Sustainable Living
The Year of the Forests (B)
from Edmund Rice International
I'm writing from the heart of Passion Week, soon to be Holy Week, in the Year of Forests. One of the great hinges between the medieval world and the renaissance, in western traditions, is Dante's Divine Comedy. It famously begins: "I found myself in a dark forest" [mi ritrovai per una selva oscura]. In some ways, this Lent, I'd suggest the western world is still there, in the dark forest.
Those of us in the west have a predominant metaphor of 'moving towards the light', out of the forest. As the Protestant reformers here in Geneva loudly proclaim in the city's motto: Post tenebras lux (After darkness, light). It's not very flattering to the Catholic Church, but it captures the spirit of the scientific and technological revolutions we call the Enlightenment, that have dropped us into the twenty-first century. Yet, our 'enlightened' world has called for a Year of the Forests. Have we forgotten something? Was something lost on the way?
Once a year, the Human Rights Council in Geneva calls a 'social forum', where ideas are welcomed and visions sought. Stephen Humphreys, from the London School of Economics, stood up at this forum one Monday morning in late 2010, and, in a brief address of ten minutes, said something like this (my translation): Development causes climate change. Climate change prevents development. We need a new paradigm.
He sat down, and the conversations continued. People freely used terms like 'developing countries', 'developed countries' and even 'development'. It was as if nothing had changed. New paradigm? I think they missed it. Or, like most of us, were in deep denial.
I'd suggest the new paradigm is sustainability. The new target is not 'growth', let alone 'development', but an ecological footprint of 1.7 hectares/person. This is something the overdeveloped world needs to achieve as earnestly as the developing world. Our only two problems are: lack of imagination (we can't see what a sustainable society looks like) and lack of courage (we are too scared to move on this). Vision? Courage? Anyone?
An obsession with growth is rather adolescent, and that is Bill Plotkin's analysis of our nation-states and their cultures. He would suggest we are still in a prolonged adolescence; he suggests most of us die in it. The crucial passage from adolescence into adulthood is a soul journey that must bring us back into touch with Earth. We haven't left the forest! We simply ran away from the dark – and then chopped down our forests, so it's harder to find our way back. It's no accident Jesus ends up, after all that walking through semi-desert, on a tree.
These last few weeks we've all stood in the square, with the people of Egypt. They did not seem to me to be young radicals throwing stones. These were middle-aged shop-keepers, not even angry. Simply patient, and simply waiting for something: what we all want. Don't tell me you weren't stirred, and even found yourself wanting it too. We watched the Egyptian army find it had no-one to fight. Forests teach us that big things sometimes just crumble.
This Holy Week, this Easter, remember the ancient wisdom that said the Cross was fashioned from the wood of the Tree of Life in Eden - "one and only noble Tree" as we used to sing. The flesh of Jesus bled into its woody cells. Trees in all cultures unite heaven and earth.
The task? The usual one: audit our communities, ministries and schools. Reduce our ecological footprint each year – until we reach 1.7 ha/person. Fear not – the websites will give it to you in acres as well. (www.ecologicalfootprint.org or www.myfootprint.org and many others, to suit each country)
If you want to grieve with the forests in Holy Week ["If they do this in the case of the green wood, what will they do when the wood is dry?"], the Australian Columbans have brought out a 'Stations of the Forest'. The link is:
http://www.columban.org.au/about-us/columban-videos/stations-of-the-forest/
The bigger task is finding our way back into the forest. We'll leave that for another letter ....
Moy Hitchen cfc, For EDMUND RICE INTERNATIONAL
