Articles

A letter from Bristol Christian Climate Action to all churches in Bristol:

Dear Friends,

The weekend of 12th/13th December is the 5^th Anniversary of the Paris Agreement on Climate (at COP21), when almost all nations promised to keep global temperatures well below 2°C of historic levels, and if possible to no more than 1.5 degrees.

You may or may not have gathered, in the newspaper euphoria, that the promises made by governments at the time would have resulted in 3.5 degrees of warming, even if the “voluntary commitments” were really implemented.

The idea was to come back in 5 years time (at COP26 in Glasgow) with planned carbon reductions that would achieve the temperature target.  This meeting will take place in November 2021 in Glasgow.

But, the problem is, that no country, not even the UK which considers itself a leader on Climate Change, has plans that get anywhere near the carbon cuts that are needed to keep global temperature rises to the Paris Agreement 1.5 degrees  hopes [1].  Net Zero by 2050 targets might sound impressive, but climate Scientists , and the UK’s official Committee that provides the budgets, are increasingly insistent that swift, steep cuts to greenhouse gases are needed to avoid the worst climate, ecological and human emergency.   The 10 point plan recently announced by the Government is woefully insufficient.

As Christians in this church you are doing your best to follow Jesus and help your neighbours, and in these difficult times, we are not wanting to add to anyone’s anxieties. It is not the ordinary “person in the pew” just managing to keep heads above water in the “Covid situation”, who bears the primary responsibility or ability to form a new green economy.  It is governments.  But, there is one thing that you COULD do this week, to help our global neighbours who suffer most from flood, fire and harvest failure right now, and our young people who are going to live through the consequences of this generation’s actions.

We are asking you to write to or email your MP and ask them to support the new Climate and Ecological Emergence Bill (https://www.ceebill.uk/). This is a private members bill.  It was presented to Parliament in September, supported by a cross party group of MP’s.  It will be debated next March  and will need a large number of MPs from all parties to vote it into law.

The Climate Change Act 2008 was ground breaking in its day, but its targets will NOT reduce emissions enough to nurture and restore the earth God gave us, or provide safety, food and life for our neighbours or our children’s children.

If you have time, and feel a calling to join with other Christians in Bristol to work together on climate justice , do contact us through email – christianclimateactionbristol@gmail.com or facebook  Covid restrictions at the time permitting, Bristol Christian Climate Action will be marking the 5^th Anniversary of the Paris Agreement.  If you would like to join us, please contact us as above.

Thank you very much for reading this.

Members of Bristol Christian Climate Action

submitted by Gaie Delap

References

[1] Anderson K, Broderick J.F., Stoddard I. (2020) A factor of two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short of Paris-compliant pathways. Climate Policy 20 1290-1304. https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2020.1728209

Reflections by Val Pommier on 128 Hampton Road, Bristol BS6 6JE  

It was in 1987 that Jean-Noël and I made our first visit to Bristol for an interview to be wardens at the Friends Meeting House in Redland.

We were welcomed by Mary Friend, the clerk of the Warden’s committee who continued to watch over us for many years.

You offered us and the other candidates a weekend full of surprises. We were hosted in different families (John and Pauline Roberts were our hosts). You organised a party for us to get to know as many Friends as possible. You took us on a trip round the town (Judy Chandler was our guide).

Ken and Gill Bocock, the retiring resident wardens, showed us round the warden’s house and talked to us about the job from their perspective. We began to dream. We knew we could do the job and coming from a small two bedroomed flat in Hartshill Meeting House in Warwickshire we knew we could bring up our two children in this amazing 4 bedroomed house.

We were interviewed by Cyril Poster, Jennifer Clapham and David Nash and then returned home to await the phone call that would tell us if we had been chosen or not.

The phone call came and in August 1987 we moved into 128.

The warmth of the welcome we had received at our interview weekend continued through the following 15 years. Clerks came and went, committee members changed, several treasurers supported us during our years with you, but we remained, through so many ups and downs of the job and meeting house improvements.

In 2002 we decided it was time for us to move on. It had taken us a very long time to reach this decision and that is a tribute to the whole of Redland Friends Meeting where we felt we belonged.

When we left we took with us a significant part of 128 Hampton Road. Jean-Noël had spent 15 years making scores of sketches and paintings from the windows of the house. Intimate views from the back windows, views that only the residents of the house would ever see, expansive views from the front of the house and from the flat roof, views of Redland rooftops and the sunlight hitting the walls of old victorian houses.

Original painting of these views are on walls of homes in England, France, Germany, The Netherlands, USA, So many people benefitting from this house!

