The people who still love nature

We are misunderstanding climate sceptics, says Liam Stokes. They’ve not lost their sacral sense of creation; they’ve lost their hope.

At church last week we were invited to pray for COP30, and I could sense more than a few eyes rolling all around me.

COP30 was the regular check-in on progress towards global climate goals. This year it took place in Belém, the Metropolis of the Amazon, a region Pope Francis called ‘a theological locus, a space where God himself reveals himself and summons his sons and daughters’.

There was far less myth and parable at COP30, which was a lanyard-wearing jamboree of carbon counting and sustainability policy making. And truth to tell, it didn’t go well. The BBC report described it as ‘among the most divisive’ of all the meetings in the 30 years they have been happening.

At the same time, climate sceptics gathered online, seething at the tonnes of jet fuel expended to convene the green blob in the name of reducing emissions. They too spoke in dry, disenchanted tones.

Here in the UK, these sceptics find their champions in Reform, whose Deputy Leader describes climate mitigation as ‘net stupid zero’, a phrase I confess makes no sense to me but certainly suggests he disapproves.

Yet time and again polls tell us that Reform voters are not the ‘drill baby, drill’ cartoon characters they are made out to be. They care deeply about nature, wildlife and the countryside. Many of them even care about climate change. They worry about climate impacts and think oil and gas companies should be taxed to fix the damage.

So, the love of nature continues to smoulder in the heart of many a populist. What has been extinguished is their sense that anything can be done to protect and restore it.

Recent research from Climate Outreach paints a stark picture of a people who have lost their hope: the cost of living crisis seems endless, the world is dangerous and unpredictable, and people feel they can neither help themselves nor trust anyone else to help them.

So if nothing can be fixed, why shoulder the cost of fixing nature?

And yet the love remains. A faint glow is felt in every human heart, a memory that creation is something more than the sum of its parts, something more than net zero emissions and biodiversity net gain. Something that whispers of the divine.

Saint Francis spoke of birds and beasts as his brothers and sisters. St John Paul II called nature ‘a gospel that speaks to us of God’. Pope Francis spoke of the Earth as a ‘sacrament of communion’.

Now, I’m not saying this is the language the average Brit is using to speak about the countryside. “I would be bang up for climate mitigation measures if only they spoke a bit more about the sacrament of communion.”

No, that’s probably just me.

But St Paul does tell us this truth is ingrained in every human (Romans 1:20). We feel God’s ‘eternal power…through the things He has made’. No amount of spreadsheet environmentalism has managed to flatten that instinct. But it has flattened our ability to find a role for ourselves in stewarding creation. It does not invite us to participate.

The mission for those gathering at COP conferences, then, is not to shout the targets even louder. The mission is to rebuild the moral imagination, to help people remember that their small acts matter even if they never quite know how.

We need the grand global technocratic effort. As I’ve written before, Pope Francis was right to engage with it, to baptise and sanctify it. To turn their international conference into his pulpit. The principle of subsidiarity insists on decision-making at the appropriate level, and global problems will require global solutions.

Yet while the technocrats can measure carbon, only the imagination can restore hope, without which the global efforts are doomed to drown in a chorus of cynicism. And the imagination is kindled not at international conferences, but in the home.

Pope Francis said that the climate crisis is not simply an ecological crisis but a spiritual one, a failure of meaning as much as of policy. When Chief Rabbi Mirvis stood outside Parliament last week and said the world must ‘listen to the voice of religion’, he was speaking to something our policy wonks cannot articulate: that behind all the data and the deadlines lie deeper questions to which faith holds the answers.

Subsidiarity might validate the distant work of the global institutions, but it also asserts the primacy of the small and the local. The small acts of love undertaken at a human scale. The stewardship of the garden and the parish.

And when we work within the realm we call home, we can begin to re-enchant. We can recall Dorothy Day and her Catholic Workers, who weave the mystical and the practical by meeting Christ in the heart of every person they serve. We can model the wild saints whose love for creation went largely unseen and unrecorded, yet mended the world one hidden act at a time, like St Francis preaching to flocks of birds.

As Tolkien’s Elrond would have it: “Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

There is more to write about the Church’s role in this work, and I plan to write it very soon. A plea to pray for COP30 needn’t trigger a ripple of cringe throughout the pews. But the Church needs to retrieve its own sacral language.

This is how the moral imagination is rekindled: not through slogans or targets, but through recognition that whilst the tree we plant or the solar panels we install might not make an instant and obvious impact on the climate crisis, our actions still matter on a cosmic scale we cannot fathom.

The people love nature, they are just unconvinced they matter in the fight to defend it. Do not hector the sceptics. Give them hope.

This is a slightly edited version of an article which was first published on Liam Stokes’ Substack Nature, Faith and Fantasy. For the original article, see here. It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission.

Like what you’ve read? Consider supporting the work of Adamah by making a donation and help us keep exploring life’s big (and not so big) issues!