything to their advantage. So now it's their turn to stop doing that and start trying, changing that. Because if they don't change, every little effort that we do here is important, but it won't be the same. So it's their responsibility to stop looking at their pockets and start looking at the people.

Rowan Williams  1:14:55  

Power is what it is partly because it practices being deaf. So sometimes the volume has to be turned up. In the last year or so the emergence of extinction rebellion, the development of the school strikes and so on. This seems to be a matter of turning up the volume.

Nonviolent civil disobedience, what you might call the theater of nonviolent protest.

Just as a witness to the depth of conviction, the depth of concern that has already clearly had an impact.

People sometimes ask about the legitimacy, the morality if you'd like, of defying the law or resisting the law, breaking the law. And what's important then is to ask what what is the law for law is to conserve the stability and security of a society. We have a legal system, we have police, we have courts, so that people will feel that they have somewhere to go if they're damaged, hurt, robbed, offended, etc. What if you live in a world where the very possibility of stability and security is being undermined by a lot of the practices we take for granted in our economy? Then you have been a way to drive back towards the first principles of law, say, Yes, okay. I am defying or transgressing this particular regulation for the sake of law itself, that is for the sake of a society which has security, stability, justice, etc. And I accept the consequences. If I break the law, I go to jail, fine. But I'm calling the law to account in terms of its own first principles.

Rev., John Swales  1:17:50  

In Leeds we set up with a few like minded people set up Christian Climate Action Group in Leeds, and then a few of us decided to go down to the October rebellion. And it has to be one of the most strange, beautiful, sad, holy experiences, which I have had. At one point ours we had a bit of a choir formed, there was protesters, grandparents locked on to each other and locked onto the ground, refusing to move because and they're going to be arrested, but the police are waiting for the bolt cutters and whatever to arrive. So I found myself walking the streets of London and weeping, crying.

Like leading morning prayer by a hearse, where people have locked themselves on to the hearse, and you're there praying for people in joining with the protesters and finding my liturgy changing with the context. This needs to change the language that we use. I found myself reaffirming people's baptisms in Trafalgar Square, becoming more aware than ever, that the buildings and the architecture around are representative of power and industry and the powerful. And instead of saying to people do your turn from sin, would I change that make it more specific to the context do you turn from unrestrained capitalism, consumerism and individualism? And then the people I'd reaffirmed the baptism would head off into the city of London to be arrested- a very strange situation to find myself in.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook  1:19:51  

What's interesting with civil disobedience, I often think people like it in the past and not buy it in the past and go, Oh, the wonderful suffragettes or Martin Luther King or Gandhi. And then when you do it today, it's problematic and annoying. And actually, we have a history of civil disobedience in this country that, you know, people often again, point to the suffragettes, but since then, you know, there were mass trespasses. And that's why we have the right to Rome. And, you know, people like the Ramblers Association came out of mass trespass. We had people pulling up GM crops and get involved in civil disobedience, including Prince Charles. So we have a good tradition of it and it's about doing what's right. Duty is to honor sacred law and the law of love. And civil disobedience is a manifestation of that. And I also see it is very initiatory because we're stuck in a system that wants us to stay quiet and wants us to keep our heads down and keep consuming. It's very narcissistic. It's very self indulgent. And there's something about saying "I do not stand by this system". And when you commit an act of civil disobedience, it's a breaking of your relationship with something, it's a Rubicon to cross. And when people do it, they have an inner transformation very often. It has an element of trickster in it as well, it has an element of mischief in it potentially, but certainly an element of sacred service.

Rachel Mander  1:21:28  

So I was really amazed getting into the environmental movement, holding a space, which is sort of inherently confrontational, because you're saying, I don't like the status quo. And I want to be counted as being anti that. And as someone who I really dislike conflict, I cannot tell you how much I dislike it, I find that incredibly difficult space to hold, but also a really powerful one. And I think there's something about stepping outside of the ordinary, into something that feels extraordinary, that opens your eyes to other dimensions of the extraordinary as well. And so when I'm standing in a place that I can sometimes feel a little bit nervous about, I'm also most open to God and I find it an amazing place to pray, and also an amazing place to have fellowship with other people. Because my experience with the environmental movement is a lot of people are wrestling with and acknowledging their own brokenness, and that of what they see in the world and the people around them. And they're working out how do I go forward with this? Oh, I think, kind of love, hope, sacrifice all of these different ideas. They're all very much open questions that people have. And there's a lot of divergent opinions about where they're moving towards as well. But it's a space that's very open to, I guess, the cracks and brokenness and vulnerability. And it's a really amazing place for connection with other people and to experience church, in a different sense of that word.

