What a summer

By Ken Russell in Articles

Ken kicks off the Connections articles for 2011 with thoughts on the changing environment

We're kicking off another year of our Connections column today, and as for my sins I am the convener for the team of parish people who contribute to it, it behoves me to place the ball on the half way line and give it a decent punt.

What a summer it has been so far. You may say "what summer?" Nothing by halves. Earthquake, snow, fire, gales and flood. As I write, a force 5 cyclone, equivalent to the strongest and most destructive ever measured, descends on northern Queensland, and reports tell us the people of Cairns and Townsville are cowering in their homes in mortal fear for their very lives. Our region of the world has suffered extremes of weather this summer and with such force and anger that even skeptics of the theories of radical climate change have, we're told, become believers. We've had bad summers before, but the question being asked is the trillion dollar one - are bad summers to become the norm? On the answer hangs many things of supreme importance for us all, not least the future of farming in New Zealand.

Most of us in this Parish have been conditioned to assume a protected safe community. I am not an unusual. My house has never been flooded, blown to pieces, shaken to its foundations, or burnt to a cinder. We have seen pictures of the dire results of such catastrophes elsewhere, In the third world, most likely, where we assume poverty mitigates against the safeties we take for granted, and does not provide the protections our more affluent society affords. At least, that has been the rationale.

But this summer has provided the strongest evidence yet that the climate scientists may have got it disastrously correct. The ongoing generation of greenhouse gases, the warming of the oceans, the melting of the great icecaps, the long warned-of signs are not just theories. They are realities. Very clearly, the Planet is out of sorts. Even the hitherto most regular and predictable patterns of the four seasons may, as a result, be in doubt, and the safest, most comfortable places on the face of Planet Earth, among them New Zealand, rendered less comfortable and less safe.

So what? . "Everything" because so much in our New Zealand economy, and that of our Australian cousins, has depended utterly on the regularity of kindly and predictable weather. Have we even started to reckon with the distinct possibility that vast tracts of our respective countries, long accustomed to hot and sultry summers , where the farming community has learned in the process of time to cherish precious water reserves, might in the future have to deal with summer flooding so severe it takes all before it and washes stock, feed, topsoil, and generations of honest endeavour out to sea. It has happened this summer in Northland, disastrous drought to equally disastrous flooding in a matter of 24 hrs, and need I mention Queensland and Victoria? The consequences of such overwhelming "acts of God" as the new regularity for our fair antipodean homelands do not bear thinking about. And how about a winter as severe as for us as was that experienced in the UK only a few weeks ago?

But also, " nothing." Since time immemorial the human race has learned to adjust, and to survive, and sometimes even to prosper in the face of capricious nature. The easy comfort and security with which most of us in the fair city of Dunedin have grown up is not an entitlement, though we should be thankful if a fair providence has delivered us from the worst of nature's ravages thus far. As nature's extremes come uncomfortably closer, let it be a sober reminder that none of us are entitled to immunity from the risks and vulnerabilities of being creatures of a constantly changing planet, and it will be the measure of our adaptability, resourcefulness and courage as to how we face a likely more threatening future.

Our Connections column will regularly explore how we in Aotearoa/New Zealand are faring vis a vis the rest of the human family, how we see the good news of Jesus relating to the exigencies and vicissitudes of our life a nation, and what being members of the church of Jesus may mean in the task of unraveling truth and delivering justice in an increasingly uncertain environment.. Are these just words, or do they have real meaning for us and for our neighbours? And where, if anywhere, is the one we call "God" in all of this? If we can do that, even in a small way, we will have gone some way towards justifying our existence as a church.

-- Ken Russell

First printed as a Connections article in the Parish Weekly Bulletin, February 6, 2011.