As I sit in these Zoom Meeting for Worship, I have opposite me a painting through the open kitchen window of 128. Yellow forsythia in flower and the old pear tree in leaf.

I am blessed by what we had and what I still have.

When I heard this year that there was an on-going discussion about the possible sale of the house now that Bill and Louise Thatcher had retired I was full of emotion. Emotion may not have its place in decisions such as these but it was all I had to offer – preferably in silence!

As I listened at the Threshing Meeting on August 24th my thoughts wandered to the moment of our departure on August 25th 2002.

All our belongings had already gone by removal van to France. Jean-Noël and our daughter, Noémie were already in our camper van in front of the meeting house waiting for me to come out.
“Why was I taking so long to lock the door:” they wondered. I was finding this moment difficult. This house had been my home and my safety and now our future was uncertain. I wanted to check that everthing was perfect for Bill and Louise to move in with their family.

The whole place was empty and as clean as I could make it. Then I noticed the telephone cord. Those spiral, coiled cords on the old fashioned phones catch all the grime. I hadn’t noticed just how dirty it was until the moment of parting. I wasn’t going to leave it like that. I started to clean!

We know that the umbilical cord which attaches us all to the source of life must be cut for us to find our own way forward. It is a new beginning, an adventure which leads us into an unknown future. The cord is cut in the faith that new life will flourish.

I read the following statement published in Bristol City of Sanctuary June newsletter during Meeting for Worship on 14 June. It seemed to me to sum up the right response to the demonstrations and protests we had seen in Bristol over the previous week or so, and resonates with Quaker values.

The killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police has sent shock waves around the world. His death highlighted, again, the extent of police brutality against the black community in the USA. The global response to this terrible act has also forced us all to confront racist structures that exist within our own countries. In the UK, these include the disproportionate stop and searches of black people, prejudicial assumptions that infiltrate the public and private sphere, the Government’s deliberate creation of a Hostile Environment, the Windrush scandal. Unfortunately, the list is long.

This is not the first time that we have seen such an outpouring of grief and understandable anger. People are tired of discrimination, tired of police brutality, tired of the injustices, tired of fear, tired of structural inequalities that continue to exist within businesses, faith communities, educational and public institutions and that also exist within our government.

“It’s up to all of us – Black, white, everyone – no matter how well-meaning we think we might be, to do the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it [racism] out. It starts with self-examination and listening to those whose lives are different from our own. It ends with justice, compassion, and empathy that manifests in our lives and on our streets” – Michelle Obama

There are no quick fixes for racism so ingrained in our communities in Britain. However, by continuing to work together locally we can make Bristol a real City of Sanctuary which provides welcome, safety and hope for all. There is so much work to be done but there is also a tangible feeling of hope that things can change for the better.

Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with this movement, and all those who  stand for justice and peace in our city, nationally and around the world. We must listen to the voices that speak their pain and then act decisively on what we hear. Our humanity must speak truth to power until every person is valued equally.

Caroline Beatty – Co-chair, Bristol City of Sanctuary
Reverend Richard McKay – Co-Chair, Bristol City of Sanctuary
Forward Maisokwadzo – Manager, Bristol City of Sanctuary

Submitted by Linda Ewles

by Rob Hopkins 

Review by Alison Bordes

The two qualities which are most important to children of today are hope and imagination. Hope to believe they can change the world they live in and imagination to find ways to do so.

Janet Galbraith 1986 (Quaker Faith and Practice 23.85)

At the start of a new decade when there is a great deal of gloom around, here is a book to lighten the spirit and give a glimmer of hope.

Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transformation Movement shows how change is possible if we can embrace the idea that by using our imagination and creativity, new perspectives and solutions can be found in facing up to the multiple challenges which confront us. He has experienced transformation in his own community in Totnes and instances around the world where people come together with a common purpose to find new ways to combat personal loneliness, prejudice and negative beliefs about how to deal with a fractured world.

Hopkins exhorts us to use our innate creativity to think beyond what we see in front of us to find better ways of living and behaving. He uses multiple examples of how communities have shown how they have the drive and enthusiasm to achieve realistic solutions.

Climate change, extreme governments and ideologies, loss of biodiversity ecosystems, insecurity both personal and global are all confronted by the author. He has a well-founded belief that we humans have it within us to bring about change if we combine and pull together and each contribute using our imagination. An inspiring book that will be available in the Redland library soon.

