News updates - and an occasional blog
6 November 2009
NEW TEAM MEMBERS
As we enter a new phase of our work (with a new name) we are glad to welcome five new leaders to the team. Their contribution will emerge over the next few years and we hope that what we offer will be greatly enhanced by their presence. One strong hope is that we can offer more trips each year, though the group size (4-12) will not increase. That is one of the key aspects of our mission and we shall guard it carefully. Nevertheless it could be that our enlarged team will venture beyond the shores of Britain and Ireland... maybe Norway or Holland, Spain or Brittany.
COPENHAGEN CLIMATE TALKS
Things are hotting up on the world stage with the Copenhagen Climate Change talks coming in December. World leaders need our fervent prayer (and action?) to ensure that significant progress is made at that meeting. To fail would mean potential disaster for our planet...and that's a muted prognosis. Our Patron (the Bishop of Oxford) has joined a high -profile campaign to have his photograph, with 'Copenhagen' written on his forehead, projected onto various public buildings in Britain, including the Houses of Parliament. He shares this 'honour' with other bishops of his diocese including Stephen Cottrell - and we applaud this action.
(See 22.4.2010 for a post-Copenhagen comment)
17 February 2010
BOB JUDKINS
Some of you will know Bob, who travelled with us on many occasions, starting about 20 years ago. Bob died in January 2010 in his 80s. This is to put on record that we will greatly miss a most wonderful friend, traveller, soul-mate - a person of deep spirituality rooted in the 21st century. He was renowned for his distinctive humour, his ready laugh, his love of the wild - and his beautifully sensitive leading of the eucharist in 'places on the edge'. But he was also ready to acknowledge that he was 'an angry old man' when it came to matters of injustice, such was his commitment to the needs of those who suffered at the hands of oppressors. We were (are) privileged to know him: he was, and will remain, an example to us all in many facets of our Living. His eulogy summarised his ministry : 'showing people the Love and Laughter of Jesus'.
Wonderful.
17 April 2010
A WORLD WITHOUT AIRCRAFT : JOURNEYING IN A MODERN TECHNO-WORLD
After the Icelandic volcano eruption of mid-April the philosopher Alain de Botton – recent writer-in-residence at Heathrow airport - imagines a world without aircraft.
In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea. The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, and would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship.
Everything would, of course, go very slowly. It would take two days to reach Rome, a month before one finally sailed exultantly into Sydney harbour.
And yet there would be benefits tied up in this languor. Those who had known the age of planes would recall the confusion they had felt upon arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that ‘the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel’.
This new widespread 'camel pace' would return travellers to a wisdom that their medieval pilgrim ancestors had once known very well. These medieval pilgrims had gone out of their way to make travel as slow as possible, avoiding even the use of boats and horses in favour of their own feet. They were not being perverse, only aware that if one of our key motives for travelling is to try to put the past behind us, then we often need something very large and time-consuming, like the experience of a month long journey across an ocean or a hike over a mountain range, to establish a sufficient sense of distance.
Whatever the advantages of plentiful and convenient air travel, we may curse it for being too easy, too unnoticeable - and thereby for subverting our sincere attempts at changing ourselves through our journeys.
(see http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8626000/8626927.stm)
22 April 2010
AFTER COPENHAGEN
Extracted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8571347.stm
16.3.2010
The "disappointing" outcome of December's climate summit was largely down to "arrogance" on the part of rich countries, according to Lord Stern. The economist told BBC News that the US and EU nations had not understood well enough the concerns of poorer nations. But, he said, the summit had led to a number of countries outlining what they were prepared to do to curb emissions.
Seventy-three countries have now signed up to the Copenhagen Accord, the summit's outcome document, but the weak, non-binding nature of the document led many to condemn the summit as a failure. Having failed to agree a treaty to supplant or supplement the Kyoto Protocol, and having failed to set a timetable for agreeing such a treaty, opinions are inevitably split on how countries seeking stronger curbs on greenhouse gas emissions should move forward.
Speaking in Brussels, Gro Harlem Brundtland - the UN's special envoy on climate change - suggested there would now be a twin-track approach, with some of the important discussions taking place outside the UNFCCC umbrella. She also acknowledged that the talks had proved much more problematical than some governments - particularly in the EU - had anticipated. "They got the message that it was much more complicated than [they had believed], and that they have to work with Brazil and China and others, not only in the broad framework of UN negotiations but also more directly and pragmatically," she said. Lord Stern agreed that what he described as the "disappointing" outcome of the Copenhagen talks was largely down to rich nations' failure to understand developing world positions and concerns.
The most concrete part of the Copenhagen Accord is an agreement that richer countries should raise funds to help poorer nations adapt to climate impacts and "green" their economies. The immediate objective, he suggested, was to enact the short-term promise of providing $30bn over the period 2010-12 from the public purses of western nations.
If that money did not start to move fairly quickly, he said, that would further erode trust among developing countries. How and where these funds are to be disbursed has yet to be decided.
THE NEXT STEP
That’s up to us.
We have the power to act as individuals - and communities.
And we have the ‘people-power’ to persuade governments to act on our behalf and not put the economics of the country first in order that their record ‘looks good’.
1 May 2010
THE PEOPLE'S SUMMIT
‘People-power’ (see above) is exactly what was promoted in Cochabamba, Bolivia in the penultimate week of April, where the new charismatic leader of that country (Evo Morales) called together over 35000 people from 140+ countries to debate aspects of climate change from the bottom up. It gave voice to the many groups who felt that Copenhagen had let the world down. Whether there will be any action as a result of the conference only the future knows, but at least Morales was enabling the powerless and the 'unheard' to be given a voice on the world stage. After all, if the official meeting in Denmark failed to get binding agreements and commitments from the world's rich, then who is to say that the ordinary people of the planet couldn't do better? They might well carry a message of hope and a demand that filters upwards to the powers-that-be. More and more one feels that world leaders (with one or two exceptions) are interested more in their own kudos and survival than in the good of their people. Let us hope that events such as Cochabamba 2010 will happen more and more and bring light into the darkness that modern politics - with its unending focus on that nebulous thing called 'growth' - has created.
(For a fuller report see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8629155.stm ).