John Hayward Posted: 13 July 2011
Keywords: Finance & the Economy, Government & Foreign Affairs, Lifestyle Issues, The Environment,
'If no reform takes place, only 8 stocks out of 136 will be at sustainable levels in 2022. In other words, if we don't make structural changes to the way we do business now, we will loose one fish stock after the other, with a possible chain reaction for the ecosystem that is hard to predict.'
At last some good news on the environment, from European fisheries commissioner Maria Damanaki, who has unveiled long-awaited proposals to reform the EU's Common Fisheries Policy. She says the three key concepts underpinning the new regulations are sustainability, efficiency and coherence. On the first of these, she has announced:
'Environmental sustainability means bringing all stocks to sustainable levels by 2015. We have committed to this at the Johannesburg UN World Summit in 2002, and the same principle is contained in the United Nations Law of the Sea and in our recent Biodiversity Strategy.
'Maximum Sustainable Yield – MSY - means that we can keep fishing. But we have to manage each fish stock in such a way that we can get maximum fish production while still keeping the stock sustainable. With the reform, MSY becomes a legal obligation in all our acts.
'A second thing we need to do for sustainability is stop waste: discards, which can amount to 60% of catches in some fisheries, undermine all our data collection efforts and are morally and environmentally unacceptable. So I propose to change the system so that all catches are landed and counted against quotas.
'A third element of the sustainability focus is the ecosystem approach: the long-term plans for stock management that we have already started need to become the common denominator of all our fisheries. As new ecosystem information becomes available, it has to be fed into the plans.'
This 'behavioural revolution' is welcome, if very long overdue. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that 'We are not called to conceive, design, build and maintain a better version of the old world but rather to participate in the new one that has been inaugurated on the cross.'
As we noted in Christianity, Climate Change, and Sustainable Living, 'Our personal lives, the cultures in which we live, the systems that structure our society: all require renewal ... we are all participants in many other big systems: economic, social and political.' Our response to the challenge of environmental sustainability is just part of our wider response to God's renewing activity on the cross.
A very helpful blog - I just take mild issue with the statement that 'We are not called to conceive, design, build and maintain a better version of the old world but rather to participate in the new one that has been inaugurated on the cross.' But the new one inaugurated on the cross is precisely the old one healed. The fact that Jesus was not given a new body, but had His old body raised suggests that God does not dispense with the old world and replace it with a new one - He heals, unites, revivifies and infuses the old one. Redemption is precisely REdemption. This would seem to me to support a much more co-operative approach to ordinary human attempts to improve our world - not a sectarian insistence on a pure 'Christian' agenda.
Furthermore, the new world that has been inaugurated on the cross is not yet fully here - and won't be until the putting right of all things. So we cannot escape working to improve the old one. Focusing exclusively on participating in the new world would mean not bothering with people's medical needs, housing needs, psychological needs etc. No - trying to ameliorate the old world IS to participate in the new.
Michael Lloyd 2 August 2011
Completely agree with you (of course), Michael, that 'the new one inaugurated on the cross is precisely the old one healed' and that 'we cannot escape working to improve the old one.' Perhaps it would help if I gave a bit more of the context of the quote (from pp.214-215):
'The New Testament is infused with a sense of ‘now and not yet’, the belief that the kingdom of God has come in Jesus but is not yet fully here, that Christ came to ‘make all things new’ but, as yet, all things are not made new.
'The Christian response to climate change and the ideal of sustainable living needs to be embedded in this realization. We are not called to conceive, design, build and maintain a better version of the old world but rather to participate in the new one that has been inaugurated on the cross. We are not expected to haul ourselves up by our moral bootstraps, but to discover the people we already are in God’s sight. We are not summoned simply to surrender those pleasures that make life worthwhile, but to rediscover what in fact does make life worthwhile.'
John Hayward 2 August 2011