Archbishop Delivers Major Environment Lecture

In his first major intervention on the environment since becoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams warned that damage being inflicted on the planet was "making the human future more and more precarious." And he encouraged the British government to take the lead in the international arena in promoting new approaches.

In a lecture entitled "Changing the myths we live by", delivered before an invited audience at Lambeth Palace, Dr Williams drew deeply on Christian theology to argue that human justice and flourishing were both dependent on an understanding of creation as an act of self-giving by God – a gift to be shared with joy, not exploited and manipulated for short term and selfish motives. "No response to the world that is not aware of this is either truthful or sustainable," he said.

He also argued that "addiction" to fossil fuels was distorting international relations: "How supplies are to be secured at existing levels becomes a grave political and moral question for the wealthier states, and a real destabiliser of international relations. This is a situation with all the ingredients for the most vicious kinds of global conflict – conflict now ever more likely to be intensified by the tensions around religious and cultural questions."

Dr Williams added: "Not the least horror of our present circumstances is the prospect of a world of spiralling inequality and a culture that has learned again to assume what Christianity has struggled to persuade humanity against since its beginning – that most human beings are essentially dispensable ..."

Dr Williams appealed for "a new level of public seriousness about environmental issues", and urged the British government to take the lead – by promoting by promoting "contraction and convergence." It was attractive because it sought to "achieve fairly rapid and fairly substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions – but to do so in a way that foregrounds questions of equity between rich and poor nations."

He also challenged churches to build on positive local developments, for example by undertaking an "ecological audit."

Dr Williams concluded: "...the news for humanity is both joyful and sobering: there is a possible human future – but it will be costly for us. The question is whether we have the energy and imagination to say no to the non-future, the paralysing dream of endless manipulation, that currently has us captive."