What is Creation in Crisis?

Creation in Crisis is a local initiative calling for a strong and informed response to the dangers of environmental degradation.  It is part of a growing movement within the Anglican Church to rise to the challenges of climate change, recognising in it their mission to bring about social justice.

What Crisis? 

It is becoming increasingly clear that climate change and related phenomena are having a disproportionately large impact on the countries of the developing world. The Department for International Development recently predicted that rising sea levels, fuelled partly by carbon emissions from countries such as the UK, threaten to reduce India's farm output by as much as a quarter, and increase the number of people at risk from coastal flooding in Africa from one million in 1990 to 70 million by 2080. Within many of our lifetimes, areas such as these are facing the possibility of immense human suffering, destruction of natural habitat, and loss of life and livelihood.

What Can We Do?

Action is required now. Yet many of us remain understandably perplexed by the wealth of information with which we are confronted. So many of those small, everyday decisions that inform our waking lives have been brought into the complicated sphere of twenty-first-century morality that it can often seem overwhelming. Should we buy local products with a smaller carbon footprint, or fairtrade goods from poorer producers abroad? Should we fly to that important meeting, or risk losing valuable time by travelling overland?

There are no easy answers to these questions. During the ten days of our events, we will reflect on these and similar issues with a view to opening up a dialogue in our community and with each other. If in the process we manage, however falteringly, to articulate a common vision for the future of our planet, we will feel that something important has begun. Our two debates will look at the ethics of eating and conservation, both of which involve important moral considerations. For each, we have an exciting mix of experts with different perspectives on how to manage the problems we face.

What has this got to do with Christianity?

Central to the whole purpose of Creation in Crisis is our sense that we, as Christians, need to reconnect with the world as uniquely God’s creation. The Christian hope is an audacious hope – the promise of the renewal of all creation in the New Jerusalem, the holy city of God. We lament the pollution and waste in which we have all had a part, particularly here in the developed world, and which has disfigured our planet to such a degree that we have now reached crisis-point. But within this crisis we feel the seeds of renewal, a new calling to us from the God who saw all he had created and declared it ‘very good’ (Genesis 1.31). The audacity of our hope does not diminish our responsibility. To the contrary, it fills us with strength to face the challenges before us, and to conform the realities of our present situation to that greater reality, which is God’s intimate and absolute concern for every part of his creation.