Rev., John Swales  1:23:07  

In my job here in Leeds, I work closely with the police. I'm a friend of the police received grants from the police for the work I do. In the context of the October rebellion. I was struck by both the human-ness of the police, but also struck by that how they are a tool of the state. So while I was there, a section 14 was declared for the whole of London, which meant it was illegal for myself to gather with a couple of others under the name of Extinction Rebellion, even if you weren't committing an offense, except for the section 14 green in place. And that's gross misuse of power. So in one sense, the police aren't friends, they are there to do their job. And at the same time, every police officer is, is made in the image of God, if I get to know each police officer individually, I'm getting to know something of more of what God is like.

This is a situation where there's maybe 30 people are locked on, you know, locked onto baths locked onto structures. And I was weeping. Weeping because it was beautiful. The police were there dragging people away. And the people sat on the ground (and) were singing songs of peace. And I'm upset because I'm seeing you know, grandmothers and scientists and professors and teachers and builders been dragged away by the police. And the police officer came up to me and said, Are you alright, then? I said no, not really. And she said, Why is that? I said, Well, I've got some questions. She goes, What are those? I looked at that try to catch your eye. And I said, at what point...at what point is a police officer does your conscience, not allow you to do what you've been ordered to do? And she leaned forward. And she said to me, You need to know. I've handed in my notice. I've only got two weeks left. And I've already been in touch with XR to be one of their police liaison officers. 

I went there with the intention of getting arrested. Just before I went my Nana, my grandmother died. And I had a funeral which I had just a couple of...couple of days ago, which I was leading. And I decided not to add extra upset. So I was in a strange place where I went there with the intention of getting arrested, but then was actually trying to avoid arrest, which was more difficult than I thought. I was getting stopped and another collar on walking around London with a retired friend, police officer would come up and say, Are you a protester? I'd say yes. And he said the only place you go to now is Trafalgar Square. And I would say I'm not going to commit an offense. I'm not going to sit in the road. I just want to go to Westminster Abbey in prayer and I was told very clearly, the only place you can go to now you have no permission to go anywhere else. It took everything within me not to sit on the floor there and then and get arrested.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook  1:26:26  

In this country, we have, in my view, a kind of pretense of a democracy. And any ways that we break the law are a way of saying that this land no more is being used in a healthy way in this land. And therefore I need to break them all to make myself be heard. People don't pay attention, when you stand on the sidelines holding the banner, unfortunately. They can have some value right into your MP signing a petition going on a march. they can help raise awareness of something. But frankly, we've been doing that for 30 years and carbon dioxide emissions have gone up 60%, it hasn't worked out. And I think people have to understand that. Civil Disobedience has got a long history. And there's a lot of evidence that that is the thing that makes the change. It's a confrontation stage. And it's done respectfully, and with dignity and with beauty and with fun. And with compassion, then it makes sense.

Dámaris Albuquerque  1:27:23  

The first thing is organization, because when they start working together, then they find thecommon goals that they have as a community. When they start identifying needs and prioritizing needs and making plans together, then they are encouraged and continue working. Every community has to have a Community Plan taking into account needs, both from men and women, and from youth-from children. So everything is included in that plan. And we say don't make a big plan that you won't be able to fulfill. Do small things. And then we say here are the laws. And we teach them some laws about community participation, about natural resources, about water. So they can go and speak to the local, their municipal, authorities. And say, here is our plan here are needs what is in your budget for us. And so they may be road repairs, electricity, water schools, anything. And then in some of our community leaders now have become council members. And so that gives them more strength.

Professor Kevin Anderson  1:28:55  

There are huge political structural issues that we have to address. But I don't see the division. Often there's false dichotomy in my view between the individual and the structure, the state, the policy realm, these are two sides of the same coin. We work as a partnership is a messy partnership between bottom up and top down, they're not separate things. So policymakers may very occasionally come up with wonderful ideas themselves, but almost always, they're influenced by other things they've seen around them. And often those things have emerged from some sort of grassroots change. And we don't know where they play out. It isn't an emergent system. But those things generally, somewhere, will play out in other people around us in our institutions that may play out then in terms of local councils that may play out in terms of changing an agenda, a dialogue that policymakers at a national level, or indeed an international level may start to have. There are three elements to it. As I see, for us, the first thing, we need to identify the large carbon footprint components in their own lives. This is not too challenging if you sit down to think Well, where do my main carbon emissions come from? is basically where do we use most of our energy? Actually, the emissions savings we get if we try to make those changes, which we need to do, are not that important. But what is important is it gives us the credibility to talk about that with our friends, our families, and our work and so forth. 

