Archbishop Calls for Action on Environment to Head off Social Crisis

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has warned that without a radical rethink of the relationship between environmental and economic challenges the world could face the spectre of "social collapse."

In a keynote lecture at the University of Kent in Canterbury, Dr Williams said that the separation, or even the opposition, of economic and environmental concerns had "come to look like a massive mistake."

"Economy and ecology," he warned, "cannot be separated."

"To seek to have economy without ecology is to try and manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself - to try and formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature."

Dr Williams foresaw dire consequences for such an approach: "When we speak about environmental crisis, we are not to think only of spiralling poverty and mortality, but about brutal and uncontainable conflict. An economics that ignores environmental degradation invites social degradation—in plain terms, violence."

Dr Williams rejected the idea that technology itself would solve the ecological crisis: "To appeal to a technical future is to say our most fundamental right as humans is unrestricted consumer choice."

Instead there needed to be big changes to public attitudes, habits and expectations, and Dr Williams urged grassroots support for environmental issues to be seen as major political and electoral issues: "Election campaigns seldom give much space to environmental matters; but the perceived significance of these concerns is weightier now than it has ever been."

Dr Williams also encouraged policy makers to embrace "contraction and convergence" regimes in order to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

The archbishop went on to envisage new regulatory frameworks to protect the environment from economic depredation. He spoke of the "urgency of some intensified international regime to monitor and discipline economic activity."

He also envisaged a charter of environmental rights, adding: "we should be able to live in a world that still had wilderness spaces, that still nurtured a balanced variety of species, that allowed us access to unpoisoned natural foodstuffs."

Dr Williams highlighted the significance of faith traditions in promoting a new approach: "All the great religious traditions, in their several ways, insist that personal wealth is not to be seen in terms of reducing the world to what the individual can control and manipulate for whatever exclusively human purposes may be most pressing."

He added: "The loss of a sustainable environment protected from unlimited exploitation is the loss of a sustainable humanity in every sense - not only the loss of a spiritual depth but ultimately the loss of simple material stability as well. It is up to us as consumers and voters to do better justice to the 'house' we have been invited to keep, the world where we are guests."