What can we afford?

"Why can we afford to tackle so many problems, yet we can’t afford to tackle climate change? [...] We can’t possibly imagine tackling something like climate change because we are busy actually causing that climate change with the world’s biggest mining boom"
[...]
"[W]hy [can] Melbourne [...] subsidise a car race but [...] no longer afford to subsidise fresh fruit in public schools? Why [can] Sydney afford to host the Olympics but not house the homeless?"
[...]
“It is very hard to get on mainstream TV talking about issues of Indigenous disadvantage, but gee it is easy every night to get 30 seconds about the Hang Seng and the Nikkei-Dow. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have an economics degree who even knows what the Hang Seng is! Do you really think that the people who need to know are tuning in to the Channel 10 News to find out? So what is it doing there on the news every night? It is telling you that big, important things that greater minds than yours have puzzled over are happening in the world. And you might think we can afford to spend more on health, you might think we can afford to spend more on education, and you might think we might do something sensible like tackle climate change, but you don’t even know what the Hang Seng is. So why should we listen to you?"

- Richard Denniss, Executive Director of the Australia Institute,
Address to 13th Assembly of the Uniting Church in Australia.
H/T Peter Lockhart.

What we can or can't afford is always a matter of priorities. Scarcity is not the problem.

That's got to hurt - right in the breadbasket

Although somewhat dry and relying almost entirely on figures and maps, this video expresses what I take to be one of the key issues relating to climate change, namely, its likely impact on food production (and from there, on geopolitical stability and conflict). If you can't spare the few minutes to watch it, the key take-home message is that pretty much all of the world's main grain-producing areas lie in regions likely to be particularly susceptible to more intense and/or frequent heatwaves. This must be taken with a grain of salt, since the regional resolution of cilmate models does not have a high degree of confidence. Nonetheless, even the significant possibility of such an outcome can help to focus the mind.

Good and bad growth

"Implied in what has just been said is a recognition of the dangers of 'growth' as an unexamined good. Growth out of poverty, growth towards a degree of intelligent control of one's circumstances, growth towards maturity of perception and sympathy – all these are manifestly good and ethically serious goals, and, as has already been suggested, there are ways of conducting our economic business that could honour and promote these. A goal of growth simply as an indefinite expansion of purchasing power is either vacuous or malign – malign to the extent that it inevitably implies the diminution of the capacity of others in a world of limited resource. Remember the significance of scarcity and vulnerability in shaping a sense of what ethical behaviour looks like."

- Rowan Williams, Ethics, Economics and Global Justice.

I offered some reflections of my own on the dangers of pointless growth back here. Not all economic growth is pointless. Stupid poverty remains stupid. But there is such a thing as stupid wealth, and that is a far more relevant issue for most of us.

Scarcity is not the problem

"The conflict between the narratives of abundance and of scarcity is the defining problem confronting us at the turn of the millennium. The gospel story of abundance asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of a God who loved the world into generous being. The baptismal service declares that each of us has been miraculously loved into existence by God. And the story of abundance says that our lives will end in God, and that this well-being cannot be taken from us. In the words of St. Paul, neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor things -- nothing can separate us from God.

"What we know about our beginnings and our endings, then, creates a different kind of present tense for us. We can live according to an ethic whereby we are not driven, controlled, anxious, frantic or greedy, precisely because we are sufficiently at home and at peace to care about others as we have been cared for."

- Walter Brueggemann, "The Liturgy of Abundance and the Myth of Scarcity"

My ethics lecturer at Moore College, Andrew Cameron, would often say "scarcity is not the problem". At first, I thought he was crazy. Of course scarcity is a problem. There are people starving for lack of food or ill from lack of clean water, others who sell themselves into slavery for lack of money, or who go without medical care and suffer apparently unnecessary pain, farmers whose crops fail due to drought and changing weather patterns. All these people cry "we do not have enough!"

But that is not what he was saying. He was saying (I think) that scarcity is not the problem. Scarcity only becomes a problem due to other, deeper problems: our unwillingness to share, our ignorance (willful or otherwise) of the needs of our neighbours, our confusion of wants and needs, our fear that unless we hoard all we can then we might miss out, our delusion that endless economic growth is necessary for a healthy society or that boundless consumption will make us happy. These are the real problems. Scarcity is the symptom of a world out of joint. And lives based on the assumption of scarcity compound other problems. If I fear that there will not be enough to go around, I will be more reluctant to share.

The quote with which I began is from this article by well known Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann. It is worth reading in full (it is not too long) as a great articulation of the fundamental Christian belief in God's generosity. God is not stingy. He has not shortchanged us. He provides abundantly (though not infinitely as our childish dreams desires). There is enough. There will be enough. Be not afraid.

