When it comes to social policy, how do you get people to change their behaviour? And what if that change requires sacrifice?
The Climate Coalition’s rallying cry of ‘For the Love of’ was a pertinent reminder of this challenge: how do we find motivators which are attractive enough – and ‘real’ enough – to be accessible to a great number of people, but don’t shy away from the severity of the problem at hand? There is a great deal of sense (and a great deal of importance) in making the issue of climate change one which is relevant to our own lives in the UK; love is a powerful motivator. We are far more likely to respond to things we have emotionally experienced. Is it possible to talk about what is emotionally real to us while acknowledging the danger faced by the ‘other’ poor who will suffer? How do we draw people in by making climate change relevant to them, without ignoring the broader problem faced by much more vulnerable communities on the other side of the world?
One option is to put these two seemingly distant worlds alongside each other, which the Climate Coalition endeavored to do. But this requires great sensitivity: putting ‘Bangladesh’ on a banner next to playing ‘rugby’ as things we love and so want to save is a sad reminder of the dissonant priorities which the ecological movement is trying to navigate. It’s more than just a bit awkward – it expresses the difficulty of communicating what loving something entails. For the former, most of us do not really ‘love’ Bangladesh outside of some sense of obligation to universalism, and for the latter, we are in danger of saying ‘love’, which is about true relationality, when what we mean is ‘preference’ – a motivator which probably overpowers the kind of ‘love’ we have for Bangladesh. Certainly, there are individuals who sacrifice a great deal in order to play rugby; but, for the majority, rugby is a hobby – only a game. It doesn’t require things of us in the same way that love does. It doesn’t force the gaze outwards. If we are to talk about love in this context we have to know what we mean.
This does not mean that we can’t be specific about what we love and what is threatened, or even that we can’t use the word ‘love’ to refer to anything less high-minded than ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘humanity’. We don’t, after all, have 5 different words for love at our disposal in the English language. But we might take more time to think about what different ‘loves’ are capable of communicating – and there were plenty of ‘loves’ on display in Westminster which did a wonderful job at this. If we must talk about love in the sense of ‘things for which we have preference’, a focus on things that connect us to a world beyond our own experience is vital to climate change campaigning. Coffee, or chocolate, for example, are ‘loves’ acknowledging a global climate change connecting the wealthy and the poor. Love of gardening connects us to a wider problem of changing seasons and damage to crops. Love of grandchildren expresses a universal concern for future generations, which also touches individual families. If we are to truly understand love as involving sacrifice when it comes to climate change, we need to make the global local, a task that, in an interconnected world, is still surprisingly difficult for us to do.
Perhaps this is where the Church might step in. We already have a model of the global becoming local: the body of Christ. In participating in our local churches we also, somehow, become part of the global. The call to love our neighbours is, we know, no longer constrained by physical proximity. After all, the Christ of the World came as Jesus of Nazareth, expressing love for all people by becoming about as provincial as it was possible to be. He cared for the local in a fashion which was intended to have global consequences. Can we do the same?
Hannah Malcolm is a research intern at Theos | @hannahmmalcolm
Image by possan from flickr.com, available under this Creative Commons Licence
