Single use habit

ACCORDING to the compilers of the Collins Dictionary the word of the year in 2018 was single-use.

Most of us will have seen David Attenborough’s seminal programme on the oceans of planet Earth choked with plastics that have done the job for which they were designed, but now they are around to haunt us for generations to come. The descriptor single-use, however, doesn’t just apply to plastic cups and straws. It has overtaken us in other industries and commercial arenas. Food packaging and coff ee pods are being poured into our landfill sites. Some items of clothing are now bought for one occasion and never used again. Recently on a flight with a well known airline I was issued with single use earphones! Life can’t go on like this and, of course, more critical than disposable earphones is the airline travel that brought these earphones to the market.

This reflection, however, is not a treatise against your favourite coff ee nor is it a council of war against your next holiday in the sun. I have too many logs in my own eye to be in any position to deal with the log in yours. Nevertheless, this is a call to self-examination in relation to the lifestyle choices that are endangering the planet and diminishing the opportunities we bequeath to our children and grandchildren.

Ban Ki-moon when he was General Secretary of the United Nations famously said: “We are the first generation that can end poverty, but we are the last generation that can end climate change.” That’s a pretty stark claim and, of course, we can deny it or we can hope that our capacity for scientific advance will pull us out of this predicted tailspin or we can listen to the experts and make the lifestyle adjustments that our future on planet earth requires.

This isn’t just about our disposable lifestyle. It’s about the bigger broader issue of how we care for creation and how we share the plentiful resources of this remarkable planet so that every child of God can enjoy life in all its fullness.

So long as we consume as much as we do the poor will be consumed by our greed. So long as we live without a thought for tomorrow our children may not have a tomorrow. And so long as we live as if we are the only ones that matter, our sisters and brothers in the developing world will continue to suff er the ravages of war, famine and poverty. I hear Jesus telling his listeners that it will profit them nothing if they gain the whole world at the expense of their soul. Two thousand years on these words of Jesus have lost none of their poignancy and urgency.

A recent survey indicated that, while a majority of people accepted the precarious nature of our future on planet earth, most remained unwilling to make the lifestyle changes that would substantially alter our future prospects. Almost incredibly, within the Christian community there are people who relish the idea of the planet burning up in some kind of Armageddon-like event as the forerunner to the coming of the kingdom. I don’t advise anyone to extract that kind of meaning out of the ancient writings of Scripture. Instead, take heed of Jesus’ prayer for the kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven and never forget the part that we have been given in the building of that kingdom.

So long as we live without a thought for tomorrow our children may not have a tomorrow.

Remember that the image of God is imprinted in the children of the future as much as it is imprinted in each of you who have taken the trouble to read this article to the end. A generation, yet unborn, may well ask: “Why did our single-use habit turn them into a single-use generation?” One of the other Collins’ words of 2018 was backstop, unless we heed the warnings and respond appropriately there may be no backstop.