People should use the climate change crisis as an opportunity to become human again, setting aside the addictive and self-destructive behaviour that has damaged their souls. That is the view of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.
In his recent Operation Noah lecture at Southwark Cathedral, he said that people had allowed themselves to become “addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost.”
The consequences of such a lifestyle meant that the human soul was “one of the foremost casualties of environmental degradation. Many of the things which have moved us towards ecological disaster have been distortions of who and what we are and their overall effect has been to isolate us from the reality we’re part of. Our response to this crisis needs to be, in the most basic sense, a reality check.”
The Archbishop said we needed to keep up pressure on national governments. “There are questions only they can answer about the investment of national resources. We need equally to keep up pressure on ourselves and to learn how to work better as civic agents.”
Earlier this year Dr Williams said God was not a “safety net” that would guarantee a happy ending and human pillaging of the world’s resources meant the planet was facing a “whole range of doomsday prospects” that exceeded the results of global warming.
Humanity faced being “choked, drowned or starved” by its own stupidity, he said, and he compared those who challenged the reality of climate change to the courtiers who flattered King Canute, until he proved he could not command the waves by going to the seashore and trying to do so.