Why Be Green?
Why Be Green?
Sometimes being green is hard! Buying the more expensive Fair Trade brands (not the sort I’m used to), standing by the fruit & veg. in the supermarket pondering whether the grapes have been air freighted (very bad environmentally – all that CO2) and whether I can justify buying them anyway as at least the kids will eat them… and what about Fair Trade pineapple – almost certainly air freighted but the people who grow them need the money…
What about organic – good for us, good for the planet, surely? Well, usually, but sometimes grown in less green ways than conventional food – under glass in heated greenhouses with all the CO2 emissions that involves….
I try not to use the heating too often in the winter – so I pull on another jumper … quite possibly made in sweat-shop conditions by people who do not earn a living wage for what they do and who have no employment rights at all…. (but have you seen the price of a Fair Trade, organic jumper?!! I have 5 of us to buy clothes for!!)
So why do I bother? Because I believe that it is worth the headaches.
Our planet is in grave danger, the planet that we, the human race, were charged with looking after by God when he created us (see Genesis 2). We have a biblical imperative to do our best to look after God’s creation, and our failure as a race to protect the planet before serving our own greed has cost dear our planet, and those in other parts of the world who share it with us. Oh yes, we have to live with wet summers and people in Gloucester and other places have suffered from awful floods, but very few have died. In other parts of the world climate change has been more dramatic and less kind. In parts of Africa, where making a living is already precarious, the rains are failing more regularly, when they do come they are more torrential, washing away valuable top soil, making it harder to grow healthy crops the following year – and all this whilst often living with AIDS as well. In parts of India and Bangladesh the flooding of the Ganges is happening more often with ever more devastating consequences for some of the poorest people on the planet. And people live in misery. And they die.
All over the world climate change is a reality, and the human cost of it is tragic. So I believe that we all have to do our ‘bit’, even if it involves a lot more thinking than we are used to and some decisions that might be uncomfortable for us. So I think very hard about where everything I buy comes from & how it got to me: food, toys, clothes, cosmetics. I do the obvious things: walk & take public transport when I can rather than use the car, only put the heating on when we need to in the winter, line dry clothes rather than tumble dry them. I also try to do the less obvious & more expensive things: buy Fair Trade & organic clothing whenever I can (M&S are extending their FT cotton range & it is more affordable than most!), investigate paying for more loft insulation for The Rectory even though we don’t own the place (we’ll benefit from the fuel savings anyway), ask the diocese if they’ll consider putting solar panels on the roof (well, I can ask!!!), buy a kitchen waste bin that can take ALL food waste so that even less goes to landfill, send fresh juice cartons & plastic milk carton tops off to be recycled at plants up-country at my own expense (it helps keep the Royal Mail going!!).
Now, my doing my bit on my own won’t add up to much of a difference to our planet – which is why I write in the magazine, because if all 120 regular members of our church made similar changes to those I’ve made, then told others about them, who told others – well, that’s how Christianity spread, and then we really can have an impact that will change the whole world – for the better.