What Is to What If by Rob Hopkins (2019) Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing

Redland became a ‘Sanctuary Meeting’ in 2017. Our Meeting’s refugee action group was active between 2016-2018!  While we have been less collectively active as a Meeting in refugee support in the past year, many of our member and attenders, both from Redland and other meetings in Bristol Area, continue to be very much engaged in Bristol’s refugee support sector.  Others have significant personal connections with people seeking sanctuary in the city.  It is inspiring and supportive to know what each other is doing.  So this gathering, on 26th January, following a shared lunch, will be an opportunity to share our involvement and experience in the field.  Please come and tell us what you are doing.  I will structure the meeting lightly so everyone gets a chance to contribute and reflect.  I suspect that our collective experience will fully earn us our place in the wider Sanctuary Everywhere movement – let us see.

Whether or not you are active in this field at the moment, of course you are welcome to come.  On 16th February there will be a meeting for learning from 10-10.45am at Redland Meeting House, to reflect on the way in which this concern links with others in the meeting, such as climate change and homelessness.

Caroline Beatty

Talk by Chris Walker, QPSW Sustainability Programme Manager, to Bristol Area Quakers
19th October 2019
My role within Quakers in Britain is to manage our central climate justice work – alongside my colleague Livvy Hanks. Our work focuses on system change – working for the economic and political changes that are needed to avert climate breakdown and build a fundamentally more just and sustainable economy. We speak out on behalf of Friends, and support Friends in their own witness too.
Whilst quite a bit of my work focuses on climate policy and what’s going on, or not going on in political institutions on climate change. I could talk about the UK’s current climate targets, what Brexit means for climate policy.
I want to step back a bit and reflect on our role as Quakers, as people of faith, as citizens, confronting this vast, interconnected, deep rooted crisis of climate change.
We’ve never averted climate breakdown before. We’ve never halved global emissions in ten years. We’ve never – to the scale required, concurrently and with big deadline – restructured our economy, contained the power of multinational companies, changed hearts and minds, put ourselves in the way of oppression and violence, and transformed ourselves.
With this in mind, I want merely to talk about 5 things I think I know about climate justice- and what’s required of us. I’m not going to neatly connect them all up. I’ll leave gaps and maybe contradictions. And I am definitely not claiming that I, or the work of Quakers in Britain, live up live up to them ……. yet.
I’m going to start with our testimony: our faith is rooted in a commitment Peace, Equality, Simplicity, Truth. But we know that these or not neat tools in a box. They are perhaps, four dimensions, entangled ways of imagining what’s required of us in a world that presents crises that are also entangled, with many dimensions. Inequality and environmental plunder sows the seeds of war. Our high consumption lifestyles not only distract us from what really nourishes us, but fuels extraction, exploitation and injustice and so the cycle continues. And Friends, we need to confront these entangled truths. I’ll come back this later.
So what’s required of us? This brings me to the first thing I think I know about climate change.

Thing 1: Well we certainly need to be raising the alarms, demanding urgent, emergency action on climate change – through direct action, divesting our money from fossil fuels, mass campaigning, lobbying.

They are all needed, none of them are the magic key alone. And Friends across the country are providing inspiration:
Many many young Quakers have joined the school strikes, and many older ones have joined in solidarity. BYM staff joined the global climate strike to show our support, with the backing of our managers. It’s why when Greta Thunberg came to the UK in April, she visited Friends House where she met with Young Friends and spoke to 900 mostly young climate activists.
Many Friends have been involved in Extinction Rebellion. We still don’t know how many Friends were arrested in the Autumn rebellion, and just as key, playing supporting roles. Meeting Houses have been offered as meeting space.
Friends have been central to resisting fracking – especially at Preston New Road in Lancashire. Friends have convened interfaith protests and vigil and taken part in direct action. We believe Cuadrilla may be on the verge of pulling out of that site, and that protests have been a huge problem to the economic viability of the project.
Many Friends and Meetings are involved in demanding their local authorities declare a climate emergency – At least 79 city, county or borough councils, and around 30 town or parish councils have declared one. And many and then saying – so what’s next? Friends in Birmingham have been central to convening other faith groups to engage with the council about how they will enact an action plan in response.
Most Quaker meetings have divested their money from fossil fuels, like Britain Yearly Meeting has, and this has been really important in lobby councils and pension funds to divest too.
Yet, at the same time as raising the alarm, committing to urgent action, our movement needs to confront a deeper, more complex truth.

And that’s Thing 2: Climate change is a symptom of a way of running our global economy that depends on exploitation of people and the planet. Its roots are long and deep.

