Easter is a good time to look up from the daily business of life – getting and spending – and think harder about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. How grateful are we to those who make sacrifices for us, and how much of our effort goes into sacrificing for others?
For years, I’ve been proud to support Tearfund, a Christian overseas aid organisation. This year its meditations for Lent have focused on its report, They Shall Inherit the Earth: Christian attitudes to climate change.
Why should Christians be particularly concerned about climate change – or what someone in the report prefers to call “climate justice”?
One reason is that those who are and will be worst affected by climate change tend to be the poor – both those in relative poverty in our wealthy country and those in absolute poverty in less developed countries.
You don’t really understand Jesus and his teaching if you haven’t noticed his preoccupation with the poor.
But another reason is that Christians are called to be “stewards of the earth”.
Tim Healy, a lecturer at Alphacrucis College, says “our acceptance of the God-given mandate to care for the earth is an expression of obedience to Jesus’ command to ‘love our neighbours’ – not only those down the street but ‘down time’ as well.
“It’s those who live in the years beyond our own who stand to benefit the most from our faithful and responsible stewardship,” he says.
Susy Lee, an author, says she prefers the term “climate justice” because “the people most likely to be causing [climate change] are not the people most likely to suffer from it.
“The Kingdom of God has a lot to say about justice. God created the world and asked us to look after it justly.”
The report recounts the experience of Hattie Steenholdt, who was on a Scripture Union beach mission trip when bushfires raged through Mallacoota in the early hours of New Year’s Eve in 2019, and stayed around to help.
“We’re called to be stewards of the earth, and yet we live in a time and a society that puts the self first . . . so it is countercultural to go ‘hey, this is something big that’s going on and we’re all playing a part in it’.”
The Christian notion that we’re all responsible for caring for the earth doesn’t sound a million miles from the Aboriginal commitment to “country”.
Many Australian overseas aid agencies include our First Nations people among those they help. And, when it comes to climate change, our Torres Strait Islanders are (forgive the pun) in the same boat as the other South Pacific nations whose worries about climate change we’ve taken so little notice of.
Aunt Rose Elu, last year’s Queensland Senior Australian if the Year, is from Saibai, one of the seven Torres Strait Islands.
“When I was young,” the report quotes her as saying, “I remember that the sea was beautiful, crystal clear and the sea breeze would blow through the houses so beautifully.
“Recently I was home on Saibai and I was shocked by the changes I saw. I cried for my home. The sea level was higher than I have ever seen it. The walls were not working. The graves of my ancestors are being eroded. The high tide washes them away.”
Kuki Rokhum is a director of one of the local Christian organisations that Tearfund works with in India. She says “it is the poorest countries, and within them the poorest people – who have produced the lowest carbon emissions, and have the least resilience to allow them to respond – that feel most strongly the effects of climate-change related disasters, droughts, floods and extreme temperatures.
“With increased disasters there will be more climate-related displacement.”
Farmers in north-west India are already struggling because of unpredictable rainfall and extreme heat, but they know that future generations will feel the impact of a changing climate even more acutely, the report says.
For the family of 80-year-old Dhulji Meghwal, and many others, rainfall has become sporadic over the past two decades and extreme temperatures have led to dry and degraded soil.
“One bigha of land [around 0.4 acres] used to produce enough for the whole year. Now, that land will produce only enough for six months. People are falling into debt because they are purchasing seed from the market and then not getting the production they expect,” Meghwal says.
Economists eschew “anecdotal evidence” and prefer to stick to lofty concepts, backed up by copious facts and figures. Perhaps they’d be more persuasive if they got down to cases more often - as aid agencies have long understood.