So there's really clear psychological evidence to say that if you want to try to have debates and arguments, then actually, your credibility is improved if you're trying to do these things yourself, particularly if you can talk about how difficult it is or how easy you found it. So those discussions and dialogues are facilitated by us trying to do these things. But the emissions themselves, let's be clear, are much less important than the idea. It opens up the scope for localized dialogue. That localized dialogue then plays out within our universities, within our schools, our hospitals, wherever we happen to work. In our sports clubs, with our friends, down in the pub, all of those things. We start a new dialogue. But we also need to engage directly with our companies and with the institutions that we're more directly involved with, with our local councils. I think about what solutions we can come up with if people are putting forward things that completely counter to responding to climate change. Then emphasize those things. Use our local media, use local radio, write letters, write emails, engage via social media. There are lots of ways that we can have a saner influence, we may not always be right. We think ideas are good. We have listened to other people's ideas. So listening, not just hearing other people are saying, and then evolving our own ideas. But I think there's a well beyond that as well to to engage at the national level, policymakers, particularly most of the European countries, the democratic process is still incredibly rich and really open to many people to have engagement. I know we criticize it all the time. But I think we, we are far too cynical about our political processes. Write to our MPs go to the surgeries, critique what they say when the things don't fit, but also be very supportive when they're making difficult politics decisions that are broadly in line with our commitments. It is driving a much stronger agenda across all of these tiers from our immediate, local vicinity to our, to our sort of towns and villages and communities, to the national level. And we as citizens, I think can engage across all of those. So we need to open up space for this dialog as wide as we can, it must, we must, make sure we get much greater cultural buy in here.

Sometimes these other conditions will have different cultural framings different ways and look at the issues, different sets of insights that could be really revealing to the rest of us as well. So we need that wider portfolio of of thinking about these issues. And we need to develop new narratives. Not just a narrative about a progressive future, but multiple narratives about progressive, low carbon, equitable future. We need to reconsider what do we mean by value? What do we mean by rewarding success? And we need to have a better concept of time. So rather just be thinking about short term. Think about the longer term our children, our children, children and our children's children's children, and about other species as well, the nonhuman world, the world, the more than human world. I think one of the problems we have had is we have taken post enlightenment, a very reductionist view of the world, it's been phenomenally successful, let's not pretend otherwise. 

Reductionism, post enlightenment, along with the fossil fuels have provided us with lots of really wonderful things in our society. But what we've been really poor at doing is understanding the system implications of that sort of reductionism, and of our level of sort of extraction from society-abstraction from it in some respects, but are also extraction from it in terms of materials. And I think we have been very poor at that and now are really struggling still, to understand system implications. Whilst we are excellent at looking at more more detail of a smaller, smaller part of the system, we seem to be almost like genetically almost unable to stand back and look at the bigger system implications. But I think we have to start doing that. And sometimes maybe other cultures have been better at doing that than than the dominant Western culture that we're seeing, certainly around us in the Northern Hemisphere and influencing other parts of the world, perhaps unduly influencing other parts of the world. 

Ultimately, it is going to be a messy partnership on every single level, between the seven and a half billion people living on this planet. Between us and other species, as well, between technologies and politics, and the social sciences and the humanities, there are no silver bullets to this problem. There are no very clear pathways, and there probably won't be a single clear pathway. It's gonna be an iterative learning process. But we can't sit on our laurels anymore, we have to start to respond immediately. We should have responded yesterday. And because we didn't, it's much more profound, the rates of change that we require today. But we need we need a much wider constituency of voices to be heard if we are going to respond in any reasonable fashion, to the challenge that we have brought on ourselves.

Dámaris Albuquerque  1:35:11  

Well, we believe that this Earth is not ours. It was created by God. And Jesus came here to Earth, I believe. And he lived among us. He felt what we felt what humankind felt. And he saw the needs and he saw... 

