Before I start I would like to set the context for this addrerss. I would like to tell you about a new group set up in Ireland called Eco Congregation Ireland. Eco Congregation Ireland is a recently established Church environmental programme, with representation from the four main Christian Churches as well as the Society of Friends.
I have been working loosely with Eco Congregation Ireland since April this year as part of my work with an environmental colition of NGO’s called Stop Climate Chaos I have also asked the board of management in this church to join Eco Congregation Ireland and the church has applied to become a member. For those you interested in finding out more take a look at their Web site http://ecocongregationireland.org
Anyway this autumn Eco Congregation Ireland encouraged all churches in Ireland to consider a meaningful and relevant celebration of the Creator and Creation as part of their service calendar and this is why I am addressing you today.
Of course this address is presented with all the usual Unitarian caveats. It is presented in good faith and with a personal passion that you may or may not agree with.
OK that’s the context over with

Over the last month I have been preparing a tender for the Department for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government for a public awareness campaign on climate change. Part of the brief given was that the tender should identify how a public awareness campaign would communicate the issue of climate change to consumers!
This puzzled me
Just what is a consumer I wondered?
According to my Apple computer dictionary a consumer is a person who purchases goods and services for personal use. I suppose we could say, based on that definition, that all of us here are consumers, anyone who makes an offering to the collection this morning could be called a consumer, a consumer of religious service.
Our consumer culture would tell us that our purpose, as consumers, is to maximise pleasure, proclaim more is better than less; new is better than used and deep down behind the façade that resources are essentially infinite. This I believe is the predominant worldview of all Western culture. The Church of consumerism I have heard it called.
It has now become clear to me that within this church of consumerism we are, like EreesEEkthon, Consuming the World and ourselves at an alarming rate.
In February last year in the United States, 86 evangelical leaders signed a joint statement on global warming. Called Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action, the statement declared that human-induced climate change is real, its consequences will hit the poor the hardest, and that Christian moral convictions demand an urgent response to the problem.
Needless to say I was surprised! For too long now there has been a longstanding distrust between religious people and their institutions, on the one hand, and environmentalists and advocates of sustainable development, on the other. As I see it, this distrust is based on some longstanding differences between the two sides. Environmentalists would often perceive religion is a conservative influence on society and therefore say it is unable to really address the issues of sustainable development.
Franciscan writer and author Richard Rohr asks, “Why is it that church people by and large mirror the larger population on almost all counts?...On the whole, we tend to be just as protective of power, prestige, and possessions as everyone else.”
Beyond this “conservative” perception also lie tensions that stem from two quite differing world-views.
Consider the issues of women’s status in the church or other heated differences such as when human life begins. Profound issues such as what constitutes truth is another difference in worldview that can separate the two communities or take the different perspective on the place of humanity in the natural order, this to has separated the two sides and created divisions within them.
But when I look closer, the two groups also share important points of interest. I suggest that both religious and environmental groups view the world from a moral perspective; both view nature as having value that surpasses economics; and both sides opposes excessive consumption.
As I see it religion and environmentalism have sizeable and complementary strengths. Growing these strengths is now what is needed for the changes ahead.
Advocates of sustainable living are strongly rooted in science, and have a concrete vision for sustainability. Religious traditions on the other hand can shape people’s worldview, wield moral authority. They have the ear of multitudes of followers, they often possess strong financial and institutional assets They are also strong generators of social capital, a vital asset in community building.
This was why I was so surprised by the Evangelicals calling for a "Creation care agenda", because in it I saw for the first time a common interest and shared understanding of a hugely important concern for all of humankind. Climate Change.
The Evangelicals "Creation care agenda" has four main points and these mirror what environmentalists have been saying for some time, they are that

1: Human-Induced Climate Change is Real
2: The Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest.
3. Moral Convictions Demand Our Response to the Climate Change Problem.
4: The need to act now is urgent. Governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate change—;starting now.

I would like to look at each one briefly.
1: Human-Induced Climate Change is Real
I know certain strands of the media are still trying to inject doubt about climate change, but we need to see this debate as over. Saying that climate change is not linked to human activity is like saying that the earth is flat. The facts are clear.
In 1957 the Mauna Loa meteorological station in Hawaii has been continuously monitoring atmospheric carbon dioxide. Concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in 1957 was 315 ppm - The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2007 is 384 ppm and is increasing by about 2 ppm each year.
This is the highest concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last 600,000 years and probably in the last 20 million years
Over the last 100 years fossil fuel emissions have increased by more than 1200% to the point that humanity is now dumping 70 million tons of global warming pollution into our atmosphere every day. Based on the current rate of increase, greenhouse gas concentrations are likely to reach 400 ppm by 2015, and be up to 800 ppm by 2060 if we do nothing about it.
Unfortunately when we add to these human induced emissions the possibility of further large-scale climate feedback events within the natural system we have the potential for some significant increases in GHG concentrations in the atmosphere over the next 50 years. In 1996 the EU commission said society needs to achieve a stabilization of CO2 in the atmosphere below 400 ppm to give a relatively high certainty of not exceeding a 2°C increasing temperature above pre industrial levels. This 2°C increase is an important threshold and is seen as a potential climate tipping point by scientists if we exceed it.