Even if we can convince ourselves that we’ve only just realized the importance of climate breakdown, we’ve certainly known that the things that drive it were always unjust.
An increasingly globalized economy driven by profit for the few has not only left a global majority behind, its relied on systems of extraction, displacement and marginalization. Those hardest hit globally, like with climate change, like with housing inequality, with insecure work, are poorer, they are people of colour. Women nearly always suffer from these injustices more than men.
Our global economic system has not only led to inequality. Inequality has enabled our system.
Take fossil fuels, for example. The writer and activist Naomi Klein has written that “The thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that they require sacrificial places and sacrificial people. People whose lungs and bodies can be sacrificed to work in coal mines and refineries, people who lands and water can be sacrificed to pollution. In fact, in the 1970s, officials in the US were openly referring to certain part of the country as ‘national sacrifice zones.”
And it’s not possible to sacrifice people and places without, what she calls “othering”. Imagining other people, other communities, other races, nations, as less valuable, as distant, as conveniently hidden.
It was, then, the relative ranking of humans that not only to set in train some our global histories darkest moments – slavery, colonialism – but also that made it possible to dig up and burn those fossil fuels in the first place.

So what does justice require of us?

I can’t fully answer that, but I do know that because just because I, in my context, waking up to climate emergency, and what it means for my family, my daughter, cannot talk about it in isolation from other, older emergencies. It doesn’t trump the emergencies of racism, poverty, forced migration. To persuade others to pause their struggles to help with this one continues to marginalise other people and their stories.
Rather, to make our climate movement as broad, we need to make the agenda broad too.

How do we do that?

Thing 3: We need to go beyond just talking about urgent action, and talk about deep change

As citizens, but I think particularly as people of faith, we can see ourselves as offering hope and vision for a just transition to a zero carbon economy, that also confronts some of these other emergencies of housing inequality, fuel poverty, unemployment, poor public services.
Some of this vision is laid out by Green New Deal models in the UK and US – making the case for zero carbon investment that puts poorest and most marginalized first.
So what we’re working to do centrally, and many Friends are doing locally, is to say to government and parliament – tell us your economic plan – what’s your strategy for green investment – for investing in green jobs, green housing, green land use, limiting the climate impact of investment overseas and trade? How will you make sure all this makes our economy more equal? And to do so alongside other people of faith lets politicians know that we won’t just be happy with statements and commitments – we are all stakeholders in climate policy – we are watching what they are doing – we notice – we care. We don’t have to be a policy think tank to hold government to account on this stuff.
We can support you to do that too – with training. Whilst direct action is essential – so is engagement. However slow, frustrating it is. Many MPs don’t get the urgency – and many more don’t understand enough about climate change. But the tone of their engagement has changed. And because a just transition covers so many areas of policy, there is nearly always a point of connection of shared values – which we have take advantage of. Maria Caulfield.
And many MPs are more responsive when you connect climate change to a broader agenda for change and justice. Young people, investing more in deprived regions, supporting healthier local rural economies.
And speaking of local economies:

The 4th thing I know:
The seeds of a new economy, a just sustainable economy, are all around us

Across the UK, and beyond of course, people are modelling how we can run our economy and society differently to transform it. It may be small or particular – a local veg box scheme – a project to teach people to cycle or connect with nature – enterprise doing business differently.
When we are overwhelmed by the scale of our transformation needed – we can look around us, be inspired by local leadership, and ask how we can help. This can help us connect with different kinds of people. And we can also point to these people when we speak to people in power to say look – people care- people are putting resources in to a better future. It’s not just that politicians are failing to lead – they are failing to unleash the good will, the innovation, the creativity of local communities to build a sustainable economy.
That’s the local, but let’s think about the global

Thing 5: Another place we can look to support leadership and take courage, is to those communities taking action where the stakes are already much higher

There are people around the world, whose homes, livelihoods and communities are already on the brink. They might also have to work a lot harder to be heard – either because in their own countries, democracy is even weaker than here, or when protest is met with oppression and violence. Or when at the UN, at international climate conference, they are repeatedly overlooked and ignored. Whether its people resisting Shell oil in the Niger Delta or coal mines in Indonesia, or young people on climate school strikes in Kabul, when we get despondent about my own power and activism, it’s important to remember the context they are in.
In November next year, the UN climate talks will be in Glasgow. Many activists, with amazing stories from around the world, will be coming to the UK – or at least want their stories heard. It’s a focus for us to think about how climate justice means solidarity- to help others be heard, to learn from their struggles, to take inspiration. We’re going to be working to help those groups be heard at the climate talks and by UK citizens, and we’ll be reaching out to make connections way beyond our own context and our own communities. I’d say watch this space- but don’t. Think about what you can do locally to take inspiration.
And again it’s about linking the struggles. Meetings across the UK have become Sanctuary meetings, places of Friends for migrants. Many are resisting war and militarism. This global gathering in the UK is a chance to connect our global struggles. We all need to work out how.

Chris Walker
chrisw@quaker.org.uk www.quaker.org.uk/climatejustice