Unto them that hash up small things...

...shall a Mighty Project be Given! Today’s the day for a big announcement — the route for HS2, a projected high speed London-Birmingham rail link through Buckinghamshire that has stirred strong feelings from our neighbours in the Chilterns, mainly on environmental grounds. Of course any large infrastructure project has to go somewhere, and there may be some tweaks in the mix after months of consultation, or not.

Historically, however annoyed people are, there have been thought to be few votes in transport. I remember a Community Forum years ago in Bracknell where groups were asked what really mattered to them and everyone was amazed that people said the main thing holding them back in their lives and businesses was the weakness and patchiness of UK transport in comparison with most other Western European nations.

There are some bright spots in the English transport firmament, but to achieve the kind of consistent system they have in Germany or Scandinavia you need to take a consistent approach over many years. Short-termism is the name of the UK game, in investment of all kinds.
This makes, inevitably, for a Great Car society, because at least people can get around that way even if is slow, expensive and ecologicaly questionable.

So is One Big Sexy project the answer? The fact is that any transport network is only as strong as its weakest link. There’s real weakness in English transport at its most local level, including lack of integration with infrequent and unreliable bus services. You can’t get to work five miles away in Wycombe from here for 9·00 a.m. by public transport because all the buses are dong the school run, so people jump in the car. If we really have £27Bn to spend, there are almost certainly other ways to increase the capacity of the network (double deckers, someone suggested) more dramatically, along existing lines.

Finally, the project seems to rely on the good times rolling again financially by 2016. They may, but rumbles abound about the Private Finance Initiative, a “privatisation good, government money bad” means the UK government has used for a while to finance infrastructure instead of public bonds.

The general effect is turning out much like trying to pay off your mortgage on your credit card.

For example a Christmas Tree for the Treasury costs £40 in cash, or £875 by PFI! The gross sums indicate that the UK has received benefit of £60BN from PFI for a cost to the Taxpayer of £260BN. The commitments extend in some cases thirty years into the future. Hmmm. And people wonder how we got into debt... Only from the most short-term of perspectives can it be that brilliant to pile on another £27BN of debt to our grandchildren for ten minutes off the time to Birmingham. You’d think.

Born-again Terrapin in Chesham Bois

Many schools used to have a 1960’s terrapin — It was a temporary building designed to accommodate a class, often without a toilet, in conditions that guaranteed cold in winter and sweltering heat in the summer.

Carrying water across the playground to supply it was an additional task for the milk monitor. In such places many people were said to be having the happiest days of their lives.

But all good things come to an end, and I was delighted to go to Chesham Bois C of E Combined School on Saturday to open a new classroom for reception children, repacing such a structure. Fundraising for it was all local, and the project to have it built has been running for a long time. Although the wait was tedious, the result is a building whose time has come — a superb suite of teaching and ancillary facilities, including a kitchen area, loos, storage and outdoor play area.

Best of all, this scheme combines various technologies to provide insulation and reduce power consumption to a point where there will be times at which it is self powering — PV / solar cells for hot water and electricity, with an air-source heatpump that extracts heat from air on its way in and out of the building. By jumping in early in the microgeneration cycle, the school will gain maximum benefit from its investment, and was able to secure a 50% grant to install the PV / solar cells. By monitoring use, awareness grows, and the school has very much got itself a reception classroom for tomorrow as well as today. Other schools who wish to have the benefit of such tasty worms need to be early birds...

Trouble Brewing — Stirring Times

Great Missenden’s Big Brew took place a couple of Saturdays ago in the Parish Church. Its context was Living Hope, an environmental day conference organised by the local Church. It brought together national and local leaders from green organizations like A Rocha, CAFOD, CCOW, Christian Aid, Christian Ecology Link, Tearfund and Traidcraft with an audience of 130 people. There were three keynotes to kick proceedings off:

1. Paula Clifford argued for a passionate realism about where we stand, including an awarenss that others around the world are paying a heavy price for our indecision. One thought for the day was that “politicians are a renewable resource”. She suggested three prime sources of hope in torubled times:
   — Community: The Body of Christ is a central NT concept, but can be an elusive ideal. We need to re-estabish what this means for ourselves locally, nationally and internationaly
   — Interdependence: is a pragmatic reality which is often underestimated or abused. How are we interdependent in a global world, and how shuld we be?
   — Mission: Christians have, since hte beginning, been turning the world upside down; but how would a carbon-neutral world look and feel, and how do we bring it about?
   
   
2. Chris Sunderland of Earth Abbey told us that in his lifetime world population had grown from 2.5 billion to 6.7 billion, and we need to re-imagine our way of life. Some people are sharing their land and working fewer days to reconnect with each other and the land, and he commended local projects and ideas like GrowZones.
   
