WCC NEWS: Building “right relations” between people and with the earth

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World Council of Churches - News

BUILDING “RIGHT RELATIONS” BETWEEN PEOPLE AND WITH THE EARTH

For immediate release: 21 April 2011

Jim Hodgson is a journalist with extensive experience in Latin America
and the Caribbean. Since 2000, Hodgson has worked with the United Church
of Canada’s Caribbean and Latin America desk, most recently as programme
coordinator for South America and the Caribbean.

During the past 25 years he has written for a variety of church-based media
and worked for extended periods in the Dominican Republic and in Mexico.
He recently spoke at a seminar on Theology and Ecology held in Buenos
Aires, Argentina at the end of March 2011. He was interviewed there by
Marcelo Schneider.

What are the burning issues you see today when you get closer to
awareness-building processes in Latin America?

People in South America are addressing ecological issues on multiple
levels: the mining issues that sometimes involve Canadian companies here
in Argentina, they address water issues all the time, the questions around
the use of land, the use agricultural chemicals, pesticides, all of that
is hugely controversial. The emphasis here on export crops like soya,
those are huge issues and people deal with them all the time.

Perhaps one of the leading ecological theologians in the world is Leonardo
Boff, from Brazil, whose work is well known in Argentina as well. And then
there is also the experience of Bolivia, which is close by. I’m not sure
how much people know about what president Morales has been proposing with
the way that the Bolivian society and its indigenous sectors have been
wrestling with the same issues around economic priorities (…) oil, gas,
mining. “Pachamama”, the Mother Earth, and all of those concepts are
really calling on not just the Bolivians, but the whole world to rethink
how we live and how we live in relationship with the earth. All that is
going on in South America and we in the North can learn a lot.

One of the risks is that people who ultimately have power tend to be
corporate-interested and they seem to have ways of dividing the larger
countries of the so called global South, like putting Brazil apart from
the rest of Latin America, South Africa from the rest of Africa or India
and China from the rest of Asia, so it splits before some spirit of
solidarity could exist. People have to watch out for that.

What are the climate change-related issues for the churches today?

I certainly see the issues of climate refugees. This is one of the things
that the moderator of the United Church of Canada Mardi Tindal has pointed
out saying that by the year 2050 there will be 200 million climate
refugees in the world as oceans levels rise. So the challenges are huge
and really quite immediate. For us as Canadians, we are in rather a tense
relationship with our government over its attitude towards climate change.

The Canadian government together with some other governments around the
world these days are taking very short term views, refusing to live up to
commitments they made in Kyoto saying that is costs too much to the
economy today. And these are the richest countries in the world speaking,
of course. And they trust a lot in technology or the idea that eventually
there will be technology to deal with these problems. So, what we’ve
tried to do is work on a number of different levels, in informing and
mobilizing the people of the churches in Canada. We do that to some extent
within the denominations but also from an ecumenical space called Kairos
(Link: http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=3a3e7d683e20ad106184 ), the 
coalition that the
Canadian churches have put together over the past ten years. This is an
effort that goes back to 30 or even 40 years, actually.

Through Kairos we also work on helping people in Canadian churches
understand the issues. And we also work together as churches with other
sectors of civil society trying to influence the policies of the Canadian
government. So it’s kind of a high level talking to the government,
addressing the leaders, but that is all reinforced by a large education
program that tries to get other voices involved, so more people would be
speaking to the government.

Is there an ideal way to connect high level leadership negotiations and the
daily lives of the churches?

One of my hopes is that people would see the value of strategies of
multiple levels. It is great that some people go off and talk to their
governments and address the United Nations, but we also need some
education work and mobilizing people and helping people to understand
these issues. Let’s face it: to wrap your head around climate change is
not easy. You have to wrestle with concepts around science and I think
people, religious people, have a 200 year history now of a certain
distance from science, but I think that the situation of the world today
demands that people of faith and scientists get into a new relationship
with each other.

