NECCSA Update: August 2006
1. Eucharistic Prayer
Mike Durrant led a group on a Wilderness Retreat recently. He has send the following Eucharistic prayer which he adapted from the Methodist Eucharistic prayer.
All creation worships the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We join with all creatures to worship our creator and redeemer.
Creator God, you spoke and out of the chaos came order; you spoke and out of the darkness came light; you spoke and out of the barrenness came life and colour and song and the amazing variety of creatures and life forms. You took earth, you sculptured from it a human form, breathed your breath into it, making us people created in your own image.
And when we disobeyed you, thus disrupting the unity and harmony of what you created, you made all your fullness live in Jesus Christ and through him you have reconciled to yourself all things in the heavens and the earth. So together with all created and redeemed life, we worship you saying:
Holy, holy, holy
Creating and redeeming and sustaining God,
All of creation is filled with your presence and speaks of your glory.
Praise be to you in the highest heaven. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,
Praise be to you in the highest heaven.
All praise be to Jesus, the firstborn over all creation. On the night on which he was betrayed, he took bread; he gave thanks to God, broke it and gave it to his disciples and said “This is my body which is for you. Do this to remember me.”
In the same way after supper, he took the cup. He gave thanks and gave it to is disciples and said to them “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this whenever you drink it to remember me.”
Christ has died. Christ is risen, Christ will come again.
Holy Spirit, come upon this bread and wine. May it be for us the body and blood of Christ.
You send your Spirit, they are created, you renew the face of the earth.
Make us one with Christ, and one with each other; make us whole within and bring us into harmony with all creation. May we be people who share with creation in worship of you and who share with you in the renewal of all creation.
Amen.
2. A Rocha South Africa: Inaugural conferences
Two inaugural conferences of A Rocha South Africa was held recently, namely at the Umgeni Valley near Howick and in Stellenbosch. Sue Winter send us this report on the Stellenbosch conference:
“The earth is the Lord’s…. “(Psalm 24:1) - So what is the Church doing about it? This was the theme of the inaugural conference of A Rocha that was held at the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens. A Rocha is an international Christian conservation organization which started in 1983 with a bird conservation project in Portugal. “A Rocha” means “The Rock” in Portuguese. Since then A Rocha has grown to a family of national organizations working in 16 different countries.
The conference was marked by a commemorative tree planting in the gardens where a Wild Pomegranate (Burchellia bubelina) was planted and dedicated to all individuals and churches in the Western Cape working together to care for God’s creation.
The keynote address at the conference was given by Peter and Miranda Harris, founders of A Rocha, who are now based in France. Peter encouraged the church in general, to awake to its responsibility of being good stewards of the natural resources and beautiful environments that God has entrusted to man.
Other guest speakers included Allen Goddard, director of A Rocha in South Africa and Colin & Roni Jackson from A Rocha Kenya who shared their experiences of 8 years of community conservation work at Mida Creek in Kenya. Dr Ben Marais shared his perspective as a paediatrician on the importance of Christians being involved in environmental issues, due to their direct influence on human health and that of future unborn generations. Lynn Pedersen, deacon at St Martins Anglican Church in Bergvliet, provided a useful overview of what the New Testament says about creation stewardship. Sue Winter, encouraged delegates to consider how they could make a difference in their community by starting an interest group and getting involved in practical conservation projects. She ended with the following quotable quote: “Working for God on earth does not pay much, but his retirement plan is out of this world!”
A wide range of conference delegates were present including representatives from more than 5 Stellenbosch churches, pastors, volunteer groups and civil society from all over Cape Town and Stellenbosch.
A Stellenbosch A Rocha interest group has been initiated by Lydia Willems and Sue Winter called “Bewonder & Bewaar”. Contact Lydia at 083-7025481 or lydia2@sun.ac.za, if you would like to join. For more information on A Rocha and how to become a member, go to www.arocha.org.
3. Presidential challenge on consumerism
In his Nelson Madela Memorial Lecture, read at the University of the Witwatersrand. July 29, 2006, President Thabo Mbeki raised issues that are central to the task of Christian earthkeeping. We need to keep in mind that environmental degradation is caused mainly through urban expansion, commercial agriculture, industry and the use of resources and energy in these sectors. These economic activities are aimed at fulfilling consumer demands. Consumerism therefore drives the economy.
