Do the right thing for our planet

01 May 2009

A woman once came to Mahatma Gandhi with her little boy. She asked, ‘Mahatma-ji, tell my little boy to stop eating sugar.’ ‘Come back in three days,’ said Gandhi. In three days the woman and the little boy returned and Mahatma Gandhi said to the little boy, ‘Stop eating sugar.’ The woman asked, ‘Why was it necessary for us to return only after three days for you to tell my little boy that?’ The Mahatma replied: ‘Three days ago I had not stopped eating sugar.’

There was a time when we may have thought it enough for a few others to make sacrifices to make changes to save the planet; those wacky greenies, perhaps? But now we see that self interest is out; global interest is in!

Whenever there’s a problem, it’s tempting to shift the blame from ourselves. People have tried to do that with climate change, with some saying the fundamental issue is over population rather than human consumption. Fred Pearce, an environmental consultant, combats this in ‘Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat’, writing for Yale e360 (http://www.e360.yale.edu). He says it’s a ‘convenient argument’ for ‘over-consumers’ in rich countries to blame ‘over-breeders’ in distant lands for the state of the planet, when ‘by almost any measure, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution’.

Owning up

It’s hard to own up to contributing to a problem by our own action or inaction. Like Gandhi in his encounter with the small boy, we need to get our own house in order first sometimes. As Jesus said (in Matthew 7:4-5), ‘Before we can tell someone else to take the speck out of their eye, we need to take the plank out of our own’.

No one’s pretending that’s easy. To change the habits of a lifetime, to reduce our personal carbon emission and call for our nation to reduce its environmental footprint requires a decided attitude shift for many of us.

Ironically, given that God clearly told us to care for the earth, Christians have not always responded well to environmental issues. Perhaps our conviction that ‘earth is not our home’ and that we’re ‘just passing through’ has made us short-sighted. If that’s so, it’s time to open our eyes—for the sake of all the world’s populations, those now living and future generations.

By Christina Tyson (from War Cry magazine)