Simply Living ናሙና

We accept that everyone is made in God’s image and we follow God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. So then, we need to go out of our way to ensure that our lives are not having a negative impact on others, that our imprint is a positive one. Whether the others live next door, or in a faraway country makes no difference in this regard. We all stand utterly equal before God and and it is not his will that one person hurt another.

We may find it quite easy to remember those we meet face to face, and treat them with dignity and love. It’s not as straightforward to think of those whom we are interconnected with around the world, yet have never met; people who may have grown our food or constructed our electronic devices. In creating products for us, their local land has likely been utilized, sometimes in sustainable ways but often times not. Consumption, including the resources we use and fuel we burn, has an impact on people around the world. We see this already in the earth’s climate change.

Eugene Cho, founder of One Day's Wages, says “Everyone loves the idea of justice until there is a cost. Ironically, justice is never convenient, and there is always a cost.”

Inadvertently, the lives of people living in rich countries involves using up the earth’s natural resources in ways that are unsustainable and therefore negatively affect communities that already have too little. This doesn’t bode well for future generations. If everyone lived like the US does, we would need 4 planets to sustain us. The Lord has provided us with enough in one planet, yet some consume and waste far too much, while others go to bed hungry every night.

One devastating impact on people living in poverty is climate change, caused by our lifestyles that have become heavily dependent on burning fossil fuels. I have met  people living in very poor conditions in Nepal who now regularly experience flash floods due to glaciers melting in the Himalayas. Not only are these floods incredibly dangerous, but they wreck the farms which the Nepalese depend on for their food and income.

“We have seen climate change throughout our country [causing] shorter cultivation cycles in dry regions, loss of harvest due to flooding, loss of animal biodiversity, and fires in forests that then become even drier,” says Marcelino Lima from Brazil.

Response: Seek to grow in your awareness of climate change. Read stories of those whose lives are affected by the negative effects of climate change in developing countries like those in Dried Up, Drowned Out.