   
3. Dave Bookless of A Rocha believed that since Copenhagen concern about climate change had slipped down the political agenda. We had also missed the opportunity of the financial crisis to reboot our banking system and returned to business as usual. The environment isn’t the problem — we are! Lord May, an atheist, wants Churches to invoke fear of a divine punisher to make people act. This aspiration is understandable, if a little nutty. Dave argued that, like St Francis, we need to open our eyes, minds and hearts to God, the Earth, and the other person.
   — We are fallen, with a propensity for idolatry. God’ first commission in Scripture was to steward the earth.
   — We need a Copernical reeconfiguration of our attitudes — earth doesn”t revolve around us.
   — The other is a significant figure in Scripture. The alien within our gates matters, and with the prospect of serious migration driven by climate change we need to get our heads and hearts arund the consequences.
   

There followed smaller meetings on a variety of topics from greening school buildings to liturgy, the practicalities of ground and air-source heating, to the latest climate science. This event certainly showed that local churches and groups can put on top notch training events around the issues facing us. Congratulations to Margaret Dixon and her local team for pulling it all together. The event has now gone on to a website for follow up and sharing of ideas — earthingfaith.org.

There’s no getting away from the fact that getting real about our environment involves choices for us all, and has an inevitable political dimension. Therefore, to wrap things up, I chaired an afternoon session with David Lidington, our local MP. His thought-provoking review of the major issues and realities brought in experience of the national and international scene and demonstrated, to my mind, courage and leadership in two potentially awkward areas:

1. David mentioned what would otherwise have been one dreaded elephant in the room — the new high speed rail link across the Chilterns. This issue could turn into ignorant armies clashing by night, stigmatising the other lot as NIMBY’s or Tree-huggers. We actually need some light as well as heat, here. There is no cost-free way of maintaining a high tech society, but by the same token there’s no point saving the environment by mucking up the local environment unnecessarily. There are some cute calls to be made. Public Consultation on the £17Bn scheme begins in earnest this autumn, and people need to lock onto the global and local realities closely and imaginatively.
   
   
2. David very helpfully discussed how the process of politics actually works for jobbing MP’s — genuinely personal communications arising from real experience are, inevitably, more helpful than name-calling bulk productions, which are more helpful than nothing, perhaps, but don't actually give MP’s much to go on. The message I heard was (my words not his) “Be personal, be real, and above all, get involved!”
   

This is a troubled time to be green. There is a fair amount of disappointment from Copenhagen. Powerful vested interests are manning the bar on the Titanic with glad tidings that the icebergs are illusory and the party must go on. What I don’t get is, even if it could be proved scientifically that pumping tons of needless crap into the sky doesn’t actually affect anything that matters, where’s the fun in dong that? Wouldn’t it be even more fun to tread lightly and with self-awarensss towards habits of living that go with the grain of life?

Global Warming reality checkpoint

Thanks to Martin Hodson, environmental scientist, for a tip off about the best book I’ve seen in the run-up to Copenhagen. There are all kinds of strong views being expressed about global warming and our options about it. As something of a natural contrarian, I’m not comfortable with treating dissidents like medieval heretics. Truth should be big enought to stand up for itself. There’s a Benedictine principle that the least voice is always worth listening to, even if you disagree.

On the other hand, despite manful efforts by some elements in the right wing press to pretend there is no relationship between trashing the planet and the planet getting trashed, the science is basically in, and was years ago, and everybody actually knows we can’t just carry on the way we’ve been. Even if it were somehow proved that chucking stuff into the atmosphere isn’t dangerous, I’d still want to know what’s the joy in filthing the place up and wasting scarce resources? Why not think different and live cleaner lives?

So we all want to know how things stack up, but lack the information to work out how to evaluate the various claims and counter-claims in the air. David MacKay is Cambridge physicist, a competent mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His English is also fluent and fun. His book is called Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air.
In this book he does two invaluable things

1. He takes us through the way things stack up, both energy use and energy sources. Thus we can work out, for example, how big a role various renewables could or could not play in a sensible energy policy.
   
2. He’s concerned n ot only to give us rough and realistic figures, on a pragmatic, down and dirty rather than ideological basis. He also wants to help us develop for ourselves a greater numeracy about the various options and realities; what they mean and how good they might be for what.

Interestingly the book is available from conventional channels, but also free on his website here. If you disagree with his figures, he’s happy to consider others and correct his conclusions if necessary. All in all, this is the level and kind of information we need to understand our future options and make decisions which are realistic and effective about a subject which has hitherto generated far more heat than light.