The following extract from President Mbeki’s lecture is particularly relevant:
Thus, everyday, and during every hour of our time beyond sleep, the demons embedded in our society, that stalk us at every minute, seem always to beckon each one of us towards a realisable dream and nightmare. With every passing second,they advise, with rhythmic and hypnotic regularity – get rich! get rich! get rich! And thus has it come about that many of us accept that our common natural instinct to escape from poverty is but the other side of the same coin on whose reverse side are written the words – at all costs, get rich! In these circumstances, personal wealth, and the public communication of the message that we are people of wealth, becomes, at the same time, the means by which we communicate the message that we are worthy citizens of our community, the very exemplars of what defines the product of a liberated South Africa. This peculiar striving produces the particular result that manifestations of wealth, defined in specific ways, determine the individuality of each one of us who seeks to achieve happiness and self-fulfilment, given the liberty that the revolution of 1994 brought to all of us. In these circumstances, the meaning of freedom has come to be defined not by the seemingly ethereal and therefore intangible gift of liberty, but by the designer labels on the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the spaciousness of our houses and our yards, their geographic location, the company we keep, and what we do as part of that company.
In the event that what I have said has come across as a meaningless ramble, let me state what I have been saying more directly. It is perfectly obvious that many in our society, having absorbed the value system of the capitalist market, have come to the conclusion that, for them, personal success and fulfilment means personal enrichment at all costs, and the most theatrical and striking public display of that wealth. What this means is that many in our society have come to accept that what is socially correct is not the proverbial expression – “manners maketh the man” – but the notion that each one of us is as excellent a human being as our demonstrated wealth suggests!
4. Religion, Science, and the Environment Symposium
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim from the Forum for Religion and Ecology has distributed the following report on the destruction of the rainforests in the Amazon basin. They attended the Religion, Science, and the Environment Symposium on the Amazon River with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew. The symposium consisted of scientists, environmentalists, government officials, NGO representatives, and UN officials, as well as religious leaders and journalists. They report that there were daily presentations as well as site visits and that the trip was quite moving in so many ways. “The sheer size, scale, and beauty of the Amazon region is breathtaking; but so is the tremendous loss of land and biodiversity that is occurring. The impact of deforestation, agribusiness, and mining on native peoples has been devasting.”
The symposium was covered by the BBC as well as by national television in Brazil. The following article by a well-known British journalist, Geoffrey Lean was attached.
Dying Forest: One year to save the Amazon
Time is running out for the Amazon rainforest. And the fate of the 'lungs of the world' will take your breath away Report by Geoffrey Lean in Manaus for the Independent. Published: 23 July 2006
Deep in the heart of the world's greatest rainforest, nine days' journey by boat from the sea, Otavio Luz Castello is anxiously watching the soft waters of the Amazon drain away. Every day they recede further, like water running slowly out of an unimaginably immense bath, threatening a global catastrophe. He pointed out what was happening on Wednesday, standing on an island in a quiet channel of the giant river. Just a month ago, he explained, it had been entirely under water. Now it was jutting a full 15 feet above it.
It is a sign that severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year. And that would be ominous indeed. For, as we report on page 12 today, new research suggests that just one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.
Just the day before, top scientists had been delivering much the same message at a remarkable floating symposium on the Rio Negro, on whose strange black waters this capital city of the Amazon stands. They told the meeting - convened on a flotilla of boats by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church, dubbed the "green Pope" for his environmental activism - that global warming and deforestation were rapidly pushing the entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would irreversibly start to die.
The consequences would be truly awesome. The wet Amazon, the planet's greatest celebration of life, would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst. This would cause much of the world - including Europe - to become hotter and drier, making this sweltering summer a mild foretaste of what is to come. In the longer term, it could make global warming spiral out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.
Nowhere could seem further from the world's problems than the idyllic spot where Otavio Luz Castello lives. The young naturalist's home is a chain of floating thatched cottages that make up a research station in the Mamiraua Reserve, halfway between here and Brazil's border with Colombia.
Rare pink river dolphin play in the tranquil waters surrounding the cottages, kingfishers dive into them, giant, bright butterflies zig-zag across them and squirrel monkeys romp in the trees on their banks. And an 18ft black caiman answers, literally, to the name of Fred; gliding up to dine abstemiously on sliced white bread when called. There is little to suggest that it may be witnessing the first scenes of an apocalypse. The waters of the rivers of the Amazon Basin routinely fall by some 30-40 feet- greater than most of the tides of the world's seas - between the wet and dry seasons. But last year they just went on falling in the worst drought in recorded history.
