"World out of control" by Archbishop Freier

Well, he got that bit right.
www.melbourne.anglican.com.au/media is the place to look. Dr Philip Freier, Archbishop of Melbourne intends to talk about this at Federation Square on 27Th June, with Hugh Evans, Director of Oaktree Foundation and Penelope Swales, international folk singer and activist. Now this is one talk I should like to attend. Can I? Will I?
Climate change and global poverty. Both big issues for our time. Is there an easy answer? No. In a word, no. Remember the cancel the debt campaign? Well, I was listening to News Radio this morning on the way home. Zambia was featured. That country's debt was cancelled by 90%. That's not bad. Conditions were attached. The report said the country was better of but still required some credit to get infrastructure up and running. The government still can't afford to employ the people it needs to staff schools and so on. Water is short. That is good quality drinking water. It told of a village where there was one well for the entire village. And the quality of the water was lousy. Now it appears that Zambia is doing well. Some countries aren't.
OK, so what is the biggest impediment to real and lasting change? In two words: Human Nature. Fallen man. No mater what we do, man is the problem. It takes only one greedy man. Look at Zimbabwe. 15 years ago it had a life expectancy of 60 years. What is it now? 37 for women, 34 for men. That's terrible. What caused it? One corrupt and power hungry man. And that's all it takes. One despot ruler in a country. Bit like a school yard bully gone wrong who makes every ones life a misery. And you can't beat it. Only Christ can and that only by His indwelling Holy Spirit in our lives. Until man is born again there is no hope.
The solutions are easy. Over simplified they amount to cancellation of foreign debt owed by poor nations and planting of trees. One fixes the financial problems of the nation, the other locks up carbon thereby reducing carbon in the atmosphere. Too simple isn't it. But that's what it amounts to. Trees not only reduce carbon in the atmosphere, they lower the water table and in the process reduce salinity, provide a renewable building resource and the list goes on. Add to that soil stabilisation. Do some research on soil erosion and salinity. In Australia, trees were completely cleared from paddocks. It was later found that soil salinity and soil erosion were reduced by leaving trees around the edge and in particular in the corners of the paddocks. In fact some farms that had severe erosion and salinity problems all that was needed to start the reversal of the problem was the re-planting of trees. Australia's ABC's "Landline" program is an excellent source of information on this. Have a look at the reduction of the size of the worlds rain forests.
Now trees wont completely fix global warming. But they are a start. Of course another sure fire way of reducing global warming is to reduce our dependence upon the burning of fossil fuels.
More on this later. It does make a change from bragging about my daughters, doesn't it?