PS On the subject of light and heat, I am grateful to Ashley Nlson for a link to his site (here) which is a most compendious source of information on the LED lights that are now appearing iin all manner of applications everywhere.

Shrinking the Footprint

The Church environmental campaign (Website and resources here) held a launch day at Lambeth Palace, led by the Bishop of London and Joan Ruddock, UK Minister for Climate Change and Energy. People were there from every part of the country, with interesting local presentations from Exeter, Newcastle and London dioceses. This took me back to our various awareness raising sessions in the diocese in 2007, and reminded me how far we have to go.

It’s now over 30 years since the Lambeth Conference called for “Urgent and Instant Action” on this one. That call was followed by 20 years of doing almost nothing! These were the days of Mrs Thatcher, with her famous ignorance and antipathy about alternative energy. The outlook now is entirely different, as exactly the events the scientists indicated would happen are unfolding around us.

There has been real progress in the past 10 years, and scientific arguments which seemed so notional in 1978 is obvious and almost universally accepted now. This is a whole world issue — the UK only contributes 2% to the whole, but someone's got to give a lead. Copenhagen is absolutely crucial. To get it right world leaders need to pitch something real, but also doable. After years of childish denial and idiocy from US Governments, Obama is on the case, gathering the 16 nations who account for 80% of global emissions. This has to be encouraging.

People stick heads in the sand because they fear the consequences of confronting our fantasies about infinite growth and consumption, which has been the only show in town. Theologically, Christians have a rich tradition. It’s not just our measured pattern of feasting and fasting. There are big Scriptural concepts there — Shabat, Noachite Covenant, Shalom, Jubilee, Proportionality in reaping, Usury as a sin, Stewardship, and the vision of a whole earth groaining in futility for redemption. These are core messages of our theology, even if we’ve rather lost sight of some of them in the last century. It’s obviously time to focus on them again.

So what do we do? As well as joining anyone willing to come along on a public awareness changing exercise, the Carbon Trust, with whom the Church has been working closely, has developed a 5 Stage response model:

1. Mobilisation
   
2. Case for action
   
3. Opportunity assessment
   
4. Implementation Plan
   
5. Manage Implementation

We need to run several cycles of such processes at every level in our operations, building numbers of Eco-congregations, backing change in our schools (which account for a huge proportion of our emissions), managing buildings in new ways, changing our ways of life.. People need a bit of leadership and it’s all hands to the pump. Actually, there’s an immense amount of awareness and common sense in the UK about this, and the Climate Change Act was carried through with careful cross party preparation on the basis of common understanding.

We just have to get our rear ends into gear. The Enemy is Whinging Pom Cynicism, both corporate (“Anything that doesn’t solve the whole problem instantly is only a futile gesture so we’ll all have a good laugh at it”) and personal (“What I do doesn’t make a difference, so I think I’ll just carry on doing nothing”).

Pragmatically, the choices seem to be

• Mitigate,
• Adapt,
• Suffer.

The fact is we will have to do some of all three. How much of each is, to a certain extent up to us. Inaction like that which followed the 1978 Lambeth Conference call for urgent action will not get anyone anywhere, and there is time to make up.

A Short History of Progress

You can be too thin, and you can probably be too rich. But can you have too much progress? Our Victorian great grandparents would have said no, but Ronald Wright makes you think. Consider a tribe of Neanderthal hunter gatherers. They take a month to trap a Wooly mammoth. Boring. Then someone invents a map that doubles their monthly Wooly Mammoth haul. Progress. Then some other geeky Neanderthal invents a more efficient Wooly Mammoth tracking device,a compass. Three a Month. More progress.

But imagine at this point Big John Wayne arrives in a Time Machine with satelite tracking and a tommy gun; or more likely you brilliantly work out how to drive a whole herd of 100 wooly mammoths over a cliff; progress? not really, because not only have you no way of turning 90% of the catch into usable food before it goes off, but you have just trashed your whole food supply for the forseeable future. Cue one heck of a party, followed by famine, and possible extinction. Too much progress?

Of course that’s them, not us. We wouldn't be so stupid. Oh no. But all sorts of people have been — the Mayans, the Romans, the Ancient Sumerians, the Easter Islanders. Did the man who cut down the final tree on Easter Island realise he was dong rather a silly thing? Did he know he was sticking the last nail in the coffin of his whole civilisation? Why did he have to do it? Did he have a choice? and, considering the wraths and sorrows of our own binge on the fantasy of limitless progress, consumerism, and attendant environmental degradation, do we have a choice? And if we do, are we willing to exercise it?

