For release Sunday, January 17, 2010 The United Church of Canada
Climate Change a Crisis of Conscience for all Canadians
(Toronto) -
Mardi Tindal, the Moderator of Canada’s largest Protestant
denomination, The United Church of Canada, today issued an open letter
to Canadians calling on them to consider climate change a crisis of
conscience.
In the letter Tindal urges Canadians “to choose hope
and action over despair and paralysis in addressing what she calls “one
of the most urgent moral challenges in human history.”
“I
believe this is a unique time in humanity’s fretful reign on Earth, a
rare moment that will have historic significance,” writes Tindal in the
letter that was written after she returned from the United Nations
Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this past December.
Tindal
attended the conference as part of a World Council of Churches
delegation, and was the only North American denominational church
leader present.
She returned to Canada bitterly disappointed with the outcome of the negotiations.
“Our
moment of opportunity came and then went, and here we are now, the fate
of civilization and of millions of the planet’s life forms hanging by
the frayed thread of inaction,” she writes in the letter titled “Where
Is the Hope after Copenhagen?”
Tindal believes this is a
transformative moment in the planet’s history and that “the world will
be shaped by how we and our communities respond in the months to come.”
“We need each other. We are emphatically, biologically not
alone. As the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere rise, the
planet will fail to provide for us. Life as we know it will die.
Millions of human lives are on the line, rich and poor, old emitters
and new, vulnerable and strong. There is no inoculation against this
except all of us changing our behaviour all at once,” writes Tindal in
the letter.
This is why Tindal says the issue of too much
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has moved far beyond a political
process. It has also moved far beyond being just a scientific issue. It
is an ethical issue.
“Science has shown us that we have caused
the chemical changes we can now track in the atmosphere and the ocean.
Therefore, because climate change has been caused by our actions, we
are ethically obliged to take responsibility for those actions,” writes
Tindal.
She says that she believes we must look at issues like climate change through the lens of morality and faith.
“Science
describes what is. Faith describes how things can and should be. On
this issue science is not enough. We need more. And that is why
ecological issues are also fundamentally moral, ethical, and
theological concerns.”
The complete text of Tindal’s letter is posted on The United Church of Canada’s website (www.united-church.ca). An abridged version of the letter (950 words) is available upon request for use as an op-ed or commentary.
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For more information, or to arrange media interviews, please contact:
Mary-Frances Denis Program Coordinator, Media and Public Relations The United Church of Canada Toll-free: 1-800-268-3781
