This year we have had several new arrivals in our parish in Lochgilphead, Argyll and the Isles. It’s always lovely to see (and hear!) new babies at St Margaret’s.
New life: such promise for the future.
And yet by the time this current crop of babies reaches the age of eleven, this planet may be at a dangerous tipping point that curtails their adult lives. If we don’t act on climate change, there may be no future that can sustain humanity.
Catholic Social Teaching says we’re stewards of this earth. For much of this century, we’ve been warned we have to care for it more effectively. One stumbling block (leaving aside flat-earthers who deny all evidence of climate change) that has prevented us from steaming ahead with all possible mechanisms to alter this frightening trajectory is the naming of years as goals.
We were told we had to reverse the rise in temperature by 2050. We had just moved into a new millennium - 2050 was light years away. So we continued with our fossil fuels and our exhaust fumes and our increasing herds of cattle to feed people whose traditional diets had never ever included burgers and steaks. The clouds of methane wreathing the altars of the god of fast food have drastically increased the risks to the very existence of the earth.
Now, almost 20 years on and with so little progress made (think of all those toddlers suffering from asthma in UK cities; whole populations wearing face masks to go about their daily grind in Tokyo and Beijing), we are told that we really, really have to do something by 2030.
And still that seems a way off. We can talk about it a bit longer; procrastinate some more.
Well, no we can’t. Unless, of course, we think the lives of those babies born this year count for nothing. That it’s OK when they are eleven years old for this world to have reached the tipping point denying them the fun of their teenage years, the joy of marriage, the wonder of becoming parents themselves, of growing old and having the pleasure of walking in forests, by lakes, cruising on seas, visiting historic cities.
The day the scientific reports came out naming 2030 as Doomsday, I saw a Facebook post questioning whether there should be a wind farm on nearby hills. Bring it on, I replied. If our parish’s babies – the babies in your family, your parish - are to have a future, the time for nimbyism is over. Pope Francis laid it out in Laudato Si: ‘Never have we so hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last two hundred years.’ And he warned ‘Those who will have to suffer the consequences…will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility.’
Do we want this on our consciences? Pope Francis said – in June 2015 – that we have to hear the cry of the poor. Three years on, we have to hear the cries of our own babies, too. Speak out. Act. Pray. We made this mess. Let’s make sure our leaders (and we as individuals) sort it.