2: The Consequences of Climate Change Will Be Significant, and Will Hit the Poor the Hardest.
Like the story of EreesEEkthon this tale is not so pleasant either. To set the scene
Nearly half the world's population that’s 2.8 billion people are living on less than $2 a day.
More than 1 in 4 adults cannot read or write and 2/3 of these are women.
Women do about 66% of the world's work in return for less than 5% of its income.
In our world today over 1,200 children under the age of 5 die every hour - most from easily preventable or treatable causes.
More than half a million women die in pregnancy and childbirth every year - that's one death every minute.
Approximately 40% of the world's population-mostly those living in the world's poorest countries are at risk of contracting malaria.
The WWF say that the global fishing fleet takes two and a half times more from the oceans than they can sustainably produce.
World trade robs poor countries of nearly € 2 billion a day - 14 times what they get in aid.
For every €1 in grant aid to developing countries, more than €19 comes back in debt repayments.

Developing countries have contributed least to the problem of climate change but they are the countries that will be worst hit by a changing climate. In fact they are already feeling its impacts.
The impact of global warming that has already occurred, and the future warming of the planet, to which we are already committed, is and will increasingly be, devastating for the poor, undermining their chances to progress. Industrialised countries have the historical responsibility of causing climate change and it is a matter of fairness and justice that the rich north bear the leading responsibility for tackling the problem, both by reducing our emissions now and by assisting developing countries to adapt to the changes that are already occurring.

3. Moral Convictions Demand Our Response to the Climate Change Problem.
Al Gore when he received an Oscar for the film “an inconvenient truth” said: "My fellow Americans and people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis. It's not a political issue; it's a moral one. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act. But that's a renewable resource. Let's renew it."
In a further interview Gore said
"Put simply, it is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours."
And again interestingly I see in the Evangelicals "Creation care agenda" some interesting parallels and agreement where I would not have expected to find them.
There is young group of university students in the US called the “Inconvenient Christians” who run a Web site called “Restoring Eden.org”. On the site they are calling young Christians to take direct action on climate change and reinforcing their moral arguments in supporting this position. On the Web site, as one would expect, there are numerous references to the Bible and its commitment to creation. I would like to repeat from my reading earlier the Restoring Eden’s mission statement, Psalm 104.
How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.... When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.
The fourth point in the Evangelicals "Creation care agenda" states that
The need to act now is urgent. Governments, businesses, churches, and individuals all have a role to play in addressing climate change—;starting now.
The Chinese symbol for crisis is made up of two words "danger" and "opportunity" climate change is most certainly a crisis. It is most definitely a danger, but within this danger we must also seek to find the opportunity.
What we do about climate change is a complex question. There is one spiritual school that would suggest we do “nothing”. By nothing they mean “Nothing” we would need to cease “Doing”. Such a solution is probably beyond our societies understanding, but it is one solution. A second and more “Doing” solution would be to look at some of the tools available particularly with regard to the psychology of behavior change.
In her 1969 book On Death and Dying Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describes, in five discrete stages, the process by which people deal with difficult news. These are,
Denial
Anger
Fear
Bargaining
Acceptance

On the face of it climate change may seem too daunting, we may even seek to deny its existence. But what the The Kübler-Ross model offers is a framework within which we can begin the debate.
Explain the The Kübler-Ross model in an informal manner.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference” is a common prayer used by alcoholics anonymous.
It is clear that there is a need to act now - but just what we “can change” is a little bit daunting from.
In my mind we need to look at the problem in manageable chunks!
What can we do as individuals, within our communities, within our region, within our country and as citizens of the planet? I suggest that there are four sequential steps that we must embark on. We need to:
Identify and accept that climate change is a reality
Negotiate agreements on how to deal with it
Develop and implement the technology required
And we need to do this before the internal dynamics of the land and ocean systems develop conditions that are impossible to reverse.
There are some experts who believe the world has already reached this point of no return and are advising that society needs to adapt to the new conditions of a climate in flux rather than trying to change the current system and this may indeed hold value but for the purpose of this address I would like to propose another immediate option for this congregation to try now.
Eco-Congregation Ireland is an environmental management system for churches, available to all Christian denominations throughout Britain and Ireland. It has been developed through a partnership between the “Churches Together” group in Britain and Ireland and the environmental awareness organization “Going for Green” or ENCAMS who run the keep Britain tidy campaign.
Eco-Congregation provides an environmental management system for a church to carry out a simple environmental audit to help a congregation to assess what they are already doing and to determine future priorities for improvement.
Eco-Congregations provides resource modules, which aim to integrate environmental care into different areas of church life. Each church will normally choose three modules on which to concentrate each year from a list including:
Worship and Teaching, Children’s and Youth Work, Property and Grounds Management, Finance – Purchasing and Waste, Personal Lifestyles, Working with the Local Community and Thinking Globally. And pick up another three modules the year after and so move the congregation to a more sustainable path in structured th have things are visit the way.
Eco-Congregation Ireland is an Internet based initiative so all the resources are free and can be downloaded from their website. The modules are designed to enable congregations to set up their own EMS and monitor their ongoing progress towards a more sustainable congregation. I have registered an interest in the programme and received a starter pack, which includes a special Eco-Congregation Ireland folder and Module One – an environmental audit.
Once we have completed this audit, we are on your way to becoming an eco congregation!
Would any one like to get involved?

Amen

Gavin Heart