Diocese of Liverpool

Thought for the Day, 8 November 2002

The Rt Rev. James Jones

Chilling words this week from Ian Duncan Smith to the Conservative Party. They came at the end of his no-questions–allowed speech and sounded apocalyptic: “unite or die”!

It brings to mind a saying of Jesus when he too was under pressure, ”if a house is divided against itself that house will not be able to stand.”

If that's true for a political party and for a Church it must be even truer for the future of the planet. It's recently been revealed that an area the size of France has been lost from the Amazon rain forest. Trees are the lungs of the earth. They breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, so that we in turn can breathe the oxygen in and carbon dioxide out. In this divinely and finely balanced world we need the forest to deal with the carbon. You don't have to be a tree hugging New Age guru to see that there's a vital unity between us and the trees. We need the forest not least because it's just been shown that inspite of the Government's targets to reduce carbon emissions they've actually increased.

Not that any of us here in England's green and pleasant land feel much difference now. But they do elsewhere.

Earlier this year I was on the east coast of India and saw villages that had not so long ago been devastated by super-cyclones, sweeping across sea and land at 300 kilometres an hour. What the cruel winds failed to destroy, the waters overwhelmed. Tens of thousands drowned and we heard stories of children's innocent bodies floating in flooded fields.

Of course scientists argue backwards and forwards as to the cause of climate change. It's difficult to prove that cutting down trees in one part of the world causes cyclones in another. But only the most blinkered can deny the inevitability in the Biblical proverb that we reap what we sow.

In Britain the average person sends over 2.6 tons of carbon a year into the atmosphere. In America its more than 5. In India it's 0.2. There's a huge imbalance between the different continents – but what is meat and drink to one part of the world is poison and poverty to another.

There's much talk at the moment of the role of the United Nations in legitimising action against Iraq. But equally pressing is the need for some form of world governance that will bind us together for the future of the earth. As the Chinese delegation said on agreeing the UN resolution on Iraq – ‘the sunlight of unity must break through the cloud of difference.'

However much countries may claim their own sovereignty, when faced with the future of the planet sooner or later I fear the words of Jesus will come home to roost, “A Kingdom divided against itself will surely fall.”