Sahelanthropus tchadensis

In 2004, the General Synod received a report from the Working Group and agreed to the Group’s reappointment for a further 3 years. It asked the Group “to collate information on practical steps which individual Anglicans, parishes and church organisations can take towards sustainable environmental practices, and to make that information available on the General Synod website.” It also asked the Group “to maintain and foster links with world-wide Christian environmental networks.” The latter was addressed in part at the 2005 meeting of the

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international Anglican Communion Environment Network (ACEN) in Canberra, at which Bishop Browning was appointed the Network’s chairperson. There is no evidence of other networking occurring.

The Group’s website notes that in 2005, General Synod agreed to continue providing Internet space for the Group’s material, with a focus on “practical steps for churches and individuals to promote environmental sustainability”. As of February 2007, that information did not appear to exist on the Group’s site other than for the recent link to the aforementioned site operated by the Church of England. In addition, General Synod provided a maximum budget of $5400 for the Working Group’s participation in the then forthcoming meeting of the ACEN. It also agreed to “support the Environment Working Group in requesting information from dioceses about whether the dioceses currently include, or would be prepared to include, environmental concerns in their criteria for choosing ethical investments…” The results of that research were not available on-line in February 2007. Notably, the Uniting Church and at least some of its Synods have already addressed the issue of ecological dimensions to their investment portfolios. The matter is also mentioned as part of the work of the Environment Commission of the Anglican Archdiocese of Melbourne and is addressed to some extent in the Catholic realm.

Subsequently, there appears to have been very little activity, let alone further development of policy and praxis by the Working Group, though this may be a result of the Group’s website not listing any developments since 2005. However, the link to the Group’s page via the ‘Social Issues’ and the renamed ‘Energy, Environment and Climate Change’ links notes that in 2006 “Anglicans joined with other 16 faith traditions and the Climate Institute to release ‘Common Belief: Australia’s Faith Communities on Climate Change’.”163 That statement is correct but does not tell the whole story. The Anglican contribution did not come from the Environment Working Group, the Primate or the General Synod, but from Bishop Browning writing under the auspices of the ACEN – an international body. In effect, there was no official national Anglican contribution to this publication. This is not entirely surprising given the publicly available164 views of the Working Group’s chairperson, who believes that:

“Global warming is an issue that only well-off democratic countries can afford to make a fuss about. The third world has far more pressing issues, issues of sustaining life. The greenhouse effect is really peripheral to Australia’s environmental concerns. What does it really matter if Australia’s ski fields shrink?”

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See Appendix 1. 164

I attended a meeting of the Environment Working Group in Canberra in 2005 and did not come away inspired by its progress or what I perceived its potential to be. The meeting was under-attended, with barely enough attendees for the Group to function. I noted that the Group had no staff, no office and no resources other than perhaps some borrowed administrative support to compile minutes and organise meetings. The General Synod may have paid for members’ travel costs, as it is one of its official bodies. It was little more than a shell of an organisation and clearly relies primarily, if not entirely, on volunteer labour.

Compared to the productivity of CEA, which was constituted at roughly the same time, the Anglican Environment Working Group has been relatively unproductive. Its primary outcome is the document ‘Green by Grace’, which is reviewed later in this section. To my knowledge, it has not produced any other policies or policy-related material other than the advice and recommendation that lead to the General Synod calling for the Federal Government to sign the Kyoto Protocol. With no staff, and not even the resources to construct and operate its own website akin to that of CEA, it cannot fulfil the networking and central resource role that it envisaged for itself in 2001. At the Group’s meeting in 2005, the hosting Bishop, George Browning165, mentioned plans to form a body equivalent to CEA but as of mid-2007, this had not occurred.

In addition to a lack of resources and a small and widely spread volunteer membership, the Group faces potentially on-going disharmony arising from the strongly different views of its Chairperson. This may be a factor in the Group’s relative lack of success and it is unclear how the Group, if it is still functional as of 2007, proposes to deal with this. Perhaps the fact that the Chairperson is a Sydney Anglican and that the Archdiocese of Sydney now has its own form of a non-operational ‘environment policy’ may allow the Group’s internal dynamics to progress.

In discussions that I had with members of various diocesan environment commissions, I was given the clear understanding that they had little or no faith in the ability of the Working Group to achieve its aims, let alone match those of CEA, which are themselves very limited in terms of operational policy. Instead of directing energy toward improving the effectiveness of the clearly struggling Working Group, Environment Commission members seemed to feel it was more useful to get on with the job of ecological reform at the diocesan level. They often noted that they had enough trouble with their own constraints in terms of funding and a widespread lack of interest from parish priests, so trying to shift things at the national level was beyond their agendas. I note that even in the Diocese of Grafton, only two parishes were fully

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It is notable that despite being a national and international leader in Anglican ecological policy and praxis, Bishop Browning is not an official member of the Environment Working Group.

participating in the outcomes from the Environment Commission’s policies. A Commission member in the Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn reported a similar situation.

