Patrick Daly discusses what should be a young adult’s response to climate change…

Environmental Blog

In just under a month’s time [NB: at the time of publication] our world leaders will convene in Copenhagen to decide on which new ways we can begin to globally tackle climate change. Recently, the Archbishop of Canterbury has launched the Christian voice into the debate by putting forward the argument that we as a nation should be looking to become as self-sufficient as possible to limit carbon production. The question we now face is; what do we, as young Catholics, have to say about climate change? What does our faith inspire us to say?

Tackling climate change is not something that will be easy and nor is it something that we as Catholics can afford to ignore. However, a Catholic friend of mine recently confided to me that she feels like her environmental passions work against her Catholic sensibilities. This stuck me as being very revealing about our reluctance to speak out with the Catholic voice about climate issues. ‘Green Catholicism’ is not something that is very public.

I started to ask myself: is our current attitude towards the environment to do with our Christian faith? Has our Christian faith’s fixation on the person distracted us from the harm we do environmentally? To answer these questions I found myself drawn back to the creation story in Genesis, compelling me to re-read it and to allow it to slowly seep into me.

The passage that kept swirling through my mind and which grabbed my attention with two strong fists as I read was when God expresses His wish to create humankind. In verse twenty-six it states, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image…’”. As I read this line over and over, I found myself asking, who is God talking to here? Who is this ‘us’ that he talks of?

Some might point to this and say that it’s an early reference in the Scriptures to the Holy Trinity. However, for me, in this passage God is addressing the earth and all of creation itself. He is saying to the earth, the land, the sea and the stars, “Let us, together, create man out of your materials and out of my Spirit”.

This powerful environmental message needs to be proclaimed to our Church and I believe that we young members of the Catholic faith have the energy with which to do it. We can announce that to let the earth die is in fact to let ourselves die, for we are created out of and by the environment. This truth about creation, about our shared being with the earth, is a good a message as any to take to Copenhagen and to begin to announce to the rest of the world that young Catholics are taking a stance against climate change.

• The Copenhagen Climate Change summit will take place between 7-18 December 2009

Tags: climate change, environment

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