I like the passage when he fed a multitude-5000 men, women and children. He could have made a miracle, you know, out of nothing and brought the bread and feed the people. But he said, Do you have something, you feed them? And they you know, we don't have anything. So he said "anything, nothing!" Well, he was a child with five loaves of bread and two fish in the hands of Jesus that multiplied, we are not asked to be just, you know, waiting that everything comes from heaven. We have to do our share, we have to find that resources look around in a collective way. And He then told the disciples, tell the people to sit down on the green grass. So you can use the Earth, you can use the grass, you can use whatever is in your hand, but collectively, it will be extended to everyone in everyone was filled. That's what it says. 

So I believe that as Jesus came to teach, to preach, and to heal, we are also commanded, because he also said, "As the Father sent me, I'm sending you". So its the same mission that Jesus came to do an earth that is our mission to care for everyone else. And of course, to care for creation, as well.

Rowan Williams  1:37:23  

This recognition of interconnection with things is I suppose what shows itself in the greater openness, simply understanding how it works kind of science that really does explore intelligent exchange. It shows itself, above all, I would say, in a sort of sympathetic patience with the processes of nature, we don't try to get shortcuts, and quick fixes the natural world, it's not that we just leave it alone. But our involvement with it becomes something that let's prepare to spend a bit longer feeling of the grain of things, not making dramatic, overwhelming interventions. So the good gardener listens to the soil and the season and the nature of the plant. A good gardener doesn't say, my main job is to get this garden full of the same flowers 12 months through. A good gardener says the interventions I make, the action I take will have to be somehow, you know, in and around how things actually grow.

So too much intervention, too much technological triumphalism about how we engage with the world is part of the problem. Scaling that back of it, learning about walking at the pace of the world around us, I think is how it shows itself. And that's why I'd say things like sometimes in the past, gardening and cooking a good for us, they show us what can't be hurried. Maybe that unhurried relation is the way we show that we've got the point.

Dr. Gail Bradbrook  1:39:20  

So we say that tell the truth, you know, that's our request. And that has to be for ourselves as well. And so telling the truth is about speaking to your friends and family, neighbors about this crisis in an honest way. And about the rebellion in an honest way. We don't know it's gonna succeed, and we don't know what can be saved. And if we just make it sound like oh, yeah, if we just worked really hard. And we rebel and then we're going to turn this thing around, everything's going to be okay. It just doesn't feel honest. 

I suppose the question is, how bad could it be? That there are so much heat locked in to the system already tipping points are already been breached-the ice is melting? And what would it look like if we really took this emergency seriously, in the next year or so. And we went into this for want of a better analogy, a wartime approach or wartime economy. And I don't mean that we're in war with anything but that spirit of like, actually, we're in a crisis, and we've got to all pulled together and do something here. On the one hand, we have to try. Ultimately, it comes back to this point of what's the right thing to do? Is arriving just to roll over and give up in despair? Well despair is not a fun place to be actually. So I always say, look into the abyss. And it is an abyss really look into it. Don't shy away from looking into it. Because we're a death phobic culture. And when you face your own death, and you face death and the problems that your children are going to face and look at the ones that you love and life, life on Earth face and it's hard, but you can face it, you have the inner strength to do it. Especially if you have faith and face it female and then decide what you're going to do about it.

David Benjamin Blower  1:41:22  

Soil

Put your hands in the soil
Feel the groan and feel the joy
All sit with the hurt
All stare the dirt
Occupy the bandstands
Gather lost citizens
Climb down your pyramids
Relinquish your privilege
Welcome strangers to your table
As though they were angels
Make space for the spent
Sit with the lament
Break your vows to the Powers
Plant trees and grow flowers
Share your resources
Free all the horses

All citizens
Put your hands in the soil
And feel the groan
and can you feel the joy?
And be still

Go down to the riverside
And who’s not afraid to die?
Rise from the waves
Broke loose from the powers of the age
Live now as citizens
Of the life of the age to come
Behold the messiah dying
For the earth we’re crucifying
Break bread and take drink
All feel and think
Shed tears everyday
For everything we throw away
Mourn for your families
Mourn for your enemies
Sing songs to the stars
Console yr grieving hearts

All citizens
Put your hands in the soil
And feel the groan
and can you feel the joy?
And be still

Clap your hand to your mouth
Let your pride go south
Put hands on your head
Make terms with the dead
Put your hands on your face
Too late to learn from mistakes
Put your hand on your heart
Can we stop what we start?
Sisters to the leverage
Brothers to the edges
Youth to the fore
The bleak future is yours
All ye of noble birth
Join the scum of the earth
Gather round the powerless
For theirs is the power that can save us

All citizens
Put your hands in the soil
And feel the groan
and can you feel the joy?
And be still