In the Mamiraua Reserve they dropped 51 feet, 15 feet below the usual low level and other areas were more badly affected. At one point in the western Brazilian state of Acre, the world's biggest river shrank so far that it was possible to walk across it. Millions of fish died; thousands of communities, whose only transport was by water, were stranded. And the drying forest caught fire; at one point in September, satellite images spotted 73,000 separate blazes in the basin.
This year, says Otavio Luz Castello, the water is draining away even faster than the last one - and there are still more than three months of the dry season to go. He adds: "I am very concerned."
It is much the same all over Amazonia. In the Jau National Park, 18 hours by boat up the Rio Negro from here, local people who took me out by canoe at dawn found it impossible to get to places they had reached without trouble just the evening before. Acre, extraordinarily, received no rain for 40 days recently, and sandbanks are already beginning to surface in its rivers. Flying over the forest - with trees in a thousand shades of green stretching, for hour after hour, as far as the eye can see - it seems inconceivable that anything could endanger its verdant immensity. Until recently, scientists took the same view, seeing it as one of the world's most stable environments.
Though they condemned the way that, on average, an area roughly the size of Wales is cut down each year, this did not seem to endanger the forest as a whole, much less the entire planet. Now they are changing their minds in the face of increasing evidence that the deforestation is pushing both the Amazon and the world to the brink of disaster.
Dr Antonio Nobre, of Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, told the floating symposium - whose delegates ranged from politicians and environmentalists, to Amazonian Indian shamans and Roman Catholic cardinals - of unpublished research which suggests that the felling is both drying up the entire forest and helping to cause the hurricanes that have been battering the United States and the Caribbean.
The hot, wet Amazon, he explained, normally evaporates vast amounts of water, which rise high into the air as if in an invisible chimney. This draws in the wet north-East trade winds, which have picked up moisture from the Atlantic. This in turn controls the temperature of the ocean; as the trade winds pick up the moisture, the warm water that is left gets saltier and sinks.
Deforestation disrupts the cycle by weakening the Amazonian evaporation which drives the whole process. One result is that the hot water in the Atlantic stays on the surface and fuels the hurricanes. Another is that less moisture arrives on the trade winds, intensifying drought in the forest. "We believe there is a vicious cycle" says Dr Nobre.
Marina Silva, a fiery former rubber-tapper who is now Brazil's environment minister, described how the Government was finally cracking down on the felling by seizing illegally cut logs, closing down illicit enterprises and fining and imprisoning offenders. As a result, she says, it dropped by 31 per cent last year.
But even so, it has only returned to the levels it was in 2001, still double what it was 10 years before. And it has reached far into the forest after the American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago at Santarem, some 400 miles downriver from here. This encouraged entrepreneurs to cut down the trees to grow the soya.
The symposium flew down en masse to inspect the damage this had caused - vast fields of beans destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe, where until recently there had been lush, trackless forest. Priests and community leaders who were campaigning to protect the forest told us how they had received repeated death threats.
So far about a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor drying it out. And if you add these two figures together, the total is growing perilously close to 50 per cent, which computer models predict as the "tipping point" that marks the death of the Amazon.
The models did not expect this to happen until 2050. But, says Dr Nobre, "what was predicted for 2050, may have begun to happen in 2005." Nobody knows when the crucial threshold will be passed, but growing numbers of scientists believe that it is coming ever closer. One of Dr Nobre's colleagues, Dr Philip Fearnside, puts it this way: "With every tree that falls we increase the probability that the tipping point will arrive."
Brazilian politicians say that the country has so many other pressing problems that the destruction is unlikely to be brought under control, unless the world helps to pay for the survival of the forest on which it too depends. Calculations by Hylton Philipson, a British merchant banker and rainforest campaigner, reckon that it will take $60bn (£32bn) a year, less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war. The scientists insist there is no time for delay. "If we do not act now", says Dr Fearnside, "we will lose the Amazon forest that helps sustain living conditions throughout the world."
This report seems to indicate that environmental degradation is not necessarily a slow and gradual process, but that the rapid collapse of a whole ecosystem if environmental changes move beyond a certain threshold. This requires from Christians an ability to read the signs of the time and to remain vigilant.