Everything’s gone green.
This article first appeared in Youthwork Magazine
Big Yellow Taxi. I know it's not green it's yellow but it is the title of one of the most infamous Eco warrior anthems of all time. Come on if you don't know the title you know the chorus:
'Don't it always seem to go,
You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.'
The songs been covered by Counting Crows and Amy Grant (remember her?) and sampled by Janet Jackson but was originally penned by arch hippie Joni Mitchell. The lyrics were inspired by a visit to Hawaii - upon throwing back the curtains in her hotel room she saw beautiful green mountains in the distance and a filthy great car park just outside her window.
That was the 60's mind when the hippies thought it would be a jolly good idea to save the environment but also thought that they could smoke copious amounts of grass whilst doing so. Strangely enough they didn't make much progress.
So on to the noughties and everybody's on the bandwagon now: we've got hundreds of sites dedicated to contemporary hobbits who live off grid and often underground, making energy from goat dung and writing odes to the wonders of compost loos.
And we're all ultra aware of the impression our carbon footprint makes on mother earth. It's a wonder airports haven't installed confession boxes in arrivals for all those who recognise that no matter how many trees you plant jetting across the planet just isn't very green.
As if that wasn't enough even my work colleagues have taken to holidaying in wigwams in North Scotland. A trend started by many of the rich and famous who have avoided the eco ignominy of purchasing a second house in the country for owning a first yurt in Devon instead.
Green is a powerful cultural force indeed, so powerful it even managed to resurrect the hopes of the Conservative party. Witness the young bright Tory things pedalling around London chalking up eco cred and the party logo now transformed into a tree with a blue trunk and green leaves. Bigging up their green credentials was a deliberate and successful attempt to update the Conservative's image for younger generations: It was a PR consultant who masterminded David Cameron's 2007 Arctic Circle trip to witness melting glaciers and pose for photo ops with husky led sleds.
Not wanting to be left out, the church is catching up too, with entire shelves of Christian bookstores now dedicated to green concerns and many a sermon dedicated to unpacking the Bible's environmental agenda in Genesis.
All very inspiring but also overwhelming. We may have swapped all our lightbulbs for energy saving updates, bought 'everlasting' shopping bags and started holidaying in Skegness instead of the Seychelles but we probably still have that nagging question in the back of our head, are we doing enough?
It seems not. As Aid agencies have highlighted, the knock on effects of global warming are having devastating repercussions for the world's poor. Sometimes the impact is direct - with prolonged droughts affecting harvest-and sometimes indirect - the increased growth of 'bio fuel' crops for 'green' cars has led to a shortage of food crops being grown and therefore contributed to the price increases of food across the world.
So back to that irritating question, if we take the dictum 'let us live simply so that others can simply live' seriously, what does that simple life look like? And what does Christ expect of us?
It's telling that several Christian books on the environment begin with a chapter entitled 'why bother?' - so we might ask 'why bother with a chapter entitled why bother?' isn't the need to save the planet self evident? The implication is though that Christians need more persuading to get on board the green bandwagon. Is this because we're still too apathetic? Unaware of the urgency of the issue or are we too comfortable with consumerism, the key reason we pollute so much? Or do those authors presume that many Christians believe that as God is going to make 'all things new' (Rev 21.5) in the future, a new heaven, a new earth, that it doesn't matter if we sweep a bit of rubbish under the rug now?
Now of course we don't think that but I can't help but feel that with every refuel, every air flight, every badly packaged piece of tat I buy that I'm paving over my own small section of paradise. Sorry Joni.
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