9.3.3 ‘Green by Grace’

As of March 2006, the national Anglican website suggests that the Church does not have an official institutional ecological policy. This was still the impression given in February 2007. This situation contrasts with the websites of the other subject denominations, both of which provide collections of both broad and issue-specific ecological policy documents. The Anglican website’s ecological policy content is restricted to the Working Group’s advice on the Kyoto Protocol and the primarily theological document ‘Green by Grace’, which was prepared by the Environment Working Group for the 2004 National Synod.

In 2005, the Anglican home page contained a link to ‘Green by Grace’ under the heading ‘Theology, Liturgy, and Professional Standards Resources’, suggesting that the Church saw the document as a theological rather than a policy resource. Yet in 2007, the document was only available via the Environment Working Group’s page. ‘Green by Grace’ is certainly a primarily theological work, but has a very small final section on praxis. It is not a directive operational policy and is perhaps best considered, in secular governance terms, as a ‘white paper’ i.e. the background material that usually precedes formal policy. As such, it indicates that the Anglican Church of Australia is still bridging the gap between a very recent (2004) ecotheological shift and its manifestation as institutional ecological policy at a national level.

‘Green by Grace’ was substantially prepared by Bishop George Browning, a leader of environmental reform in the Anglican Church, assisted by Jeff Sturman166 and Deborah Guess167. As a primarily theological rather than policy document, it is beyond the scope of this thesis to undertake a detailed analysis of it. I provide only a brief assessment of it below.

‘Green by Grace’ addresses popular secular perceptions about Christianity’s ecological credentials that are consistent with the work and widespread misinterpretations of the work of Lynn White Jr., (1967). It specifically refutes White’s assessment that the ‘dominion’ interpretation of key text within Genesis is orthodox, and instead argues for the stewardship interpretation, citing other biblical texts to support this. Some of the texts used are agrarian and

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Dr Jeff Sturman is a Senior Lecturer in the field of environmental engineering (particularly relating to water) at the School of Environmental Science, Murdoch University, Western Australia. Fellow Anglican environmentalist and member of the Environment Working Group, Dr Catherine Baudains is also an academic in that School.

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Deborah Guess was then a recent postgraduate in Christian ecotheology from Monash University. She has been highly influential in the ecological policy and praxis developments in the Anglican Archdiocese of Melbourne. As of 2007, she is a PhD candidate addressing an aspect of Anglican ecotheology.

uphold the long-standing but subsumed and obscured tradition of Christian stewardship grounded in an agrarian view of Nature. It does not address the issues that arise from the concept of agrarian-based stewardship, particularly anthropocentrism, instrumentalism, productivism and utilitarianism. However, it does address the long-standing criticism of Christianity (and indeed other religions) for its emphasis on the transcendent realm at the expense of the physical world (after Collins, 1995). It places works to “manage the resources of the earth” in the same realm as proselytising and working to alleviate human suffering, noting that such work is about striving towards a goal that cannot be reached until the foretold divine intervention occurs to complete such work.

‘Green by Grace’ addresses the claim that modern society and the dominant Western and Christian culture is uniquely to blame for the extent of ecological harm. It points out that historical non-Christian civilisations have also caused great harm, and that indeed modern non- Christian nations continue to cause great degradation. It does not state this to downplay the ecocrisis.

Despite evidence of an anthropocentric and instrumentalist theology, the document claims to be otherwise and asserts that it uses a theocentric basis for its position, i.e. that addressing the ecological crisis is a moral obligation because Creation was made by God and is therefore sacred, making it a sin to abuse it.

It also refutes the ‘all beings are equal’ argument of Peter Singer, which it labels as utilitarian and open to abuse, lacking a “clear standard of right and wrong”. It rejects both ecocentrism and pantheism as inconsistent with Christian theology. It briefly describes panentheism as per Barbour, 1990, and de Chardin (1881-1955), but doesn’t take a position for or against this. It advocates acceptance of the concept of ‘ecologically sustainable development’, particularly the precepts of intergenerational equity and the precautionary principle, noting that these must be addressed theocentrically, not instrumentally.

The section entitled “Some practical responses by Australian Anglican churches”, whilst very short, is the closest that the document comes to being operational policy, though in this case it is purely advisory and has no institutional force. It includes:

• “The energy and water audits undertaken by the Diocese of Canberra & Goulburn. The diocesan Environment Commission works also with the Australian Centre for Christianity and Culture, and Catholic Earthcare Australia, arranging seminars on topics such as global warming;

• The conferences on spirituality and ecology in the Diocese of Grafton;

• Melbourne diocesan synod’s decision to set up an Environment Commission;

• The grass-roots action of WA Eco-Care in communities dedicated to sustainable living;

• The Australian Anglican Church’s participation in the world-wide Anglican Communion Environmental Network;

• The greening of church space using endemic168 [sic] plants.” The document then provides a suggested reading list.

Despite its philosophical problems, ‘Green by Grace’ is a leap forward for the Australian Anglican Church. It has the potential to empower significant positive ecological outcomes in the Church were its full potential to be realised through operational policy and praxis. I explore the latter at the diocesan level in the following section.