Eco Blog - St. George's Berlin

 Those who grew up watching Star Trek, or have seen its reruns, will remember the phrase: "Space: the final frontier". Actually space is not really the final frontier. The Guardian (27 September 2021) reports: "humanity knows more about deep space than the deep ocean". The context of this statement is worth examining because it involves a new and serious threat to our planet: " In late June, the island republic of Nauru informed the International Seabed Authority (ISA) based in Kingston, Jamaica of its intention to start mining the seabed in two years’ time via a subsidiary of a Canadian firm, The Metals Company (TMC, until recently known as DeepGreen). Innocuous as it sounds, this note was a starting gun for a resource race on the planet’s last vast frontier: the abyssal plains that stretch between continental shelves deep below the oceans. " (Guardian, 27 September) ( LINK ) The article goes on to quote "Louisa Casson, an oceans campaigner at Greenp...

  The   Archbishop of Canterbury, Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church have issued a joint statement on climate change, which underlines the urgency of the situation. Here are some excerpts: ( LINK ) "...by concentrating on our wealth we find that long-term assets, including the bounty of nature, are depleted for short-term advantage." (p.2) "The extreme weather and natural disasters of recent months reveal afresh to us with great force and at great human cost that climate change is not only a future challenge, but an immediate and urgent matter of survival." (p.3) "We frequently hear from young people who understand that their futures are under threat. For their sake, we must choose to eat, travel, spend, invest and live differently, thinking not only of immediate interest and gains but also of future benefits. We repent of our generation's sins." (p. 4) "To those with more far-reaching responsibilities – heading a...

The current climate crisis is like the parable of a man who used credit to buy all the things he liked: nice cars, good homes, fancy vacations, new clothes, the best steaks in restaurants. The man drew on his credit knowing that he had a good job. He had an inner certainty that everything would somehow turn out all right before any debts came due. His buying went on for twenty years. Friends and family warned about the risk, but it did not seem immediate and he resisted changing how he lived. One day the bank stopped his credit card. That alarmed him but he had others. Before long his favourite new car was repossessed, but he had another car that he could use. Eventually he received a notice that his house would be sold at auction unless he paid his mortgage. He was bankrupt. The comfortable   lifestyle that he had refused to give up was irretrievably gone. In  the same way o ur society has slid slowly into the climate crisis by paying with a carbon footprint we coul...