Another thing that Tindal says is that science tells us more or less what
has been, what is and to some extent what will be, but faith tells us what
ought to be, what should happen. So, we have an ethical voice that says we
need to manage resources differently, we need to work in ways that at
least don’t damage the interest of people who are poor and marginalized,
but actually advance their interest, that begin to make things better for
people on the edges.

How does that connect to the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation
(Link: http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=82e4ee7d35b329788f6f )?

I think a lot of conflicts in the past and certainly conflicts to come are
fought over resources, be it land, oil and, increasingly in the future,
water. So, building peace through the debate on caring for the earth is a
strong link.

What came out very strongly in this event here in Argentina is that climate
change related issues are to be dealt with not only from an ecological
point of view, but also in relation to economy, politics, culture and
theology.

Going back to the Canadian churches, we’ve tried to wrestle with these
questions together is by talking about relationships. This comes partly
out of work on restoring our broken relationships as Christian churches
with the indigenous peoples who’ve had an unfortunate history of
imperialism and colonialism. So, over the past ten years we’ve all been
learning about that and now there is a process of reconciliation that’s
begun and we’ll see how all that goes. But one of the expressions that
got used a lot is how do we restore ‘right relations’ or ‘just
relations’.

Could that process also be considered as an historical legacy of the
WCC’s Assembly in Vancouver in 1983?

People certainly very much remember it. There was an opening there to
indigenous ways of celebrating and expressions of how indigenous people
practice faith. What happens in an Assembly like the Vancouver one is that
you make visible what was not visible before in a very public way and
people begin to think about some issues differently and about relations
differently. So this expression ’right relations’ is understood not
just as in the relationships between people, but with our relationship
with the earth, relationships between man and woman, relationships between
different classes.

In the United Church of Canada we’ve taken the expression ‘right
relations’ and we also try to use it when we talk about partnership, in
our relationship with the Methodist Church of Argentina, for instance. We
also try to practice right relationships there are honest, transparent to
the extent possible to be equal and not imperialistic or determining the
content of the conversation. So when we come back to the question of
peace, there are all kinds of relationships that we have to work on.

What is invisible today that should be made visible?

We still have a long way to go to make visible the violence against women.
What do we have to do to transform culture so that men behave in a
different way towards women? That would be a huge one. There is also the
structural and systemic racism that still goes on. Who can get what kinds
of jobs? Who can get what kind of education?

In Canada, we still have very different school systems. For indigenous
communities, compared to the school system I went through there is a lot
of difference. And people think that it is impossible to address those
issues but it is not. All of those things about the lack of fair access
and lack of sharing have the risk of leading to deeper conflict and the
absence of peace.

The seminar "Christian faith and ecology: towards an eco-ecumenical
theology" was held 28 - 29 March at the Protestant theological school
Instituto Universitario ISEDET in Buenos Aires. The event was sponsored by
ISEDET (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=e0029d3d718dbad12357 ), the 
non-governmental
Argentina-based Rural Reflection Group (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=d2977e19056259e62b99 ) and the World 
Student Christian Federation (WSCF)
Latin America and Caribbean region (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=70b4d3e12d0842d46a06
) and was supported by the World Council of Churches (WCC
(Link: http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=c3e6e39ca0d4752b696b )) and the 
United Church of
Canada (Link: http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=df54c0d34f65d9621f8c ).

More on WCC climate change advocacy:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=4590654f70cd202b8ca3 (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=83b63b031fd6e16c5a85 )

Biblical reflection on climate change refugees (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=0eb8ae2592051f4e49ae )

International Ecumenical Peace Convocation website:
www.overcomingviolence.org (Link:
http://www.oikoumene.org/index.php?RDCT=1f7817c303cf91ed9f21 )


The World Council of Churches promotes Christian unity in faith, witness 
and service for a just and peaceful world. An ecumenical fellowship of 
churches founded in 1948, today the WCC brings together 349 Protestant, 
Orthodox, Anglican and other churches representing more than 560 million 
Christians in over 110 countries, and works cooperatively with the Roman 
Catholic Church. The WCC general secretary is Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit, 
from the [Lutheran] Church of Norway. Headquarters: Geneva, Switzerland.



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