What Must We Do?

The Church Speaks on Climate Change

Reconnect/Restoration with the Cosmos: A cosmic, not anthropological view of creation.

Within the movement of nature, tranquil and silent but rich in life, there continues to palpitate the original delight of the Creator.

The right to private property does not do away with the original gift of the Earth to the whole of humankind.

The natural world has value in itself

Areligious respect for the integrity of creation

See care for our planet Earth as a 'vocation'.

A Personal Response

We must examine our lives and acknowledge the ways in which we have harmed God’s creation through our actions and our failure to act. We need to experience a conversion, or change of heart.

Ecological education

Restraint, penance and self-imposed limitations

Co-operate in facing global warming as one of the major issues of our time and take roles of responsibility

Respond with sound judgments and resolute action to the reality of climate change.

Detailed and resolute responses need to be both swift and radical.

Consumers send powerful signals to the market by their greenhouse-friendly choice of goods and services.

Profit is secondary to ecologically sustainable living.

Responding to this issue will have to be a central dimension of the life of faith.

Solidarity involves personal and political commitment to the two strategies of mitigation and adaptation.

We commit to an ecological lifestyle, politics and praxis as people of hope and commitment.

Help our nation by developing an ecological ethic

Solidarity with like minds

Justice for the poor/disadvantaged in terms of global change

Sufficiency in my lifestyle

Sustainability in my practices

Prudence in my choices and my understanding of the issue

A Communal Response

Dismantle structural forms of global poverty

Administering prudently a nation’s environmental resources

Future generations should not be robbed

Each sector of the community- has a role in imagining and building a future Australia with radically reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

Detailed and resolute responses need to be both swift and radical.

Short and long term ecologically sustainable options, and unsustainable dead ends, need to be identified and appropriate laws framed.

Australia must continue to support structures that help reduce global warming.

Australians have a particular duty to recognise the fact that they are directly implicated in the causes of atmospheric pollution

For the sake of future generations, we need to

  • lower population,
  • alter consumption levels and
  • promote more resource-efficient technologies.

Take decisive action to stave off the extinction of species which could sterilize the planet.