Give us this day our daily bread. Amen.

Smith on global scarcity

A (poorly edited) extract from my article on global scarcity in the latest edition of CASE magazine has been published at Sydney Anglicans.

You'll need to subscribe to CASE to get the full article, or you can find many of the ideas back in this series.

Hart on learning to see

Sometimes we don't see what's under our noses. Sometimes we see but do not perceive. Having one's eyes open and head pointed in the right direction is no guarantee of correct vision. Hart makes an excellent point about the labour of vision that is required in order to see straight in a world bent out of shape:

[A]ll of nature is a shattered mirror of divine beauty, still full of light, but riven by darkness. ... [T]o see the goodness indwelling all creation requires a labour of vision that only faith in Easter can sustain; but it is there, effulgent, unfading, innocent, but languishing in bondage to corruption, groaning in anticipation of a glory yet to be revealed, both a promise of the Kingdom yet to come and a portent of its beauty.

- David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea:
Where Was God in the Tsunami? (Eerdmans: 2005), 102-3.

Learning to see creation rather than merely 'nature' does not mean closing our eyes to the pain all around (and within). Instead, it is to look thankfully not fearfully, seeing abundance rather than scarcity. It is to look caringly rather than instrumentally, seeing beauty before usefulness. It is to look hopefully, seeking glimpses of the glory yet to be revealed.

The End of Suburbia IV

Peak Oil: denial (continued)
Way back in November, I was writing on Peak Oil (and here). You might think that my recent condition has distracted me from this issue. In one sense, yes, it has. But as I reflect upon it, I think there are many similarities between having cancer and facing the possibility of Peak Oil. In both cases, there is a limited resource (Oil, time) in which there is uncertainty over just how much might be left, the dead end possibilities of denial, blind optimistic 'faith' (which is really no faith at all), getting distracted from the main game, or despair.

Blind faith
In my previous post, I argued that blind faith in the market or God's protection were inadequate responses. Instead, Christians are liberated from fear and so can face the truth, whatever it might be found to be. The truth is not easy to find on this question. Competing experts telling us different things. Of course, it is possible that even the appearance of dispute can help one side or the other. Yet what to do in this case?

A distraction?
Some Christians might consider such things a distraction, from the real issue of preaching the gospel. In one sense, yes, it is quite possible for secondary concerns to make the church forget its raison d'etre: witnessing to Christ crucified, celebrating his resurrection and awaiting his return. However, it is not the case that 'secondary' concerns mightn't themselves become a cause of unfaithfulness when ignored: much of the church in Nazi Germany considered Hitler's Aryan clause to be a distracting non-gospel issue.

Despair
For those who start doing a little research and find the stats convincing, a fourth common response is despair. The future seems bleak and hopeless. Globalised civilisation, addicted to cheap oil, mightn't survive in anything like its present form, and what is left may be so unrecognisable that those who survive (which may only be a small percentage of the world's present population on some estimates) find themselves in a post-apocalyptic landscape desperately scrabbling for bare necessities in a post-industrial neo-tribalism. Even if such a worst-case scenario doesn't play out, there are enough variations holding out the prospect of major social upheaval and suffering to make any imaginative observer pause and consider other civilisations whose short-sighted greed ended in their own destruction.

Scarcity is not the problem
However, for the Christian, despair is not an option. Because despite appearances, scarcity is not the problem. Our first parents, faced with a whole garden of goodies, nonetheless came to believe that God had shortchanged them by denying them the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2-3). However this image is to be interpreted, the sting in the serpent's questions was the nagging fear that God was not generous, was not good, had not provided enough.

A theological 'solution'?
But of course, we, like them, live in a world with ample resources to provide for our needs. The problem is that we have artificially inflated our needs to include cheap transport, easy energy, comfort and inordinate and ever-expanding wealth. And so the primary theological 'solution' to Peak Oil is thankfulness, which is the key to contentment. Listen to the Apostle Paul: I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me. (Philippians 4.11b-13) And again: Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. (1 Timothy 6.6-9)

There is much more to say about Peak Oil than this, but here is where I suspect a theological response ought to begin: with thanks for our creator God's abundant provision of a good world and an admission that our needs are more readily met than we often suspect. The problem is our selfishness, greed and shortsighted focus on ourselves to the detriment of the larger body - whether of the church, of humanity, or of the entire created order.
Series so far: I; II; III; IV.
Ten points for the town in which these ubiquitous little bikes dominate the streets.