Oil Fast?

I'm in a quandry. I was all checked in, bags packed, passport in hand, and ready to board my flight to Nairobi and then I decided to check the Christian news sites. The first item I hit on was from an organisation I had not heard of before. Apparently Operation Noah are a Christian environmental agency in the UK and they had the bright idea to call for an "oil fast". When? Tomorrow just as I board the 1020 to Nairobi and listen to those engines roar and look out my window at those graceful wings that will carry me hundred of miles in just a few hours - wings full to the brim with oil. Do I cancel my trip? Do I encourage others to fast while I go ahead with my trip? Why am I special?

I will fly and in fact I don't feel so bad about it. I quite like flying!

But there is a deeper question here. If we are to take environmental questions seriously how much will we allow them to impact our own life style? Do we just go back to hanging about in trees and caves and eating whatever fruit we can find, or is it OK to enjoy a good DVD on a Saturday night and take a drive in the country on Sunday afternoon. We need to be reasonable about all this but we also need to be serious and honest.

In fact this is the first long-haul flight I have made for a while as I have managed to divert some of my business onto Skype - oil free as far as I know. If you are interested I'm off to Nairobi for four days, on to Ethiopia for a few more and then ending up in Cape Town for the Lausanne III Congress. More reports will follow ......

Poor politics

In the UK you could have been forgiven for not knowing that major decisions were being taken in New York last week effecting the lives of millions of the world's more vulnerable people. The media here were in a frenzy of excitement as the brothers Miliband fought it out to lead a baddly battered Labour party. In the end David nearly cried, Ed told him how much he loved him, and the rest of us are still trying to remember which is which. Meanwhile in New York the great and the good of governments from around the world where trying to out do each other in proving now much they believed in, but could afford to do little about, the MDGs.

The magic year of course is 2015. It is by then that we will have put right all ills, and the poor (who of course won't exist any longer by then) will live happlily ever after. The problem is that when the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) were first drawn up 2015 was a long way off - now its only five years away, and what's more we have a global recession to keep us all occupied. In those heady days (remember the fireworks?) of 2000 the British governmemt wrote (I have the publication in front of me now), "It's not pie in the sky to talk of achieving basic social services like education and healthcare for everyone in the world in the next fifteen years". But what about in the next five year?

To be fair several governments did put new resources on the table last week and my own (UK) government has committed major resources to join Bill Gates in combating Malaria in Africa. But the real problem is that if the poor are to get less poor the rich (that's us) need to get less rich - and who's going to elect politicians who offer to make them poorer?

But there is a hopeful side to all this. In her 2009 provocative Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo suggests that Aid doesn't work anyway and that if we are going to meet targets like the MDGs then we need to take a very different route - a route that has to do with enterprise, vision, community, and equitable trade. Perhaps that's where China and India may now lead the way to a better world. ... Perhaps? The thought I'm wrestling with tonight however is whether a 'community of enterprise' is more in keeping with the Christian gospel than 'a community of aid'? (I'm thinking of all those parables Jesus told about workers and wages.)