I am banged up having my annual reality check at Saint Wandrille, Normandy, until Saturday. This entry has been preposted. The internet is switched firmly off for the week, and I will be delighted to respond to comments, but only at the weekend.

L4/23-27 Soldiering on through Lent

23 Recycle More
This is definitely Lucy’s department. As South Bucks Recycling Queen, she’s now got us down to a carrier bag every fortnight for 7 of us plus the office. What we need to do more of this year is digging for victory — potatoes this year!

24 Go a whole day without gossiping
For this I relied upon the kindness of strangers. I was working up in Edinburgh and thus didn’t know anyone they knew to gossip about. Bit of a cheat, really. A few years ago I got right up one lady’s nose. She said “Rector, I shouldn't be telling you this,” so I said “well don’t, then” and she complained to the Bishop! Happy days.

25 Cheer someone up
No names, no pack drill. But I think most people I meet feel pretty battered by work, bureaucracy, targets or even, perish the thought, Church. I'm trying to focus more on people’s strengths than their weaknesses, because however weak our weaknesses are, it’s our God-given strengths that enable us to be able to do anything about them.

26 Make and share cakes
Bit of a cheat — Nick decorated some shop ones, because there just wasn't time to warm up the oven and do it properly on the right day. The boys all made made up for this by producing Lucy’s Mothering Sunday Cake. It’s a kind of susbstitutionary theory of cake making. OK right, it’s a bit of a cheat.

27 Have lunch with someone you don’t know well
Back in Sandhurst for the funeral of Stanley Douglas-Cook, friend and companion to many in the town. A kind, decent gentleman who had not had an easy life in various ways, but walked through it all by faith and had time for anyone — including me. Rabbit Rabbit is definitely better than Grabbit Grabbit. I treasure the complete Studdert Kennedy poems Stanley once got me after a long conversation about suffering. It was good to meet Stan’s family, whom I didn’t know, along with many old friends I did.

Stop the world. I want to get on!

Yesterday evening I chaired a well attended public Climate change consultation at St Michael’s Amersham, with Revd Profesor Ian James (head of the school of Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics at Reading University), Sandeep Sengupta (International Relations doctoral student from the Enivronmental Change Institute, Oxford University) and Miranda St John Nicolle (Diocesan Environmental Group). We got a comprehensive overview of the basic science, human and development issues, and practical possibilities. I found the whole experience disturbing and energising.

1. We have a phenomenal depth of expertise and passion about environmental justice in this diocese. Out and about, if I say "gay bishops" everybody except the occasional couple of zealots glazes over almost instantaneously. When I engage about Creation, which I do rather more often, I notice that people light up. Of course they do. There are four or five verses in the Bible that just possibly could have anything at all to do with the Gay issue. Meanwhile ruddy great chunks of it, say a fifth of the text, is the Creator’s love song — heavens proclaiming God's glory, people exercising stewardship, prophets drawing messages from God out of nature. Apart from the anoraks, a few religious correspondents and rentaquote coteries, nobody in long trousers actually gives a pig's burp about gay bishops, compared to staying alive. Sometimes I feel like a kind of Kierkegaard / Nietzsche character who sees the village is burning down and runs into the square shouting, but nobody wants to know! This diocese is already engaging closely with the environmental challenge in a few parishes and most of our schools. Now we need to get out onto the streets more. We need to change, whilst there's still anything left to argue about. Here endeth the Bishop's rant!
2. No it doesn’t! The hacks are brilliant, and are doing some great consciousness raising, thank God, but UK editors still give astounding amounts of airtime to wacko contrarians, as though there were any doubt about the basic science. For them it's just another story. For everyone else it has to be more than that. It took us forty years, nationally, to learn about smoking and health, and change our public habit. We haven't got that kind of time on this one.
   
3. Lambeth 08 will be a fantastic opportunity to network around and explore the global dimension Sandeep talked us through last night. I'm taking his stuff with me on my pre-Lambeth South India schools visit next week (watch this space), and I'm praying we get quality time together on it next July at Lambeth, especially if we can pull together the various strands like we did at last night's seminar.

What is God going to say to the Anglican Church in the hour of death and the day of judgment? Well done, you sorted out the property disputes over gays in Virginia but, oops, bad news, you destroyed my world! It's time to get real and get out there.

Creation and Creativity 2

Here, as the UN Secretary General has warned about global warning, is a piece of real creativity! h/t Martin Everitt for emailing me the original...

Creation and Creativity 1

Along the lines of someone who did the warmup slot at Willow Creek last year, Ilana Yahav, Sand Artist