Caring for Creation

In his foreword to ‘Sharing God’s Planet’, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, encouraged us to take a walk to remind ourselves that we are part of wider creation. The current climate change situation is such that it will be a long walk – simply to restore the world’s balance we need to cut carbon emissions worldwide by 60% of current levels by 2050. Not only is this a daunting goal but its end lies at least two generations in the future. For individuals and institutions alike, taking action (however simple and obvious that action may seem) and sustaining it will require considerable effort. But act we must.

Shrinking the Footprint is the Church of England’s campaign to help its members and institutions to address – in faith, practice, and mission – this vital issue of climate change. It aims to challenge, encourage and support the whole body of the Church to shrink our environmental footprint to create the "The 40% Church". At the 2007 Diocesan Synod in Cologne, there was overwhelming support for the creation of the post of Diocesan Environmental Officer and Brian Morgan of the Berne chaplaincy was appointed to this urgent task. To start this initiative Brian will be sending out in September a questionnaire to all diocesan offices and chaplaincies in order to audit the impact that we as a diocese have on the planet. I earnestly request that you all help Brian by completing the questionnaire – disappointingly in the UK only 25% of parishes have done so to date – I hope that we can do much better than that!

In addition, please visit the Shrinking the Footprint website, which is full of suggestions and downloadable booklets on how to reduce the carbon footprint of your chaplaincies and homes (www.shrinkingthefootprint.cofe.anglican.org). You will all be aware that inevitably the bishops must often use flights to cover this vast diocese, but we can still soften the blow by using low energy hybrid cars, high speed rail and off-setting as much as possible.

Of course the life of our church is filled with a whole range of urgent priorities and it is easy to be distracted by the most obvious and personal, but the issue of climate change is of such vital importance that in all our activities and initiatives we should constantly seek to lesson the impact that we have on the world we all share. To that end each chaplaincy may wish to follow the lead of Diocesan Synod and appoint its own environment officer who could then liaise with Brian and carry this work forward at a local level.

May God bless you all and may he continue to bless this Earth our home.

+Geoffrey

Shrinking the footprint
www.shrinkingthefootprint.cofe.anglican.org