Oikos: God’s Big Word for a Small Planet. Andrew Francis

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Oikos: God’s Big Word for a Small Planet - Andrew Francis страница 2

Автор:
Серия:
Издательство:
Oikos: God’s Big Word for a Small Planet - Andrew  Francis

Скачать книгу

Mennonite Trust.

      His social policy writing includes his previous Cascade book, What in God’s Name Are You Eating? (2014), about food ethics, and the multi-authored Foxes Have Holes: Reflections upon Britain’s Housing Need (2016), which he edited. A biographical study of a theologian, Dorothee Soelle: Life and Work (2015), is to be followed by one of English writer Lawrence Durrell in 2019. His other theological work includes Shalom: The Jesus Manifesto (2016), an in-production theology of mission for 2018, and a future liturgical/pastoral theology volume.

      A former potter and artist, he is a joyful cook and jam-maker, enjoying growing food in his community garden. He lives in southwest England. His personal website is www.anmchara.com; anmchara is Gaelic for “soul friend.”

      Introduction

      Working in small groups of two to five tent-dwelling families, they follow the centuries-old traditional cycle of taking their caribou north for the summer, where the animals graze on the exposed tundra. The people and their herds move south for the winter so that the caribou can dig into and feed upon snow-covered lichens. The Nenet retain animist beliefs that all their world and its component parts—animal, vegetable, earth, and human—are inextricably bound together as a “spiritual” whole. But both their world and worldviews are threatened.

      The Yamal is one enormous gas field and is now being exploited in its commercial development by the Russian conglomerate GazProm, bringing the railroad, settlements, and roadways to the region. Now, each Nenet family receives a monthly $30/£20 allowance from the state to help them meet the necessary costs of encounters with twenty-first-century materialism. One hangover of the old Soviet system is that all Nenet children must now go away for state boarding school education for at least ten years from the age of seven; many Nenet teenagers fail to grow up learning the traditional crafts and skills to maintain their culture’s nomadic lifestyle.

      In 2013, global warming was acknowledged to have led to a winter thaw then refreeze, which resulted in the starvation and death of over 15,000 caribou and thus sixty families lost their livelihoods. They became wage-slaves and predominantly slaughtermen, killing their remaining and other caribou to help feed the railroad staff, construction teams, and gas workers. Now the number of caribou is not being viably sustained, because of those growing human demands, so a vicious cycle of potentially terminal decline has begun for both Yamal’s caribou and the traditional Nenet way of life.

      Despite the International Court of Justice ruling in 2014 that Japanese whaling is illegal and must stop, the Japanese declared in late 2015 that they would resume limited whaling in 2016; as we go to press this saga continues. There are sustainable alternative sources of marine protein. No wonder acquaintances who support Sea Shepherd have challenged me to be a volunteer for the internationally staffed Antarctic fleet; regrettably, my life-limiting heart condition means I could not even pass the medical to be a ship’s cook.

      Both of these narratives describe learning journeys. Each year the Nenet find that ancient migratory herd-ways are now blocked by new rail-track or road embankments. Although most Sea Shepherd volunteers are white, westernized, and well-educated, they are also of all creeds or none and learned about the plight of whales, making considered choices to risk their lives to “save the whales.” In today’s world, as the hunt for resources strengthens in the face of human need, we all have to do three things:

      1. Recognize the plight of the planet for both human and other species.

      2. Learn about the cost of making changes for the benefit of all.

      3. Decide how much commitment each of us will make to ensure those changes occur—whatever the cost.

      Oikos means “household”

      The interconnectedness of planetary life is masked by westernized consumerism and lifestyles. Would GazProm in their commercial search for profit welcome the global community’s intervention to protect the Nenet people and the caribou? However, the increasing moral support for the Sea Shepherd organization demonstrates that globally people are prepared to object when westernized consumerism goes too far. Over some time, without baleen whales, the exponential growth of krill will ultimately clog up the oceans, just as effectively as a chemical pollutant. Hunting whales to extinction engenders geo-suicide.

      We have to make connections. That “we” means people like you and me who have both time and education to read books, to explore the issues, and to act both politically and economically for change. In my lifetime, we have seen the growth of the multinational (a.k.a. transnational) corporation, whose economic powers transcend those of single nations and whose political might can overcome community protest or ecological concerns. A relatively neutral example is that (as I write) World Bank statistics identify that the

Скачать книгу